Troppo presto per essere ottimisti

Tre ottimi motivi per essere pessimisti ed evitare trionfalismi
di Marco Onado, professore a contratto senior presso il Dipartimento di finanza della Bocconi

Dall’inizio della primavera si è diffusa la sensazione che il peggio della crisi sia passato. Prima timidamente, poi con sempre maggior decisione, le autorità dei principali paesi hanno parlato di “germogli di ripresa” e i mercati di borsa hanno avviato un rialzo spettacolare, tuttora in corso, con aumenti del 20-40% rispetto ai minimi di inizio marzo (100% addirittura per la Russia). Tutto bene quindi? Ci sono almeno tre motivi per essere prudenti, oltre naturalmente la scaramanzia che in questi casi è d’obbligo.

Il primo è che gli squilibri macroeconomici e finanziari che hanno portato alla crisi non sono stati ancora risolti, tanto che l’ottimismo viene solo dal rallentamento dei segnali negativi (in primis la produzione industriale), piuttosto che da un cambiamento di segno degli indicatori. Come ha detto il presidente della Fed, Ben Bernanke, in una testimonianza al Congresso ai primi di giugno, “le imprese sono ancora molto prudenti e continuano a tagliare posti di lavoro e investimenti”. Ne consegue il rischio concreto di un lungo periodo in cui la crescita può risultare inferiore a quella potenziale. Lo spettro della ‘sindrome giapponese’, in cui la crisi finanziaria ha pesato come un macigno sullo sviluppo economico del paese per oltre un decennio, è tutt’altro che rimosso.

In secondo luogo, le migliaia di miliardi di dollari che i governi hanno impiegato o impegnato sotto forma di ricapitalizzazioni, sussidi e garanzie pubbliche lasceranno un’eredità pesante, di cui è ancora difficile scorgere le implicazioni di lungo periodo. Uno studioso di prestigio come John Taylor, della Stanford University, denuncia preoccupato che “il deficit federale sta esplodendo” (Financial Times del 26 maggio): dal 48% del pil di fine 2008 è previsto dal Congressional Budget Office balzare all’82% in 10 anni e al 100% in altri cinque. La gestione di questa massa enorme di debito aggiuntivo (creata, si badi, per curare l’eccesso di debito privato) sarà estremamente difficile, tanto che i mercati hanno determinato un rialzo significativo dei tassi di interesse a lungo termine.

A questo si aggiunga il problema delle banche centrali, che si sono caricate di titoli rischiosi in quantità assolutamente straordinarie e che, nel caso della Fed e della Bank of England, in base alla strategia di quantitative easing, stanno acquistando a piene mani titoli pubblici a lungo termine. Taylor sostiene che le banche centrali oggi hanno la grande tentazione di lasciare che una grande fiammata inflazionistica riporti debiti pubblici e privati a livelli sostenibili. Si tratterebbe di uno scenario non meno preoccupante di quello giapponese. La testimonianza di Bernanke contiene fra le righe la consapevolezza che le banche centrali, avendo scampato lo scoglio di Scilla dell’implosione del sistema finanziario mondiale, dovranno ora affrontare la Cariddi del controllo del debito pubblico e dell’inflazione.

In Europa, i problemi non sono molto diversi: il Trattato europeo e lo statuto della Bce offrono una difesa in più rispetto agli Stati Uniti e al Regno Unito, ma il recente attacco di Angela Merkel all’istituzione di Francoforte getta ombre inquietanti sull’indipendenza della nostra banca centrale nel prossimo futuro.
Il terzo punto fondamentale è che nel clima di ottimismo si sta allentando la tensione sulla necessità di cambiare le regole del sistema finanziario. Come se quello che abbiamo attraversato fosse un semplice incidente di percorso, sono sempre più diffusi i moniti a evitare costi eccessivi di regolamentazione e, quel che è peggio, aumentano le divergenze sul come garantire il coordinamento dei regolatori a livello globale oppure a realizzare un livello europeo, in particolare all’interno di Eurolandia, di supervisione finanziaria.

In sintesi, l’unica certezza è che il fronte finanziario della crisi è ragionevolmente sotto controllo. Ma si aprono tre fronti non meno delicati sui quali si deciderà la battaglia economica e politica dei prossimi anni. Non è ancora il momento di smobilitare l’esercito e tanto meno di danzare nelle piazze.

