More Banks Fail in "Deepening Financial Crisis"

More green shoots for the fungus collection.

What if they gave a Great Depression but systematically rigged the statistics, manipulated the markets, inflated the currency, and were able to convince the majority that it was not all that bad?

Would it still be a Great Depression? Or a Great Delusion?

How angry would people be when they realized they had been fooled into making very destructive personal financial decisions based on this deception?

Would the perpetrators be able to claim immunity because they were performing a service to the government? This is one defense that Barrick Gold (and JP Morgan) used when they were initially sued for manipulating the price of gold in the New Orleans court case. Barrick Corp Drops Bombshell

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the [public] is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country." Edward Bernays

“It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the formation of public opinion...If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie.” Joseph Goebbels

Bloomberg
Seven U.S. Banks Seized in Busiest Year for Closures Since 1992
By Ari Levy and Flynn McRoberts

July 3 (Bloomberg) -- Six banks in Illinois and one in Texas were seized by regulators as the deepening financial crisis pushed the toll of failed U.S. lenders this year to 52, the most since 1992.

Twelve banks have failed this year in Illinois, the most of any state. The seven lenders seized yesterday, with total assets of $1.49 billion and deposits of $1.34 billion, were closed by state or federal regulators and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. was named receiver, according to statements from the FDIC. Buyers were named for each of the closed institutions.

The Illinois banks are affiliates of Peotone Bank & Trust Co., in Peotone, Illinois, about 45 miles (72 kilometers) south of Chicago. The failures resulted primarily because of soured loans and losses on investments in collateralized debt obligations, the FDIC said. Illinois, with an unemployment rate above the national average, was one of seven states to begin the fiscal year without a spending plan.

"The six failed Illinois banks are all controlled by one family and followed a similar business model that created concentrated exposure in each institution," the FDIC said. CDOs, which packaged bonds and loans into notes of varying risk and yield, lost money as real estate defaults soared.

Regulators this year have closed the most banks since the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1990s as lenders struggle with mounting losses on mortgages and commercial loans. The total for 2009 is more than double the 25 banks shuttered in 2008 and surpasses the 50 that were closed in 1993. The prior year there were 181 failures or government-assisted transactions.

FDIC Fund

The FDIC estimates yesterday's seizures will cost its insurance fund $314.3 million. The regulator imposed an emergency fee in May to raise $5.6 billion to rebuild the fund, which has deteriorated in the past 18 months. More assessments are possible, the FDIC said.

Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, a Democrat, refused to sign a budget because lawmakers failed to approve raising the income tax. In his original $53 billion budget proposal in March, the governor sought personal and corporate tax increases to help eliminate an $11.6 billion deficit and maintain state services.

Chicago is 280 miles from Detroit, home to General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC, which were forced into bankruptcy. Lear Corp., the Southfield, Michigan-based maker of automotive seats, announced plans yesterday to enter bankruptcy. The unemployment rate in Illinois was 10.1 percent in May, compared with 9.4 percent nationally.

A Mess

"This is a mess," said Jack Ablin, who oversees $60 billion as chief investment officer at Harris Private Bank in Chicago. "We're a manufacturing state and in the Midwest, so we're influenced by the autos."

In addition to CDOs, the failed banks were plagued by losses on commercial real estate loans. Founders Bank of Worth, the biggest of the Illinois banks seized yesterday, had $374 million in construction and commercial real estate loans as of March, accounting for 63 percent of the bank's net loans and leases, according to a regulatory report.

Millennium State Bank of Texas, the Dallas-based bank taken over yesterday, had $67.5 million in such loans, or 81 percent of its total loans.

"The common denominator for most of the bank failures so far has been troubled construction loans," said Matthew Anderson of Foresight Analytics, an Oakland, California-based real estate research firm. "There's no easy way out with defaulted construction loans in today's environment..."

Japan Calling: A Little More Local Color on the Japanese System

A friend in Japan is updating me on how things are going there.

