Many people are unfamiliar with SDRs. Special Drawing Rights were first issued by the IMF in 1969, as Bretton Woods was straining and fears there was not enough gold and dollars, the main reserve assets, were growing. SDRs are a basket of existing currencies. The basket gets reset every 5-years. The last reset was in November 2005. The US dollar accounts for 44% of the SDR basket. The euro's share is 34%, while the yen and sterling's shares are 11% each. The SDR is a basket of existing currencies not a single currency like the euro, but rather more like the old European Currency Unit. The value of the SDR is calculated and posted by the IMF daily. It is currently worth about $1.51.
There have been two allocations of SDRs. The first was in 1970-1972 for 9.3 billion SDRs and the second one was in 1979-1981 for another 12.1 billion SDRs. In 1997, there was a proposal to double the SDR issuance to 42.8 billion (roughly $64 billion). One hundred and thirty one members endorsed the proposal and they had a weighted vote of 77.7%.
Approval requires 85%. The US has a 16.75% vote share, and has not approved the proposal. If there was a signal in Geithner's remarks is was that the Obama Administration may reconsider the US stance. Here is why it is necessary: Roughly the fifth of the IMF members which have joined since 1981 have never received an SDR allocation. Of course that inhibits their ability to participate in the SDR system. Moreover, given the depth and magnitude of the financial crisis and economic downturn—anticipated to be the first time in more than half a century that the world economy will likely contract—an new allotment of SDRs may be compelling.
We have heard these kinds of arguments many times before over the course of the 20th century, and usually in response to a global balance of payments crisis. Is there anything new about this proposal? It looks likely to be a purely political move.
A number of people including Columbia University’s Joseph Stiglitz, are supportive of the idea, arguing that the status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency creates unnecessary problems for both the US and the rest of the world.
Most importantly for the US it means that it is very difficult for the Fed to manage domestic monetary policy because the US financial system must accommodate not only conditions in the US but also distortions introduced by the use of the US dollar as a reserve currency, and these distortions can be massive. The most obvious example is the way over the past decade systematic industrial policies mainly in China and East Asia aimed at running trade surpluses and the accumulation of reserves meant that the US economy and its financial and monetary systems were forced to adjust in ways that created large and serious imbalances, which only now are we resolving.
At least four months ago George Soros (and others) proposed an increase in SDRs to help provide sufficient liquidity to arrest the deflationary forces that were growing. Ironically, China and Russia, apparently inspired the by famous speculator, have gone even further.
For one thing liquidity is key, and I think not even the euro – and certainly not SDRs or alternatives to the SDR – can ever hope to achieve anything like the level of liquidity implicit in the US dollar market. For another thing, for a currency to achieve reserve status there must be some systematic way of delivering the currency to central banks and other players who want to acquire it, and the US does so by its ability and willingness to run persistent trade deficits. How will the IMF or whoever controls the SDR create and assign reserves?
Some observers suggest that SDRs are the IMF's money (sometimes referred as paper gold), but that reflects a misunderstanding. Issuing SDRs is not the same as the IMF printing money. The IMF doesn't do that. An increase in SDRs simply boosts each member’s claims on the composite currencies. The IMF is not a central bank.
More specifically, if the SDR is indeed a true reserve currency, and not simply an accounting entry that allows central banks to pretend that they are not holding dollars but whose value ultimately rests on its convertibility to the US dollar, who will determine the global money supply and how do we prevent this from becoming a horribly politicized process? After all the Fed has an interest in seeing stability in the value and use of the dollar, and so it can be counted on more or less to act in the best interest of the reserve currency, but why should anyone care about the value of the SDR over the long term and, more importantly, how can prudent behavior be enforced? More worryingly, if Europe has had so much trouble managing monetary policy among a group of neighboring countries with fairly similar social and economic conditions, how do we manage monetary policy on a global scale?
Perhaps the SDR is a covert way of getting back to something resembling the gold standard by creating a fiat currency with very strict rules about its expansion. If that is the case, the SDR almost certainly won’t last long.