Crisis Won’t End Until Balance Sheets Get Real: Jonathan Weil (bloomberg)

July 2 (Bloomberg) -- Investors are feeling better about financial companies’ balance sheets than they were a few months ago. That’s not to say they have a lot of confidence in them.
Compare, for example, the stock-market value of Regions Financial Corp. with the bank’s reported net worth. At $3.97, the Birmingham, Alabama-based company’s stock is up 69 percent since its February low, giving Regions a $4.5 billion market capitalization. That’s still only a third of the $13.5 billion book value it showed as of March 31. In the market’s view, the bank’s asset values remain grossly overstated.
The same story is playing out across the financial-services industry. Financial stocks in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rocketed 35 percent during the second quarter, fueling the index’s biggest quarterly advance since 1998. Yet for hundreds of U.S. banks and insurance companies, a vast credibility gap remains when it comes to their accounts.
As of June 30, there were 336 U.S.-listed financial companies trading for less than 60 percent of their book value, including Citigroup Inc., SunTrust Banks Inc. and Marshall & Ilsley Corp. Together, they had a stock-market value of $233.1 billion, compared with $463.1 billion of book value, or common shareholder equity, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
When I ran the same stock screen for a column about this same time last year, it turned up 168 companies with a combined $120.3 billion market value and a book value of $270.3 billion. The way the credit crunch was playing out then, market declines were begetting writedowns, leading to more market declines and then more writedowns, and so on. That downward cycle finally has been broken, only nobody knows what will come next.

Pressure on Management

Often when companies see their shares trading at large discounts to the net asset values on their books, their managers will feel pressure to take big writedowns and corresponding charges to earnings, especially for intangible assets such as goodwill leftover from past acquisition sprees.
These are strange times, though. After peaking during the fourth quarter of 2008, writedowns and credit losses at U.S. financial companies fell more than half to $101.8 billion in the first quarter, according to Bloomberg data. That was when financial stocks generally were at or near their lows.
Bank managers may not be any more inclined to cleanse their books now than they were then. Prices and liquidity have improved for many of the mortgage-backed bonds that helped spur the global financial crisis. Loans generally don’t have to be marked down to market values anyway, under the accounting rules.
What’s worrisome about the financial sector’s rally is that it has been government-induced. So far this year, the Federal Reserve has printed lots of money, hyped stress tests for large banks that were hardly stressful, and made clear it won’t let big institutions such as Citigroup die.

‘Green Shoots’

The Treasury Department promised subsidies for buyers of banks’ toxic debt securities, a program now having trouble getting started.
Banks and insurers got Congress to browbeat the Financial Accounting Standards Board into making rule changes that will let them plump earnings and regulatory capital. There also was Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s line in March about “green shoots,” which sparked a media epidemic of alleged sightings.
For all this, we still have hundreds of financial companies trading as though the worst of their losses are still to come. Just imagine what their prognosis might be if the government hadn’t pulled out all the stops.

Hidden Losses

Meanwhile, housing prices keep falling. Bank regulators this week said delinquency rates on prime home mortgages more than doubled in the first quarter to 2.9 percent of such loans, up from 1.1 percent a year earlier. The peak of the interest- rate resets on adjustable-rate mortgages won’t hit until 2011, according to analysts at Credit Suisse Group AG. And while there’s a meltdown in commercial real estate, hardly any of the credit losses have shown up on lenders’ financial statements.
Many of the largest banks and insurance companies have taken advantage of the run-up in their stock prices to raise badly needed common equity, including Regions, which had a $1.6 billion stock sale in May. (Its books still show $5.6 billion of goodwill, about $1 billion more than Regions’ market cap.) Most distressed financial companies, however, have been shut out of the capital markets and face dim takeover prospects.
To name a few, Colonial BancGroup Inc., a Montgomery, Alabama-based lender with $26.4billion of assets, is down to a $126 million market cap, or 10 percent of its book value. Flint, Michigan-based Citizens Republic Bancorp Inc., with $13 billion of assets, has a $91 million market value, or 7 percent of book. Austin, Texas-based Guaranty Financial Group Inc., with $15.4 billion of assets, this week said it may not survive and that it may revise its 2008 net loss to $2.2 billion from $444 million.
Truth is, there’s no way to know if the economy has turned the corner, or if last quarter’s market rally will prove sustainable. Yet when this many banks still have balance sheets that defy belief, it means the industry probably hasn’t re- established trust with the investing public.
Trust, you may recall, is the financial system’s most precious asset. On that score, we still have a long way to go before we can say this banking crisis is over.

