I think it's time to dismiss one of the falsehoods perpetuated by MSM and this article: that the main reason why the credit market is seizing is because banks do not trust each other.... wrong! the real reason is they either don't have any spare cash or that they have no more risk appetite to lend.
The UK market would make for a good case. With interbank lending guarantee by the govt, you would expect the credit markets to resume flowing, but it has not materialized. The banks have made a decision to lend less and deleverage.
So don't expect the capital injection by Paulson to make the banks start lending. They won't. Which is why the Fed will have to go into the markets and be the direct lender (which is what they did in the commercial paper market)
You wrote: it's not " do not trust each other", it's "have no more risk appetite" - those are the same thing! You are directly contradicting yourself in the same paragraph.
You wrote "[the problem is] ... don't have any spare cash" and "don't expect the capital injection [to fix it]", which is again a self contradiction.
So sorry, I think I'm going to trust MSM (or at least this article) and not you.
Eg. Usually I loan out $1 billion. But now, my risk appetite is smaller because of my desire for a smaller leveraged balance sheet, hence i will loan out only $100 million.
So even if I trust that you are able to pay back the loan, I will no longer lend to you because I have no desire to lend so much anymore. The overall credit supply decreases.
Maybe my initial post was not clear, I believe the main reason for the tight market is this: Constriction of desired leverage -> Decreased credit supply
Eg. Assuming the precrisis loan-to-cash mean leverage is 500%, USD 100 billion of cash can yield USD 500 billion of loan supply in the credit market. Now, the loan-to-cash mean leverage is about 200%, so the same USD 100 billion of cash will yield only USD 200 billion of loan supply. Thus, the Fed has to print a lot more cash to restore the precrisis credit supply. The announced capital injection is not enough. They have to inject a lot more. If they don't wish to print that much cash, the Fed can be the direct lender and assume the precrisis leverage themselves.
But a higher borrowing cost is not a problem unless it is so prohibitively high that it prevents lending, which, judging by the relatively steady loan amounts, it has not.
The necessary supply of funds is there, it's just that no one trusts anyone, so they are charging lots more for the risk.
For an analogous situation, consider this: The Fed decides to institute a lottery, where they pick a random bank every day. Whichever bank is picked gets shut down, and all their creditors and depositors get nothing. This is obviously very bad for whichever bank is picked, and bad for anyone who lent money to that bank. No one knows who is going to be next, so they charge everyone higher rates to account for the risk. There is still plenty of money to lend, and there is still a market for the loans, it's just that there is extra risk of a random insolvency event.
In the real world, the illiquid and non-transparent Asset Backed Securities are like the Fed lottery, in that, by marking them to market, all it takes is one lowball transaction by third parties to crater a bank's balance sheet, forcing it into insolvency. Since no one knows who still is at risk, they are charging higher rates. It's not because they don't have the money to lend, it's because it is better to have the money sit idle than to lose it. (And in the case of some banks, it is better to have cash on hand in case their own asset-backed securities become worthless. Even lending it to a perfect borrower is riskier in that case, because even if the borrower can repay, it's no good to the bank if they need the cash in a pinch.)
it is better to have cash on hand in case their own asset-backed securities become worthless. Even lending it to a __perfect borrower__ is riskier in that case, because even if the borrower can repay, it's no good to the bank if they need the cash in a pinch.
In other words, the issue here is that the banks are reducing their leverage and not because they don't trust each other, which is my main point. If the Fed inject so much money into the banks that they can afford a few loan defaults here and there, the credit market will start to go back to precrisis levels. An interbank lending guarantee without the capital injection won't help much.
Conversely, if the Fed sets a price for troubled assets, each bank will know where they stand, and they won't have to hoard cash any more. Those banks that made bad decisions will fail, as they should, and those that didn't will see confidence in them restored.
A direct capital injection offers blanket protection to all banks, good and bad, and does nothing to discourage this from happening in the future.
There's a reason why those trailing P/E are lows. The E will decrease drastically in the future. You have to make really good guesstimate on what the E will be in the future before you can determine whether it is cheap.
There's a lot of danger in picking stocks based on P/E. You have to look at their debt ratios and short term financing requirements. You should avoid highly profitable firms that use crazy leverages in achieving these high returns.
An almost risk-free way to money in the stock market is to put most of your money in fixed income while apportioning a small % in long dated options.
Eg. you think Morgan Stanley is dirt cheap at current levels ($10) and you are willing to invest $100,000 in them.
Action 1: You bought $100,000 worth of MS shares at $10 each
Action 2: You bought $90,000 in bonds that yields 11%. You bought $10,000 worth of Jan 2010 MS 5 call options at $7 each.
Scenario 1: MS gets nationalized or goes bankrupt
Action 1: You would have lost almost all of your $100,000 investment.
Action 2: If you hold out until your bond mature, you'll get back your $100,000 principal after 1 year. Your options is worthless.
Scenario 2: MS goes up to $30
Action 1: Your investment is now worth $300,000
Action 2: You get $100,000 from your bonds and your $7 options is now worth $18. So your investment is worth $125,000.
So Action 1 is very volatile and risky. Your profit range from -100% to 200%.
Action 2 allows you to sleep soundly at night, even during current market conditions. Your profit range from 0% to 25%.
Hey not bad at all. In the worst case, you'll have at least preserved your capital.
Here is my experience. I used Rails for one project of mine that requires processing of millions of data rows. Because the Rails ORM create an object for each data row, we end up using a lot of memory. We had to get a 2GB memory server to hold up the project. Even after we avoided the ORM (which removes the pleasure of coding in Rails), the memory usage was still high.
Sure, we could process the data rows outside of Rails in C but because the processing of data rows is an integral part of the project, that would mean coding 80% in C and 20% in rails. Not exactly an enjoyable experience.
So we rewrote it in PHP and avoid objects and use just functions and hashes/arrays. And it worked very well for us. The site render time drops from 0.8s to 0.03s. Memory usage rarely exceeds 100MB.
AR usage is one of my main concerns. I myself am a Python guy with good proficiency and understanding of Rails, but we employ mostly Rails people. Our biggest project right now uses Rails for the API and website and several background daemons (work queues) in Python.
I'm already rewriting the API code in a minimal Merb app, which uses a lot fewer memory and can-haz C-based ORM code with DataMapper. My plan in the future is to try and push possible migration of the Rails-based site code to Merb as well.
Interesting to see yet another company starting out with ruby on rails and then rewriting the whole thing in PHP when it has to scale. There seems to be a pattern to it...
Had a similar situation in a Python project. Got it working by adding a few Python callbacks to the SQL as functions. The code stayed in the same language and memory consumption flatlined. Don't know if that is easy to do from RnR, though.
The UK market would make for a good case. With interbank lending guarantee by the govt, you would expect the credit markets to resume flowing, but it has not materialized. The banks have made a decision to lend less and deleverage.
So don't expect the capital injection by Paulson to make the banks start lending. They won't. Which is why the Fed will have to go into the markets and be the direct lender (which is what they did in the commercial paper market)