2013年11月30日土曜日

危険な場所

クマはもういない

2013年11月29日金曜日

これ見なきゃ

2013年11月28日木曜日

<日本をかもにする方法> 馬鹿にされる日本マネー、GURDIAN 発 ビジネスインサイダー経由・・

A Former Trader Explains How He Used To Mess With Japanese Clients

内容は90年代からリーマンショックの頃までごろごろしていたこと。事実だとしても別に日本だけが被害にあったわけではなく、むしろ日本のサブプライムの被害は少なかった。

問題は、ウォール街の内部告発記事が、英国のガーデイアンに掲載され、タイトルで日本が馬鹿にされて、それが米国のリベラル系メデイアを経てやっとこちらに伝わるパターン・・

このパターンは、いい加減にしてほしいところ・・

My first year on Wall Street, 1993, I was paid 14 times more than I earned the prior year and three times more than my father's best year. For that money, I helped my company create financial products that were disguised to look simple, but which required complex math to properly understand. That first year I was roundly applauded by my bosses, who told me I was clever, and to my surprise they gave me $20,000 bonus beyond my salary.
The products were sold to many investors, many who didn’t fully understand what they were buying, most of them what we called “clueless Japanese.” The profits to my company were huge – hundreds of millions of dollars huge. The main product that made my firm great money for close to five years was was called, in typically dense finance jargon, a YIF, or a Yield Indexed Forward.
Eventually, investors got wise, realizing what they had bought was complex, loaded with hidden leverage, and became most dangerous during moments of distress.
I never did meet the buyers; that was someone else's job. I stayed behind the spreadsheets. My job was to try to extract as much value as possible through math and clever trading. Japan would send us faxes of documents from our competitors. Many were selling far weirder products and doing it in far larger volume than we were. The conversation with our Japanese customers would end with them urging us on: “We can’t fall behind.”
When I did ask, rather naively, if this was all kosher, I would be assured multiple times that multiple lawyers and multiple managers had approved the sales.
One senior trader, consoling me late at night, reminded me, “You are playing in the big leagues now. If a customer wants a red suit, you sell them a red suit. If that customer is Japanese, you charge him twice what it costs.”
I rationalized that our group was careful by Wall Street standards, trying to stay close to the letter of the law. We tried to abide by an unwritten "five-point rule": never intentionally make more than five percentage points of profit from a customer.
Some competitors didn’t care about the rule. They were making 7% or 10% profit per trade from clients, selling exotic products loaded with hidden traps. I assumed they would eventually face legal charges, or at least public embarrassment, for pushing so clearly away from the spirit of the law.
They didn’t. Rather, they got paid better, were lauded as true risk takers, and offered big pay packages to manage similar businesses.
Being paid very well also helped ease any of my concerns. Feeling guilty, kid? Here take a big check. I was, for the first time in my life, feeling valued for my math skills – the ones I had to hide throughout my childhood, so as not be labeled a nerd or egghead. Ego and money are nice salves for any potential feeling of guilt.
After a few years on Wall Street it was clear to me: you could make money by gaming anyone and everything. The more clever you were, the more ingenious your ability to exploit a flaw in a law or regulation, the more lauded and celebrated you became.
Nobody seemed to be getting called out. No move was too audacious. It was like driving past the speed limit at 79 MPH, and watching others pass by at 100, or 110, and never seeing anyone pulled over.
Wall Street did nod and wave politely to regulators’ attempts to slow things down. Every employee had to complete a yearly compliance training, where he was updated on things like money laundering, collusion, insider trading, and selling our customers only financial products that were suitable to them.
By the early 2000s that compliance training had descended into a once-a-year farce, designed to literally just check a box. It became a one-hour lecture held in a massive hall. Everyone had to go once, listen to the rushed presentation, and then sign a form. You could look down at the audience and see row after row of blue buttoned shirts playing on their Blackberries. I reached new highs on Brick Breaker one year during compliance training. My compliance education that year was still complete.
By 2007 the idea of ethics education fell even further. You didn't even need to show up to a lecture hall; you just had to log on to an online course. It was one hour of slides that you worked through, blindly pushing the “forward” button while your attention was somewhere else. Some managers, too busy for such nonsense, even paid younger employees to sit at their computers and do it for them.
As Wall Street grew, fueled by that unchecked culture of risk taking, traders got more and more audacious, and corruption became more and more diffused through the system. By 2006 you could open up almost any major business, look at its inside workings, and find some wrongdoing.
After the crash of 2008, regulators finally did exactly that. What has resulted is a wave of scandals with odd names; LIBOR fixing, FX collusion, ISDA Fix.
To outsiders they sound like complex acronyms that occupy the darkest corners of Wall Street, easily dismissed as anomalies. They are not. LIBOR, FX, ISDA Fix are at the very center of finance, part of the daily flow of trillions of dollars. The scandals are scarily close to what some on Wall Street believe is standard business practice, a matter of shades of grey.
I imagine the people who are named in the scandals are genuinely confused as to why they are being singled out. They were just doing what almost everyone else was, maybe just more aggressive, more reckless. They were doing what they had been trained to do: bending the rules, pushing as far as they could to beat competitors. They had been applauded in the past for their aggressive risk taking, no doubt. Now they are just whipping boys.
That's the paradox at the core of the settlements we're seeing: where is the real responsibility? Others were doing it, yes. Banks should be fined, yes. But somebody should be charged. Yet the people who really should be held accountable have not. They are the bosses, the managers and CEOs of the businesses. They set the standard, they shaped the culture. The Chuck Princes, Dick Fulds, and Fred Goodwins of the world. They happily shepherded and profited from a Wall Street that spun out of control.
A precedent needs to be set, to slow down Wall Street’s wild behavior. A reminder that rules are there to be followed, not exploited. The managers knew what was going on. Ask anyone who works at a bank and they will tell you that.
The excuse we have long accepted is ignorance: that these leaders couldn't have known what was happening. That doesn't suffice. If they didn't know, it's an even larger sin.
This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk


 サンクスギビング特別号から ( マネー原理プロ)


・・いまさらだが、サンクスギビングはアメリカにとって特別な日である。ユニバーサルなクリスマスや、どちらかというとアイリッシュのお祭りのハロウインとは違う。

サンクスギビングは純粋にアメリカだけ。だからアメリカ人なら、皆が共通に楽しむ平等さがある。・・

・・次は79000年後、ハヌカとサンクスギビングが重なったのは世紀の偶然か、それとも歴史の必然か・・。

・・ THE END OF THE END OF THE WORLD・・・ 世界の終わり(説)の終わり・・

・・・ 2年前のこのビデオを見れば、今米国で起こっていること、また今米国が日本に要求していることの背景が明確にわかる。そして賢い人は、次に何が起こるのか、そのヒントも感じられるはずだ。( 先週の上院でのフィルバスター核ボタン、 女性の活用などなど・・)

日本の外交関係者、金融政策関係者は、英語がわかろうがわかるまいが、必見のビデオである・・。
                                      (マネー原理プロから抜粋・・)

2013年11月27日水曜日

Keep roaring. 




彼女はこの録画の二週間後、力尽きた

2013年11月26日火曜日

実は失われていなかった20年・・(一人当たりのGDPはアメリカよりも良かった日本)

% of people w optimistic economic outlook (Pew): Germany 75% Poland 27% UK 15% France 9% Spain 4% Italy 3% Greece 1%

JAPAN???

2013年11月23日土曜日

押された核ボタン  真マネー原理プロ・・




(マネー原理本文から)前述のレターの内容の訂正。この訂正は過去の訂正で一番重要。なぜなら、今がバブルか否かの議論において、重要なFEDの方向性に決定的なインパクトを与える・・・。

2013年11月22日金曜日

泡のないビールは不味い

下は今日のストックボイス、ワールドマーケッツでの個人的バブル論・・。(40分ごろ)



