Kein Profit?

Unglaubliches passiert derzeit auf dem Markt – kein Wachstum? Ja gibt’s denn sowas? Unsere Gesellschaft hat sich doch erst eben gerade daran gewöhnt, dass alles immer grösser, höher, weiter wird. Von Jahr zu Jahr, ungeachtet aller negativen Konsequenzen:

Kian Abouhossein, banking analyst at JP Morgan, said: “The hits will essentially mean that some investment banks will have made almost no money over the last quarter. Profits will be close to zero.”

Quelle: World’s banks hit for $30billion in credit crunch

Och, die Armen! Heisst das, dass es dieses Jahr anstelle zweistelliger Bonuszahlungen nur einstellige geben wird?

Keine Ahnung?!

[…] Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said that when he was in charge he “didn’t really get” how the boom in sub-prime lending might hurt the economy.

Es ist immer gut zu wissen, dass Nationalbanken fähige Leute vorstehen … Das nächste Mal engagieren die Amis lieber einen Bauarbeiter von der Strasse. Kostet erheblich weniger, weiss gleich viel wie der olle Alan *kopfschüttel*

Die Briten zuerst

Erster Vorreiter der zu erwartenden Schockwelle ist die britische Bank Northern Savers:

One plan being worked on by City bankers was to divide the company’s £100 billion mortgage portfolio between the other major banks, in what would amount to a private-sector rescue of the lender.

Worried customers besiege Northern Rock’s Kingston branch In scenes not experienced for decades, police were needed to keep the peace at branches across the country as increasingly angry and desperate investors rushed to withdraw their funds.

[…] One plan under discussion in Whitehall is a co-ordinated rescue of Northern Rock involving other banks and the Bank of England.

Quelle: Angry savers force Northern Rock to be sold

Schön, dass die anderen Banken so „sozial“ sind, und ihrer schwächelnden Schwester zu Hilfe kommen. Es lebe die soziale Marktwirtschaft!

Schlangen vor den Bankschaltern

[…] sources close to the company said that if customers continued to draw their deposits at the same alarming rate, Northern Rock would be forced to break up.

Das ist wohl das Schlimmste, was einer Bank passieren kann: Die Anleger wollen alle zur gleichen Zeit ihre Ersparnisse zurück. Geht aber nicht, weil Banken nur einen Bruchteil des ihr anvertrauten Geldes in Reserve halten müssen und den Rest wiederum selbst irgendwie irgendwo angelegt haben (für mich als Nicht-Finanzler ist das Funktionieren dieses Systems immer noch eines der grösseren Rätsel der Menschheitsgeschichte):

[…] Northern Rock’s business soared. Now they carry a mortgage book totaling $200 billion dollars.

$200 billion! So why can’t they pay out a paltry $4 or $5 billion to their customers without a government bailout?

It’s because they don’t have the reserves and because the bank’s business model is hopelessly flawed and no longer viable. […]

Quelle: US Banks Brace for Financial Storm Surge as Dollar Plunge and Credit System Panic

Soweit ich mich erinnern kann, gab es so etwas zu meiner Lebzeit hier in der Schweiz erst einmal – damals ging die Spar- und Leihkasse Thun hops.

Alle Jahre wieder …

100 Years of Progress in Banking: Bank runs pictures as color digital images

Nebenbei: Top, die Wette gilt!

Im globalen Finanz-Casino läuft ja immer noch eine am 21. September auslaufende Wette, die besagt, dass der DJ EURO STOXX 50 um einen Drittel fällt …

So there is a really interesting and lucrative optimisation problem here in balancing risk and reward, so complex that some outfits use genetic algorithms to crack it. Although efficient, the problem is that the answer „just works“, without anyone understanding the underlying problem. And of course this means that when it goes wrong, no-one really knows why.

Collateralised debt obligations can be put together with many different components, for different customer demand, or more cynically to make them look attractive to fund managers and the advisors of high net worth individuals.

The problem is that these black boxes are tough to understand, even if they are explained gently by the bankers. Just because you have the Linux kernel source, doesn’t mean you know what it will do. […]

It’s been clear for a while that some of the banks have been pushing products whose risks are far from clear, unless you are a specialist.

Nor have the banks completely washed their hands of the original risk, since many act as prime brokers to hedge funds in mortgage derivatives, lending money secured against holdings in instruments, which may have been created by the retail arm of the same bank.

Thus, the risk is now spread very widely in complex ways, which meant that when the sub-prime mortgages started to smell bad, no one could work out which institutions were being hurt. […]

Many use the lognormal distribution, which resembles what we see in real life. Except that it gravely under-estimates the probability of big price movements, as Nassim Taleb has been telling people for a long time. Ignoring this has led several banks to encounter issues that „should“ happen only once in the life of the Earth, actually happening twice in the same month.

Quelle: Original thinking in a derivatives market

Was lernen wir daraus? Investment-Banker wissen kaum mehr als du und ich, mit dem grossen Unterschied, dass sie der Technik und ihren fragwürdigen Algorithmen mehr vertrauen als wir dem normalen Menschenverstand. Ah, und dass sie Ende des Jahres einen massiven Bonus kriegen, weil sie (und ihre Modelle) so wunderbar funktioniert haben. Mal schauen, ob es Ende 2007 auch ein Weihnachtspäckli von der Bank gibt …

Kommentare

Auch ganz gut fand ich einige der 21 Kommentare zum Artikel:

Its a sanitised form of gambling.

1. Plan for the worst, hope for the best
2. Never bet … err … „invest“ money you cant afford to lose.
3. If you’re winning, the money dosn’t exist until you walk away with it.
4. If you’re winning, people get greedy, set a figure and walk away when you reach it.
5. The little person gets shafted allways, the game favours the Banks in the long run.

Stockbroker (def): A person who invests your money until it’s all gone. – Woody Allen

[…] Hey – almost every model works if markets keep going up…

The sub prime market got used up like any resource, and when the was no place to expand to, it imploded. It’s what we humans do to any resource, and it’s what we’ll do with oil, coal, uranium, the next round of financial regulation loop holes, p2p downloads and everything else.

Old debt, new debt, sold debt, transferred debt, it’s all still debt. Payback time is upon us, and the vultures are starting to circle.