IMF calls for Alternative Reserve Currency, Again

February 11, 2011

CNNMoney
February 11, 2011

The International Monetary Fund issued a report Thursday on a possible replacement for the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

The IMF said Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs, could help stabilize the global financial system.

SDRs represent potential claims on the currencies of IMF members. They were created by the IMF in 1969 and can be converted into whatever currency a borrower requires at exchange rates based on a weighted basket of international currencies. The IMF typically lends countries funds denominated in SDRs

While they are not a tangible currency, some economists argue that SDRs could be used as a less volatile alternative to the U.S. dollar.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the IMF, acknowledged there are some “technical hurdles” involved with SDRs, but he believes they could help correct global imbalances and shore up the global financial system.

“Over time, there may also be a role for the SDR to contribute to a more stable international monetary system,” he said.

The goal is to have a reserve asset for central banks that better reflects the global economy since the dollar is vulnerable to swings in the domestic economy and changes in U.S. policy.

In addition to serving as a reserve currency, the IMF also proposed creating SDR-denominated bonds, which could reduce central banks’ dependence on U.S. Treasuries. The Fund also suggested that certain assets, such as oil and gold, which are traded in U.S. dollars, could be priced using SDRs.

Oil prices usually go up when the dollar depreciates. Supporters say using SDRs to price oil on the global market could help prevent spikes in energy prices that often occur when the dollar weakens significantly.

The dollar alternatives

Fred Bergsten, director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said at a conference in Washington that IMF member nations should agree to create $2 trillion worth of SDRs over the next few years.

SDRs, he said, “will further diversify the system.”

Dollar firms after starting 2011 weak

The dollar has been drifting lower so far this year as the global economy improves and investors regain their appetite for more risky assets such as stocks and commodities.

After rising above 81 in early January, the dollar index, which measures the U.S. currency against a basket of other international currencies, eased below 77 earlier this week.

However, the dollar was higher Thursday against the euro, pound and yen as disappointing corporate results weighed on stock prices following several days of gains on Wall Street. The rally in the commodities market also cooled, with the price of oil and metals backing off recent highs.

In addition, renewed concerns about the debt problems facing troubled European economies put pressure on the euro and supported the dollar. The yield on Portugal’s benchmark bond rose to a record high Wednesday, and borrowing costs for Ireland, Spain and Greece remain elevated.

“The market is shedding risk, with equities and commodities weakening and the U.S. dollar broadly stronger” said Camilla Sutton, currency strategist at Scotia Capital.

Traders were also digesting comments from Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, who told Congress Wednesday that despite a strengthening economic recovery, the unemployment rate remains high while inflation is “still quite low.”

Those remarks reaffirmed the view that “the Fed would be very slow to tighten policy given its dual mandate of price stability and employment,” analysts at Sucden Financial wrote in a research report.

Bernanke also urged lawmakers to come up with a “credible plan” to bring down “unsustainable” federal budget deficits.

“We expect that the outlook for the U.S. fiscal position will weigh heavily on the U.S. dollar in the quarters ahead,” said Sutton. In the near-term, however, she said “a strengthening growth profile” could help provide “a temporary period of dollar strength.”

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In the U.S. Banks repossessed 1 million homes in 2010

January 13, 2011

AFP

The bleakest year in foreclosure crisis has only just begun.

Lenders are poised to take back more homes this year than any other since the U.S. housing meltdown began in 2006. About 5 million borrowers are at least two months behind on their mortgages and more will miss payments as they struggle with job losses and loans worth more than their home’s value, industry analysts forecast.

“2011 is going to be the peak,” said Rick Sharga, a senior vice president at foreclosure tracker RealtyTrac Inc. The firm predicts 1.2 million homes will be repossessed this year by lenders.

The outlook comes after banks repossessed more than 1 million homes in 2010, RealtyTrac said Thursday. That marked the highest annual tally of properties lost to foreclosure on records dating back to 2005.

