It is interesting that none other than the Daily Telegraph, one of the City of London's main mouthpieces, published an article on Dec. 29, 2008 by Liam Halligan, arguing that all of the rescue packages and bank nationalizations have not helped things one bit, and that only by mercilessly exposing the true magnitude of the toxic waste, writing it off the books, and legal proceedings against those who committed these crimes, could the problem be solved. And then, as the most important measure, the Glass-Steagall Act would have to be reinstituted internationally. Evidently some circles in the City are panicked indeed.
Meanwhile, the miraculous proliferation of money for the financial oligarchy and the speculators, at taxpayers' expense, is proceeding to even giddier heights. Whatever had already been made out of bad mortgage credit, thanks to paid-off rating agencies, transforming it into "packages," certificates, derivatives, and highly profitable "securities," has been endlessly restructured and rebundled, and then re-sold under new names. What if everything goes bad for banks in Europe? No problem, that's why we have the European Central Bank (ECB), which will tenderly relieve the banks of their toxic waste.
Along these lines, on Dec. 26 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote an article titled "Securitization Business Running at Full Throttle," reporting that in 2008, the volume of securitization would reach a good Eur500 billion, and that Germany's True Sale International would achieve a volume of risk transfers in the range of tens of billions. The banks' intent has been to take the burden off their balance sheets, thereby reducing their own equity capital requirements. But what was new about the year just ending, was the securitizations which were explicitly aimed at creating guarantors for refinancing deals with the ECB. It works this way: A bank first sells credits to an SPE that has been formed for just this purpose; and the SPE in turn creates securities nominally backed by these credits, breaks them into tranches, with graduated yields, and—at least in theory—graduated risks of loss. Since there is no longer any market for these securities, the bank then buys back these tranches from the SPE, and uses the topmost, highest-rated tranche as collateral to borrow money from the ECB. The ECB accepts this paper as collateral because of its high credit rating, even though it knows the rating is a fiction.
But even that isn't a big problem, because after all, what are the rating agencies for? Thus, for example, Italy's second-largest bank, Intesa Sanpaolo, issued mortgage-backed securities, first Eur5.7 billion worth, and then another Eur13 billion worth, which were given an AAA rating by one agency, and as a result were used as collateral for "fresh" money from the ECB. And just in case your mind begins to spin at these figures, so that you don't lose your sense of proportion: Eur13 billion is equal to the annual debt-service which Greece must pay for its national debt of 92% of GDP—a situation which is not unconnected to the riots that have been going on there in recent weeks.
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