Yves here. Although this post deals with a specific aspect of the House of Lords inquiry, note how it focuses on mechanisms that led to bank insolvency, in this case, how dubious accounting produced exaggerated profit reports, and along with it, looting (as in paying out funds to insiders to a degree that put the survival of the firm at risk).
By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance.
The many inquiries into the financial crisis have turned over plenty of stones but have failed to find any smoking guns. But the House of Lords economic affairs committee’s inquiry “Auditors: market concentration and their role” is making strides in identifying and maybe rooting out the accounting shenanigans that lay at the heart of the crisis.
At a recent session of the HoL inquiry, UK-based investors said that IFRS (international financial reporting standards) had encouraged imprudent, reckless and even illegal behavior by UK and Irish banks, enabling them to deceive investors, boost executive bonuses and ultimately destroy their institutions at taxpayers’ expense. (See text pages 72-73 of this report for a fuller explanation of the shortcomings of IFRS)
The investors told the Lords – who included the former UK chancellor Lord Lawson – that IFRS had enabled bank boards and auditors to present their institutions as massively profitable, when in fact they were barely profitable or even loss-making — and all in ways that auditors could invariably claim “complied with the standards”.
In turn this enabled the banks to make imprudent payouts to executives (in the shape of bonuses) and to shareholders (in the shape of dividends) which in truth they could not afford to make.
In an article published in May 2009, Brandon Davies, managing director of the Global Association of Risk Professionals Risk Academy said the switchover from UK GAAP to IFRS in 2003-05 had prompted banks to recategorize assets on their balance sheets in dangerous ways:-
Under Basel II … a bank is incentivized in the growth phase either to acquire more assets to increase income or to repay surplus capital to its shareholders. In the contraction phase of the cycle, the systematic deterioration in credit quality requires an increase in capital resources to maintain the same total of balance sheet assets, or a significant reduction in the amount of assets supported by a given amount of capital.
IFRS has produced a significant effect on capital ratios, because any fall in the price of an asset in the accounting categories ‘available for sale’ and ‘held for trading purposes’ produces a reduction in capital by the amount of the fall in price, as will happen in the contraction phase of the economic cycle, or an increase in capital as asset prices rise in an expansionary phase of a cycle.
In practice, these two accounting categories for assets cover a much greater proportion of the assets on banks’ balance sheets than was the case for ‘mark to market’ assets under the old UK GAAP. This is because the new categories cover any assets where there is an intention to sell the assets. Such assets are often held for prudential regulatory purposes in the banking book, which is actively managed as with any investment portfolio. This has led to many relatively illiquid and long-term assets (such as loans to private equity, securitized assets such as mortgages and illiquid bonds) being covered by these categories. The effects on regulatory capital are, moreover, exaggerated, as prices are also affected by an increase in liquidity in the growth phase of a cycle, and by a decline in market liquidity in the contraction phase.
IFRS’s biggest flaw, however, is that it gave bank managements and their auditors too much latitude in the valuation of assets, which in the upcycle created an illusion of capital strength and egged managements to indulge in more and more poor quality lending, creating a Ponzi-like scenario in the frothiest market sectors. It also enabled bank managements to make ludicrously low provisions for bad debts.
According to a transcript, Iain Richards, head of corporate governance at Aviva Investors, said:-
…you get—and I will characterize it slightly—a finance director will approach the auditor and say, “What’s the range of fair values that would be acceptable under the standards?” The auditor might say, “Well, it’s between 70 and 140 and we think the reasonable prudent number would be about 95”. The FD says, “Thanks, 140 is just what I was looking for. Thank you very much”, and it’s compliant with the standards. I’m exaggerating but the auditor is then in an invidious position of having very little leverage under the way that the standards work to push back on that.
