grave!

C'è un dettaglio che forse sfugge in queste cose: dei 700 miliardi di perdite delle banche USA riconoscite a bilancio finora e che hanno creato questo crac quasi tutte erano perdite "di libro", non di cassa, cioè non erano tutti clienti che non pagavano, tipo Parmalat che ad un certo punto non pagava più le rate dei suoi bondsQui parliamo di perdite che non sono di cash flow, non c'è una relazione chiara e diretta tra a quanto trattano questi bonds (con dentro 200mila mutui diversi...) sul mercato e quanto pagano di rate i mutuatari, la mia impressione è che il prezzo di mercato oggi sconti che in futuro ad esempio da un 4.5% che non paga si arrivi ad un 10 o 15%, ma al momento è un 4.5% che non paga il mutuo.Il prezzo di mercato dei derivati su pool di mutui cartolarizzati è già ad un livello molto basso che corrisponde ad una situazione futura, come se molti di più non pagassero e per questo essere passati alla contabilità "marked to market" è stato un errore letale. Se si fosse tenuto il sistema contabile esistente fino al 2002 le perdite riconosciute a bilancio sarebbero state per ora la metà e soprattutto non ci sarebbe stato un crac perchè si sarebbero spalmate nel tempo e la psicologia del mercato che vende solo questi bonds non avrebbe avuto molto peso. In altre parole ogni banca avrebbe fatto i suoi calcoli su quanti pagano e non pagano e prezzato i bonds indipendentemente dal panico del mercatoCome mai allora nel 2002 si è passati alla contabilità "al mercato" ? Beh... ad esempio Enron diede una festa con champagne quando fu approvata perchè in un mercato positivo ti fa gonfiare automaticamente il capitale e quindi consente di espanderti in modo più aggressivo e però poi anche viceversa ti fa sparire il capitale quando il mercato è negativo perchè devi segnare a bilancio l'ultimo prezzo dell'ultima transazione anche se non rappresentativa degli asset che tieni magari per dieci anni fino alla scadenza sennza venderli. Questo serve a illustrare anche il punto di come in realtà sia tutto regolamentato dall'inizio alla fine nelle istituzioni finanziarie contrariamente al mito della "assenza di regolamentazione" come causa della crisi, ci sono state decisioni prese dalle autorità che hanno determinato la crisi e questa è una di quelle.------------------ ------------------ da Steve Forbes ------....called mark-to-market, or fair value, accounting. The idea seems harmless: Financial institutions should adjust their balance sheets and their capital accounts when the market value of the financial assets they hold goes up or down. That works when you have very liquid securities, such as Treasurys or the common stock of IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) or GE. But when the credit crisis hit there was no market for subprime securities. Yet regulators and lawsuit-fearful auditors pressed banks and other financial firms to relentlessly knock down the book value of this subprime paper, even in cases where these obligations were being serviced in the payment of principal and interest. Mark-to-market became the weapon of mass destruction.When banks wrote down the value of these assets they had to get new capital. The need for new capital was a signal to ratings agencies that these outfits might be in need of a credit-rating reduction. This forced financial firms to increase collateral for credit default swaps--which meant more calls for new capital.Result: Investment banks that still had positive cash flows found themselves in a death spiral. Of the $600-plus billion that financial institutions have written off, almost all of it has been book writedowns, not actual cash losses. This accounting madness sank Fannie and Freddie this summer when the government effectively took them over and provided them with a $200 billion loan facility. The two entities are still cash positive and haven't drawn down a dime of this new line of credit.Rigid mark-to-market accounting is similar to a highway that has a speed limit and a speed minimum. When snow appears on the road, bad road conditions cause drivers to go slowly. Under a mark-to-market concept, police would be ticketing these slow drivers for going below the minimum speed.If this accounting asininity had been in effect during the banking trouble in the early 1990s, almost every major commercial bank in the U.S. would have collapsed. We would have had a second Great Depression.Congress has made it clear that it wants mark-to-market suspended or abolished, but the SEC and the Treasury Department still refuse to meaningfully modify it. This is the one big piece of business left undone in ending the credit crisis.The final factor in this perfect storm was short-sellers. They quickly saw how mark-to-market made seemingly impregnable companies vulnerable to destruction. They picked their targets and relentlessly sold financial stocks short. The SEC helped them out. In the summer of 2007 the commission abolished the uptick rule, which held that a stock couldn't be shorted unless it had gone up in price. It's no surprise to anyone but the SEC that market volatility exploded after the uptick rule ceased. There were no speed bumps left when shorts went after a stock.Compounding this lunacy was the SEC's inexplicable failure to enforce the rule against "naked" short-selling. Before an investor can short a stock, he is supposed to borrow the shares and pay a broker or stockholder a fee. What sellers soon realized was that the SEC was turning a blind eye to naked short-selling, thus adding even more pressures to beleaguered bank equities.As the crisis progressed, Treasury errors didn't help, particularly its policy of virtually wiping out the value of Bear Stearns' common stock. With that precedent set, shareholders knew that at the merest whiff of a bad rumor they'd better bail out of a bank or insurance company, or their money could be obliterated. That's why Fannie's and Freddie's stocks collapsed so quickly, not to mention those of Lehman Brothers, AIG and Wachovia (nyse: WB - news - people ).Letting Lehman Brothers fail was also a blunder. The fallout vastly exceeded what would have come down if Bear Stearns had filed for bankruptcy. Had the Treasury not announced in mid- September that it would seek a $700 billion bailout facility, Morgan Stanley (nyse: MS - news - people ) and Goldman Sachs (nyse: GS - news - people ) would have been destroyed as well.