Final thoughts:
a) the ramblings by China was interesting but its an airy-fairy idea at best, its motive is likely to "scare" the US officials to think harder about their macro and monetary policies going forward
b) the move will never happen unless IMF becomes more representative of the global financial system, that could take years of appointments to change the racial and country mix of IMF
c) there are a lot of countries that does not agree with IMF's policies
d) SDR needs to get liquidity to a substantial level before it can be an alternative, that is like asking Malaysia's economy to move into the global top 10 biggest economies in 5 years, possible but improbable
e) a saner proposal will be akin to the Euro currency - it can be started by getting ASEAN members to throw all their currencies into the hat together with HK, China, Japan and India... the rest can join later and the new currency can be called AZO... but even that proposal will be extremely difficult, in fact many times more difficult than for the the European Union/ Euro Currency to be formed because of the various differing political platforms each country has, and that each country basically have to give up on having their own monetary policies - if your country unemployment is very bad, but the rest are OK, there's nothing you can do to your monetary policies to loosen the purse, etc...
So, SDR, a pipe dream...
p/s photos: Lara Dutta
For all the anger being lashed out at bank employees compensation. Bank CEOs have been grilled, even Greenspan has been lambasted (rightly). But what about the ratings agencies?? They were mostly responsible for the growth of CDOs, rating them AAA when only a small component of those CDOs consist of AAA borrowers. Without their implicit approval, the investment banks could not have managed to lure so many investors to buy these so called triple A rated papers. Just a notch below AAA would have seen these CDOs growth cut by a substantial amount. Its not the first time ratings agencies have "helped" to create troubles for the global financial markets. You can name Enron, Worldcom and now CDOs. These buggers get their rating fees upfront and not even a slap on the wrists. I would suggest that Moodys, Fitch and S&P be fined the sum of all fees received from rating the CDOs for 2004-2008. There has to be punitive action. I certainly hope that the upcoming G20 meeting will see some "action" on these ratings agencies.
Sydney Morning Herald: Ratings agencies such as Moody's Investor Services, Standard & Poors and Fitch rule the roost. They decide who is risky and who is safe. But how scientific are these ratings? Who is on the judging panel? And how accurate are they? Let's start at the last question. In terms of accuracy, their record is nothing short of appalling.
These are the are people who brought you Enron, who claimed the biggest corporate scam in US history was a fabulous investment opportunity just a few weeks before it collapsed. And not just Enron. The agencies gave the nod of approval to a whole range of dotcom darlings, including Worldcom, which lost billions of dollars in shareholder funds and where executives found themselves before courts and in jail.
But if you thought they'd learnt from that horrible and hugely embarrassing experience, you'd be dead wrong. Because around the time they were copping a shellacking over the dotcom collapse, in 2001, the ratings agencies were sowing the seeds for the downfall of the Western capitalist system as we know it
A huge number of unscrupulous participants played a role in the American real estate boom that has since brought the system to its knees. But it was the ratings agencies that provided the legitimacy for America's investment banks to pump up the market, to sell collections of high-risk loans to vast numbers of unsophisticated investors around the world, and all under the mask of a gold-plated AAA rating.
Just in case you missed the point, you had subprime loans to home buyers - which by definition were loans to people with a history of default - being packaged up, diced and spliced and repackaged as low-risk investments. The "mortgage-backed securities" were repackaged into "collateralised debt obligations" and Wall Street investment bankers sold them as safe investments to dentists in Norway, country councils in Australia and anyone else with more dollars than sense. Those who tipped in their money thought it was a terrific deal: a huge return on a AAA-rated investment. If only they'd known those selling them laughingly referred to them as "the cream of the crap".
So what is wrong with the ratings system? For a start, it involves an enormous conflict of interest. Those with the product - not the client or the investor - pay for the rating. From the ratings agency's perspective, it's easier to make money that way.
