Anche Bloomberg legge da queste parti... sono le cose di cui si discuteva ieri sera... in prima linea una domanda: lo stress test serve davvero a tranquillizare i mercati o rischia di nuocere ?
I banchieri USA sono riluttanti ad accettare i soldi del governo (e le relative restrizioni alle loro paghe...
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Obama Seeks to ‘Clean Out the System’ With Bank Test (Update2)
Feb. 24 (Bloomberg) -- President
Barack Obama aims to dispel the cloud over U.S. banks that has driven their
shares to a two- decade low by subjecting them to rigorous reviews and reviving the market for their toxic assets.
Officials will begin so-called stress tests of about 20 of the nation’s largest banks tomorrow with the aim of ensuring they have sufficient capital to withstand the toughest of economic times. Institutions that aren’t able to raise needed capital privately will get taxpayer money, regulators said yesterday.
“What we need to clean out the system is for investors to know that there are not more crises to come,” said Raghuram Rajan, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund who’s now a professor at the University of Chicago. “The stress tests, if they are followed by action, can help do that.”
At the same time, shining a light on banks’ potential problems could end up fanning investor concerns rather than quelling them. It may also highlight how little the government has left for fixing the banks’ problems after spending more than half of the $700 billion bank bailout fund authorized by Congress last year.
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With tests like these, you run the risk of further eroding the confidence of investors,” said Wayne Abernathy, an executive vice president at the American Bankers Association in Washington. “The jury is still out on whether receiving the government money will be a benefit or a harm.”
Citigroup Talks
Policy makers are struggling with that issue as they try to decide how much more help they can provide Citigroup Inc. without diluting the value of
shares held by investors too much, a person familiar with their deliberations said.
The initial reaction yesterday showed some relief that shareholders won’t be wiped out by full nationalization of some lenders. Citigroup gained 10 percent to $2.14 after losing more than 40 percent of its value last week. The Standard & Poor’s 500 Banks Index advanced 2.1 percent to 59.41 even as the broader
S&P 500 Stock Index tumbled 3.5 percent.
S&P 500 futures expiring in March rose 0.5 percent to 748.80 as of 12:07 p.m. in London today. Citigroup shares rose before the opening of trading in New York.
The Treasury, Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Office of Thrift Supervision vowed to preserve “the viability of systemically important financial institutions” and stated their “strong presumption” banks should remain in private hands and not be nationalized.
Bernanke Hearing
Fed Chairman
Ben S. Bernanke may today be questioned about efforts to combat the credit crisis in a Senate Banking Committee hearing in Washington.
Any fresh government funds injected into the banks would be in the form of mandatory convertible preferred shares that would be exchanged into equity “only as needed over time.”
While the new injections could leave the government with majority ownership of several lenders, a Treasury official said on condition of anonymity that the stress tests aren’t intended to lay the groundwork for federal takeovers. Instead, they are aimed at getting a truer picture of the banks’ long-term health, the official said.
That too is the goal of the Treasury’s effort to set up public-private partnerships to buy up the toxic assets clogging banks’ balance sheets.
By putting a market-determined price on the assets, Treasury Secretary
Timothy Geithner hopes to address doubts about what the assets are worth and, in the process, provide investors with a clearer picture of banks’ balance sheets.
Toxic Assets
“You have to remove the uncertainty about asset values, and Geithner’s plan is an efficient way of jump-starting private- sector price discovery of those values,” said
Randal Quarles, a former Treasury undersecretary of domestic finance who is now a managing director at the Carlyle Group in Washington.
Geithner is betting that lenders’ share prices have been so beaten down that investors have already discounted the distressed values that may result from the price-discovery process.
“Banks have lots of assets on their books that have not resulted in losses yet, that people think will result in losses at more than historical levels,” Quarles said.
The philosophy behind both the public-private partnerships and the stress tests is that the more information investors have, the better the markets work. That’s in contrast to the stance taken by Japan in the 1990s, where executives regularly low- balled loan losses only to eventually have to come clean later.
Capital Levels
While U.S. regulators don’t intend to publish the details of their stress tests, the results will effectively become known once it is determined how much capital each bank is required to raise, either from investors or the government. The more capital needed, the worse off the bank.
“These examiners begin the stress test with already a deep understanding of the institution” because they are in effect residents at the firms they oversee, said
Bob Bench, a former deputy comptroller of the currency.
The stress tests may look at situations such as how much losses would climb if the
unemployment rate climbs past 10 percent, he said.
“In the normal course of business, bank regulators tend not to look over the horizon,” said Bench, a senior fellow at the Morin Center for Banking and Financial Law at Boston University. The new reviews will do so, he said.
Gilbert Schwartz, a partner at Washington law firm Schwartz & Ballen LLP and a former Fed attorney, said the regulatory review would help “put a number” on the problem facing each individual bank.
“Even though the hole may be large, it will clear up the uncertainty and provide assurance that the institution’s problems will be resolved -- either by the government putting capital in or taking some other measure,” he said.