IFRS is pro-cyclical is that it allows mispriced credit to go unchecked. It enables banks to price risky loans as if they were safe loans. While the pro-cyclicality of IFRS has been widely recognised, experts say the problem was exaggerated in the UK as a result of the way it was implemented. Richards added:
IFRS [as applied in the UK] is extremely pro-cyclical. It facilitated and exacerbated the credit bubble and then brought it home to roost in the crash and crisis. [In bank financial statements] there were valuations that frankly [were not] rigorously carried out on some instruments where reliance on netting off against credit default swaps was fictional given that the CDS market, which hit US$66 trillion at its peak, was 80% naked and the counterparties could never meet their exposures. Reliance on an instrument like that to support a toxic instrument that you are carrying on your balance sheet is imprudent — but it’s acceptable and allowed under the standards.
In a letter to the Times dated 27 July 2010, a group of academics and accountancy experts said “In its commencement phase, the ‘fair weather’ model significantly overstated bank profits, resulting in excessive dividends. It also obscured true gearing and capital destructive business models. In “storm” mode it accelerated and exaggerated losses, resulting in taxpayer-funded recapitalizations.”
Aviva’s Richards added:
The double-digit billions pumped into the banks went to plug the gap created by both bonus distribution and dividend distributions that were made just preceding the crisis.
His stark assessment was endorsed by other fund managers in the HoL session, including David Pitt-Watson of Hermes; Guy Jubb of Standard Life Investments; and Robert Talbut of Royal London Asset Management.
And Pitt-Watson said:
If we had had more conservative accounting, then the profits and the equity of the banks would have been lower; the bonuses wouldn’t have been so big; they wouldn’t have loaned out so much more money. I am intrigued that when HBOS was taken over by Lloyds that, of their £432bn loan book, Lloyds said £186bn of that was not business that they would’ve wished to do. It would have been helpful … if whoever was auditing HBOS had said, “Your loan book seems to us to be rather different from the loan books that we’re finding in other banks.
Under IFRS/mark-to-market accounting, HBOS auditors KPMG were not required to differentiate between what appears to have been “phoney” lending by the Edinburgh-based bank to a labyrinth of already insolvent corporate borrowers and shady off-balance-sheet vehicles and kosher corporates that were genuinely capable of repaying their loans.
Pitt-Watson said that “we as investors and society” need to see the re-introduction of a principle-based accounting system that includes prudential and on-going assessments of risks.”
The fund managers’ concerns about IFRS echoed those of Tim Bush, a former fund manager at Hermes and a member of the UK’s “Urgent Issues Task Force” that is tasked scrutinizing the work of the Accounting Standards Board.
Last August, in a letter sent to the ASB, the BIS and other accounting regulators, Bush said the ASB’s failure to properly understand IFRS had caused it to implement the standards in a way that contravened the Companies Act.
Bush said the ASB had failed to get its head around the law relating to creditor protection, which is embedded in the Companies Act (which applies to companies using IFRS and those using “UK GAAP” ) As a result, said Bush, the ASB had approved standards that contravened the law in respect of creditor protection.
Overall Bush said the way in which IFRS had been implemented in the UK and Ireland had “created ‘double dose’ to the extent of being a deadly dose, by removing what had underpinned banking solvency for over 120 years”, leaving UK and Irish banks dependent on a different (flawed) set of financial reporting standards to their counterparts elsewhere Europe.
Bush also said the use of IFRS had prompted the boards of UK banks to make illegal payouts to executives and to shareholders:
Overstating profits could lead to an illegal distribution (which is a criminal offence), as well as a breach of Section 386 (also a criminal offence). Some aspects of IFRS do overstate profits and indeed several UK and Irish banks collapsed after paying dividends. They did not have the capital that they presented, and they were not going concerns. The true situation was that business models were loss-making and actually consuming capital. The accounts were unreliable for capitalism to function properly as they did not show the capital.
Bush that IFRS, as applied in the UK and Ireland, had created phantom bank profits and phantom capital that had “misled creditors, misled shareholders, the Bank of England, FSA and others”. He claimed this had led to the “regulatory fiasco” that had caused the financial crisis and, owing to the authorities’ insistence on sticking with IFRS despite its flaws, continued to pose a severe risk to the financial system.