そして下はサマーズバブル論・・

簡単に言うと、アメリカはバブル無しで成長した時期は終わった。今はバブル無しでは最低限の成長が実現できない・・・ 

つまり、うまいビールにバブルは必要ということか・・ なるほど、サマーズは少しトーンを変えた・・


2013年11月19日火曜日

さよならマリア





マリアとは一つ共通点がある.1993年に活気あふれる取引所のフロアーに飛び込んだこと。

米国のマーケットメディアの人の流れには、ブルーンバーグからCNBCに入り、CNBCからFOXへというパターンがある。プロ向けのブルーンバーグ。派手なCNBC。保守的なFOX。

普通に見て、キャリアパスとしては、CNBC頂点だが、同局がWALL街に近すぎることに辟易し、金融危機後、救済されながら反省しないWALL街をバンクスターとよんでFOXに去ったダイラン ラテイガンなどもいた。

そんななかでマリアはずっとCNBCとともあった女性。米国の株のチャートをみればわかるが、彼女93年に女性として初めてNY証券取引所に入ったころから、米株は歴史的な上昇を始めた・・。

恐らくマリアがFOXにいくのは主義主張とは無関係だろう、これも時代の転換の象徴。


2013年11月17日日曜日

風雲急を告げる日韓関係 マネー原理プロから  


日本のメディアがキャロラインケネディさんが駐日大使に決まったことを報道したのはそんなに前ではなかった。しかしこのレターでは4月3日に紹介している。それは、日々チェックしている外交ブログにその情報があったからだ。実は同じ情報ソースで先週気になる情報があった。それは日韓関係である。


参加者の一人、イアンブレマーが、先週(国務長官)ケリーは、早々にイランを引き上げ(核協議)韓国へ飛んで日韓関係の悪化に対応せよと強調していた。

先週、世界のニュースで米国とイランとの核協議は最重要扱い。ところが、米国を代表する若き外交スペシャリストは、先週の時点で、米国の国益にとって、今はイランとの核協議より、日韓関係の方が緊急課題だと主張していたのだ。

瞬間虚をつかれた感覚だった。だが冷静に振り返ってみると、色んな所にヒントはあった・・。

恐らくそんな話題とは無関係に、日本ではキャロラインさんの歓迎ムードだったはず。だがそもそもその彼女の任命をいち早く教えてくれたのは、同じ外交の専門家たちだ。

そして今日、「安倍総理が韓国をおろかな国と呼んだ」という話題が出ていた。これで合点がいった。だがその前に怒り。週刊文春は何を考えているのか。これは日本にとってシリアスだと思う。

そもそもこちらでは、今在米韓国勢力が議会を使い、いろんなところで反日攻勢を加速している。特に東京五輪決定後は勢いを増した。

(5月にブログで米国における日韓の力の違いを触れた。最近に特に韓国と米国内からのアクセスが急増し驚いている)

宿敵の日本が上げ潮になり、韓国が焦っているなら放っておくのがベストだろう。しかし最近米国内のTPP反対勢力と、在米韓国人の反日勢力が結びつく雰囲気がある。

その一例は、米国ではここにきてミシガンの上院議員のレビン氏など、複数の有力上院議員たちがTPPに反対を表明したことだ。

レビン議員は、自動車産業保護を前提に、TPP交渉には日銀が円安政策をとらない条項を盛り込むべきで、もしアベノミクスで日本が円安政策をするならTPPは認めないとしている(Wポスト)。

