29 enero 2016

+ bajadas de los bancos

A la banca italiana no le ha gustado el banco malo que, de capón, han tenido que montarles para meter toda su morralla de créditos morosos…(acumulan 200.000 millones de euros de mora). Seguimos a la espera de ver su evolución, pero el desplome de la banca es descomunal, el de ayer terrorífico, y el acumulado en el último año, peor. Caídas de la banca italiana ayer:
Mala cosa ya que se han contagiado los españoles también. La banca española, por el efecto dominó, tampoco anda muy fina. Ayer el Santander y el BBVA se dejaron más de un 3,5% cada uno, y haciendo nuevos mínimos, los más bajos desde el año 2000. Y sí, es un problema general del sector en toda Europa.
Los apoyos no llegan; bueno, ayer Ana Patricia Botín ha comprado 200.000 acciones del Santander y se ha dado de alta en la cuenta 1.2.3. Ya iba siendo hora que la Presidenta tuviera su cuenta corriente en su propio banco, digo yo… Su padre habría aparcado unos cuantos millones de acciones por aquí y por allá. Ella no puede con la avalancha de papel de los fondos de inversión, que identifican al Santander como banco mediterráneo, y es que acojona las posiciones en Brasil y demás sitios.
Por cierto, Santander Consumer, el banco filial recientemente colocado, pierde en bolsa ya el 60% desde el IPO: Bien para la matriz, mal para el que suscribió…, como suele ser habitual.
Y la matriz va horrible:
Si comparamos el UNICREDITO (UCG.MI), BANCA MONTE DEI PASCHI DI SIENA (BMPS.MI) y el Banco SANTANDER (SAN.MC): Acumulan unas enormes pérdidas desde el año 2000:
Mientras, todos los bancos españoles tienen que lidiar con la mora, con la declarada oficial que es pantagruélica:
Y con la que está oculta en subestandares, cuasi moras, refinanciaciones con carencias de principal…, y otra mucha que no declararán… Basta por ver el mogollón de edificios/naves/centros comerciales invendibles que hay por ahí sueltos…
Y no pienses que el Santander es una excepción. En 2015 ganó más de 5.000 millones de euros de beneficios. Mientras que el Deutsche Bank tuvo en 2015 más de 6,000 millones de euros de pérdidas, y le está yendo igual de mal en bolsa. El Banco de Santander (SAN.MC) ha perdido un 65% en bolsa en los últimos 5 años y el Deutsche Bank (DBK.DE) ha palmado un 60%. Da igual los resultados que tengan…, da igual que ambos sean llamados los “bancos sistémicos” (hay solo 30 en el mundo y el Santander es el único español), todo da igual. Todo depende de las tripas que tenga y las expectativas de que se coma sus reservas y el capital.
Es igual. Los inversores no quieren tener bancos ya que se temen lo peor. Y lo peor es que un banco puede llegar a valer cero, y nunca puede valer infinito. O dicho de otro modo, es equiprobable que pueda cotizar en céntimos de euros que vuelva a cotizar en 8 euros.
Otros bancos, que sufrieron fuertes quebrantos, no han levantado cabeza: Se perdió casi todo en bolsa y no hubo repunte posterior…
Una lata…
El otro caso español aparte de Bankia es el Banco Popular, que quebró sin quebrar…:
Todo esto que pasa en los bancos sucede por los excesos cometidos a la hora de asumir riesgos bancarios. Demasiados préstamos indebidos, demasiados riesgos foráneos indebidos, se intentó crecer a cualquier precio fuera, pensando que se compensaría lo malo de una zona con lo bueno de otra, demasiados riesgos en derivados y en productos apalancados…, demasiada cartera de bonos, demasiado apalancamiento (se daban más créditos de lo que se tenían de recursos)… Luego vino esta purga tan conocida que ha pillado a tantos a contrapelo, ya que la imagen de marca es fabulosa…
Y no, no nos está afectando el lío que nos han montado los políticos, todavía… Tristes abrazos,
PD1: Además, con tantos personalismos y “bancos de bandera” en la UE, no se ha hecho el proceso de concentración que hizo los EEUU. Han quedado 4 grandes bancos y los pequeños han casi desaparecido…
En Europa no se hará… Son muchos los sillones y pocos los destinos…
PD2: Esta mañana el Banco Central de Japón ha decidido poner los tipos en negativo (-0,1%) para tratar de generar inflación. Lleva estimulando con mucho porcentaje del PIB su economía para que crezca, para salir de su larga deflación, algo que no está consiguiendo. Tiene un deduda pública del 240% y sus bonos a largo plazo, a 10 años, no rentan nada de nada:
Creo que no es el camino, y otros países nos vamos japonizando por momentos…
PD3: Sabes que hay muchas familias que tienen a los hermanos que no se hablan, que andan peleados… El Papa ha dicho a los hermanos que no se hablan: "Este año de la misericordia es una buena ocasión para olvidar las cosas feas y perdonarse…" Con lo fácil que es pedir perdón, con la alegría que da luego el reencuentro con tu hermano/a… ¡Ánimo!

