The Greek “bail-out” of last year has and has not worked, depending on how you look at it. Stephanie Flanders:
Everyone says that heightened talk of a Greek default is proof that last year’s bail-out has “failed”. But you could make a strong case for the opposite.
In reality, all that the Greek support programme last year was ever going to do was buy time. And that is exactly what it has done. It just hasn’t bought quite as much as governments hoped.
If the case for calling it a success rests on the problem having been punted a year in to the future, but that extra year hasn’t enabled Greece to solve the problem, I’d call it a failure. If you have a large debt, and you decide to borrow extra money to buy a car to allow you to take a better-paying job you have been offered which allows you to start repaying more quickly – that is a success. Transferring your credit card balance to another provider is not.
For some, these new dynamics shift the balance in favour of facing up to the reality of an involuntary restructuring or Greek default. Officials should stop fighting it, on this view, and instead focus on limiting the collateral damage, by recapitalising the banks that will be hardest hit (notably the Greek, French and German).
I’m not sure what “recapitalising” banks actually means, but it always seems to involve banks being protected from their own mistakes, a luxury granted to few other industries.
In practice, banks aren’t that different to other businesses. When a bank makes a £1 million loan (buying bonds amounts to making a loan), it has used £1 million in money to buy a £1 million pound asset. Yes, when you loan money to someone or something that loan is an asset, because it generates an income in the form of interest payments. It is a liability to the person/thing taking out the loan. So slightly counter-intuitively the more loans you make the more assets you have.
So when a bank makes a loan it is buying an asset in the expectation that it will generate an income and profit. This is exactly the same as a manufacturing business buying £1 million pounds worth of equipment to increase production. The expectation is that the purchase will generate income and profit in the shape of producing more goods to sell.
But if a manufacturer makes an asset purchase that back-fires they are not bailed out, and a good thing too. Why should banks be any different? The argument is that banks are too big and too systemic to fail, in the sense that the failure of a bank will have a lot of repercussions beyond them.
But banks have got too big because for years there has been an implicit and explicit understanding that they would be bailed out in the event of problems. If you run a business knowing that any failures will be compensated for, you will take too many risks. Banking is also an industry with high barriers to entry, so new competitors don’t tend to come along, making the incumbents even more safe and complacent about risk.
And what about the systemic risks? I wonder how much that is simply to do with the sheer size of banks and the loans they make. A manufacturing business that goes bust might also take down suppliers and customers so they too carry systemic risks; but a multi-million pound manufacturer will of course have less impact than a multi-billion pound bank.