Its been about ten years since I have worked in Tokyo personally, but everything he is saying is a logical extension of how things were at that time. I am very familiar with the NTT communication system, which was the basis of some of our early work here in the US. Its convenient sometimes to have a determined bureaucracy with plenty of money and power at your back when its time to get a strategic initiative achieved.

This is useful because people like to make facile comparisons between Japan and the US without really understanding some important differences in the markets, public policy, demographics, and culture.

"There are many things here that make life difficult, but on the other hand, make life much easier, some planned, some dictated by circumstances and by accident. It seems very socialist. Makes it very difficult to compare Japan and the US.

There is national health care here. Due to a focus on disease prevention (they have started to take waist measurements and warn you if your waist is say more than 34 inches), not eating too much meat, getting enough vitamin D from sunlight and getting a little exercise because you have to walk 10 minutes to the train station, you can expect, on average, to be fully functional until about 75 and live into your 80s.

Almost everyone is reimbursed for commute to work, by least expensive route, say bus and train, even if you work in a convenience store. Japanese people have told me that the idea is that everyone who wants to work should be able to work where they want without being deterred by the cost of the commute. At one firm I worked at, the limit for the reimbursement was 800 dollars per month, so a very few people commuted by bullet train from quite a distance away. More exactly, if you go to work 5 days a week, the company will reimburse you for the bus/train pass, which allows unlimited travel, so you can use the train pass to go shopping or do other things on weekends for free.

My pass for a half hour commute each way, about 40 miles round trip, is 120 dollars per month. This is why the public transportation systems work well and have continued to improve. All the trains are continuing in improve, and for example, the bullet train now uses one half the energy it did when it debuted 45 years ago. JR East, beginning with the Yamanote Line, is replacing all its trains with new regenerative braking trains that are lighter and roomier and use half the energy of the earlier models. Advertisements on the trains say it takes 1/10 the energy to go by train than by car, but I think that is for older models.

Which brings us to the biggest advantage: most people do not need a car here, and if they do need one, a household can get by with just one car.

I have long thought of cars as vampires sucking the economic life out of every household in the US. And the risk of death and serious injury from car accidents is about half what it is in the US (although the statistics may not be directly comparable).

In 45 years, only one rider has been killed on the bullet train, and that was because he tried to stick his hand in the door too late and got the sleeve of his jacket caught in the door. While there are commuter train accidents from time to time, they are rare, and I think in Tokyo, the last passenger deaths were about a decade ago when a train derailed. Since the auto fatalities in Japan are about 7,000 per year, whereas in the US they are around 40,000 per year with about double the population, I guess that if the Japanese drove as much as people in the US, there would be about another 10,000 auto fatalities per year here, so over the 20 years I have lived here, there are say 200,000 people walking around who wouldn't otherwise be here. That trumps absolutely all other considerations.

I think it is telling that during the oil price spike last year, the US cut its gasoline consumption by about 5%, whereas in Japan, gasoline consumption was cut by 14%. I said, the Japanese cut their gasoline consumption by 14%... BECAUSE THEY CAN.

Broadband, subsidized and incentivized, has been here for a decade. Around 1999, I picked up a Yahoo Broadband modem, filled out a form, brought it home, and plugged it in. 6 M/sec, 15 dollars a month. Although I didn't understand it at the time, the modem was converting my telephone calls into internet telephony, so calls to the US that were a dollar a minute by NTT were suddenly a flat 3 cents a minute. Around new year, I made a lot of phone calls, and was bracing for a thousand dollar phone bill... and then I realized that I hadn't gotten an NTT bill in months... it was instead a 20 dollar charge tacked on to my credit card.

The Japanese government has been panicking about the oil running out for more than a decade. I noticed Koizumi saying "global warming, global warming" over and over again, and mention of peak oil was conspicuous by its absence. That's when I realized that when he was addressing the captains of industry, what he was really saying was "You idiots, the oil is running out! Get the energy use of everything down!"