28 enero 2016

la media no sirve en economía

No entendemos nada de lo que está pasando por ahí… Usamos medios antiguos, del siglo pasado, para acometer errores. La economía es la suma de las actividades y algo más… Despreciamos la nueva economía y sus efectos en el conjunto…

Math, Myths, And Misunderstandings About China: The Seductiveness Of The Average

You Cannot Manage New Economies With Obsolete Measuring Tools

First-year students of statistics are routinely warned that, “On average, every person has one ovary and one testicle.”  More seriously, they may be told the story of the six-foot man who drowned in a river with an average depth of four feet.
These quips are supposed to prevent students from mindlessly using irrelevant or misleading statistical averages or aggregates.  Yet economists often do just that when they measure a country’s or a region’s activity and growth rate by using statistics that bundle together sectors or jobs that, in reality, are behave quite differently from each other.
Often, a single macroeconomic statistic aggregates or averages components that could signal either economic weakness or an acceleration with the potential to rekindle inflation.  The resulting uncertainty probably is why, today, the major central banks still hesitate between more monetary easing and its opposite, a return of higher interest rates.

Math, Myths, and Misunderstandings about China

We see one of the most obvious current examples of how misleading averages and aggregates can be in the ongoing, so-called “rebalancing” of the Chinese economy.
Several years ago Andy Rothman, one of the most astute and least “bipolar” analysts of the Chinese economy, acknowledged an emerging consensus that the country’s GDP would soon slow down from its breakneck pace of more than 10-percent growth per annum.  He warned, however, that this slowdown would not happen evenly across the board.
Once the huge pent-up demand for infrastructure, plant construction, and housing was satisfied, these sectors would settle into the lower growth rates typical of more-developed economies.  However, household spending was still in its infancy, and would probably continue to grow at double-digit rates.  It thus would remain “the world’s best consumption story”; but since it could not physically be expected to accelerate beyond the annual 11 percent of recent years, China’s GDP would naturally settle into a much slower growth trend.  That, however, would not necessarily be cause for alarm.
Rothman recently updated his views, from which I paraphrase some snippets with my own emphasis added1:
+ Exports haven’t contributed to GDP growth for the past seven years.  Only about 10 percent of the goods rolling out of Chinese factories are exported.  China largely consumes what it produces.
+ Manufacturing is sluggish, especially in heavy industries such as steel and cement, as China has passed its peak in the growth rate of construction of infrastructure and new homes.  But factory wages are up 5 to 6 percent this year, reflecting a fairly tight labor market, and more than 10 million new homes will be sold in 2015.  Manufacturing has not collapsed.
+ China has rebalanced away from a dependence on exports, heavy industry, and investment:  Consumption accounted for 58 percent of GDP growth during the first three quarters of this year.  Shrugging off the mid-June fall in the stock market, real (inflation-adjusted) retail sales actually accelerated to 11 percent in October and November, the fastest pace since March.  China has remained the world’s best consumption story.
+ Unprecedented income growth is the most important factor supporting consumption.  In the first three quarters of this year, real per-capita disposable income rose more than 7 percent, while over the past decade, real urban income rose 137 percent and real rural income rose 139 percent.
+ The strong consumer story can mitigate the impact of the slowdown in manufacturing and investment, but it can’t drive growth back to an overall 8-percent pace.
So we are far from the gloomy forecasts of analysts who blindly trust GDP statistics aggregating very disparate sectors or, worse, who mistake stock-market fluctuations for evidence of economic strength or weakness.

Measurement Lags Reality

I am not a fervent disciple of the “This Time Is Different” School of Economics.  In fact, I have often argued the opposite – that, over its cycles, history tends to “rhyme”2.  Still, economies do change over time, and one of the problems of economic analysis is that the way in which we measure activity or growth often lags well behind changes in the real world.
In the late-1980s, for example, Tocqueville Asset Management argued that America’s manufacturing was not dying, as the consensus then proclaimed, but was in fact being reborn, as became apparent in the 1990s.  One of our main arguments, articulated with the help of Harvard Professor Robert S. Kaplan, was that corporations were still using accounting methods invented in the 19th century, when basic, heavy industries dominated economic activity3.
In these “ancient” times, raw materials and direct (or “touch”) labor constituted up to 80 percent of total manufacturing costs.  It was thus acceptable, when analyzing companies’ sources of profits, to allocate “indirect” costs (those difficult to impute to specific activities or products) in proportion to the easier-to-measure costs of materials or direct labor.  But by the 1980s, electronics and other newer and lighter industries used fewer raw materials; their direct labor rarely exceeded 5 to10 percent of total costs.  As a result, a situation had developed where a majority of total costs was allocated arbitrarily based on the small portion that was easily measurable.
This obsolete accounting method grossly misestimated which corporate segments were profitable or not, so that corporate strategies often continued to fund less-profitable, traditional activities instead of investing in potentially more-profitable opportunities.  This had been detrimental, not only to the competitiveness of individual companies, but also to the overall U.S. economy.  Fortunately, by the late 1980s, a more accurate approach to cost accounting was being adopted, which augured well for a US economic revival.

