俄经济：得救还是死缓？

    俄罗斯刚刚挽救了该国货币和银行业，或者更准确地说，使其得以苟延残喘。

    俄罗斯既没有向银行系统投入大量硬通货，也没有许诺会注入更多资金（至少在明年之前不会），它所做的，只是放松了（在愤世嫉俗者看来，是放弃了）大部分用于判定是否具有偿付能力的审慎标准。通俗点说，就是让银行无限期的假装它们将收到借款公司的还款。

    在我们继续深入讨论之前，很多非常受人尊敬的观点表示，放宽审慎标准恰恰是危机时期所应采取的行动，这可以避免风险在脆弱的银行体系内骤然凸显，从而使得情势不必要的恶化。当你有理由相信危机可能只是暂时的，你所面对的只不过是流动性危机，而非偿付危机时，就更有理由这么做。这是美国和欧洲自2008年以来反复讨论得出的结论。

    俄罗斯认为，其危机只是暂时的，是由于石油市场面对供给冲击反应过度所造成的，而油价终究会回归长期均衡的水平，使得俄罗斯经济得以恢复正常（虽然需要稍微紧缩开支）。因此，当前因客户恐慌造成的银行流动性短缺必须被克服，最终一切将安然无恙。

    本着这种精神，俄罗斯银行再也不用按市场价格对其债券投资组合进行计价。它们可以假装自己所持有的头寸一美元仍然价值100美分，尽管事实上，如果现在它们被迫清偿，其持有的头寸一美元仅能作价20美分。银行还能够按照三个月前的汇率记录外币贷款。这两项措施降低了银行为满足法定标准必须持有的（卢布标价）资金额。

    更棒的是，现在你还可以将所有外币标价的信用风险转嫁给俄罗斯中央银行，央行现在将接受外汇债券作为企业美元贷款的抵押。换言之，如果情况糟糕到极点，怎么从正在破产程序中的某塞浦路斯贸易分公司拿到钱这种事，就让俄罗斯央行来担心吧。严格来说，信用风险不能像卖断那样直接转移，但影响却大致相同：你先得到现金，日后我们再来担心贷款质量。

    银行也获准提高存款利率，以鼓励人们将资金留在银行系统。这打破了之前的逻辑，即禁止超高存款利率，因为其通常是即将破产的银行压箱底的最后一招。

    但是，这里的重点是债务危机迷们所说的“贷款延期、假装没事”（Extend and Pretend）的精髓。即使你不得不重组贷款、推迟还款、改变币种并降低利率，你依然无需改变你给予此项贷款的风险权重（因此，你仍然无需为这些贷款预备更多资金）。

    这使得俄罗斯国家支持的企业（按照巴塞尔协定III的规则，这些企业的本币债务风险权重大都为零）能随心所欲的对国内银行违约，因为（就针对贷款的准备金而言），贷款机构将能假装什么事都没有发生。

    另一项规定的效果大致相同，暂停受制裁影响企业的风险权重。即使你不得不承认贷款发生损失，俄罗斯央行现在将给你两年，而非一年的时间为贷款进行拨备。

    如上所述，这些都在一定程度上有道理，但必须基于一个基本假设，即危机是暂时的，而且你的客户都将留在俄罗斯，真正解决他们的问题。

    然而，历史表明，很多人宁愿购买前往伦敦的单程机票，然后用剩下的欠你的钱避免被引渡回俄罗斯。

    监管机构采取此类措施时，往往是自欺欺人。这是一场赌博，如果油价反弹，俄罗斯可能会成功，至少是部分成功。而且，目前这样将导致西方银行不再向任何俄罗斯银行提供贷款，不过它们本来也已经停止了向后者放贷，所以短期来看几乎没有什么损失。

    但是，如果制裁不取消，而且油价明年稳定在每桶60美元左右，那么到明年夏季，俄罗斯银行业的局势，将如迈克尔•杰克逊的MTV《Thriller》那般充满恐怖气氛。（财富中文网）

    译者：Jennifer

    审稿：Hunter

    Russia just saved its currency and its banks–or, more precisely, gave them a stay of execution.

