Surmonter la crise des marchés financiers

Un manque de transparence et le rôle inapproprié des agences de notation sont à l’origine de la crise actuelle des marchés américains du sub-prime, d’après le dernier rapport politique de la Conférence des Nations unies sur le commerce et le développement (CNUCED)

Based on these assumptions, the UNCTAD paper assesses the actions taken by the US Federal Reserve (Fed) and the European Central Bank (ECB) to solve this crisis and outlines what needs to be done to avert such a crisis in the future. 

First, despite heavy criticism from some observers, this paper considers the short-term response to the crisis in most parts appropriate. 

In particular, it dismisses the argument that low US interest rates in the early 2000s were the main driver of the US housing bubble, and lowering interest rates now may just generate another bubble. 

The paper sees cutting interest rates during financial turbulence as justified « if there is a significant threat that the financial turmoil may spill over into the real sectors and threaten the employment target of the central bank directly, or its inflation target indirectly ». 

In this context, the paper also criticises the « dogmatic and rather restrictive stance » of European monetary policy at the time, whereas it praises the « positive role » of the Fed’s cuts in stabilising the world economy. 

In order to avert or at least better control such crises in the future, one has to reflect more deeply on the long-run policy responses, the paper suggests. 

Long-term policies should aim at increasing the transparency of structured financial products, according to the paper. It calls for two main steps that should be considered at the multilateral level: 

First, the role of credit rating agencies needs to be revised. They should solve information problems and increase transparency but seem to have played the opposite role and made the market more opaque, suggests UNCTAD. 

It also criticises the fact that rating agencies are not fully subject to market discipline that would increase the accuracy of their ratings. Therefore, the paper considers reform of the role of such agencies in evaluating complex financial instruments to be « an unavoidable step towards increasing transparency ». 

Second, there are maturity mismatches in non-bank financial institutions. According to UNCTAD, the recent turmoil arose at least in part from maturity mismatches in non-bank agencies that enjoyed liquidity guarantees from parent banks. 

In particular, banks tried to increase profitability and escape the capital requirements imposed by the Basel agreement by setting up off-balance-sheet vehicles that earned large profits from transforming short-term liabilities into long-term assets. 

The problem with such investment vehicles, according to the paper, is that they had a built-in maturity mismatch, and once they lost access to the market for asset-backed commercial papers, the parent banks had to step in and provide the necessary liquidity. Thus, a liquidity crisis which originated outside the banking sector could immediately spill over into the sector. 

The paper concludes that the involvement of banks with lightly regulated agencies that could conceivably transmit liquidity and solvency problems into the banking system should be either prohibited or reported in a fully transparent way.