Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 28 January 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Context Phase
Professor Edward Kane:
I should have said how bonds and insurance contracts are priced. People try to get a measure of the probability of default, or the probability of some event if it is an insurance contract, and the contingent loss given that event and put them together. It is much richer when we look at options. It should be priced as the difference between the put option, for the institution to be able to put losses on the taxpayer, and the call option, for the taxpayer to be able to take over the firm. In the case of banks that are too big to fail, the call option is never exercised. Not looking at that as a put option and using the bond or insurance approach misses how important is forbearance. I do not remember seeing how the particular calculation is made but some co-authors and I put the figure 2 into the statement. We figured out what it was worth as a quarterly dividend to have guarantees across the banking system. It surged in late 2008 and early 2009 and has come down since. It will never go away and the value will be there until we change the incentives.
anne flynn
Posted on 30 Jan 2015 11:08 am (Report this comment)
Peter Sutherland
"Those Northern Bank fellas were just amateurs"
Behold the man who was previously on the board of the now “troubled” Allied Irish Bank, which wrote off the substantial debts owed by the former Prime Minister, Garret FitzGerald, and other people who gambled on the stock-market, and lost; but who now tells us that debts imposed on us taxpayers, because of private, foreign and domestic banks that also gambled, these are sacrosanct – and no cheeky questions from you peasants, either…
… Sutherland opposes… the banking inquiry. This is hardly surprising from a former chairman of AIB who appeared at the 1999 public inquiry into the Dirt tax evasion scandal.
“It would have been better not to have an inquiry at this time … We need to look to the future…” [Irish Times]
Before we avert our gaze at this glorious future which is coming, why not look at some of his past performance, though? Behold the man who was one of the directors of the Royal Bank of Scotland until 2009; this is the same bank that is number one of the top ten Irish government bond (debt) holders; those same bondholders that Pete is pontificating must be “reassured” by imposing “austerity” on us peons; behold the man who was
a board member at Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) during the financial meltdown when the UK bank collapsed into state arms after a frenetic, debt-fuelled growth. Of the bank’s 2007 role in the €71 billion acquisition of Dutch bank ABN Amro, the biggest ever banking takeover, Sutherland says it made “the mistake of buying at precisely the wrong time when the world was falling off the back of a bus”. [Irish Times]
Or as Zerohedge puts it
Lack of revisionism is not too surprising coming from a person whose personal, and future, fortune, is based on the past generosity of American, and now Irish taxpayers. Because his wealth is certainly not due to his skill at anything related to his actual career.
Behold the man who is Chairman of Goldman Sachs, a kind of international bookies for casino-capitalism, described as “a vampire squid on the face of humanity” for its part in the world-wide crisis; a company which is currently giving out $111,000,000 to its executives, while Pete is urging “austerity” on the people who are paying a penalty-premium to ECB loansharks, in order to bail out the private losses of his firm!
Behold the man who has used every opportunity to browbeat Ireland about the necessity of greater EU integration – for example, the adoption by Ireland of the Euro; who now tells us
We have to recognise that as currency devaluation is not an option, downward flexibility in wages and prices is essential to avoid unemployment… [Irish Times]
Which is only what every thoughtful opponent of Maastricht and every other such treaty was trying to warn about – but was shouted down by the “Great and the Good” such as Sutherland, Fitzgerald etc., and their apologists, enablers, & messenger boys in Official Ireland.
http://rebel-alliance.org/2010/12/20/peter-the-hutt-sutherla...