19 Ekim 2009 Pazartesi

Turkey's Dogan Case Raises EU Hackles

Is Turkey serious about joining the European Union--or is it just cherry-picking reforms to advance its own agenda? An attempt by Ankara to take down the country's biggest media group has Europe worried that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan is willing to ignore the EU's insistence on a free press in favor of pursuing political vendettas. His government has been putting pressure on the Dogan Media Group, culminating in a fine of $2.5 billion for alleged unpaid taxes that threatens to crush the company. Erdogan insists the fines have nothing to do with his personal feud with the group, whose coverage of the government has been highly critical. But the EU sees clear evidence of an assault on free speech. Later this month the EU's annual progress report is expected to slam Turkey's record on media freedom. And the repercussions could go much deeper. According to one senior EU diplomat in Istanbul, the Dogan case "makes you wonder whether ­[Erdogan] is really serious about making Turkey a European country."
With pressure growing inside countries such as France and Germany to offer Ankara something short of full EU membership, the timing for the Dogan case couldn't be worse. Erdogan's apparently ambivalent attitude could do serious damage to Turkey's bid. By giving the impression that domestic feuds are more important to him than EU membership, he sends a signal that Turkey doesn't really need Europe. And there are all too many Europeans willing to reciprocate the feeling.

22 Mart 2008 Cumartesi

Hold The Hysteria (For Now)

Hold The Hysteria (For Now)
The real economy of production and jobs is not yet in a state of collapse, even though much of the commentary suggests it's on the edge of ruin.

Robert J. Samuelson
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 2:06 PM ET Mar 22, 2008
Regarding the economy, it's hard not to notice this stark contrast: the "real economy" of spending, production and jobs—though weakening—is hardly in a state of collapse; but much of today's semi-hysterical commentary suggests that it is. Financial markets for stocks and bonds are regularly described as being "in turmoil." People talk about a recession as if it were the second coming of Genghis Khan. Some whisper the dreaded word "depression."

Meanwhile, Americans are expected to buy about 15 million cars, SUVs and light trucks in 2008; though down from 16.5 million in 2006, that's still a lot.

There's a disconnect between what people see around them and what they're told, often by highly respectable authorities, about what's happening. The first is upsetting (rising gas prices, falling home prices, fewer jobs) but reflects the normal reverses of a $14 trillion economy. The second ("panic," "financial meltdown") suggests the onset of something catastrophic and totally outside the experience of ordinary people. The economy, said The New York Times in a page-one piece last week, may be on "the brink of the worst recession in a generation"—an ominous, if imprecise, warning.

It may be, but as yet, the evidence is scant from either conventional economic statistics or mainstream forecasts. A recession is a noticeable period of declining output. A group of academic economists set the exact dates of a recession in hindsight, and since World War II, they've declared 10 of them. On average, these have lasted 10 months, involved a peak monthly unemployment rate of 7.6 percent and resulted in a decline of economic output (gross domestic product) of 1.8 percent, reports Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com. If the two worst recessions (those of 1981–82 and 1973–75, with peak unemployment of 10.8 percent and 9 percent, respectively) are excluded, the average peak jobless rate is close to 7 percent.

No one doubts that the economy has slowed. Many economists, though not all, think a recession has already started. Zandi is one. He forecasts peak unemployment of 6.1 percent (present unemployment: 4.8 percent) and a GDP drop of 0.4 percent. If that comes true, the recession of 2008 would confound predictions that it would be one of the worst since World War II; it would actually be milder than the average postwar recession and milder than the last two, those of 1990–91 and 2001.

Broadly speaking, the story is similar for stocks. So far, their weakness is unexceptional. A standard definition of a "bear market" is a drop of 20 percent or more. Last week, the market was at times close to that. Declines would have to get much worse to qualify as momentous. Since 1936 there have been 11 bear markets as measured by the Standard & Poor's index of 500 stocks, says Howard Silverblatt of S&P. On average, they've lasted 20 months and involved a decline of 34 percent. One was 60 percent (1937–42) and two were nearly 50 percent (1973–74 and 2000–02, the last being the "tech bubble").

Some causes of the present hysteria are familiar: media hype; political finger-pointing—always given to exaggeration, and whining from Wall Street types. Banks and investment banks have suffered large losses on subprime mortgages and related securities; their stock prices have dropped. "A lot of squawking is coming from financial-sector people," says economist Michael Mussa of the Peterson Institute. But there's another large, invisible cause. It's an idea: disagreement over whether the economy is highly unstable or whether business cycles are mostly self-correcting.

