CALDEIRÃO DE BOLSA

É incrível como Cramer, no seu estilo desvairado e excêntrico, consegue abordar questões absolutamente fundamentais! Se eu fosse dado a crendices diria q estamos perante um visionário.
Nunca tinha pensado na crise da banca americana (tanto a de investimengto como a tradicional) na perspectiva com q Cramer o faz. Não é fácil interiorizarmos a ideia de q os grandes bancos americanos possam estar a utilizar contabilidades artificiosas p esconder a verdadeira dimensão da crise e dos prejuízos, mt menos q a possibilidade de instituições finaneiras com capitalizações de centenas de milhões de dólares possam vir a... falir! Mas realm/ há aspectos q me têm feito alguma confusão. Por ex. o Citigroup depois de registar, em 2 trimestres consecutivos, prejuízos colossais, não se cansa de garantir q a instituição vai regressar aos ganhos já nos 2 últimos trimestres do ano... Ora, isto faz-me confusão pois não se vislumbra q os gravíssimos problemas q corroem a banca americana venham a desaparecer de um momento p o outro, isto pese-embora a descida dos juros, por parte da FED, q sempre ajuda a aliviar os devedores. Mas se os juros (nos EUA) estão + baixos, a inflação tb está + alta, pelo q os cidadãos americanos c dívidas ganham por um lado, mas perdem por outro.
É certo q o sector bancário mundial já tem passado por graves crises nas últimas décadas, o problema é q estamos a falar do sector bancário da maior economia do mundo!...
Eu duvido q a hipótese + devastadora de falências em série na banca americana se concretize. Acredito + num cenário tipo "Bear Sterns": qd algum grande banco americano chegar a um beco sem saída, a Fazenda americana vai injectar o dinheiro q for preciso p viabilizar os bancos, ainda q (claro está!), utilize p tal dinheiro dos contribuintes.
Lá como cá aqueles q tratam o Estado com desdém e arrogância são os 1.os a baterem-lhe à porta sempre q estão em dificuldades.

Abraço,

"Without Transparency, Catastrophe Lies Ahead"

By Jim Cramer
RealMoney.com Columnist
6/30/2008 1:12 PM EDT



"Here we are more than $400 billion in the red on mortgage bonds and we still don't know anything about them! We don't know what's in them, how to freely trade them, how to break them up and reconstitute them, and we have no reliable predictions of their cash flows.




We have seen the banks collapse and we know that residential mortgages -- not private equity or commercial loans -- are almost entirely the reason. That's the Wachovia (WB - commentary - Cramer's Take) story, the Washington Mutual (WM - commentary - Cramer's Take), Citigroup (C - commentary - Cramer's Take) and Bank of America (BAC - commentary - Cramer's Take) stories.

What's strange is that we are beginning to bump into a difficult issue: are the losses exceeding the real losses? Are the bonds that worthless? Is the issue what was paid for the bonds, or the default rate of the bonds? Is the issue geographic? Is it related to home-equity loans? Loan guarantees made by the banks?

One thing is certain: We know nothing about the exposure of the plummeting banks to the real housing market. Sure, in cases like Downey (DSL - commentary - Cramer's Take), the loans are visible, but they are bad construction loans that will most likely wipe out that bank.

We don't know, though, the loans that are dogging Lehman (LEH - commentary - Cramer's Take) or Merrill (MER - commentary - Cramer's Take) or Bank of America or Wachovia. The Lehman and Merrill loans seem left over from mortgages they didn't get out the door or mortgages they bought, but it isn't like you hear the banks say, "We have looked at each mortgage that is related to each issue, and we find them paying off and the bonds undervalued."

We still don't know what cents on the dollar to put them.

We've had this problem for more than a year, and we are still nowhere near the bottom of it, which is why there is no bottom to the bank stocks at all.


Presumably at a certain point someone will figure out what some of these bonds will be worth, but that's been masked by ratings agencies and insurance that didn't pan out that made figuring out the bonds imperative.

Mind you, outfits like Washington Mutual, Bank of America and Wachovia have their own mortgages that were not securitized and their own home-equity loans that are known to them. Bank of America, in particular, with the acquisition of Countrywide, which issued about 20% of all loans, might be able to figure out what's defaulting and what's not. Washington Mutual's firing of James Corcoran, the architect of the willy-nilly retail banking growth at that company, is a good sign, but the best would be firing the knucklehead "banker" Kerry Killinger, who really is responsible for the destruction of a great American bank.

But in the end we go back to being unable to calculate, which then makes the banks unable to figure out how much capital they need to put up, which then causes still more rounds of capital to be raised and a burying of those who went before the previous raise.

All of this -- the lack of transparency, the lack of knowledge -- makes the process of valuing just impossible. That's why, without some sort of Resolution Trust for Commercial Mortgages and without an aid package that gives the FHA billions of dollars to help defaulting borrowers refinance, we are looking not at runs on the bank, but at a crushing of the equity of most of the majors and a recapitalization of the industry.

I know the oil situation is wiping out the airlines and playing havoc with the consumer and most likely causing a recession, but it is the banks that are most worrisome. A recession arguably reduces earnings significantly, but the balance sheets of corporate America are very strong and downside surprises from 14-times-earnings firms won't cause 50% declines from here, more likely 5% to 20% -- painful, but not a wipeout.

However, unless these banks began to tell us what they really have -- I don't even bother talking about the SEC anymore, they have ceased to play any role in disclosure for financials -- and own up to what is no longer covered by insurance, it is no longer unthinkable to believe that many of the top 10 banks in this country may soon be technically insolvent and in need of taking over by the government. Believe me, in those situations, the least of the worries is the common stock holder; he immediately gets wiped out in the process. "

(in www.realmoney.com)