(Jonathan Weil is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Jonathan Weil in New York at jweil6@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 2, 2009 00:01 EDT

Fed’s Yellen Says Rates May Stay Near Zero for Years (bloomberg)

July 1 (Bloomberg) -- Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Janet Yellen said the prospect that policy makers will leave the benchmark U.S. interest rate near zero for the next several years is “not outside the realm of possibility.”
“We have a very serious recession, we have a 9.4 percent unemployment rate,” and inflation possibly falling further below the Fed’s preferred level, she told reporters yesterday after a speech in San Francisco. Given the recession’s severity, “we should want to do more. If we were not at zero, we would be lowering the funds rate.”
Yellen’s comments go beyond those made by other policy makers after a June 23-24 meeting, when they said the federal funds rate will likely stay at “exceptionally low levels” for “an extended period.” They have held the rate, also known as the overnight lending rate between banks, at between zero and 0.25 percent since December.
The Fed “did succeed in averting a full-blown meltdown,” Yellen said in the speech to the Commonwealth Club of California. Nevertheless, the threat of another financial shock, such as one from falling commercial real-estate prices, is “high on my worry list.”
Yellen said the U.S. economy may be about to “turn the corner” and reiterated her expectation that the recession will end later this year.
“Right now, we’re like a patient in intensive care whose condition has stabilized and whose fever is just starting to come down,” Yellen said in the speech. “We’re just completing the sixth quarter of recession, but the pace of decline has slowed markedly” and “confidence in the financial system is slowly returning.”

Hundred-Year Flood

The 62-year-old bank chief, who votes on monetary policy this year, compared the financial crisis to “a hundred-year flood: a disaster of the highest order which has put us on continuous emergency footing.”
“I expect that we will turn the growth corner sometime later this year, but I am not optimistic that the economy will spring back to normal anytime soon,” she said. Unemployment will “remain painfully high for several more years.”
The world’s largest economy has lost 6 million jobs since December 2007, the start of the deepest recession in 50 years.
Under Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, the central bank has doubled its balance sheet and created unprecedented emergency programs to unclog credit markets.

Recent Data

While recent data indicate a smaller pace of decline in some areas of the economy, such as housing and new construction, joblessness is climbing and the increasing cost of residential loans is impeding new lending. The unemployment rate reached 9.4 percent in May and new mortgage lending is at a 13-year low.
Rising mortgage rates may “place a drag on a still very sick housing market,” while increasing oil prices may hurt the recovery, Yellen said in her speech. Still, the fiscal stimulus and a rebound in consumer demand and housing construction will probably prompt a revival in economic growth, she said.
“We’ve seen encouraging signs lately that the economy is poised to turn the corner,” the bank president said. “Our major banks have made excellent progress in establishing the capital buffers needed to continue lending even through a downturn that is more serious than we anticipate. But they are still nursing their wounds and credit will remain tight for some time to come.”

Predominant Risk

As for inflation, the “predominant risk” is that it will “be too low, not too high, over the next several years,” Yellen said. Inflation excluding food and energy may fall to about 1 percent over the next year and remain below 2 percent, with an unlikely possibility of turning into deflation if the economy fails to recover soon, she said.
Another Fed district bank president, Charles Evans of Chicago, told reporters in London today that he also sees inflation falling “a bit from where we are now.”
The global financial crisis, which began with the collapse of the U.S. subprime-lending market in 2007, has led to $1.47 trillion of writedowns and credit losses at banks and other financial institutions, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The Fed “won’t hesitate” to withdraw the record stimulus it has put in place, when necessary, Yellen said. “If anything, I’m more concerned that we will be tempted to tighten policy too soon, thereby aborting recovery.”
Responding to audience questions after her speech, Yellen said China’s concern about the value of the dollar “is logical” given the country’s holdings in Treasuries.
China’s call for the creation of a reserve currency other than the dollar is “not practical at the current time,” and more of a “long-term” idea, she said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Vivien Lou Chen in San Francisco at vchen1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 1, 2009 14:27 EDT