One in 45 U.S. households received a foreclosure filing last year, or a record high of 2.9 million homes. That’s up 1.67 percent from 2009.

For December, 257,747 U.S. homes received at least one foreclosure-related notice. That was the lowest monthly total in 30 months. The number of notices fell 1.8 percent from November and 26.3 percent from December 2009, RealtyTrac said.

The pace slowed in the final two months of 2010 as banks reviewed their foreclosure processes after allegations surfaced in September that evictions were handled improperly. Under increased scrutiny by the government, lenders temporarily halted taking actions against borrowers severely behind on their payments.

However, most banks have since resumed their eviction processes, and the first quarter will likely show a rebound in foreclosure activity, Sharga said.

Foreclosures are expected to remain elevated through the year as homeowners contend with stubbornly high unemployment, tougher credit standards for refinancing and falling home values. Sharga said he expects prices to dip another 5 percent nationally before finally bottoming out. The decline will push more borrowers underwater on their mortgages. Already, about one in five homeowners with a mortgage owe more than their home is worth.

The pain likely will be the most acute in states that have already been hit hard. That includes former housing boom states Nevada, Arizona, Florida and California, along with states that are suffering most from the economic downturn, including Michigan and Illinois.

Nevada posted the highest foreclosure rate in 2010 for the fourth straight year, despite a 5 percent decline in activity from the year before. One in every 11 households received a foreclosure filing last year in the state. In December, foreclosure activity increased 18 percent from November with a 71 percent spike in bank repossessions.

Arizona and California also showed sharp December increases in the number of homes banks took back, at 52 percent and 47 percent, respectively. Arizona, along with Florida, finished the year at No. 2 and No. 3 for the highest foreclosure rates.

One in every 17 Arizona households got a foreclosure filing last year, while one in 18 received a notice in Florida.

California, Utah, Georgia, Michigan, Idaho, Illinois and Colorado rounded out the top ten states with the highest foreclosure rates.

More than half of the country’s foreclosure activity came out of five states in 2010: California, Florida, Arizona, Illinois and Michigan. Together, these states recorded almost 1.5 million households receiving a filing, despite year-over-year decreases in California, Florida and Arizona.

RealtyTrac tracks notices for defaults, scheduled home auctions and home repossessions — warnings that can lead up to a home eventually being lost to foreclosure.

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Is 2011 the Year of the Bank Run?

January 5, 2011

CNN Money

Some market watchers say yes, pointing ominously to the torrents of money pouring out of Ireland.

Irish bank deposits declined in November for the fourth straight month, the central bank said last week. Overseas deposits fled the country at their fastest pace in more than a year.

The deposit flight compounds the stress on a financial system whose massive property-lending losses already have driven the government to accept an unpopular bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

Worse yet, it shows that the solutions policymakers slapped together in the fall of 2008 helped in some cases to create even bigger problems — ones that are now coming due.

Unconditionally guaranteeing bank deposits is just such a policy, in a country where loan losses made the banks insolvent, job loss left many taxpayers peniless and deposits now at least double annual economic output.

And this time, given the unpopularity of bailouts and dysfunctional European politics, there is ample reason to fear the banking mess won’t so easily be swept aside.

“Facing facts like these, each morning when I wake up I have to wonder, ‘Why is today not a good day for a wholesale run on the Irish banking system?’” asks Scott Minerd, chief investment officer at Guggenheim Partners. “And if there is a wholesale run on the Irish banking system, then what stops the same scenario from cascading into Portugal, Greece, Italy, and most importantly, Spain?”

That is very much the question being asked in bond markets, where the cost of borrowing surged in all the so-called peripheral European countries in the second half of 2010. The yield on Irish 10-year government bonds, for instance, surged to 9% at year-end from around 5% in August.

The high cost of market borrowing ties the hands of government officials who have promised to ride to the rescue of the bubble-ridden banks. Ireland has already ponied up outlandish sums to keep the banks afloat. Officials have said at every turn they believed they had the ability to stabilize the system, but stability has remained beyond their reach.

