Here is something that you may not think about often enough: Taking losses.
Its something that every rookie trader must learn to do — and all of the TBTF banks refuse to do. Even sovereign nations seem unwilling to accept this simple fact of financial life.
There will be losses. How you handle them determines your fortune, your fate and your future.
Seeing how people handle losses is revealing of their character and integrity. Hiding losses is what rogue traders do. Its also what rogue banks do, and apparently, rogue nations.
$2.3 Billion in losses hidden from UBS sights by a rogue trader is chicken feed. But ponder how many $100s of billions of dollars in mortgage losses are hidden from view? The real rogues are America’s largest banks, and their enablers in Congress. .
When the TBTF banks (via their purchased Congressman) forced the Financial Accounting Standards Board to pass a rule allowing them to hide their mortgage losses — FASB 157 — it showed the dishonest nature of these entities. It was revealing of the lack of integrity of all of the institutions involved — from Congress to the banks to FASB.
When Bear Stearns first began to wobble in 2007, the initial error in this era of bailouts was in rescuing their bondholders. Instead, in 2008, they should have been forced to take the loss.
Its the same for creditors of Citi, Bank of America et. al. — instead of rescue packages, their creditors should have had to take the loss.
Mortgage delinquencies growing? More and more defaults in the pipeline? We can extend & pretend, or we can take the loss.
Note that via the FDIC, some bank lenders did take the loss. Washington Mutual’s collapse led it to being bought by JPM. Wells Fargo picked up Wachovia. Other examples abound, In each case where losses were forced to be realized, we ended up with a healthier few banks, and no moral hazard.
Zombie banks get created when they do not take the loss.
Now we have the European crisis, wherein all of the parties involved refuse to (say it with me) take the loss.
Greek debt piling up? You can restructure, renegotiate, reneg, or you can take the loss. Portugal’s balance sheet a problem? Well, the ECB can kick the can down the road, or they can force lenders to take the loss.
The model for not taking the loss has to be Japan. Look at their stock market since 1989 and you will see the net result of not taking the loss. The Japanese have suffered through lost decades as a result of their refusal to take any write-downs, propping up their Keiretsu.
Until we purge the bad debt from the financial system, we will be stuck with a long and painful de-leveraging.
Please, won’t someone in Washington or Brussels or Tokyo understand the importance of this simple trading rule? Take The Loss already!
This post originally appeared at The Big Picture and is reproduced with permission.
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