A holier than thou alliance of hysterical extreme besserwisser progressives, is pushing too many into No No Land

Sir, Janan Ganesh opines that visceral/hysterical reaction against Trump no matter how correct it might be, might evidence to many voters that progressives do not share their deeply felt concerns about national security, crime, welfare dependency and similar. “Liberalism can only win if it holds a hawkish line” February 7.

Ganesh is absolutely correct. As a Venezuelan I can testify on that this type of reaction, by a similar holier than thou besserwisser group mostly correct in their opinions preaching to the choir, only made Chavez stronger.

For instance I utterly dislike walls, foremost because you can never be real sure you or your grandchildren end up on the right side of it. But, in the case of the Mexican Wall, much more constructive would a “Yes let’s build it” be. That followed up of course with “The USA puts up the land, the Mexicans the cheaper labor, perhaps the Canadians the materials needed, and the FED, by means of a wall-easing program, buys the 1%, 50 years bonds that are needed to finance it all”. I guess that would bring the emotionally laden discussions about that wall to a more sane level… better for all.

Sir, but Ganesh also writes: “Whenever the state imposes a counterterror measure, especially one as brute as the US president’s, statistics are dug out to show that fewer westerners perish in terror attacks than in everyday mishaps. Slipping in the bath is a tragicomic favourite. We chuckle, share the data and wait for voters and politicians to see sense.”

And that, as you might intuit, irresistibly provokes me to ask the following: When the state imposes a regulatory measure based on something so brutish as believing that what is perceived as very risky is riskier for the bank system than what is perceived as very safe… why does then so few chuckle, share the info, and wait for regulators to see sense?

@PerKurowski

Progressives, is ECB’s Mario Draghi shamelessly insulting your intelligence, lying to your face, or just clueless?

Sir, Claire Jones writes: “Mario Draghi hit back on behalf of monetary global policymakers, dismissing growing criticism that their aggressive actions to support the economy had widened the gap between rich and poor”, Draghi said “We have every reason to believe that, with the impetus provided by our recent measures, monetary policy is working as expected: by boosting consumption and investment and creating jobs, which is always socially progressive” "Draghi denies QE hits poor hardest" October 27

Draghi is lying, that is unless he is dangerously clueless!

Besides being President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi is the former chair of the Financial Stability Board, and the current chair of the Group of Governors and Heads of Supervision of the Basel Committee for Banking Supervision.

Therefore Draghi must be perfectly aware of the odious discrimination against the riskier (including the riskier future) that, by favoring so much what is ex ante perceived as safe, is imbedded in the current capital requirements for banks. The sad truth is that bank regulators, the Basel Committee and FSB, have de facto decreed inequality in the access to the opportunities represented by bank credit.

The distortion that nefarious piece of regulation produces, impedes that any stimuli, like that of already tilted in favor of assets owners QEs, can reach where it best could help to create jobs. In other words regulators make banks finance “safe” basements where the young can live with their parents, not the new “risky” jobs they need for them to also become parents.

And Sir, for Draghi to boast his policies to be “socially progressive”, must be an insult to all those who like to define themselves as progressive… that is unless that term has a totally different meaning I am unaware of.

PS: Again, here is an aide memoire on some of the monstrous mistakes of said regulations.

@PerKurowski ©

“Progressives” can promote fairness and growth by stopping bank regulator’s despicable discrimination against “risky”

Sir, Lawrence Summers writes: “Often in economics there are trade-offs. But not always. We can and must promote both fairness and growth. “The progressive case for championing pro-growth policies” August 8.

And for that he recommends: “more demand for the product of business. This is the core of the case for policy approaches to raising public investment, increasing workers’ purchasing power and promoting competitiveness”

Again Summers seems to ignore completely what one could believe would be a great cause for “progressives”, namely to combat how the last decades those who are perceived as risky, when compared to those perceived as “safe”, have had their access to credit made much more difficult by the risk weighted capital requirements for banks

Who are “the risky”? In terms of growth, the all important SMEs and entrepreneurs, those risk weighted 100% (and more).