Now, with the state locked out of the bond market and the banks losing depositors, who is going to lend in an economy that already has shrunk drastically from its bubbly size of just a few years ago?

Bank runs “will seriously undermine the prosperity of this country for a generation,” Pimco’s Mohammed El-Erian said in November. He said the first steps to stemming the run would include “a big external aid package and steps by the Irish government.”

The IMF, the EU and the Irish government committed to those steps this fall. But there is still no sign people in Ireland or elsewhere believe the $113 billion bailout package will keep their money safe. Among many other things, there has been a rush out of the euro for the Swiss franc, not to mention the ever-present embrace of gold.

On Minerd’s mind 

The flight from Irish banks has been most pronounced among foreigners, who presumably are less attached to their bailed-out bankers and can easily find other banks that, at least for the moment, appear less apt to go out of business.

Some 20 billion euros ($27 billion) of overseas deposits fled the country in November alone, according to the Central Bank of Ireland. The level of foreign deposits has plunged 28% in the past year and is down 42% from its bubbly peak.

But don’t blame just the foreigners. Domestic deposits tumbled by 6.3 billion euros in November, in their steepest decline since August 2009.

All told, the Irish banking system’s deposit base has contracted by 15% over the past year — which isn’t making it any easier for taxpayers to keep the deeply troubled banking sector afloat.

Meanwhile, the aid the Irish banks took from the eurosystem more than doubled over the past year, to 97 billion euros from 45 billion in November 2009.

The flight of deposits from troubled Irish banks is an unhappy irony because Ireland was lauded in some quarters in 2008 when it became the first state to guarantee bank deposits. That decision led to a short-lived surge of funds into the Irish banks — not that the money stuck around for long. Since the late 2008 peak, more than 100 billion euros of overseas deposits have left the Irish banking system.

When you consider that similar trends could easily play out in the other euro countries, you have the recipe for a hangover-inducing New Year that is likely, in the view of Minerd, to see the euro plunge anew against the dollar. He expects the euro to test its decadelong low against the dollar of 85 cents before all is said and done, compared with a recent $1.33.

“As sovereign credit downgrades continue to flow in and deposits in Europe’s weakened banking system flow out, a broader crisis in Europe appears to be imminent in 2011,” says Minerd.

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Ireland Officially Seeks Aid from Europe

November 22, 2010

Spain will be the biggest bailout of all

Bloomberg

Ireland became the second euro country to seek a rescue as the cost of saving its banks threatened a rerun of the Greek debt crisis that destabilized the currency.

The euro erased gains and Irish bonds pared an early advance after Moody’s Investors Service said a “ multi-notch” downgrade in Ireland’s Aa2 credit rating was “most likely.” The prospect of January elections loomed as the Green Party said it would pull out of Prime Minister Brian Cowen’s coalition.

A package that Goldman Sachs Group Inc. estimates may total 95 billion euros ($130 billion) failed to damp speculation that Portugal and Spain would need to tap the emergency fund set up by the European Union and International Monetary Fund after the Greece rescue.

“It probably won’t halt contagion. The sovereign crisis isn’t yet over,” said Sylvain Broyer, chief euro-region economist at Natixis in Frankfurt. “Ireland is in the middle of a difficult crisis.”

The aid, which Irish officials said as recently as Nov. 15 they didn’t need, marks the latest blow to an economy that more than doubled in the decade ending in 2006. The bursting of the real-estate bubble in 2008 plunged the country into a recession and brought its banks close to collapse. With Irish bond yields near a record high, policy makers are trying to keep the crisis from spreading.

Threat to Euro

“Clearly because of the size of their loan books, the huge risks they took, they became a threat not only to the state but to the” entire euro region, Finance Minister Brian Lenihan told Dublin-based RTE radio in an interview today. “The banks will be downsized to the real needs of the Irish economy” to “Irish consumers and Irish businesses. That has to be the primary focus of Irish banks.”