Could History Be About To Rhyme?

Venture capitalist and author Bill Davidow argues that today our techniques for measuring economic performance are obsolete, and thus lead us to reach improper conclusions about the state of the economy.  Many economists, policy-makers, and politicians, he says, are still using 20th-century methods to analyze our 21st-century economy, in which two worlds co-exist:
“The physical economy is anemic, struggling, biased toward inflation, and shrinking in many developed countries….  We use dollars to measure most of the activity.  If more dollars are spent or earned, we conclude that the economy is growing.
“The virtual economy is robust, biased toward deflation, and growing at staggering rates, everywhere.  A lot of the services provided to us in the virtual economy are free.  If we paid dollars for those services, they would be counted as part of the GDP and would add to economic growth.  But we don’t, so they are not counted.”4
In his analysis, all the “free” services we get on the Internet are actually paid for, not with money that can be counted, but with our privacy and attention.  Services like searches on Google, the listing of residential rentals on Airbnb, free email, information storage on Dropbox, phone calls on Skype, hotel and restaurant reviews on TripAdvisor or Yelp, free text messages on WhatsApp, or free music cost zero in money terms, so they are not counted in the GDP.  But in fact, they are worth billions.
If advertisers paid us directly to invade our privacy and capture our attention, and we then turned around and spent the money to purchase the services mentioned above, the government would count what they pay us as part of our income and the sale of their services as part of the GDP.  There are no accurate numbers, but a partial idea of the value of those services could be derived from the money advertisers spend on digital ads – a projected $114 billion in 2014.
Davidow is not the only one to warn that we are increasingly trying to steer our economies with faulty compasses.  British economist Diane Coyle similarly argues that the universally used GDP is no longer a good enough measure of economic performance:
“It is a measure designed for the 20th-century economy of physical mass production, not for the modern economy of rapid innovation and intangible, increasingly digital services.”5
A recent report from Morgan Stanley also reminds us that many of the tools that are supposed to tell economists when growth is about to roll over or accelerate were developed when the economy looked a lot different than it does today:
“Fifty years ago, the US and global economy was largely driven by manufacturing and industrial activity.  Today, we are much more of a services- and consumer-driven economy, not just in the US, but all over the world.  To be specific, the developed world is 70 percent consumption and services-oriented….  Many of the established economic tools don’t capture this part of the economy properly and over-discount the signals coming from the old economy.”6
Finally, as predicted by Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” concept, the virtual economy not only adds yet-uncounted growth to the real economy, but it also destroys many counted components of the old economy.  Edward Jung, former chief architect at Microsoft and now chief technology officer at Intellectual Ventures, explains:
“While GDP measures the market value of all goods and services produced within a country, many stars of the digital age (think Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, Netscape, and so on) produce no goods and provide free services.  These same star players also tend to undercut the productivity of traditional businesses.  Free navigation apps have shrunk sales for Garmin, the GPS pioneer that was once one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States.  Skype is killing the international phone call ‘one minute at a time.’”7
So, between uncounted growth from the new economy and creative destruction of parts of the old economy, our traditional macro indicators have the potential to be more confusing than they have been in a long time.

The Sharing, Gig, and Circular Economies

Three models essentially characterize the new economy that I am discussing here: the sharing, gig, and circular.
The sharing model comprises companies such as Getaround, Airbnb, CameraLends, and Loanables, which allow individuals to rent out their cars, homes, or tools when they are not fully utilized.
Dan Neil, in The Future of Everything, explains that, “The utilization rate of automobiles in the U.S. is about 5 percent.  For the remaining 95 percent of the time (23 hours), our cars just sit there, a slow, awful cash burn, like condos at the beach.”8
And Davidow quantifies the economic impact of sharing:
“The annual cost of a Honda Civic used for, say, 7,500 miles per year, is around $6,500 per year, or 85 cents per mile.  Using a Zipcar for 500 hours a year, approximately the same amount of driving, would cost only $4,250, a saving of $2500 – equal to about 4 percent of a middle class family’s income.”4
The sharing model may be in its infancy, as it potentially applies to many of our belongings.  Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky told The New York Times in a 2013 column, “There are 80 million power drills in America that are used an average of 13 minutes.  Does everyone really need their own drill?”
In a slightly different vein, BlaBlaCar connects drivers and passengers willing to travel together between cities and share the cost of the journey, while Lending Club puts potential borrowers in touch with potential lenders.
The gig model, with sites like TaskRabbit, FlexJobs, or Gig.com, is the Internet morphing of the traditional freelance economy, where people offer and rent out their skills and talent for specific missions, often for a finite period of time.
The sharing and gig economies often overlap.  Uber, for example, is positioned at the intersection of the two, since it allows a car owner to share his car while he also is performing a gig by operating like a taxi driver.
The circular model aims to replace companies’ traditional “resource to waste” way of functioning with a circular “resource to resource” dynamic.  Historical industrial processes and the lifestyles that feed on them deplete finite reserves to create products that end up in landfills or in incinerators, while traditional recycling is energy-intensive and generally degrades materials, leading to continuing high demand for virgin materials.
The circular economy aims to design out waste through repair, reuse, and remanufacture.  BMW, for example, remanufactures parts to the same quality specifications as new BMW parts, with the same 24-month warranty, at a 50-percent cost saving for customers compared to new parts.9
In the lifestyle area, eBay, Swap.com, thredUP, and Refashioner, which allow people to recycle their clothes, accessories, or almost anything, are good examples of the circular model.