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This would provide support for an Irish rejection of the bailout terms being imposed on them. Why should the people of Ireland pay for the alleged criminal acts of Irish and UK banks?
The culpability of our accounting industry and FASB is something William Black understands all too well. Regulators will accomplish nothing if they fail to call out the failure of banks to mark to market.(spelled criminal prosecutions) As long as the foxes remain in the hen house nothing will change, and executives will continue to “hit the number” so they can keep their lavish paychecks and bonuses.
The level of fraud, particularly accounting fraud, in our economy is absolutely mind-blowing, and the government is playing an integral role in propping up these insolvent institutions so we can perpetuate the myth that the recovery has legs. The ship is sinking, and the crew is still in denial because denial allows the system to stay afloat for just one more day. 24 hours seems to be the longest time horizon for politicians these days when it comes to long-term planning.
I’m looking for nice piece of land where I can plant my bananas.
“The level of fraud, particularly accounting fraud, in our economy is absolutely mind-blowing, and the government is playing an integral role in propping up these insolvent institutions so we can perpetuate the myth that the recovery has legs.”
NOTE TO SELF: This [obscene] “public-private” connection perversely reveals how the American republic has become compromised by an ideology best described as “fascism with a smiling face.”
Note that the US is slowly implementing IASB. I’ve never been a big fan of IFRS, and this is one more reason to think we should stick w/ US GAAP.
“But the House of Lords economic affairs committee’s inquiry “Auditors: market concentration and their role” is making strides in identifying and maybe rooting out the accounting shenanigans that lay at the heart of the crisis.”
They won’t. It’s a nice sentiment (who doesn’t like cheap shots at the US ala the title?) but it’ll go nowhere.
Thsi artcile has an intereseting way to describe the financial crisis:
http://www.mindfulmoney.co.uk/wp/all-errors-are-human-errors/
It says – Any sufficiently complex, tightly coupled system will fail sooner or later, the example then used is the meltdown at Hinkley Point B nuclear power plant in the UK.
there system was to complicated, so that even those whp were experts in the areas didn’t not know how to assess what was going on, therefore when something started to go wrong, everyone was ‘completely lost’. even though the systems were ones they set up and they beleived in them but the confidence was misplaced, the complexity of the system poorly understood.
The same can be said about the financial crisis.
All errors are human errors – so its really no surprise that the financial crisis was ‘aviodable’
Bob Cringley was an investigator after the Three Mile Island meltdown and has written a bit about the findings. He puts it down to bad training. People were trained how to operate the machinery, not how nuclear reactors work.
Yes, human error is an issue. But human error can be prevented or minimized by education.
Bringing it back to the financial crisis, the problem wasn’t that the system was too complicated, at least for the bad actors. They understood it and gamed it very well.
Was it too complicated for regulators? It doesn’t appear they even tried to understand it. It wasn’t in their interests.
So the financial crisis didn’t result from an inability to understand a complicated system. It came from an agency problem. That is, what’s good for me as an investment banker or regulator isn’t always good for the global economy. There are misaligned incentives.
To realign incentives, we could pay investment bankers based on national GDP and employment %. Anyone? Anyone? Builer?
Ponzi-Tontine schemes, which have been years in the planning, with the proper predatory legislation bought and paid for previously (read, for once in your sordid life, Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Financial Services Modernization Act, Commidity Futures Modernization Act, and Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.
Then research the Derivatives Policy Group, back in the ’90s, and their connections to all which transpired.
And prior to that, research the report, Glass-Steagall: Overdue for Repeal, by JPMorgan Chase, put out in response to the Group of 30’s appeal to them about the necessity for the removal of “legal risk” in the implementation of securitizations and securitized financial instruments (credit derivatives, CDSes, etc.).
