Should used bank salesmen be trusted?

Sir Henny Sender “This year’s model for cash raising – the GMAC way” May 23, begs the question whether we should trust the used bank salesmen; a question that is difficult to answer when it is so hard to assess what’s under the hood of a bank, especially now when their assets are disclosed in “risk-weighted” terms.

GMAC is reported to have $173.bn of risk weighted assets, but taking away the impact of the weights, the real nominal asset exposure could easily be ten times that amount. For $173bn of risk-weighted assets an additional need of $11.5bn sounds “so reasonable”, but then it could just all be a mirage produced by that dangerous cocktail of faulty credit ratings and arbitrarily imposed risk-weights and that have hit and obscured the financial sector ever since Basel II got going.

The fact though is that while in Germany the sales of new cars are subsidized by a payment to scrap old used cars, in the US it is the financiers of used cars that are receiving government support and that sort of reflects quite different workout strategies.