The New Economy Is All Around Us, but…

There is no doubt that the new economy exemplified by the sharing, gig, and circular models has the potential to release much capacity that until now was frozen in idle investments.  Conceptually, therefore, this “new economy” should reduce new-car purchases, new hotel-room construction, and other types of investments, while boosting the productivity of existing assets.  However, I discussed the matter with a friend who is both active in the hospitality business and an early investor in Uber.  He was adamant that I not underestimate the number of mini-entrepreneurs who purchase new cars just to become full-time Uber drivers, or the number of residential or vacation units that are being purchased to be rented full-time.
Moreover, since the income earned by many sharers and gig workers really supplements their regular incomes, many of them do not realize that their gigs or rental incomes qualify as separate jobs.  While the additional income from these activities is usually reported to the IRS, the activity may not be correctly captured by various employment surveys.
Just as importantly, the effects of the virtual economy do not fall evenly across the economic spectrum.  The lower your income, the more likely it is that you are paying a greater portion of your salary for essentials such as food and healthcare.  In that case, you live principally in the physical economy, where the cost of these items has been rising.  This segment of the population may be able to get some gig jobs to supplement their incomes, but it generally does not have the money to invest in an Uber car or an Airbnb unit.
This may explain why many people who do not participate in the new economy have the feeling that we still have not fully recovered from the Great Recession, while others actually feel fairly comfortable.  Declining prices and additional incomes accrue to participants in the virtual economy, whose members generally are already better off.  Two economies, two perceptions of economic reality, but a common GDP.
The truth is that, despite massive research in the last few years, it is hard to gauge the current size and impact of the sharing, gig, and circular economic phenomena on GDP, employment, and even incomes. 
But this should not stop us from trying.  As Einstein reportedly said, “If we knew what we are talking about, it would not be called research.”

Volatility, Schizophrenia, and Bad Breadth

To my mind, attempting to steer an economy on the basis of aggregates or averages that merge individual sectors with very disparate strengths amounts to trying to tune a carburetor while wearing boxing gloves.  The result is likely to be too much stimulus for the strong sectors and starvation for the weak ones.  And attempts to try to correct these excesses are likely to worsen the volatility of both economies and financial markets.
The stage for this type of volatility was set in the last three years, as very large gaps opened between the performances of various regional or sectoral financial markets.
Within the US stock market, similar gaps have developed. The four so-called “FANG” stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) and the “Nifty Nine”, which also includes Priceline, eBay, Starbucks, Microsoft and Salesforce, rose strongly in 2015, while the majority of other stocks were down (energy, materials and manufacturing) or broadly unchanged for the year.
Source: StockCharts.com
The kind of financial divergences that have opened in the last three years are usually closed, eventually, and the volatility promised by the lack of economic visibility could portend a challenging coming year for the financial markets.
Abrazos,
PD1: La Fortaleza del hombre: Lo primero que hay que pedir al hombre es que sea, de verdad, hombre, y cabeza de familia: fortaleza, equilibrio, autoridad… Ser cabeza de familia no es mandar, sino ser el que más sufre, el que más se entrega, el que más responsabilidades asume, el que más equilibrio pone en la casa, el que serena las cosas, el que pone el cariño y la corrección necesaria, el que lanza a los hijos a la vida… Ser un hombre de verdad hoy no es sólo saber poner el lavavajillas. Es verdad que el hombre debe colaborar en casa, pero su principal misión ha de ser el fuerte de la casa, no una réplica de la madre…

27 enero 2016

buenas noticias

Todos pendientes de si estamos descontando una recesión, o hay algo más. Este tipo recoge un buen indicador y alivia bastante:

