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Global Economic Crisis Much Worse Now Than Two Years Ago, Warns Nassim Taleb

June 11th, 2010 Comments off

In an interview with CNBC, the bestselling author of  “The Black Swan,” Nassim Taleb, described the current economic environment as being significantly deteriorated from 2008, when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. In his gloomy assessment of the global economic crisis, Taleb said, “We had less debt cumulatively (two years ago), and more people employed. Today, we have more risk in the system, and a smaller tax base.”

According to Nassim Taleb, the core economic and financial problem afflicting major economies is a saturation of debt, both public and private. The current Eurozone and UK debt crisis is a manifestation of the age of austerity that lies before us. The United States and UK share the debt crisis afflicting Eurozone economies, however policymakers are still addicted to deficits even in the current critical economic environment. Taleb warned that a debt crisis could not be countered by taking on even more debt, a policy response he compared with giving more alcoholic beverage to an alcoholic.

Nassim Taleb also pointed out that toxic assets on bank balance sheets were as severe a problem now as two years ago. While acknowledging that governments have used taxpayer money to take some toxic assets off bank balance sheets, he pointed out that further degradation of remaining bank assets due to deteriorating economic metrics meant that banks were as fragile today as they were in 2008.

IMF Nightmare Forecast: Economic Crisis Creates $4 Trillion In Toxic Assets

April 9th, 2009 Comments off

The International Monetary Fund is set to release an updated report on the scale of toxic assets that are sitting on the balance sheets of financial institutions and banks worldwide. To characterize the IMF revised numbers as jaw dropping would be a severe understatement; the International Monetary Fund will indicate that toxic assets now amount to a staggering $4 trillion. If there are any doubts as to the severity of the Global Economic Crisis, this most current estimate of the rot eating away at the global financial architecture should set them aside.

It was only back in January that the IMF had estimated that toxic assets tied to the United States stood at $2.2 billion, while NYU professor of economics Nouriel Roubini provided a more sobering analysis that placed a figure of $3.6 trillion regarding toxic garbage sitting on global balance sheets, half that figure being directly tied to U.S. financial institutions. The revised IMF numbers, in my view, tell us two things: 1. The erosion in asset values across the world is accelerating and 2. No

 

one knows for certain how catastrophic this financial cancer is; the only certainty is its virulence.As expected, the United States is the major component in the IMF scenario of horrors, being the source of three-quarters of the $4 trillion nightmare forecast. However, nearly a trillion dollars of bad assets are, according to the IMF report, tied to Europe and Asia. That latter figure is actually a portent of much worse news, as all the macro-economic indicators from Europe and Asia are deteriorating. The Eurozone is in deep recession, Eastern Europe is defaulting on massive debts and the banking sector in the U.K. is for all intents and purposes insolvent. The world’s second largest economy, Japan, is in free fall collapse, with catastrophic contraction of its critical export trade. China’s export market is shrinking, in the process shattering Asian economies on her periphery. The OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) is projecting that the economies of its thirty member countries will collectively contract by 4.3%, while global trade is reduced by a savage rate of 13%. These numbers suggest that the fundamentals that have facilitated the erosion in global asset values will be even more destructive in the months ahead.

Placed in context, the IMF revised estimate on the meltdown in the global financial architecture is merely a pointer in a very dangerous direction, and not a final estimate on toxic assets. It is likely that the ultimate number goes beyond $4 trillion. How much worse can it get? A secret document leaked from the European Commission suggested that European banks alone hold up to $24 trillion in “troubled” assets. If one quarter of those assets are indeed toxic, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the actual scope of financial toxicity on global balance sheets may be in the range of $8-9 trillion. However, even worse than any apocalyptic forecast is the realization that no one knows with certainty how massive the financial contagion really is. In the final analysis, it is the uncertainty being wrought by the Global Economic Crisis that is most destructive to the world’s financial system, even more than the appalling statistics, as frightening as they are in the abstract.