Because broadband is widely available, the Japanese government went from wanting 10% of workers to telecommute at least some of the time, to wanting 20% to telecommute by next year, as a means of reducing energy consumption.

Mitsubishi is advertising a split system heat pump air conditioner/heater that runs at about 6 cents per hour (and the electricity rate here is high, about 20 cents a kilowatt hour). My Sharp heat pump is 16 years old and runs for about 10 cents an hour. My total heating/cooling expense for a year is about 300 dollars.

There is a huge panic going on in the US about how bad the electricity grid is. I think there are estimates that unreliable electricity is costing the US 100 billion per year. In Tokyo, there has been only one major blackout in 20 years, and that affected only about a quarter of the city for half a day due to a crane snagging high tension wires. The only outages I have seen myself were when a construction crew accidentally severed a line (one hour) and when a fighter jet crashed into high tension wires (two hours). Quakes do not normally affect electricity, water, or telephone. Gas meters have automatic sensors that turn off gas supply, and then if it seems all clear after an hour, automatically reset. We sometimes have fairly big quakes every day for weeks on end... I'm not joking.

When a quake is detected by sensors, the sensors send signals to a central computer. The computer has models of 100,000 quake scenarios, and it matches the data to a scenario, estimating the surface shaking for each small grid square of Japan. If surface shaking in a particular location is predicted to exceed a certain level, the bullet trains automatically engage emergency braking. All city halls have automatic announcement systems that estimate the shaking and count down to the arrival of the primary wave at their particular location. Nuclear reactors and power generating stations receive advance warnings. Some residential condos also have this. I suppose it will become standard soon.

You can get warnings of a few seconds or minutes depending on how far away the quake is.

(After seeing the Kobe quake first hand, my solution was 1) buy earthquake ground shaking estimate map of Tokyo, 2) see closest station to downtown where risk drops substantially due to granite outcrop getting you off the alluvial plain. Estimates of shaking in downtown Tokyo is 10 times the estimated shaking where I live.)

This is why I think it is so difficult to compare the situations. You cannot walk away from the mortgage. On the other hand, your commute is subsidize and you do not need a car, so it is as if the condo were free."

The Japanese Stagnation

This is interesting, and probably an eye-opener for most Western readers.

Most Japanese mortgages are 'recourse' loans meaning that the borrower still owes the full amount of the loan even in the event of foreclosure. One of the reasons for this is that so many Japanese residential buildings are not intended to outlast the 35 year mortgage and depreciate from the day they are bought.

The Japanese government promoted officially backed mortgage programs to keep the economy going, cutting down payments to zero from the traditional 20 percent. This lured in buyers who really could not afford the houses, and are often the first to have their pay cut in an economic downturn.

Japan uses a semi-annual bonus system as part of its pay structure for employees, the bonus portion of which is more readily sacrificed for the company good.

Please consider these things in the context of the governance of Japan which as we have said is semi-feudal, ruled by a few corporations and the wealthy elite in partnership with essentially a one party government.

This will go a long way in helping to understand the "Japanese disease" of economic stagnation. You start by crippling the middle class through debt indebtedness to a corporate elite.

The Japan Times
The only bonus you'll get this summer is the sun
By Philip Brasor
June 28, 2009

One of the cleverest ideas developed by the Japanese business world is the distribution of semiannual "bonuses" to employees. Usually, a bonus is tied to a company's good fortune or an employee's performance. Japanese workers have always deemed them to be part of their salaries and tend to plan their finances accordingly. Employees and employers look at bonuses differently: The former see them as an entitlement, while the latter use them as a safety valve.

With the onset of the recession, Japanese companies have exercised their option to reduce or even cancel bonuses, and for the past month the media has been buzzing with a new term — June crisis — to describe the situation of workers who may not be able to meet mortgage payments as a result.

June and December are bonus months, and 45 percent of Japanese people with housing loans have contracts that require them to pay larger amounts in these months than they do in other months, in some cases as much as five times.