A Bit of Good News

The yield-curve indicator is not flashing...yet.
Dark Clouds
Wall Street is at its gloomiest since 2009. China's slowdown, plummeting commodity prices, and flattening corporate profits have frayed nerves. Star bond-fund manager Jeff Gundlach 
stated late last year that if oil prices got down to $40 per barrel, that would indicate that "something is very, very wrong with the world." Oil's price as I write this is $30.14. Royal Bank of Scotland went further, issuing the direst client warning I have ever seen from a mainstream investment firm. RBS says that 2016 "looks like 2008." It advises to "sell (mostly) everything."
While I am generally of a sanguine nature, I confess to being uncomfortable as well. Today's bear theory is sounder than most. No question that China and other developing markets have spent heavily on capital investments; that commodity companies have responded by expanding capacity; that the combination of those two activities has juiced the global economy; and that both those booms have faded. Sometimes the pessimists fake it--such as 2009's baseless speculation that stocks would suffer because of "uncertainty" about future U.S. tax policy--but in this instance the concerns are real.
That said, there's a long gap that separates the ability to foresee economic troubles from the ability to forecast financial markets. (Peter Lynch: "The way you lose money in the stock market is to start off with an economic picture. If you spend more than 13 minutes analyzing economic and market forecasts, you've wasted 10." He did not completely believe that, of course, but mostly.) Even if the economy hits the expected wall, that doesn't mean securities will follow suit. Other measures, such as those based on stock prices and investor sentiment, are also instructive.
The Yield Curve Indicator
Investment writer Bill Bernstein (here is his 
primer, and here is his advanced class) has provided just such a measure--the yield curve indicator, or YCI. (A true friend is one who sends not only a story idea, but one accompanied by data and charts!) When long U.S. Treasury bonds yield more than Treasury bills, as is typically the case, stocks are usually in good shape. In contrast, an inverted yield curve, with long Treasuries paying less than cash, often suggests trouble. Researchers aren't sure why that is--I think it might be because inverted yield curves indicate a tight monetary policy, while Bernstein supports the behavioral notion that investors think that "cash is trash" during stock euphorias--but, for whatever reasons, such is mostly the case.
By and large, Bernstein's charts support that thesis. For the most part, high YCIs are associated with benevolent stock markets, and low scores occur around times of trouble.
Early Years
The first two decades available for the data set, which begins in the familiar year of 1926 (the birth of the universe, per the Book of Ibbotson), show a simple pattern: a steady decline, a blow-up, and then a long period where YCI was steady.
  - Source: Morningstar
YCI was prescient in the 1920s. As the stock bubble expanded, the Treasury yield curve became increasingly negative. Its lowest point was in June 1929--four months before Black Tuesday. You can't ask for much better than that.
The indicator was not very successful in the 1930s through the mid-1940s. In the broadest sense it was on track, as a steadily positive curve was accompanied by a recovery in stock prices. (From 1933 through 1945, U.S. stocks gained 25%-plus in six calendar years.) But it utterly missed the severe 1937 setback, caused when the Federal Reserve prematurely tightened interest rates, and it missed the World War II-related downturn of 1940-42.
(Even in the 1920s, however, YCI would have been only marginally useful for timing the stock market. Get out in 1926 when the indicator first turns negative? Get back in when it briefly spiked upward? Sell in early 1928 as YCI went further into the red? Wait until 1929? Hold out even longer? As Bernstein writes, YCI can serve as an "ancillary market signal." It provides one of many answers to the question of whether stocks are in a bubble. To ask more of YCI, as with asking more of the Shiller P/E ratio, is to ask more than the statistic can give.)
Postwar America
During the next 40 years, YCI was mostly on track.

 
- Source: Morningstar
The indicator stayed steadily positive from World War II's end through the mid-1960s. So were stock-market returns, as the S&P 500 had 16 up years in 20 attempts, with the four down years being only mildly in the red. During that period, YCI gave no false negative signal. While it did do some bouncing, it never reached the point of suggesting investor caution. Which was appropriate, as the U.S. postwar stock market strongly favored buy-and-hold investing.
YCI then got very bumpy, along with stock prices. The indicator did not anticipate the 1966, 1969, and 1973-74 downturns, but rather moved along with them. That is, when each of those declines began, YCI was positive, but as stocks fell, YCI joined suit. The indicator moved quickly enough that it remained moderately correlated with future performance; for example, YCI turned sharply negative by mid-1973, when most of that bear market's losses had yet to occur.
Modern Times
For the final stretch, from 1985 until present, YCI registered three hits, one modest miss, and one complete miss.

  - Source: Morningstar
The hits were in late 1989, 2001, and 2007, when YCI dipped into the red. In the first and last cases, YCI correctly anticipated the carnage that was to follow. In the middle case, that of 2001, it once again followed the equity market rather than led it, but as the tech-stock sell-off lasted a full two and a half years, YCI did not arrive too late at the wake.
The misses occurred in 1998 and 1987. With the former, the indicator briefly dipped negative during the midst of a surging bull market that would continue for another year and a half. It was a short and slight signal rather than a blaring indicator, so the result should be treated accordingly--but nonetheless, it landed on the wrong side of the facts. On the latter, YCI was blindsided. It utterly missed 1987, just as it had utterly missed 1937 five decades previously. (Maybe it's a half-century thing?)
Today, the figure is safely positive, as it has been for seven years now. There's nothing in YCI to give an investor pause.
Ray of Light?
I won't make too much of the information derived from a bear-market indicator that fully missed two of the worst downturns of the past century and arrived mid-even at several others. A positive signal here is far from overwhelming evidence. On the other hand, YCI has likely been a more reliable stock-market guide than any economist. (An economist who correctly foretells even a single bear market is an economist who has a reputation for life, even if he misses the next three.) Its information is at least worth considering--particularly if it turns negative over the next several months.
YCI has been at its best in joining bear markets in progress. Most of the time, the indicator is unaffected as stocks decline. Stocks suffer a brief period of losses, YCI remains stable, and stocks then recover. That is the typical pattern. But on occasion, YCI follows the stock market's lead. That is when the real trouble occurs. That's one thing that I will be watching in 2016.
Abrazos,
PD1: Pensamos que somos muy buenos, que el mundo debería ser como nosotros y no nos damos cuenta de la cantidad de vicios que acumulamos, de cómo somos realmente. Los vicios son repeticiones de malas actuaciones de forma reiterada. No son sólo el tabaco, el alcohol, el sexo, el perder el tiempo en Internet, el considerarnos el centro del Universo… Hay muchos vicios ocultos que nos parecen virtudes, que creemos que hacemos bien y no son tan buenos. A la larga nos pasan factura ya que perdemos el norte y no distinguimos el bien y el mal… Además solemos pensar que somos capaces de dejar los malos hábitos por nosotros mismos, cuando queramos… y esto es muy difícil. Una vez que coges un vicio (todos los que te he enumerado ahí arriba y muchos más), es muy difícil abandonarlo, casi imposible sin la ayuda de otros, sin que otros, la gente de nuestro entorno, se fije en ellos y nos diga el camino apropiado… Pero no, no nos dejamos ayudar y seguimos pensando que lo que hacemos está bien hecho…