Who are “the risky”? In terms of fairness, the weaker, the poorer, the not yet up there, the ones praying for fair opportunities.

So how can we explain that progressives do not give much attention to these regulations that so odiously discriminate in favor of the AAArisktocracy and against "the risky"? Perhaps because these also include the risk-weight of 0% for the government, and most progressives are foremost statist.

Perhaps because it is not in the nature of progressives to understand, and much less admit, that regulators can get it so wrong.

@PerKurowski ©

Both leftwingers and free-marketeers got lost in the world of finance, banks and regulations

Sir, Paul Marshall identifies himself as one of “those of us who want free markets to retain their legitimacy” and reacts against that “monetary policy has already extended well beyond its technocratic bounds into the realms of wealth distribution” … because of course that is what Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank… is doing [with quantitative easing when] “artificially distorting the bond markets so that the debt-ridden governments of peripheral Europe can continue to enjoy a low cost of capital (the eurozone’s very own Ponzi scheme)”, “Central banks have made the rich richer” September 23.

I agree, but central bankers are assisted in this scheming, by regulators who have allowed banks to hold loans to The Safe, like governments and the AAArisktocracy, against much less capital that what they need to hold when lending to The Risky, for instance SMEs and entrepreneurs.

Paul Marshall also writes: “Quantitative easing, as this policy is known, has bailed out bonus-happy banks and made the rich richer. It is a surprise that the UK opposition party and other leftwingers have not made more of this.” That is correct but in response I would also ask, where were those free-market believers like Paul Marshall when in 1988 the Basel Accord assigned risk weights of zero to sovereigns and 100 percent to the private sector… and completely distorted the free market allocation of bank credit?

As food for thought let me quote from John Kenneth Galbraith’s “Money: Whence it came where it went” 1975: “The function of credit in a simple society is, in fact, remarkably egalitarian. It allows the man with energy and no money to participate in the economy more or less on a par with the man who has capital of his own. And the more casual the conditions under which credit is granted and hence the more impecunious those accommodated, the more egalitarian credit is… Bad banks, unlike good, loaned to the poor risk, which is another name for the poor man.” 

With current regulations banks become "bad banks" from lending excessively to the good risks... and that does not sound too egalitarian to me.

PS. Bank regulators need an App to do their job for them. An App developer would at least have asked what is the purpose of a bank and so not have ignored their function of allocating bank credit efficiently to the real economy. An App developer would also know that what is dangerous for the banking system is what is perceived safe... never what is ex ante perceived as risky

@PerKurowski

If only an “intellectual vacuum”, but, sadly, it is worse than that Professor Michael Ignatieff.

Sir, Michael Ignatieff writes about “the waning power of ideas” and begs “Free polarized politics from its intellectual vacuum”, January 10. Although, as a self described “radical of the middle”, or “extremist of the center”, I do agree with most of what he writes, I must still confess feeling that the absence of ideas would at least be better that the presence of some really bad ideas.

And a truly bad idea currently present, are the risk-weighted capital requirements for banks, and which allow these to earn much higher risk adjusted returns on equity on exposures deemed as “absolutely safe”, than on exposures deemed as “risky”.

And that makes it of course impossible for banks to allocate credit efficiently to the real economy. And that guarantees that the chances of any major bank crisis, those usually caused by dangerously overpopulating some safe-haven, have been exponentially increased.

Technically the mistake is explained by the fact that regulators estimate the “unexpected losses”, those for which you mainly require banks to hold capital, based on the same perceptions used by the banks to estimate “expected losses”.

And here we have all the free market believers not complaining about that horrible interference with the market that risk-weighting causes … and here we have all progressives not saying a word about the odious discrimination in favor of the AAAristocracy and against the “risky” that risk-weighting causes.

And meanwhile the chances for our youth to find employment in their lifetime are evaporating, thanks to this nonsense of banishing risk-taking from our banks.