ALDRABICES E PARADOXOS

Tavares Moreira comenta no Quarta República um artigo de Jennifer Hughes, colunista do Financial Times, transcrito a seguir, que denuncia uma manobra bancária que não lembraria ao diabo. Descortinaram alguns bancos (quantos?, o relatório em que se sustenta o artigo é limitado a 16) uma forma impensável de compensar contabilisticamente as suas perdas: como a dívida por eles emitida, cotada em bolsa, tende a valer menos em consequência das debilidades dos devedores, estes tomam os valores desvalorizados em bolsa como valores efectivos a reembolsar e contabilizam como ganhos as desvalorizações entre os valores cotados em bolsa e os valores de emissão dos títulos

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Como a operação é meramente contabilística e não corresponde a uma operação efectiva de compra dos títulos, se houvesse racionalidade nos mercados financeiros, à melhor situação do devedor deveria corresponder uma valorização dos seus títulos de dívida implicando a contabilização de perdas correspondentes a essa valorização, repetindo-se a brincadeira até ao resgate da dívida. Acontece o mesmo se o banco resgata títulos desvalorizados em bolsa, pagando-os emitindo dívida mais cara, isto é, a juros mais elevados.

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Tudo ponderado, parece aproximarem-se tempos de contar com o colchão.

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Fair value can flatter to deceive on your own debt
By Jennifer Hughes http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/12ecc014-5917-11dd-a093-000077b07658.html

Banks' accounting has never been more interesting. There are various definitions of interesting, I know, but for the financial world and for the media as a whole, it is fair to say the topic has never been more newsworthy.
That is reflected in a new report by KPMG which combs through the annual reports of 16 European banks to identify trends in the sector.
It found plenty. It won't surprise many to find the reports have got longer - by an average 17 per cent in the core financial sections. What might surprise some is that attestation periods - the time between year-end and the signing off of the accounts - fell by an average of three days.
The report is worth reading for anyone interested in banks, although because KPMG is an auditor - indeed auditor to some of the banks in the report - and therefore cautious by nature, it stops short of actually forming opinions about the quality of the reporting.
That leaves me the space to draw on the report to outline an opinion of my own; the problems with fair-valuing own debt.
According to KPMG, HSBC reported a €2bn ($3bn) gain from fair-valuing its own debt last year. Next of the banks to be surveyed - at some €800m - was Barclays.
Fair-valuing your own debt, when its value falls, not only leaves it on the balance sheet, but also results in a gain that feeds through net income. This is a recurring theme in the debate about fair value. Only last week, Merrill's second quarter earnings noted a $98m gain from a weakening in its own credit standing (although that is small beer compared with a pretax loss of $8.2bn for the division in which the gain was included). This month, Lehman Brothers filed its second quarter 10-Q which showed a $400m gain from fair-valuing its own liabilities.
I do not want to suggest banks are doing anything amiss in fair-valuing their own liabilities. In many cases the choice was made long before the credit crunch and it was done because the instrument was linked to a hedge or a derivative trade.
The basic problem is that most people find the whole notion counter-intuitive.
It is as if I were to suggest to my credit card provider that because I'm in some financial difficulty they should lower the amount I owe in order to reflect the fact I'm less likely to pay it.
For companies, the thinking goes that they can now buy the debt back at the lower price. But this rarely happens in practice. Falling debt value generally implies a company in trouble, meaning it would struggle to find the cash.
As far as my credit card provider is concerned, it might lower the amount on its books that it expects to get from me if I were in trouble, but it's not going to tell me to pay less back. On my personal books, I still owe the full amount.
So while the market (or my credit card company) has marked down the debt's value because it appears there is less chance of recouping the whole, that doesn't mean the borrower actually owes any less.
In general, fair value provides more objective numbers for investors to analyse and that is a good thing. But in the case of debt, it runs the risk of masking true liabilities and flattering profits.
The theoreticians warn that to fail to fair-value both the financial assets and the liabilities would make the balance sheet uneven. True. But there are ways to get around that.
The importance of a market-based fair-value opinion of an asset's worth is in a different class to market value for a liability the company is still obliged to pay in full, and the accounting ought to reflect that.
In theory, fair-valuing own debt sounds good. In practice, the cheap, early buyback won't happen. What does happen instead is accounts become even less intelligible to those with anything less than so-called "expert" status.