26 enero 2016

los bancos dan miedo...

Vuelta a las andadas de los pobres bancos que sufrieron ayer otro gran varapalo en bolsa…
No remontan:
El Ibex rebotó desde los mínimos de la semana pasada, pero los bancos españoles no recuperan… Da igual si es el mayor Banco de Santander, o el menor, el Banco Popular, todo el sector anda descalabrado…
Ayer más de lo mismo… Mira que galletones se fueron llevando, y con mucho volumen:
Un 4% de bajada ayer del Santander, un 5% Sabadell, un 7% La Caixa, un 4% Bankia…, terrorífico!
La cantidad de veces que te he dicho desde estas líneas que no tuvieras acciones bancarias, que es un sector roto, desde la crisis no ha sido capaz. Se equivocó en el boom y está pagando sus errores con creces… Los inversores no quieren bancos. ¿Estás preparado para ver una quiebra bancaria en España o en Italia? Va a ser un gran titular de prensa, y va a dejar a muchos cagados, ya que no hay salvación posible. España no tiene dinero, y se ha preparado una legislación de que si quiebra uno lo paguen sus depositantes y acreedores en el llamado “bail in”. Y no me digas que estás seguro de que el Fondo de Garantía de Depósitos te va a pagar 100.000 euros por titular, que me parto… Eso fue una engañifa para calmar los mercados en 2012. El FGD no tiene dinero, ¿con qué lo va a pagar?
Son varios los problemas que tiene la banca, pero entre otros es la poca cobertura de sus créditos mororos:
Aparte de saber los enormes volúmenes de operaciones de refinanciamiento que se han dado, con carencia de principal, a ver si las PYMEs y promotores inmobiliarios sacaban la pasta de algún lago y pagaban solo intereses y el principal después…
Y los italianos no te los enseño que acojonan más…
No hay cobertura apenas en algún gran banco. Y la MORA les sigue subiendo cual espumoso… Mira que les hemos ayudado al sector en su conjunto, con mucha pasta del BCE y de la UE… Nada. Los banqueros no se han enterado de nada y sigue fardando no se sabe de qué. 2008 fue muy severo y, a pesar del mensaje positivista de los políticos, las cosas siguen muy torcidas, sobre todo, para la banca. ¿Les volveremos a ayudar? Lo dudo.
Abrazos,
PD1: Muchos riesgos por Europa… No se fían los bancos unos de otros… Seguimos igual que hace unos años.
Fear!
Money parked at the ECB at a negative rate of 0.3% hit a new high at the beginning of 2016.
Above chart from Statista.
Possible Explanations
+ Fear of losses elsewhere
+ No demand for loans
+ No creditworthy borrowers
+ Capital impairment at banks
+ Failure of ECB policy
To encourage more lending, ECB president Mario Draghi cut the deposit rate for money parked at the ECB from -0.2% to -0.3% on December 3.
Clearly that did not work.
Let's now take a good look at Target2 imbalances, an excellent measure of capital flight from eurozone countries to other eurozone countries. 
Target2 Imbalances in Billions of Euros
Country
Symbol
Target2 Balance
Comment
Spain
ES
-241.8
Worst Negative Since 2012
Italy
IT
-229.6
Worst Negative Ever
Greece
GR
-97.3
Least Negative Since 2015 Q1
ECB
ECB
-73.8
Worst Negative Ever
France
FR
-73.5
Worst Negative Since 2011
Germany
DE
592.5
Highest Since 2012
Luxembourg
LU
140.4
Highest Ever
Netherlands
NL
49.4
Highest Since September 2015
Finland
FI
31.8
Highest Since August 2015
Cyprus
CY
2.4
Second Highest Ever
I created the above table using data from the ECB Statistical Data Warehouse
European Country Codes
The above from Eurostat Country Codes.
Lack of Trust
Target2 is a measure of capital flight between eurozone countries. For example: A depositor in a Greek, Spanish, or Italian bank does not trust their bank so the depositor opens up a new account and transfers the balance to a bank in Germany, the Netherlands, or Luxembourg instead. 
The recipient banks then park the money at the ECB at negative interest rates instead of  buying Greek, Spanish, or Italian bonds.  
Europe Fears Bail-Ins