The euro slid 0.3 percent to $1.3633 at 1:30 p.m. in London. The yield on Irish 10-year notes fell 5 basis points to 8.30 percent after falling as low as 8.11 percent.

The U.K. and Sweden may contribute bilateral loans, the EU said in a statement. Lenihan declined to say how big the package will be, saying that it will be less than 100 billion euros. Goldman Sachs Chief European Economist Erik Nielsen said yesterday the government needs 65 billion euros to fund itself for the next three years and 30 billion euros for the banks.

Deficit, Banks

Talks will focus on the government’s deficit cutting plans and restructuring the banking system, the EU said in a statement. Cowen who spoke at the same press briefing as Lenihan, said the banks will be stress tested. Ireland nationalized Anglo Irish Bank Corp. in 2009 and is preparing to take a majority stake in Allied Irish Banks Plc, the second- largest bank.

Irish banks may get immediate capital injections, Matthew Elderfield, the country’s head of financial regulation, said in a speech today. The country’s two biggest lenders need at least 5 billion euros immediately, Ciaran Callaghan, an analyst with NCB Stockbrokers, wrote in a note to clients on Nov. 18.

The package for Ireland will total as much as 60 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 47 percent for Greece.

Cowen plans to announce the government’s four-year budget plan this week and said an agreement with the EU and the IMF will come “in the next few weeks.”

The Green Party said today it will quit the government after the budget is passed, leaving Cowen without a majority in parliament. Irish voters “feel misled” by the government, leader John Gormley said at a press conference in Dublin.

No ‘Bogeyman’

Irish officials initially resisted pressure from the EU to take any aid, saying they were fully funded until the middle of 2011. European leaders sought to head off contagion from Ireland and reduce pressure on the European Central Bank to prop up the country’s lenders by providing them with unlimited liquidity.

Cowen defended his reversal on the need for aid. “I don’t accept I’m the bogeyman,” he said. “Now circumstances have changed, we’ve changed our policies.”

The bailout follows two years of budget cuts that failed to restore market confidence as the cost of shoring up the financial industry soared.

Lenihan cancelled bond auctions for October and November and announced 6 billion euros of austerity measures for 2011 on Nov. 4 in a bid to restore investor confidence. Those efforts failed after German Chancellor Angela Merkel triggered an investor exodus by saying bondholders should foot some of the bill in any future bailout.

Irish Spread

The risk premium on Ireland’s 10-year debt over German bunds, Europe’s benchmark, fell to 523 basis points today. It widened to a record 652 basis points on Nov. 11, with the yield reaching a record 9.1 percent. In 2007, it cost Ireland less than Germany to borrow. Its 10-year spread then fell to as low as 77 basis points less than bunds. The ISEQ stock index has plunged 70 percent from its record in 2007.

Ireland will draw on the 750-billion-euro fund set up by the EU and IMF in May as part of the Greek bailout to protect the currency shared by 16 countries.

Yields on bonds of Spain and Portugal have jumped amid concern that fallout from Ireland would spread. The extra yield that investors demand to hold Portuguese 10-year bonds instead of German bunds climbed to a record 484 basis points on Nov. 11.

“Speculative actions against Portugal and Spain are not justified, though it can’t be excluded,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said today on RTL Luxembourg radio. “In a moment where financial markets have an excessive tendency to punish those countries that didn’t stick 100 percent to an orthodox consolidation, one can never exclude that similar things will happen.”

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Basel Banking Committee Ready to “Strangle” Economy

September 13, 2010

real-agenda.com

The World Financial Order is almost complete. New measures will keep bailout monies in banks’ coffers, increase interests on loans while reducing credit availability.

A group of un-elected regulators has come to an agreement on how to strangle the global economy even further, while presenting their package of measures as “saving” policies” for a coming financial crisis.  The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision -current owners-  established more rules to exercise tighter controls on banks and the very financial system they managed to break by design.

