Duke of Marmalade
Registered User
- Messages
- 4,686
Incredible tapes, you must agree.
But before we all shout "I told you so", consider the line where the consequences of not bailing out Anglo are spelt out to the Regulator. BoI, AIB the lot would go down the tubes.
What did Neary know about banking?
+++1The tapes don't change anything. They are crude and the guys involved should be ashamed but it shows that the banks themselves believed they were dealing with a liquidity crisis and not one of solvency. They were buying time. They simply failed to grasp the simple economics of the effect of the financial crisis would have on their loan books. Same goes for the regulator. They were hiding behind risk models that were hopelessly crap. The regulator would have known the bank was playing them if they had people with industry experience in their ranks rather than civil servants. What did Neary know about banking?
But they did say put "N/A" under repayment. I get the impression they didn't really understand the difference between liquidity and solvency. All they were really concerned about was liquidity, and that is natural enough as the lack of solvency wasn't ever going to surface until the liquidity dried up.....but it shows that the banks themselves believed they were dealing with a liquidity crisis and not one of solvency. They were buying time.
A few pointsPart of the received wisdom is that Anglo’s foreign bondholders cost us all a fortune. They didn’t.
Anglo was in fact the most conservative of the banks in its funding, issuing relatively few bonds. Most of its funding was obtained in the old fashioned way – by attracting deposits, albeit by offering above-market interest rates.
As of September 30th, 2008 it had €71.9 billion on deposit, according to its annual report for that year. It has just €10 billion in senior bonds outstanding, which, as it happens, was roughly equal to the bank’s capital.
Had Anglo been liquidated there and then, the many people with their life savings in the bank would have lost everything over €100,000. So would the 11,000 non-retail account holders – companies, charities, universities, pension funds and credit unions – who had more than €30 billion on deposit in the bank. So would the other banks, which had €20 billion deposited.
...
Companies and not-for-profit organisations keeping cash on hand to make payroll would have been unable to transfer wages and salaries into employees. Many companies would have gone under having been rendered illiquid, insolvent or both by the loss of their cash. The direct contagion effect to other banks would have been immediate.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?