Stepping back a bit, here's a key question: What caused the depositors to flee their banks in the first place? 
The answer is fear of bail-ins, confiscations, capital controls, and bank failures like we have seen in Greece and Cyprus.
Recent examples include Portugal and Italy.
No Demand For Some Italian Bonds
Dec 11 Italians rushed to try to sell their bank bonds on Friday after taking fright at losses imposed on investors in four small lenders which had to be rescued last month. 
Italy rescued Banca Marche, Banca Etruria, CariChieti and CariFe at the end of November under new European Union rules that shift losses to investors when a bank runs into trouble, moving the burden from taxpayers. 
Some 130,000 shareholders and holders of 790 million euros ($864 million) in junior debt saw the value of their investments wiped out. It was the first time since the 1930s that bondholders suffered losses in a banking crisis. The suicide of a pensioner who lost money in the rescue has added to the outcry. 
"People in Italy are rushing to sell subordinated bank bonds," said Giuseppe Sersale, a fund manager at Anthilia Capital. "Retail investors scared by the protests triggered by the rescue of the four banks are trying to sell, but there is no demand for them."
Dark Clouds Gather
Fears grow every day. And why shouldn't they?
Pater Tenebrarum at the Acting Man blog writes The EU Bail-In Directive: Dark Clouds are Gathering
In the article, Tenebrarum discusses forced bail-ins, noting two recent cases, one in Austria and one in Portugal.
In the case of Portugal, five bonds were moved from the BES "good bank" to the "bad bank" overnight wiping out everyone holding those bonds when the ECB suddenly discovered a  financial hole in a bank thought to have been bailed out in 2014.
The bail-in mechanism is not the problem.
Tenebrarum writes (and I agree) ...
"In principle, the BRRD, or 'bail-in directive' as it is also known, is quite a good idea. The fact that lending money to fractionally reserved banks or even merely depositing it with them, involves risks needed to be firmly reestablished. One simply cannot expect that banks and their creditors will be bailed out by taxpayers at every opportunity. By arbitrarily meting out unequal treatment to similar classes of creditors, they are unwittingly hastening this process of recognition."
Bail-in Jitters
These bail-ins are causing jitters. Can you trust Spanish banks? Italian banks? French banks? Greek banks?
Depositors increasingly say no. And the recipient banks in Germany, Netherlands etc, don't want to risk bonds in those countries when the deposits are transferred. 
Target2 imbalances rise nearly every month as a result.
Your Choice 
Tenebrarum concludes with few statements that go to the heart of the matter. This one says it best.
Sorry boys and girls, you will have to choose. You can either have capitalism, freedom, prosperity and personal responsibility, or you can have socialism, tyranny, poverty and ‘security’. You cannot have both.
Correction: I attributed that quote to Mises but Tenebrarum explains: "That was supposed to be the caption under his photo. My editor apparently mixed something up. So it is actually a Pater Tenebrarum quote." 
Are German Banks Safe?
Here's an important question I leave you with: Do you think German banks are safe?
If so, you are badly mistaken. Think about Target2 for a second: If Spain, Italy, Greece, or any country leaves the eurozone, someone will have to eat those Target2 imbalances.
How would the ECB allocate those losses?
Taxpayers, depositors, or bondholders will be bailed-in directly. Alternatively, the ECB will violate the Maastricht treaty and print the money to cover the losses. In that case, the euro will take a hit.
Nothing in Europe is safe!  
PD2: Los tipos negativos ya los tenemos y mucho más los vamos a tener a partir de marzo, cuando Dragui vuelva a actuar…, para salvar a las bolsas como dijo.