そもそも外交条約は上院の選任だが、フィルバスターされたらTPPは頓挫する。今こちらの雰囲気は、その可能性は45%程度あると思う。

そんな中で日本のTPP報道は農産物の関税の話ばかり。だがオバマ政権が対日で考えているTPPの最大の狙いはそこではない。日本はそのことを気づいていないと思う。

まあ仮に気づいても、日米安全保障条約が軍事と経済のセットである事実を突きつけれれば、自分で自分の国を守る当前のことを当前の思わない今の日本には無意味だが・・

一方で韓国はTPPとは無関係。その上で米国とは貿易協定がある。なTPPの結果、日本が米国市場で優位に立つと困る。

この動きと、ミシガンからミズーリかけての反日ロービイストとが結託し、さらに大都市周辺の反日韓国勢力が慰安婦で騒ぐと、米国議会は安倍政権には厳しい存在になる。

かつて日本は米国との外交で政権だけを相手にした。世論の動向は東海岸のメディアだけを頼り、結果的に取り返しのつかない失敗をした・・・。


西海岸の日系人排斥運動と排斥法案の可決(1924年)。この時クーリッジ大統領は、日本政府に約束した拒否権を発動しなかった。当時の軍部がいくら帝国主義を煽ったところで、日本人がアメリカを嫌いにならなければ、後の日米開戦はなかったと思う。だが直前まで良好だった日米関係は、クーリッジの署名で暗転した。クーリッジが約束を守らなかったのは、議会と折衝の中で他の優先課題があったからだが、アメリカの政治は常に国内の敵の方が厄介。このアメリカの本質をなめると、日本は同じ失敗をする可能性がある。今は在米韓国勢力が米国議会を味方するのは日本として阻止しなければならないと思う。その意味でキャロラインケネディの米国内に対する影響力は日本にはプラス・・。


こちらから見える安倍政権の弱点は、日本はアベノミクスの副作用の格差拡大に敏感なこと。そして、安倍さんは五輪招致の際、首相として福島の原発沈静化を約束をしてしまったことだ。この二つは不安定要素だけに内外から絶好の揺さぶり対象。

いずれにしても、本来なら、韓国の反日攻勢は日本の愛国心を固めるチャンス。だがブレマー心配しているのは真にソレだろう・・

2013年11月15日金曜日

3000億円のオバQ

スナップチャットのロゴ

ザッカーブルグが3000億円で買うといったのを断ったのがスナップチャット。自分で使ったことはないが、メールで送った写真などのファイルが自動的に消えるアプリらしい。              

コレを受けた市場の反応は面白い。まずスナップチャットは自分の価値をどここまで凄いと思っているのかという疑問。既にアップル製品には似たような機能があるらしいが、専門家によると、このアプリそのものはそれほど凄い技術ではないという。                                           
最も面白いのはザッカーブルグ本人のビジネス感覚を疑問視するものだ。              
GOOGLEがYOUTUBE買収に払ったのが1500億。このアプリに3000億円を払おうとしたザッカーブルグの感覚を疑問視する声があった。                                      
凡人には天才が感じる価値はわからないかもしれない。個人的には、モノを作ることに価値があると教わった世代なので、デジタルの世界ではモノを消すことにここまでの価値があるのが衝撃。  

まあCIAの情報管理担当者や、エッチな写真を人に見せたいが、出回るのは困るという人は注  目・・・。                                                                

         

2013年11月14日木曜日

QEは国民ではなくウォール街のため・・懺悔する中央銀行マン (WSJ抜粋)  


PINION

Andrew Huszar: Confessions of a Quantitative Easer

We went on a bond-buying spree 

that was supposed to help Main Street. Instead, 

it was a feast for Wall Street.