When it is just companies or governments issuing debt, the potential conflict is bad enough. To get a decent rating, you have to pay all three of the main agencies. And not just for the initial rating. There is an ongoing annual fee that gets levied so you can maintain your rating. And guess what happens if you don't pay that fee? Well, the ratings agency decides it doesn't have quite enough information and it downgrades your debt, which in turn raises the interest you pay to the lenders. What would you do in that situation? You'd pay up, that's what.The whole thing smacks of extortion. But if the situation was bad with governments and corporations, when it came to the brave new world of "structured finance", the ratings agencies lost all control and all respect. As the US property boom took off, a huge number of organisations were issuing a vast array of property-related investments. The agencies began clambering over each other to rate the CDOs - the toxic products into which the Obama Administration is now forced to tip trillions of dollars to save the American banking system - as AAA.
Investors who bought those loans on their coveted AAA clearly did not want them downgraded even when the economy began to tank. And, as it transpired, the ratings agencies had never even contemplated factoring a property downturn into their calculations. Instead of providing a sobering influence, the ratings agencies pumped up the boom. So far, their role in the global financial crisis has been largely overlooked. A US Senate committee last October subjected the heads of the three main firms - all of whom had earned megamillion-dollar salaries through the boom - to an embarrassing grilling. But now they are back at it, as though nothing has happened. It is business as usual.
Li Ka Shing says it is time to buy. Let's not be so cynical on his opinion. At least he didn't ask all to buy 2 months ago, or 4 months ago or even 6 months ago. Hence I would view his opinion with some merit.
New York Times: The oracle of Hong Kong has spoken. And his message: it’s time to consider buying stocks and real estate. Li Ka-Shing reported on Thursday that his companies had severe profit declines in 2008, but he said that “if you buy in a slow market, in the medium term you get good returns,” The New York Times’s Bettina Wassener reported.
The proclamation on Thursday by Li Ka-Shing, the self-made billionaire who controls some of Hong Kong’s largest companies and carries enormous sway among investors throughout Asia, was made at a rare public appearance. Exuding confidence, Mr. Li joked with reporters and looked anything but depressed about the sharp fall in profit his companies reported Thursday.
Whether Mr. Li is proved right about stocks and property — and he certainly has a lot to gain personally if he is right — his comments come at a time when stock markets have rallied on hopes that the economic slump may be bottoming out.
“If you have money in your pocket,” Mr. Li said, consider buying into stocks. As for the property market in Hong Kong, he said, “history tells us that if you buy in a slow market, in the medium term you get good returns.”
Mr. Li advised against borrowing to invest in what remains a shaky and volatile environment. Even though couched with caution, Mr. Li’s comments were enough to echo around the investment world and helped send the Hang Seng index up 3.6 percent Thursday. Mr. Li is the man the local media call “Superman” and liken to the investor Warren E. Buffett, who controls Berkshire Hathaway. Considered one of Asia’s most powerful men, Mr. Li is also one of the continent’s most generous philanthropists.
In the last year, as the economic crisis has dragged on and deepened, Mr. Li has jumped in from time to time to try to restore confidence.
Last September, shortly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers caused the world financial system to convulse, savers in Hong Kong lined up outside the Bank of East Asia, one of the territory’s best-known and biggest banks, responding to rumors that the bank was in trouble. Mr. Li let it be known that he had been buying shares in the bank, an expression of confidence that quickly helped put an end to an old-fashioned bank run.
And this month, HSBC was trying to raise $18 billion in a rights offering, prompting the bank’s shares to fall sharply. A majority of local residents here own shares in the bank, which is now based in Britain but has its roots in Hong Kong. When it appeared that the rights offering might falter, Mr. Li — along with several other Hong Kong tycoons — pledged to put about $300 million of his own funds into the issue.
Still, it has been a difficult year for Mr. Li, and the Superman title sat a little awkwardly on him on Thursday, after Cheung Kong Holdings and Hutchison Whampoa, the flagships of the property-to-ports-to-electricity conglomerate he controls, both reported declines in net profit of more than 40 percent for 2008.