Los aberrantes tipos de interés negativos

La existencia de tipos de interés negativos en Europa es una anomalía que no se ha dado en ninguna otra parte del mundo, ni en ningún otro periodo de la historia moderna. Ni la Reserva Federal estadounidense, ni el Banco de Japón, ni el Banco de Inglaterra, pese a haber sido muy beligerantes y activos en sus políticas monetarias heterodoxas, no han llegado en ningún momento a aplicar tipos negativos. Con el objetivo fallido de conseguir inflación, el Banco Central Europeo (BCE), entre otros, ha llegado a situar los tipos de interés en niveles negativos.
Cuando los bancos centrales no sólo no remuneran las cantidades depositadas en ellos por las entidades financieras, sino que les cobran, provocan un efecto en cadena de tipos de interés negativos. Tomemos como ejemplo Suiza. El Banco Central Suizo aplica un tipo negativo del 0,75% a las cantidades depositas en su entidad por los bancos. En otras palabras, las cantidades que los bancos suizos no prestan a terceros, o no invierten en cualquier tipo de activo y tienen en liquidez les suponen un coste del 0,75% por depositar en su banco central. En la Zona Euro el tipo negativo aplicado a los depósitos de los bancos en el Banco Central Europeo (BCE) es del 0,3%.
Inevitablemente los bancos acabarán traspasando ese coste a los saldos de sus clientes: primero a las empresas e instituciones y posteriormente incluso a los particulares. De tal forma que depositar cantidades de dinero en los bancos no sólo no aporte ninguna rentabilidad, sino que supondrá un coste, que puede llegar a ser considerable, como en el caso suizo, o sueco, 0,75% y 1,1% respectivamente.
Una vez que los tipos de interés han traspasado la barrera del cero, llegando a ser negativos, es difícil saber dónde se encuentra su límite. Para muestra Suecia, donde el Banco Central cobra (no paga) el 1,1% por las cantidades depositadas. El contagio de los tipos negativos llega a los bonos soberanos a dos años de numerosos tesoros europeos, cuya rentabilidad se sitúa incluso por debajo del -0,30% aplicado por el BCE a los depósitos. Varios factores explican esta anomalía histórica de bonos soberanos con tipos de interés negativos:
-La actuación del BCE comprando ingentes cantidades de bonos con límite del tipo aplicado por él mismo a los depósitos (-0,3% actualmente). El BCE está comprando bonos a un precio al que sabe que perderá dinero al vencimiento de los mismos.
-La expectativa de los inversores de que el tipo de interés futuro pueda ser incluso más negativo del actual. Si compran un bono una rentabilidad del -0,2% ganarán dinero si logran venderlo cuando la rentabilidad sea, por ejemplo, del -0,4%.
-La obligación "normativa" de muchos inversores institucionales (compañías de seguros, fondos de pensiones) de tener que invertir una parte muy significativa de su cartera en bonos con una determinada calificación crediticia, limitándose sus posibilidades de inversión, al menos en parte de su cartera, a bonos con rentabilidad negativa.
-La percepción de riesgo de los inversores que prefieren "pagar" al Tesoro Alemán el 0,4% a dos años para que les guarde el dinero. Prefieren pagar ese coste que asumir otro tipo de riesgo.
No parece que los bancos centrales que han situado los tipos de interés en negativo hayan sido conscientes de las últimas consecuencias de esta situación. Sin duda, es un experimento con efectos secundarios preocupantes
Así, ¿cómo van a ganar dinero los banqueros y los rentistas?
PD2: Estuve de retiro y recé mucho por todos. Estuve meditando mucho sobre mi vida y lo que hago. Y me hice propósitos de mejora.
Este es mi caso: Voy a Misa todos los días, no podría no ir, me faltaría algo. La Misa es el mejor conjunto de oraciones de todas las que conozco. Me confieso todas las semanas, ya sé que puede parecer mucho, pero pido perdón por pecados menores, por faltas de atención a otros, de omisión, por la maldita soberbia innata del ser humano… Recibo la Gracia de los sacramentos que me dan fuerza para lidiar, para buscar la humildad. Hago un rato de oración por la mañana y por la tarde, tantas peticiones, que luego dejo en la Misa. Rezo el Rosario y pido por muchas cosas, por mucha gente y sus necesidades. Hay tantas, tanto sufrimiento... Intento ayudar con lo que puedo a Cáritas, de forma regular, mensual, intento amar al prójimo, ayudando, sirviendo, que para eso estamos aquí, perdonarles sus ofensas y borrarlas de mi cabeza, como cuando nos confesamos que Dios se olvida de lo que hicimos… Trato de llevar la alegría a los que me rodean, siendo simpático y preocupándome por sus problemas. Hasta sonrío a las viejas por la calle cuando me cruzo con ellas!!!
No pienses que son tantas cosas, no llevan mucho tiempo, se espacian al cabo del día y, a ratitos, te van saliendo… No cuestan tanto hacerlas, y sonreír es gratis.
Pero se me escapaba algo más. Llevo muchos años haciendo todo esto y me parecía que era suficiente, estaba bastante satisfecho, pensaba que con estas prácticas de piedad, me tenía que contentar… ¡Qué equivocado estaba! Me faltaba la más importante: amar a Dios. Esto es lo que se me había escapado. Me he pasado muchos años pidiendo cosas, pidiendo por la gente, por los míos, que está muy bien, pero todas estas necesidades ya las sabe Dios antes de que yo se las pida. Me he pasado tantos años corrigiendo mis defectos, tratando de ser mejor, cuando lo que me ha faltado es amar más a Dios.
Esto es lo que me he puesto de propósito en mi retiro espiritual, amarle más, meterme en el evangelio con el Señor, sentarme al lado de Él en una piedra mientras va hablando y explicando a los judíos su mensaje de amor. Maravillarme de los milagros que va haciendo, contemplarle cada día, tenerle cerca de mí, saber que está a mi lado todo el día, darle muchas gracias por esas cosas que nos van pasando y que vienen de su mano… Así que mis ratos de oración van a ser para Él y las peticiones las dejaré en la Patena de la Misa. A ver si lo cumplo.