Credit crisis back with a vengeance as Bankia's customers take a hit

This column doesn’t usually express much sympathy with shareholders because a share gives the right to profits derived from other people’s labour. But the plight of shareholders in the Spanish bank, Bankia, requires us to make an exception.

Though shareholding in a joint-stock company predated the advent of capitalist production, it became one of its defining characteristics. To be a shareholder in an enterprise is, in fact, to be a capitalist.

These day, shareholders tend to be major financial institutions who’ve used their inflated holdings of other people’s cash to obtain part-ownership of global corporations. The day of the small shareholder has vanished, replaced by pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and the like.

These globalised ownership structures exist solely to extract value from the labour of people working on the production lines. These range from the sweatshops of low-wage countries like China, Latin America, Bangladesh, the Philippines to advanced, hi-tech production in Britain, the United States Europe and Japan.

We tend to worry even less about the fate of shareholders in banks, who hope and expect to become rich making money out of making money. 

Bankia, with Rodrigo Rato, former managing director of the International Monetary Fund as its chairman, was formed in 2010 from seven regional savings banks, following the global financial crash of 2007-8. All were dangerously exposed to the collapse of the property market.

As of 2012, when it was nationalised to prevent its collapse, Bankia was the fourth largest bank of Spain with 12 million customers. On the 25 May 2012, it requested a bailout of €19 billion, the largest bank bailout in the nation's history. Rating agency Standard & Poor reduced its credit rating to “junk” status, along with several other Spanish banks.

In 2011 the bank had offered shares for sale with the expectation of attracting new capital from international institutional investors. They wisely stayed away.

So the bank turned to its customers for help.

Hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who had their savings deposited in the bank were persuaded, or rather tricked, into exchanging their savings for shares.

The scale of Bankia’s losses mounts with every new assessment. The latest figure for 2012, published in March this year, puts it at €19.06 billion, the largest corporate loss in Spanish history.

Yesterday, for the first time, the savers-turned-shareholders were able to put their shares up for sale. They got a terrible shock. The price of shares on the Madrid stock exchange dropped like a stone. The bank had lost 99% of its value since it first entered the market less than two years ago.

The life savings of so many families have been wiped out. Completely.

This catastrophic collapse of value so far affects just a small part of the vast overhang of credit and debt left high and dry by the effects of the end of the post-war growth, seen most painfully in the receding European economy.

There’s much more to come. Bad debt has driven Slovenia’s economy into a recession. This afternoon infamous troika – the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – will respond to Slovenia’s plan for bank recapitalisation costing €900m and a planned record sale of state assets.

But that’s a tiny amount compared to the spiralling, out-of-control credit crisis in China, without which even its slowing rate of economic growth would be impossible to maintain.

According to JPMorgan Chase unregulated, “shadow banking” is as large as 36 trillion yuan ($5.86 trillion). That’s equivalent to 69% of China’s gross domestic product and almost double what it was two years earlier.

The credit crisis which exploded in 2007-8 giving way to a global slump is far from over.  Very far. A renewed global crash can’t be far away. Bankia’s victims are amongst the first to feel its effects.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor

Signals at red as wrecking crew take over

Trying to find an image that conveys the gravity of the global economic crisis is proving a real challenge. Since its far from being a natural disaster, like the earthquakes currently shaking Nothern Italy, transport analogies might help.

Consider a 17-carriage eurozone high-speed train crashing into a wall of concrete. The front coaches – Ireland, Greece, Spain – have already been crushed, whilst Italy and Portugal are just now rearing up into the sky.

Many of those on the following coaches are only dimly aware of the problem and their governments are driving blind, donkeys chasing tthe elusive recovery carrot, always just out of reach.

If we stretch the transport analogy, we might say that there are two, much longer trains: the United States and the European Union. They are meeting head-on on a cheaply-made, shoddily built and fragile Chinese bridge now disintegrating under the shock.

The highly volatile fuel that brought the trains together in a paroxysm of mutually-assured destruction was a dangerous mixture of coal, oil, gas – and most explosive of all - credit and debt, with the Chinese buying US debt like there was no tomorrow, to keep the whole global system of production and consumption in business.

As of yesterday, however, as part of measures to reverse the return to slowdown and slump the Chinese announced that, for the first time, they’ll bypass the dollar, scrapping the US currency as the intermediary exchange currency. From Friday, they’ll deal directly with Japan, their biggest trading partner, exchanging yuan for yen. The implications are far-reaching, especially for the US which is the world’s most indebted nation.

Or, perhaps to give a more urgent flavour we could use a nuclear analogy, as in the uncontrollable meltdown of the Spanish economy. Yesterday alone saw the EU turn down Spain’s plan to save the failed Bankia, which reported the biggest loss in the country’s banking history; the departure of the central bank governor; retail sales slumping by 9.8% in April; the cost of borrowing soaring to levels likely to trigger the need for a bail-out. 

We’ve all been made familiar with the internal, country-by-country-by-regional comparative accounts of falling, or slowing GDP, soaring levels of unemployment, declining house prices, unassailably essential reductions in supposedly oversized public sectors; all explained by specific national characteristics, mistakes, like the alleged laziness of the Greeks (whose working day just happens to be much longer than the average German).

But dig a little deeper, and you begin to realise, as many do, that the debt disease is systemic, something to do with the flow of almost worthless currency around the arteries and veins of the entire global economy. If only we could fix the money problem – that private interests have taken over the issue of “money” (actually credit, to be more precise), swamping “our democracy”, some say we’d be able to return to a kind of normality. 

Ah but, say others, it’s all down to human greed, human nature. Not us, of course, we’re the altruists, the good guys. It’s them, they’ve succumbed to it. They’ve got the world in their greasy palms. (In the 1930s, they, the bad-guy banksters of the day were called, made equal to “World Jewry”, with dire consequences).

No, it just won’t do. These are all partial, one-sided, half-assed “explanations” for something more fundamentally wrong. And that is the breakdown of the social, economic and political relationships that came to dominate as a result of post-1945 measures generated to satisfy the internal dynamic of the system, aka capitalism.

This depends on, and is defined by privately-owned, profit-seeking capital invested in factories, offices, networks, and the right, or rather necessity to use some of it to employ wage and salary earners as the source of its most necessary expansion. Otherwise known as “growth”.

It’s the system stupid. Let’s build a new, different one, using the best bits of the old one to plan the sustainable production of goods and services to satisfy need. Before they wreck it all.

Gerry Gold

Economics editor