Small wonder, given that the rapid slowdown in the global economy had tipped Hong Kong, along with the United States, Japan and others, into a recession and put a damper on the breakneck growth of neighboring China. Rental and property prices in the territory, a mainstay of the conglomerate’s earnings, are expected to tumble further this year, hitting developers hard.
But the Cheung Kong group is not just any Hong Kong company, and Mr. Li is not just any Hong Kong company chairman. Thursday’s event was not just any annual news conference, but the pinnacle of the Hong Kong earnings season, complete with a boisterous media scrum that regularly lends the bespectacled and affable Mr. Li the aura of a pop star.
The complex network of companies Mr. Li controls — three of them members of Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng index — epitomize the hustle and bustle of entrepreneurial Hong Kong and its roller-coaster economy. And Mr. Li himself has the kind of rags-to-riches history that inspires every Hong Kong resident. The Cheung Kong group and its various interlinked companies grew out of the humblest beginnings imaginable: a plastic-flower manufacturing business the young Mr. Li set up in the 1950s.
Five decades later, Mr. Li is now one of Hong Kong’s leading developers of residential, commercial and industrial properties — about one in seven private residences here were developed by the group. Hutchison Whampoa, of which Mr. Li also is chairman, operates businesses as diverse as ports, hotels, supermarkets and drugstore chains, and is a major telecommunications operator in Hong Kong and abroad.
Cheung Kong Infrastructure, headed by Mr. Li’s son Victor, and HK Electric, one of the territory’s dominant power companies, also belong to the Cheung Kong/Hutchison stable of businesses.
Together, these businesses are a cross section of Hong Kong’s economy and reflect more than any other company the territory’s boom-to-bust character: riding the wave of Asia’s breakneck growth in recent years, and now suffering in line with the slowing global economy.
Mr. Li’s personal fortune has fallen as well, having slipped to 16th in the Forbes annual ranking of the world’s richest people, down from 11th in 2008, with a fortune now worth $16.2 billion — down from $26.5 billion a year ago.
p/s photos: Keiko Kitagawa
2007's top earners
p/s photos: Aum Patcharapa Chaichua
Q: What is the Geithner Plan?
A: The Geithner Plan is a trillion-dollar operation by which the U.S. acts as the world's largest hedge fund investor, committing its money to funds to buy up risky and distressed but probably fundamentally undervalued assets and, as patient capital, holding them either until maturity or until markets recover so that risk discounts are normal and it can sell them off--in either case at an immense profit.
Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn't make back its money?
A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money--for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.
Q: Where does the trillion dollars come from?
A: $150 billion comes from the TARP in the form of equity, $820 billion from the FDIC in the form of debt, and $30 billion from the hedge fund and pension fund managers who will be hired to make the investments and run the program's operations.
Q: Why is the government making hedge and pension fund managers kick in $30 billion?
A: So that they have skin in the game, and so do not take excessive risks with the taxpayers' money because their own money is on the line as well.
Q: Why then should hedge and pension fund managers agree to run this?
A: Because they stand to make a fortune when markets recover or when the acquired toxic assets are held to maturity: they make the full equity returns on their $30 billion invested--which is leveraged up to $1 trillion with government money.
Q: Why isn't this just a massive giveaway to yet another set of financiers?
A: The private managers put in $30 billion, but the Treasury puts in $150 billion--and so has 5/6 of the equity. When the private managers make $1, the Treasury makes $5. If we were investing in a normal hedge fund, we would have to pay the managers 2% of the capital and 20% of the profits every year; the Treasury is only paying 0% of the capital value and 17% of the profits every year.
Q: Why do we think that the government will get value from its hiring these hedge and pension fund managers to operate this program?
A: They do get 17% of the equity return. 17% of the return on equity on a $1 trillion portfolio that is leveraged 5-1 is incentive.
Q: So the Treasury is doing this to make money?
A: No: making money is a sidelight. The Treasury is doing this to reduce unemployment.