Nov. 11, 2013 7:00 p.m. ET

I can only say: I'm sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed's first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I've come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.
Five years ago this month, on Black Friday, the Fed launched an unprecedented shopping spree. By that point in the financial crisis, Congress had already passed legislation, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to halt the U.S. banking system's free fall. Beyond Wall Street, though, the economic pain was still soaring. In the last three months of 2008 alone, almost two million Americans would lose their jobs.
The Fed said it wanted to help—through a new program of massive bond purchases. There were secondary goals, but Chairman Ben Bernanke made clear that the Fed's central motivation was to "affect credit conditions for households and businesses": to drive down the cost of credit so that more Americans hurting from the tanking economy could use it to weather the downturn. For this reason, he originally called the initiative "credit easing."
My part of the story began a few months later. Having been at the Fed for seven years, until early 2008, I was working on Wall Street in spring 2009 when I got an unexpected phone call. Would I come back to work on the Fed's trading floor? The job: managing what was at the heart of QE's bond-buying spree—a wild attempt to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds in 12 months. Incredibly, the Fed was calling to ask if I wanted to quarterback the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history.
Phil Foster
This was a dream job, but I hesitated. And it wasn't just nervousness about taking on such responsibility. I had left the Fed out of frustration, having witnessed the institution deferring more and more to Wall Street. Independence is at the heart of any central bank's credibility, and I had come to believe that the Fed's independence was eroding. Senior Fed officials, though, were publicly acknowledging mistakes and several of those officials emphasized to me how committed they were to a major Wall Street revamp. I could also see that they desperately needed reinforcements. I took a leap of faith.
In its almost 100-year history, the Fed had never bought one mortgage bond. Now my program was buying so many each day through active, unscripted trading that we constantly risked driving bond prices too high and crashing global confidence in key financial markets. We were working feverishly to preserve the impression that the Fed knew what it was doing.
It wasn't long before my old doubts resurfaced. Despite the Fed's rhetoric, my program wasn't helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American. The banks were only issuing fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever credit they were extending wasn't getting much cheaper. QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash.
From the trenches, several other Fed managers also began voicing the concern that QE wasn't working as planned. Our warnings fell on deaf ears. In the past, Fed leaders—even if they ultimately erred—would have worried obsessively about the costs versus the benefits of any major initiative. Now the only obsession seemed to be with the newest survey of financial-market expectations or the latest in-person feedback from Wall Street's leading bankers and hedge-fund managers. Sorry, U.S. taxpayer.
Trading for the first round of QE ended on March 31, 2010. The final results confirmed that, while there had been only trivial relief for Main Street, the U.S. central bank's bond purchases had been an absolute coup for Wall Street. The banks hadn't just benefited from the lower cost of making loans. They'd also enjoyed huge capital gains on the rising values of their securities holdings and fat commissions from brokering most of the Fed's QE transactions. Wall Street had experienced its most profitable year ever in 2009, and 2010 was starting off in much the same way.
You'd think the Fed would have finally stopped to question the wisdom of QE. Think again. Only a few months later—after a 14% drop in the U.S. stock market and renewed weakening in the banking sector—the Fed announced a new round of bond buying: QE2. Germany's finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, immediately called the decision "clueless."
That was when I realized the Fed had lost any remaining ability to think independently from Wall Street. Demoralized, I returned to the private sector.
Where are we today? The Fed keeps buying roughly $85 billion in bonds a month, chronically delaying so much as a minor QE taper. Over five years, its bond purchases have come to more than $4 trillion. Amazingly, in a supposedly free-market nation, QE has become the largest financial-markets intervention by any government in world history.
And the impact? Even by the Fed's sunniest calculations, aggressive QE over five years has generated only a few percentage points of U.S. growth. By contrast, experts outside the Fed, such as Mohammed El Erian at the Pimco investment firm, suggest that the Fed may have created and spent over $4 trillion for a total return of as little as 0.25% of GDP (i.e., a mere $40 billion bump in U.S. economic output). Both of those estimates indicate that QE isn't really working.
Unless you're Wall Street. Having racked up hundreds of billions of dollars in opaque Fed subsidies, U.S. banks have seen their collective stock price triple since March 2009. The biggest ones have only become more of a cartel: 0.2% of them now control more than 70% of the U.S. bank assets.
As for the rest of America, good luck. Because QE was relentlessly pumping money into the financial markets during the past five years, it killed the urgency for Washington to confront a real crisis: that of a structurally unsound U.S. economy. Yes, those financial markets have rallied spectacularly, breathing much-needed life back into 401(k)s, but for how long? Experts like Larry Fink at the BlackRock investment firm are suggesting that conditions are again "bubble-like." Meanwhile, the country remains overly dependent on Wall Street to drive economic growth.
Even when acknowledging QE's shortcomings, Chairman Bernanke argues that some action by the Fed is better than none (a position that his likely successor, Fed Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen, also embraces). The implication is that the Fed is dutifully compensating for the rest of Washington's dysfunction. But the Fed is at the center of that dysfunction. Case in point: It has allowed QE to become Wall Street's new "too big to fail" policy.
Mr. Huszar, a senior fellow at Rutgers Business School, is a former Morgan Stanley managing director. In 2009-10, he managed the Federal Reserve's $1.25 trillion agency mortgage-backed security purchase program