 

For More Information on “Global Economic Forecast 2010-2015” please go to the homepage of our website, http://www.globaleconomiccrisis.com 

 

 

Timothy Geithner Proposes A “Cure” For Toxic Assets: Take A Poison Pill

March 24th, 2009 Comments off
In scientific terms, toxins are regarded as compounds that, if ingested in small quantities, can cause severe organic damage and even death. There are in the natural world, however, compounds which in small quantities are harmless; taken in large doses the same compounds can prove lethal. Such is the case with financial toxicity.
Our modern financial system is the creation of fallible human being, meaning there will be encountered in any modern economy a certain degree of mischievous speculation, outright fraud and chicanery. Often these activities lead to the creation of asset bubbles. If the proportion of inflated or fraudulent assets is a trivial proportion of the gross aggregate assets held by the major institutions in the financial system, the damage can be contained. However, when asset bubbles constitute a significant proportion of the paper wealth of a major economy and then deflate, they become toxic in the truest sense of the term. With our current Global Economic Crisis, it is the size of these deflating assets that contributes to their toxicity. However, their impact on the global credit system is virtually identical to that of chemical toxins on biological mechanisms; they are the penultimate monkey wrench that jams up the whole works. The toxic assets sitting on the balance sheets of financial institutions throughout the world have paralyzed the economic heart of the global economy, starving it of the blood and oxygen of normal flows of credit. The result has been economic paralysis more severe than anything experienced since the Great Depression. However, instead of an antidote, or at least a well conceived therapeutic response, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has offered up more toxicity.
Perhaps toxicology is too clinical for the Wall Street clique that has dominated policy making in Washington as it applies to the economy. By training and experience Geithner is a creature of Wall Street, and has proposed a solution to the disease of toxic assets that is nothing more than the original brainchild of former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Yet, even Paulson retreated from his original idea of buying up the toxic assets on the balance sheets of U.S. banks, choosing instead to purchase equity in these institutions, an approach that was just as ill conceived.
There are many weaknesses to the Geithner plan, not the least being that it is simply Paulson redux. It pretends that U.S. banks are essentially healthy except for the fact these toxic assets are not really toxic but are in fact “under-valued” by the market. Accordingly, Geithner wants to use taxpayer money to re-inflate the value of these assets, by encouraging private investors to buy them through auctions, thus bidding up their price. This will be accomplished by Treasury using the balance of the TARP money, $75-100 billion, to match private investors direct stake in the purchase of such assets, and then provide cheap loans to the private investors through the Federal Reserve and FDIC to buy up to $1 trillion of the toxic assets. The private investors will only risk the small proportion of their own capital being utilized in the transactions, as the U.S. taxpayer loans will be “secured” by these same toxic assets, which will be the collateral.
Rather than toxicology, Geithner is resorting to folktales and alchemy in providing this witches brew of a curative. The Geithner plan is not only bad in terms of its philosophy; have the taxpayers take almost all the risks, with the private investors subsidized to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars, while these same investors are assured of the great bulk of any upside. There is an even more fundamental problem. Most of the U.S. banking system, and much of Europe’s, is effectively insolvent. Other than radical surgery, which recognizes that maintaining on life support zombie banks can only prolong the Global Economic Crisis, any other solution is doomed to failure.
Geithner is proposing to place U.S. taxpayers at severe risk, by in effect borrowing money to purchase these toxic assets on behalf of hedge funds and other private investors. Yet, as massive a sum as Geithner’s plan envisions, it is not nearly adequate towards addressing the full dimensions of the problem. NYU economics professor Nouriel Roubini has estimated that the U.S. financial system is sitting on $3.6 trillion of bad assets. A leaked document from the European Commission assesses that banks across Europe hold up to $24 trillion in bad assets, suggesting that even Roubini’s gloomy analysis may be unduly optimistic. It is already clear that the banking system in the United Kingdom is comatose. Yet, Geithner asks that we suspend disbelief, accept that the U.S. financial system’s toxic asset exposure is limited to $1 trillion, and we should allow the private sector to do its thing, subsidized by the American taxpayers. Far from being thoughtful, insightful and analytical, Timothy Geithner offers a dish of warmed-over free market cliches and Hank Paulson inanities, avoiding at all costs even a hint of bank nationalization and radical financial surgery.

In his column in The New York Times, Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman summed up the fallacy of Timothy Geithner’s toxic assets rescue plan as follows, “But the real problem with this plan is that it won’t work. Yes, troubled assets may be somewhat undervalued. But the fact is that financial executives literally bet their banks on the belief that there was no housing bubble, and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet. And no amount of financial hocus-pocus-for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to-will change that fact”

Unfortunately, hocus-pocus is exactly what has been proposed by Geithner, to the delight of Wall Street. It will prove as effective an antidote to our economic and financial crisis as the toxins injected through the fangs of a cobra.