At the top of the list, Jean Claude Trichet, warns that the no implementation of these policies would let banks free to do anything they want -he himself is a banker- and that the new rules would secure bank reserves for difficult financial times.  The package of rules was adopted on Sunday, and it has a very clear goal: “To protect International Economies”.  This confirms the group’s intention to establish a global financial system headed by no other than themselves.  Such Order would abide by their rules no matter what effects such rules have over individual national economies.

According to their published document, banks will have to triple their cash reserves -from 2 to 7 percent- which in their minds would act as a cushion for difficult times or when banks invest in junk financial products.  That amount is in itself ridiculous, if one takes into account that banks’ investments in dubious financial products is many times larger than 7 percent.  What this measure will do is to give banks an excuse to increase interest rates on loans and reduce their loan spending programs.  The reduction in available credit will achieve a goal the bankers had yearned for and that could not accomplish through the failed cap & trade fraudulent scheme: to bring global economic activity to a halt.

“The agreements reached today are a fundamental strengthening of global capital standards,” said Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank and chairman of the banking supervision group.  Trichet commanded the group dismissing some bankers concerns that these new measures will require them to curtail credit, which in turn would cripple economic growth. He said the new rules would “contribute to long-term financial stability and growth will be substantial.”  Other bankers sided with Trichet, saying the modest effect on growth or borrowing would be a small price to pay for a less explosive financial system.

What these new rules would achieve -if anything- is the legalization of bad investments, as banks will not have to worry about how to pay for loses.  They will have large amounts of money from investors to cover their backs.  In addition, banks will continue to count on nation states to make up for any shortfalls, as more bailouts for troubled banks have not been taken off the table.  The new rules issued by the group that includes former Goldman Sachs executive Ben Bernanke, will be approved in November by the G-20 before they are handed over to individual countries before they become binding.  Nation-states will have until January 1, 2013 to adapt to the new rules.

“Banks will unarguably be safer institutions,” said Anders Kvist, representative of SEB, a bank that operates out of Stockholm.  Shouldn’t Nation-states have the prerogative to regulate banks operating in their territories?  Meanwhile, bankers continue to point out the new measures will reduce the amount of available credit for borrowers but were not bothered by the other side of the coin: Centralized Control.  That is what this is all about.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, again, a group of un=elected bankers mandates banks to “protect themselves” when they invest in financial instruments of dubious origin.  How about letting banks operate freely and collapse if they have to, due to their irresponsible investment practices?  The new provisions, called a leverage ratio, will obligate banks to hold reserves against all their money at risk.  That is like the nanny global order telling their children not to pick their noses in public.

Of course, there are those to whom global financial regulation is never enough.  Some G-8 countries were pushing for an additional 2.5 percent increase, during “good times” of economic overheating. According to the document released by the group, the rules would be adopted gradually to give banks time to adjust.  Some of the measures will not take effect until 2019, with banks having to start raising cash in 2013.  Too little too late?

The Basel Regulators left the door open to imposing stricter rules on “important” banks, whose problems -irresponsibilities- can infect the whole financial system.  The banksters’ representatives in the US -The FED, FDIC- issued a common statement saying the agreement is a significant step towards reducing the occurrence of future financial crises.  Although Nation-states still have the ability to reject these new regulations and create and approve some of their own, the international financial order has been clear that failure to adopt their newest package of rules will be punishable with harsh changes in credit availability, large increases in interest rates and overall restrictions for financial aid.  Once the new polices are adopted they become binding and countries cannot abandon them.

In the meantime, the Basel group will allow banks to continue to receive government bailout money to raise capital through 2017.  Those banks that are not capable of raising enough cash may be obligated to merge or perish as part of the consolidation and control package the regulators have in mind.  Only in the US, it is estimated that some 400 banks are on the brink of failure.

Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt said it intends to sell shares for 9.8 billion euros to increase its reserves.  Other banks that will do the same include Société Générale -a bailed out bank- in France and Lloyds in Britain. The rules imposed by the Basel Group also include paying banks -with taxpayer money- to dispose of toxic assets such as derivatives.

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