Stress Tests
The S&P 500 surged 7.1 percent on March 23 after Geithner unveiled a plan to finance as much as $1 trillion in purchases of illiquid real-estate assets, using $75 billion to $100 billion of the Treasury’s remaining bank-rescue funds. The government is conducting stress tests of banks to determine how much more capital each will need.Roubini, who predicts loan and securities losses in the U.S. will reach $3.6 trillion, said the stress tests will reveal that some banks need to be taken over and have their good and bad assets separated before being sold to the private sector. He didn’t name which companies he thought would need to be rescued.Futures on the S&P 500 expiring in June advanced 1.2 percent to 818 as of 8:30 a.m. in New York.Critics of Geithner’s plan including Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University, say the government should take over banks loaded with devalued assets, remove their top management, and dispose of the toxic securities. Sweden adopted the temporary nationalization approach in the 1990s.
‘Deflationary Forces’
“Some banks are going to have to be nationalized,” said Roubini. “It’s going to be bumpy ahead of us.”Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke this week called for new powers to take over and wind down failing financial companies. They said the U.S. also needs stronger regulation to constrain the risks taken by firms that could endanger the financial system.With “deflationary forces” lingering for as long as three years, Roubini said U.S. government bond yields will remain low and American house prices will fall as much as 20 percent in the next 18 months. While the dollar will initially benefit as investors seek a safe haven in the U.S., the currency will ultimately drop as the nation’s trade deficit shrinks, he said.Roubini dismissed China’s call for the creation of a new international reserve currency as a “pie in the sky idea” that’s unlikely to gain traction any time soon.
Mobius, Biggs
China’s central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan this week urged the International Monetary Fund to expand the use of so- called Special Drawing Rights and move toward a “super- sovereign reserve currency.” Geithner sent the dollar tumbling yesterday by saying he would consider China’s idea, only to drive it back up by affirming that the greenback should remain the world’s reserve currency.“This was a political call and in a nut shell - it ain’t going to happen any time soon,” Roubini said.Mobius, who helps oversee about $20 billion of emerging- market assets as executive chairman at San Mateo, California- based Templeton, said March 23 the next “bull-market” rally has begun. Biggs, the former chief global strategist for Morgan Stanley who now runs New York-based hedge fund Traxis Partners, predicted the same day the S&P 500 may jump between 30 percent and 50 percent.The benchmark index for U.S. equities has surged 11 percent in March, poised for its biggest monthly gain since 1991. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index of equities in 23 developing nations is headed for the steepest monthly advance on record after rising 20 percent in March.
By Michael Patterson and Maithreyi Seetharaman
As in the days of Noah...