"This argument is as old as economics," says economic historian Barry Eichengreen of the University of California, Berkeley. "There is no more consensus on it now among economists than there was 70 years ago." Those who think the economy is highly unstable talk now of an alarming "negative feedback loop"—a "vicious circle" to most people. Housing prices fall, creating more defaults and foreclosures; losses on mortgages increase, eroding the capital of banks and investment banks and causing them to curtail lending—which weakens the economy, depresses housing prices and causes more foreclosures and losses. Just as in the Depression, a crippled financial system spreads the slump. Only forceful government intervention can break the downward spiral.

Not necessarily, if most markets self-correct. As housing prices fall, more buyers come into the market; sales and construction revive. Most postwar recessions have been brief and mild, arguably because these mechanisms are pervasive. If inventories get too high, production slows and surpluses are sold; then production accelerates. If consumers or businesses are overindebted, they reduce spending to repay loans; spending speeds up when debt burdens drop. Though possible in theory, vicious circles are rare in practice. Government can help smooth business cycles, and everyone agrees that it should try to prevent financial panics. But if government is too aggressive, it may make matters worse. That occurred in the 1970s when easy credit created double-digit inflation—and then required harsh recessions to suppress it.

Hardly anyone adheres rigidly to either view but, consciously or not, many favor one or the other. That explains why the subprime losses seem so threatening to some—the start of a chain reaction—and less so to others. The Great Depression doesn't settle the issue. It's true that massive bank failures helped convert an ordinary recession into an economic calamity; but it's also true that government policy—excessive rigidity by the Federal Reserve—actually aggravated the banking collapse. Still, the economic conditions of the 1930s (average unemployment: 18 percent) are so different from today's that casual use of the term "depression" amounts to fearmongering. If the calamities implied by today's hysteria occur, they will probably result from something we don't now know or haven't yet imagined.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/128634

18 Mart 2008 Salı

We will never have a perfect model of risk

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the second world war. It will end eventually when home prices stabilise and with them the value of equity in homes supporting troubled mortgage securities.

Home price stabilisation will restore much-needed clarity to the marketplace because losses will be realised rather than prospective. The major source of contagion will be removed. Financial institutions will then recapitalise or go out of business. Trust in the solvency of remaining counterparties will be gradually restored and issuance of loans and securities will slowly return to normal. Although inventories of vacant single-family homes – those belonging to builders and investors – have recently peaked, until liquidation of these inventories proceeds in earnest, the level at which home prices will stabilise remains problematic.

The American housing bubble peaked in early 2006, followed by an abrupt and rapid retreat over the past two years. Since summer 2006, hundreds of thousands of homeowners, many forced by foreclosure, have moved out of single-family homes into rental housing, creating an excess of approximately 600,000 vacant, largely investor-owned single-family units for sale. Homebuilders caught by the market’s rapid contraction have involuntarily added an additional 200,000 newly built homes to the “empty-house-for-sale” market.

Home prices have been receding rapidly under the weight of this inventory overhang. Single-family housing starts have declined by 60 per cent since early 2006, but have only recently fallen below single-family home demand. Indeed, this sharply lower level of pending housing additions, together with the expected 1m increase in the number of US households this year as well as underlying demand for second homes and replacement homes, together imply a decline in the stock of vacant single-family homes for sale of approximately 400,000 over the course of 2008.

The pace of liquidation is likely to pick up even more as new-home construction falls further. The level of home prices will probably stabilise as soon as the rate of inventory liquidation reaches its maximum, well before the ultimate elimination of inventory excess. That point, however, is still an indeterminate number of months in the future.

The crisis will leave many casualties. Particularly hard hit will be much of today’s financial risk-valuation system, significant parts of which failed under stress. Those of us who look to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder equity have to be in a state of shocked disbelief. But I hope that one of the casualties will not be reliance on counterparty surveillance, and more generally financial self-regulation, as the fundamental balance mechanism for global finance.

The problems, at least in the early stages of this crisis, were most pronounced among banks whose regulatory oversight has been elaborate for years. To be sure, the systems of setting bank capital requirements, both economic and regulatory, which have developed over the past two decades will be overhauled substantially in light of recent experience. Indeed, private investors are already demanding larger capital buffers and collateral, and the mavens convened under the auspices of the Bank for International Settlements will surely amend the newly minted Basel II international regulatory accord. Also being questioned, tangentially, are the mathematically elegant economic forecasting models that once again have been unable to anticipate a financial crisis or the onset of recession.