    No, it didn’t throw a hatful of hard currency at them. No, it didn’t say it would inject more capital into them (at least not till next year). What it did was to suspend (or, for the cynics, abandon) pretty much all the prudential standards that define whether or not they’re solvent. In layman’s terms, it’s letting them pretend–for an unspecified period of time–that they’ll be repaid by the companies that have their money.

    Before we go any further, a lot of very respectable opinion says that relaxing prudential standards is exactly what you should do at a time of crisis, to stop the risks in a weak banking system from crystallizing all at once, and making things worse than they need to be. The case for doing so is all the stronger when you have good reason to think the crisis is likely to be short-lived, and that all you have is a liquidity crisis, rather than a solvency one. It’s an argument that the U.S. and Europe have been thrashing out ever since 2008.

    Russia thinks its crisis will be temporary, because it’s caused by an oil market that is currently overshooting in reaction to a supply shock and will, in time, return to a price level closer to the long-term average, one which will allow the economy to carry on as normal (albeit with a bit of belt-tightening). Hence the current liquidity squeeze on banks from panicked customers is just something that has to be ridden out. It’ll all be alright in the end.

    In this spirit, banks will no longer have to mark their bond portfolios to market prices. They can pretend their holdings are worth 100 cents on the dollar, rather than the 20 cents they’d get if forced to liquidate today. They’ll be able to book foreign currency loans at exchange rates that are three months out of date. Both measures reduce the amount of (ruble-denominated) capital that they have to hold to meet legal norms.

    It gets better. You can now transfer all of your foreign currency-denominated credit risk to the Central Bank, which will now accept FX claims on companies as collateral for loans in dollars. In other words, let the CBR worry about getting the money out of a Cyprus-based trading affiliate in the bankruptcy proceedings if the worst comes to the worst. Strictly speaking, the credit risk is not directly transferred as it would be under an outright sale, but the effect is much the same: you get the cash today, and we’ll worry about the loan quality another day.

    Banks will also be allowed to offer higher rates on deposits to encourage people to keep their money in the system. That breaks with the previous logic that banned super-elevated deposit rates because they’re normally the last resort of a bank that’s going under.

    But the pièce de résistance here is the very distillation of what debt crisis junkies call “Extend and Pretend.” Even if you have to restructure your loans, delaying repayment, changing their currency and cutting the interest rate, you still won’t have to change the risk-weighting you give to that loan (so you still won’t have to hold more capital against it).

    This gives state-backed companies (whose local-currency debts largely carry a zero risk-weighting under Basel III rules) carte blanche to default to domestic banks, because the lenders will be able to pretend nothing has happened (as regards holding capital against the loans).

    Loss recognition, be damned! President Vladimir Putin has often talked of his country’s pivot to China – here it is in glorious action.

    Another provision has much the same effect, suspending risk-weightings on loans to companies affected by sanctions. Heck, even if you do have to recognize a loss on a loan, the CBR will now give you two years, rather than one, to provision against it.

    As noted, this can all make a degree of sense on one basic assumption: the crisis is temporary, and your clients will actually stay in Russia and work out their problems honestly.

    History suggests, however, that many would rather just buy a one-way plane ticket to London and spend the rest of the money they owe you fighting against extradition.

    As so often when regulators take such measures, the wish is father to the thought. It’s a gamble and it may yet pay off–at least partially–if oil prices rebound. It will make it impossible for western banks to lend to any Russian bank, but then they had already stopped anyway, so little is lost in the short term.

    But if sanctions aren’t lifted, and the price of oil stabilizes next year around $60/barrel, then Moscow’s banking sector will look like something out of Michael Jackson’s Thriller video by next summer.