Then research the origins of the Group of 30 (I’ll save you some time, dood, it was the Rockefeller Foundation back in 1978) and the control of JPMorgan Chase.
Then look into the origins of structured investment vehicles (SIV), special purpose vehicles (SPVEs, SPV, SPC, SPAC, etc.).
Next look into the majority ownership of credit derivatives by JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley (with Citi and BofA brining up the rear).
Then look over the idiotic comment of yours — which completely contradicts the findings of the FCIC’s report:
http://c0182732.cdn1.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/fcic_final_report_full.pdf
(Which you might try reading for a change!)
At this point in the US, the banks may say that the FCIC should throw the USG in jail for mispricing risk, and have a point too.
From the FHA website, here is what it takes to qualify for a 3% down, presently around 4.8% interest rate, home loan.
Note that a 620 credit score is the cutoff between what they call “average” and “poor” credit. Note also that borrowers need to be a little patient if they had a foreclosure or bankruptcy very recently!!!!
==============================================
Basic FHA loan requirements.
Two Years of steady employment, preferably with same employer. Last two years Income should be the same or increasing.
Credit report should typically have less than two thirty day lates in last two years with a minimum credit score of 620 or higher or in some cases no credit score at all.
Bankruptcy’s must be at least two years old, with perfect credit since discharge.
Foreclosure’s must be at least three years old, with perfect credit since.
Your new mortgage payment should be approximately 30% of your gross (before taxes) income.
These are some of the most basic of FHA loan requirements for qualifying for a FHA loan. If you have answered yes to most of these statements, you probably qualify for a FHA mortgage loan.
==================================================
When is mainstream going to wake up.
Since when is it acceptable to blame the “cops” for what the bad people are doing?
You know …
its not the fault of the rapist. Its her fault.
Its the fault of the cops that you are a dope addict
Its the fault of the cops that you are a thief.
Its the fault of the cops for not stopping you from stealing.
NOW you are accepting …
Its the fault of the REGULATORS that there was fraud and stealing of the savings by the banksters. Those savings were just begging to be taken.
jal
The Lords report is what democratic government produces where jurists understand the difference between money and speech. There is some conception of society in the UK other than the society of graft that is American “campaign finance”.
It appears to be dawning on UK investors looting by managements just might degrade their assets. I wonder how long it will take them to realize that “austerity” may well liquidate those same assets.
Until we see financiers and politicians going to prison for their roles in the Ponzi scheme known as Wall Street, we will know nothing has changed.
Lord Lawson was interviewed on TV last month and plainly recommended that commercial banking be severed from investment banking. He was at the heart of Thatcher’s government, so it will be interesting to see if he represents the Tories currently in power.
p.s. horrible mixture of metaphors in Mr Fraser’s first paragraph.
This you mean?
“The many inquiries into the financial crisis have turned over plenty of stones but have failed to find any smoking guns.”
Edit:
The many Rolling Stones over the financial crisis have failed to turn up any Guns & Roses.
Better?
And this:
“But the House of Lords economic affairs committee’s inquiry “Auditors: market concentration and their role” is making strides in identifying and maybe rooting out the accounting shenanigans that lay at the heart of the crisis.”
I read the entire report, and I noticed many smoking guns.
I guess I’m not smoking what the rest of the herd is smoking?????
Homeowners’ Motto for 2011: MODIFY, BUT ALSO NULLIFY!
Following the old adage of “Trust, But Verify” I propose a new slogan for homeowners in 2011 in response to the foreclosure crisis: Modify, But Also Nullify.”
Nullify your mortgages (deeds of trust) during or before the “loan modification” scam process.
http://bryllaw.blogspot.com/2011/01/homeowners-motto-for-2011-modify-but.html
ponzi ponzi everywhere
So, does anyone think for a second that FASB was not a mirror organization that distorted GAAP? FASB is as crooked an organization as … something like Moody’s-Fitch-S&P .. the accounting firms and rating agencies were all actively involved in fraud!
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