Credit market systems and their degree of leverage and liquidity are rooted in trust in the solvency of counterparties. That trust was badly shaken on August 9 2007 when BNP Paribas revealed large unanticipated losses on US subprime securities. Risk management systems – and the models at their core – were supposed to guard against outsized losses. How did we go so wrong?

The essential problem is that our models – both risk models and econometric models – as complex as they have become, are still too simple to capture the full array of governing variables that drive global economic reality. A model, of necessity, is an abstraction from the full detail of the real world. In line with the time-honoured observation that diversification lowers risk, computers crunched reams of historical data in quest of negative correlations between prices of tradeable assets; correlations that could help insulate investment portfolios from the broad swings in an economy. When such asset prices, rather than offsetting each other’s movements, fell in unison on and following August 9 last year, huge losses across virtually all risk-asset classes ensued.

The most credible explanation of why risk management based on state-of-the-art statistical models can perform so poorly is that the underlying data used to estimate a model’s structure are drawn generally from both periods of euphoria and periods of fear, that is, from regimes with importantly different dynamics.

The contraction phase of credit and business cycles, driven by fear, have historically been far shorter and far more abrupt than the expansion phase, which is driven by a slow but cumulative build-up of euphoria. Over the past half-century, the American economy was in contraction only one-seventh of the time. But it is the onset of that one-seventh for which risk management must be most prepared. Negative correlations among asset classes, so evident during an expansion, can collapse as all asset prices fall together, undermining the strategy of improving risk/reward trade-offs through diversification.

If we could adequately model each phase of the cycle separately and divine the signals that tell us when the shift in regimes is about to occur, risk management systems would be improved significantly. One difficult problem is that much of the dubious financial-market behaviour that chronically emerges during the expansion phase is the result not of ignorance of badly underpriced risk, but of the concern that unless firms participate in a current euphoria, they will irretrievably lose market share.

Risk management seeks to maximise risk-adjusted rates of return on equity; often, in the process, underused capital is considered “waste”. Gone are the days when banks prided themselves on triple-A ratings and sometimes hinted at hidden balance-sheet reserves (often true) that conveyed an aura of invulnerability. Today, or at least prior to August 9 2007, the assets and capital that define triple-A status, or seemed to, entailed too high a competitive cost.

I do not say that the current systems of risk management or econometric forecasting are not in large measure soundly rooted in the real world. The exploration of the benefits of diversification in risk-management models is unquestionably sound and the use of an elaborate macroeconometric model does enforce forecasting discipline. It requires, for example, that saving equal investment, that the marginal propensity to consume be positive, and that inventories be non-negative. These restraints, among others, eliminated most of the distressing inconsistencies of the unsophisticated forecasting world of a half century ago.

But these models do not fully capture what I believe has been, to date, only a peripheral addendum to business-cycle and financial modelling – the innate human responses that result in swings between euphoria and fear that repeat themselves generation after generation with little evidence of a learning curve. Asset-price bubbles build and burst today as they have since the early 18th century, when modern competitive markets evolved. To be sure, we tend to label such behavioural responses as non-rational. But forecasters’ concerns should be not whether human response is rational or irrational, only that it is observable and systematic.

This, to me, is the large missing “explanatory variable” in both risk-management and macroeconometric models. Current practice is to introduce notions of “animal spirits”, as John Maynard Keynes put it, through “add factors”. That is, we arbitrarily change the outcome of our model’s equations. Add-factoring, however, is an implicit recognition that models, as we currently employ them, are structurally deficient; it does not sufficiently address the problem of the missing variable.

We will never be able to anticipate all discontinuities in financial markets. Discontinuities are, of necessity, a surprise. Anticipated events are arbitraged away. But if, as I strongly suspect, periods of euphoria are very difficult to suppress as they build, they will not collapse until the speculative fever breaks on its own. Paradoxically, to the extent risk management succeeds in identifying such episodes, it can prolong and enlarge the period of euphoria. But risk management can never reach perfection. It will eventually fail and a disturbing reality will be laid bare, prompting an unexpected and sharp discontinuous response.

In the current crisis, as in past crises, we can learn much, and policy in the future will be informed by these lessons. But we cannot hope to anticipate the specifics of future crises with any degree of confidence. Thus it is important, indeed crucial, that any reforms in, and adjustments to, the structure of markets and regulation not inhibit our most reliable and effective safeguards against cumulative economic failure: market flexibility and open competition.

The writer is former chairman of the US Federal Reserve and author of ‘The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World