Encuentro en un blog de Mises.org, donde se cita un estudio titulado “Subprime Crisis and Board (In-)Competence: Private vs. Public Banks in Germany”

How the state ruins balance sheets!

A new study that reviewed the performance of some 30 banks in Germany and divided them into publicly owned and privately held banks found that state-run banks had 2-3 times higher losses than private banks. The authors of the study think that this is due to the poor composition of supervisory boards where they found a tremendous lack of competence (in publicly owned banks).  

 (Abstract) “We examine evidence for a systematic underperformance of Germany’s state-owned banks in the current financial crisis and study if the bank losses can be traced to the quality of bank governance. For this purpose, we examine the biographical background of 593 supervisory board members in the 29 largest banks and find a pronounced difference in the finance and management experience of board representatives across private and state-owned banks. Measures of “boardroom competence” are then related directly to the magnitude of bank losses in the recent financial crisis. Our data confirms that supervisory board (in-) competence in finance is related to losses in the financial crisis. Improved bank governance is therefore a suitable policy objective to reduce bank fragility.”

 Another good example why public management should be the least favoured option for anyone. Unfortunately, no one has calculated the costs that these publicly owned banks have meant to tax payer’s money so far (including bail-outs). It would be interesting to oppose this costs to the cost of having them let gone bankrupt.

A similar study from the University of Ohio came to similar results.

Se habla de la salida de la crisis de Alemania, pero aun así existen ciertas fragilidades: “Los brotes verdes no arraigan en Alemania” .

Algunos liberales ponen al gobierno de Alemania como ejemplo de reacción a la crisis: sin apenas actuar, sin planes multimillonarios, ni gasto público, ni rescates… Jeffrey Tucker posteó algo en estos términos en el blog del Mises hace tiempo (siento no poner enlace). No hay duda de que mejor que el gobierno español está claro, no es nada difícil. Y es cierto que venían de una posición de equilibrio presupuestario, etc.

El estudio empieza así: 

The U.S. subprime crisis had a dramatic effect on the solvency of state-owned German banks. Four fully or partly state-owned banks had to be rescued at the expense of the tax payer: WestLB, IKB Deutsche Industriebank, Sachsen LB, and Bayern LB.

Del diario alemán Spiegel, artículo muy interesante de hace unos meses sobre los bancos en Alemania:

It is now almost two years since the financial crisis began in Germany with the government’s dramatic bailout of IKB Deutsche Industriebank. IKB was one of the many banks around the world who had speculated unwisely, investing billions and even trillions in new, supposedly safe securities that were essentially nothing but repackaged and securitized loans to so-called subprime borrowers. When the bubble burst, the financial world teetered on the brink of collapse.

If the government had not come to their rescue with previously unimaginable sums, many banks would no longer exist today. The German government has already spent a total of €760 billion ($1.06 trillion), in the form of loan guarantees and bailouts, and it even took a 25 percent stake in Germany’s second-largest bank, Commerzbank. To limit the consequences for the real economy, the government also spent billions on economic stimulus programs.

The bill for taxpayers is equally enormous. In the coming year, the federal government will have to borrow €86 billion ($120 billion) — as opposed to the €6 billion ($8.4 billion) figure that was planned before the crisis. Politicians, as well as central bankers, business owners and, most of all, citizens, expect something in return: a functioning financial system — and low-interest loans.

Luego tenemos las amenazas del director del banco central alemán a los bancos para que expandan el crédito:

Even Axel Weber, the chairman of Germany’s central bank, the Bundesbank, is relying on public pressure. He knows that banks have steadily tightened their requirements for the creditworthiness of borrowers in recent weeks and months. And he also knows that much of the money the banks have borrowed from the ECB is not reaching businesses and bank customers.

In a startling move, Weber called upon the banks to pass on interest rate reductions. Otherwise, he said, “central banks will be forced to circumvent the banks and take direct measures to support the economy.”

En ese artículo se plantea también la idea del programa del “banco malo” donde haya bancos -vertederos- que acumulen toda la basura de los bancos afectados. Spiegel también abraza la tesis del estudio primero que citaba:

Ironically, it was precisely these publicly owned banks that enthusiastically snapped up the exotic high-yield securities that have since proven to be toxic during the boom years. Should they be written down, some of the state-owned banks would be forced into bankruptcy. And should a Landesbank go bust, the state that owns it could also go bankrupt, a scenario which currently looms over the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, for example.

Hence the state-owned banks are in particularly urgent need of a way to dispose of their toxic assets

Vamos, que lo del programa del banco malo no es tanto para ayudar a la gente a salir adelante de la crisis, sino para evitar la quiebra de los estados y salir al socorro de los bancos públicos. Así se disimulan las vergüenzas de la mala gestión e incompetencias públicas: volcando los costes a toda la sociedad. Luego serán estos mismos quienes se quejen y lleven las manos a la cabeza de cómo los directivos de instituciones financieras privadas se van de rositas habiendo gestionado mal la compañía… Para otros ejemplos de la maravilla que es tener a unos burócratas al cargo de una agencia de supervisión, tengo unos cuantos posts más: 1, 2 y 3.

Por último, unas afirmaciones del estudio para poner algunas cosas en su sitio sobre el sistema bancario y la supuesta desregulación:

Worldwide, a large proportion of bank assets are still effectively state-owned. Estimates by La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes and Shleifer (2002) suggest that on average 42 percent of the equity of the 10 largest banks in each country was state-owned in 1995. The German banking sector with its large share of state-owned banks is in some ways typical of the worldwide distribution of control rights in banks. State-ownership in Germany and elsewhere comes with a specific governance structure in which high-level state employees and politicians exercise the monitoring function otherwise played by private shareholders or their representatives

 As a consequence of recent government sponsored bank recapitalization plans, state-ownership in banks is likely to experience a dramatic increase. Even countries like the U.S. and the U.K., where state-ownership in banks was never important, now feature a partially state-owned banking sector.