Q: How does having the U.S. government invest $1 trillion in the world's largest hedge fund operations reduce unemployment?
A: At the moment, those businesses that ought to be expanding and hiring cannot profitably expand and hire because the terms on which they can finance expansion are so lousy. The terms on which they can finance expansion are so lazy because existing financial asset prices are so low. Existing financial asset prices are so low because risk and information discounts have soared. Risk and information discounts have collapsed because the supply of assets is high and the tolerance of financial intermediaries for holding assets that are risky or that might have information-revelation problems are low.
Q: So?
A: So if we are going to boost asset prices to levels at which those firms that ought to be expanding can get finance, we are going to have to shrink the supply of risky assets that our private-sector financial intermediaries have to hold. The government buys up $1 trillion of financial assets, and lo and behold the private sector has to hold $1 trillion less of risky and information-impacted assets. Their price goes up. Supply and demand.
Q: And firms that ought to be expanding can then get financing on good terms again, and so they hire, and unemployment drops?
A: No. Our guess is that we would need to take $4 trillion out of the market and off the supply that private financial intermediaries must hold in order to move financial asset prices to where they need to be in order to unfreeze credit markets, and make it profitable for those businesses that should be hiring and expanding to actually hire and expand.
Q: Oh.
A: But all is not lost. This is not all the administration is doing. This plan consumes $150 billion of second-tranche TARP money and leverages it to take $1 trillion in risky assets off the private sector's books. And the Federal Reserve is taking an additional $1 trillion of risky debt off the private sector's books and replacing it with cash through its program of quantitative easing. And there is the fiscal boost program. And there is a potential second-round stimulus in September. And there is still $200 billion more left in the TARP to be used in other ways.
Think of it this way: the Fed's and the Treasury's announcements in the past week are what we think will be half of what we need to do the job. And if it turns out that we are right, more programs and plans will be on the way.
Q: This sounds very different from the headline of the Andrews, Dash, and Bowley article in the New York Times this morning: "Toxic Asset Plan Foresees Big Subsidies for Investors."
A: You are surprised, after the past decade, to see a New York Times story with a misleading headline?
Q: No.
A: The plan I have just described to you is the plan that was described to Andrews, Dash, and Bowley. They write of "coax[ing] investors to form partnerships with the government" and "taxpayers... would pay for the bulk of the purchases..."--that's the $30 billion from the private managers and the $150 billion from the TARP that makes up the equity tranche of the program. They write of "the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will set up special-purpose investment partnerships and lend about 85 percent of the money..."--that's the debt slice of the program. They write that "the government will provide the overwhelming bulk of the money — possibly more than 95 percent..."--that is true, but they don't say that the government gets 80% of the equity profits and what it is owed the FDIC on the debt tranche. That what Andrews, Dash, and Bowley say sounds different is a big problem: they did not explain the plan very well. Deborah Solomon in the Wall Street Journal does, I think, much better. David Cho in tomorrow morning's Washington Post is in the middle.
Marc Faber: China and other emerging markets offer value over the next two years as growth picks up, investor Marc Faber said. Investors should buy stocks and other assets in China after the market falls to its 2008 low to profit from an expected recovery, Faber said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. China is the world’s best-performing stock market this year.
“Rapidly growing countries have setbacks from time to time,” Faber, the publisher of the Gloom, Boom & Doom report, said in Hong Kong. “I think we’re going to test the lows again, but over the next two years, it’s probably a good time to invest.”Mark Mobius: Veteran fund manager Mark Mobius sees a potential 20% rise in emerging market stocks in 2009 and views extreme investor pessimism as a signal to gradually start buying equities. "The danger we face now is being too pessimistic," Mobius, the executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management, a division of San Mateo, California-based Franklin Templeton Investments, said in a telephone interview with Reuters.
“We are seeing that slight bottoming out, that we have to be cautious of because if we are caught with too much cash, specifically when we are looking at very good bargains, then we are going to be in trouble with our investors,” he said.
