3.5.09

on stress tests (good bank)

I now expect a clean bill of health for the banks from the Stress Tests. For most banks this will turn out to be incorrect before the end of the year. At that point, the de facto insolvency of much of the US border-crossing banking system will become so self-evident, that even the joint and several obfuscation of banks and Treasury will be unable to deny the obvious. There still will be no fiscal resources available to sanitise the banks’ balance sheets by purchasing or guaranteeing the old toxic assets and new bad assets.
At that point, only the ‘good bank solution’, which requires either a serious hair cut for unsecured creditors or a mandatory conversion of debt into equity will be viable, simply because the bad bank solution requires additional public money which isn’t there.
(You creating a new good bank out of the assets of the old bank and the insured deposits and counterparty claims on the old bank, leaving the unsecured creditors of the old bank with a claim on the equity in the new good bank; a bad bank requires funds to buy the toxic and bad assets from the old bank and addition resources to capitalise the bad bank).
http://blogs.ft.com/maverecon/2009/04/ruminations-on-banking/#more-1366

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