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Das stimmt: “It was right not to bail out Lehman Brothers”

“It was right not to bail out Lehman Brothers.” – bto: Wann liest man das in den Medien? Selten. Der Tenor ist doch immer, es wäre ein großer Fehler gewesen, Lehman pleitegehen zu lassen. Was für ein Blödsinn.

Lehman war doch nicht der Grund für die Krise. Der Grund war – ja, gähn, wir wissen es hier alle – die hohe Verschuldung gepaart mit einem über-leveragten Bankensystem. Lehman war nur ein Symptom, was zum Symbol wurde. Bewältigt wurde seither nichts, wie wir wissen. Die Banken sind größer, die Schulden sind höher, die Zinsen tiefer. Also – Pause, keine Bewältigung.

Michael Sanbu ist derjenige, der klar sagt, dass Lehman eben nicht gerettet werden sollte. Hier seine Argumentation in der FT:

  • “These have been the days we looked back at the single most dramatic day of the global financial crisis: the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, which happened 10 years ago on Saturday. In some ways, last year’s anniversary of the seizing up of credit markets in 2007 was the more important one and (…) those events best help understand the anatomy of financial crises generally.” – bto: eben, die Insolvenz des Systems, nicht eines einzelnen Spielers.
  • “(…) banks are safer than they were thanks to regulatory reforms and, in particular, stricter capital requirements, but that these could usefully have been much stricter still. But the system as a whole, and the world economy’s growth performance, remain fragile because of the large debt overhang. Total debt has not gone down, although much of it has shifted from the private to the public sector.” – bto: Man kann es einfach nicht oft genug wiederholen!
  • “Beyond our pages, the most important piece to read is authored by one former Federal Reserve chief and two former US Treasury secretaries. Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner and Henry Paulson unsurprisingly defend their record of crisis-fighting in the New York Times. More interesting is their contention that while regulators have acquired some new tools to deal with crises — specifically, greater authority to liquidate financial institutions in an orderly manner — they have lost other powers. They mention the following: ‚The FDIC can no longer issue blanket guarantees of bank debt as it did in the crisis, the Fed’s emergency lending powers have been constrained, and the Treasury would not be able to repeat its guarantee of the money market funds.‘” – bto: Das ist der Punkt, den Ambroise Evans-Pritchard in seinem Beitrag, den ich heute Morgen besprochen habe, betont.
  • “The debt overhang (…) is a result of the failure to write down the unsustainable debts of the past. If you fail to write down the stock of existing debts, your only option is to squeeze new borrowing — and that has cost the world at least as much in lost growth and employment as the crisis itself.” – bto: was doch verdeutlicht, wie kaputt das System ist!
  • “(There is a) huge bias towards bailing out the system that guided US policy in and after the crisis, and reinforced bad policy decisions in Europe. European policymakers’ “Lehman syndrome”, which made them see catastrophe lurking behind losses for creditors to even the smallest banks, was abetted by pressure from Washington to bail out rather than bail in.” – bto: und damit die Versicherung der Banken durch den Steuerzahler und die unbegrenzte Bereitschaft die Schulden weiter nach oben zu treiben!
  • “The panic that followed the Lehman bankruptcy has produced a broad consensus along the same lines, and, in particular, that it was a mistake to let Lehman fail. (…) I want to draw the opposite lesson and depart from the consensus (…) Everything we have seen since the crisis shows that we need to be more, not less, willing to ‚resolve‘ financial institutions. The problem with Lehman was not the refusal to bail it out, but the failure to manage the fallout of the bankruptcy. In particular, the normal bankruptcy process is far too slow for a bank, let alone a systemic institution as Lehman was.” – bto: ja! Genauso ist es und wir haben uns damit zu Gefangenen eines Systems gemacht, das unweigerlich auf immer größere Bail-outs hinausläuft. Das hat mit Kapitalismus herzlich wenig zu tun.
  • “The imperative in a financial crisis is to keep the essential functions of financial intermediaries active, by (…) in extremis, temporarily taking control — nationalising — relevant financial institutions and maintaining their essential operations. But that can be done without paying for (bailing out) every outstanding claim on those institutions. On the contrary, restoring trust in the functioning of financial markets is easier to do when the institutions at their core are freed from past obligations.” – bto: Klar, dann würden auch die dummen Gläubiger – also wir Deutsche – wieder viel verlieren. Nur wir verlieren es so oder so.
  • “Inventing new policy in the middle of a crisis is never ideal. But that is why it is vital to prepare the right measures for a future crisis while things are calm. Until strong, credible restructuring and resolution authorities are in place, we are failing to do that, and will suffer for it the next time round.” – bto: Und da haben unsere Politiker eben nichts getan!

→ FT (Anmeldung erforderlich): “It was right not to bail out Lehman Brothers”, 17. September 2018