Como os bancos escondem as perdas

 Edward Kane, do Boston College, não acredita muito na contabilidade bancária. Em How Bankers Hide Losses ele apresenta alguns dos dispositivos que os banqueiros usam para encobrir perdas. Compara os contadores de bancos a Siegfried e Roy. Traduzindo: são mágicos que possuem o poder de fazer desaparecer grandes prejuízos. 

A figura abaixo apareceu no artigo e é bastante interessante:

Em 808 casos onde a auditor teve problemas, somente 35 geraram um processo na SEC dos Estados Unidos e 18 sofreram sanções. Nos tempos do Covid, segundo Kane, existe um acordo entre regulador, contador e entidades para encobrir algumas das perdas:

In view of the severity of the Covid-19 crisis, regulators have decided to be less sneaky this time around. They have openly advised examiners and bank accountants to help troubled bankers to make loan losses disappear from their firms’ balance sheets and income statements. Allowing too-big-to-fail banks to misrepresent the depth of their accumulating losses is one leg of a conscious strategy through which bankers and regulators hope to lessen the threat of destructive Covid-driven systemic runs on the world’s banking systems. The second leg of the strategy rests on another fiction. Prudential regulators around the world are telling us that they can and do maintain financial stability by assuring the adequacy of what they call “bank capital.” But the statistical measures of bank capital on which regulators focus their efforts are nothing more than repurposed variants of a bank’s accounting net worth. With accountants able to conceal the impact of losses on accounting net worth, until and unless unsophisticated household depositors begin to fear that a bank may have let itself become deeply insolvent, the effectiveness of this control framework is being badly oversold.

O problema que isto pode gerar um banco zumbi. Ou seja, uma instituição financeria com patrimônio inferior a zero, mas que continua a funcionar apoiada por crédito implícito ou explícito do governo.