Publications and TV news shows have been filled with human-interest stories about people suddenly faced with the possibility of losing their homes. The Asahi Shimbun tells of a 40-year-old housewife whose husband did not receive a bonus this month and apparently won't receive one in December either. Even worse, his salary has been cut by 20 percent. They have 20 years left on their 35-year mortgage. They pay only ¥80,000 a month toward the loan, but during each bonus month they pay ¥400,000. With one child in university and another in junior high school, they have saved very little. "When we took out our mortgage," the woman says, "it was unthinkable that my husband's bonus would be zero."

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, homeowners now spend an average of 20.5 percent of their disposable income on housing loans, the highest portion ever. Meanwhile, the Japan Business Federation has reported that total bonus payments this June is 19 percent less than the total for last year, the greatest year-on-year drop since they started compiling statistics in 1959.

In the past, company labor unions would protest to employers when bonuses were cut, calling bonuses "life expenses," but recently they have taken management's side and agreed that bonuses should be tied to company performance. But the roots of the June crisis go deeper. Housing has always been the government's main means of economic stimulation. During the 1990s, when the economy was stagnant, housing was pretty much the only sector keeping the economy going thanks to the Flat 35 scheme, which allowed home buyers to take out loans with only 10 percent down payments instead of the usual 20 percent. The government's new stimulus measures eliminate down payments altogether for Flat 35. These loans are guaranteed by a government entity called the Japan Housing Finance Agency.

A person who wouldn't normally be able to buy a home can more easily buy one, and as we have seen with the subprime loan fiasco in the United States, lowering the bar for home ownership can have disastrous consequences. People who bought homes in the '90s under the Flat 35 scheme with "relaxed" (yutori) interest rates are the ones most affected by the June crisis.

NHK illustrated this tendency on the program "Yudoki Network" with the story of a former taxi driver who received a notice from JHFA saying that since he was delinquent for six months he would have to pay the balance of his loan — more than ¥24 million for a ¥36 million condo he bought in 1998 — or the condo would be auctioned off. The man's situation is worse than it sounds, because if his condo is repossessed, he still has to pay off his loan.

Japanese mortgages are recourse loans, meaning the borrower is still liable even after foreclosure. Depending on the state, most banks in America offer nonrecourse loans, which are secured by collateral, usually the property itself. Once they foreclose, the borrower's debts are gone. If you default on a recourse loan, you're messed up three times: you lose your home, you lose all the money you sunk into it, and you still have debt. Wait, make that four times — your credit rating is garbage.

The taxi driver opted to sell his condo before it went on the block (where it would probably sell for about 80 percent of its market value), but the realtor he hired said she could get, at most, ¥25 million for it. With all the fees involved, he'd still end up ¥3 million in the hole. Fuji TV's "Sakiyomi" profiled an unemployed sushi chef facing foreclosure who still owes ¥9 million on his three-bedroom Chiba Prefecture house. All the realtors he's talked to say his property is worth about ¥5 million but the only offer he's gotten is ¥2.5 million. His family has already left him and he's contemplated suicide. These cases are accompanied by advice from financial planners that boils down to refinancing the loan so that monthly payments are reduced. But that means extending the loan period and, as a result, paying more money in the end for a home that will likely be worth nothing, which they rarely mention. Recourse loans are directly related to Japan's infamous "scrap-and-build" housing policy. Banks can't be expected to lend money for houses that start losing value the moment construction is completed if those houses are used as collateral.

There are more than 6 million vacant houses in Japan. Most will never be sold, because they're pieces of crap that were never meant to outlast their 35-year mortgages. Condominiums are no better. On average, Tokyo "mansions" built in 1990, when land values peaked, were selling for half their original prices by 2004.

Interviewed on NHK Radio, economist Akiko Hagiwara said that people who realistically can't afford homes have been suckered into buying them in order to prop up the economy. People in this income bracket are also typically the first to get laid off or have their bonuses cut. "They're victims of the government," she said.