저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
한 줄 결론: 버핏은 은행 위기가 예금자 피해로 번지진 않지만 상업용 부동산 발 추가 은행 부실 가능성을 경고하며, 인플레이션은 정부 지출이 근본 원인이라고 진단한다. 은행 위기 배경: 실리콘밸리은행(SVB)·시그니처·크레디트스위스 등 지역은행 및 글로벌 은행 실패가 최근 두 달간 금융계의 핵심 이슈였다. SVB의 문제: 예금을 초저금리 장기 국채에 대거 투자했고, 금리가 급등하며 고객 인출이 늘자 유동성이 부족해졌다. 경영진이 금리가 오르지 않을 것이라 베팅한 결과다. 회계 문제: 은행들은 채권을 만기까지 보유한다는 전제로 미실현 손실을 비용으로 잡지 않아 실적을 숨길 수 있었고, 경영진은 손실 인식을 미루도록 유인되었다. 버핏의 선견지명: 대부분의 분석가가 놓친 문제를 버핏은 미리 감지해 25년간 보유한 은행주를 대거 매도했다. 다만 버핏이 보유했던 다른 은행들은 SVB와 같은 구체적 문제는 없었고, 단기 수익에 집착하는 경향이 문제였다고 본다. 예금자 보호: 미국 FDIC는 정부 기관이지만 재원은 은행 업계가 낸 보험료다. 이번 대응에 세금이 쓰이지 않으며, 예금자는 안전하다는 것이 영상의 주장이다. 주주는 손실을 입어야 하며, 도덕적 해이 문제(경영진 책임 미흡)도 지적된다. 추가 부실 우려: 버핏은 향후 몇 달~몇 년간 추가 은행 실패가 있을 수 있다고 본다. 원인은 상업용(오피스) 부동산으로, 재택근무로 수요가 감소하는 동시에 저금리로 빌린 대출의 금리가 높아지며 디폴트 위험이 커지고 있다. 은행이 이를 흡수하지 못하면 손실이 발생할 수 있다. 인플레이션: 미국 인플레이션은 2023년 3월 연 5%로 떨어졌지만(작년 같은 시기 9%대 대비), 영국 10.1%, 유로존 약 7%로 여전히 높다. 버핏은 정부 지출이 인플레이션의 근본 동력이라고 지목했다. 팬데믹 중 공급 감소와 과잉 수요(정부 부양금) 결합이 원인이다. 물가 체감: 평균 인플레이션 수치는 품목·가구별 체감과 다르다. 변동금리 주택대출자나 차량 의존 가구는 더 큰 생활비 부담을 느낀다. 전망 및 대응: 인플레이션 향후 방향은 예측 불가하다. 영상은 비상자금 확보, 지출 점검 등 재정적 대비를 권고한다. 참고: 영상 중간에 광고(The Daily Upside 뉴스레터)가 포함되어 있다.
다듬은 글
it sounds to me like you are more worried about inflation than recession...
(이 영상은 워런 버핏의 최근 CNBC 인터뷰를 바탕으로 경제 전반의 균열, 특히 상업용 부동산발 은행 위기에 대한 그의 경고를 다룹니다.)
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The failure of regional banks in the US such as Silicon Valley and Signature and of course the much larger Global Investment Bank of Credit Suisse is all anyone has been talking about in the finance world for the past two months, and now of course with the benefit of hindsight we can see pretty much exactly why it happened. Well, I would say that some of the dumb things that banks do periodically become uncovered during this period, and as one banker told me one time, he says, "I don't know why we keep looking for new ways to lose money when the old ones are working so well."
Just like other businesses, banks are run by people who are susceptible to greed and other pressures such as short-term investor expectations. We're honestly kind of fortunate that the problems we're seeing in the financial institutions today are absolutely nothing like what happened 15 years earlier during the global financial crisis. They haven't made the same sort of mistakes that they made back in 2008 or 2009, but they have mismatched assets and liabilities, and bankers have been tempted to do that forever. Every now and then it bites them in a big way.
Silicon Valley Bank invested a large amount of its deposits into long-term Treasury bonds at ultra-low interest rates, which meant that if interest rates rose rapidly at the same time as their customers increased withdrawals, they wouldn't have enough money to pay their customers. SVB's executives basically made a bet that interest rates wouldn't rise, and they did, a lot and very rapidly as well.
What made this problem even worse was the temptation for some of these banks to use accounting principles to hide their underlying problems. Accounting procedures have driven some bankers to do things that may have helped their current earnings a little bit, and it caused the recurring temptation to get a little bigger spread and report a little more on earnings. The result is something you could predict.
What Warren Buffett is talking about is an accounting rule that allows banks to hide unrealized losses on their bond portfolios. As interest rates rose through 2022, the value of their bonds on paper declined significantly. Unrealized losses mean the bank hasn't actually lost any money yet, but if they chose to sell those bonds on the open market they would then experience those losses. Since the banks planned on holding these bonds until they matured, they didn't have to report the losses in 2022 financial results as an expense. This problem was amplified by the fact that executives were essentially incentivized to hide these losses, because reporting them would have raised expenses and lowered earnings.
What's particularly surprising is that hardly anyone saw the issue coming, including government stress tests designed to detect banking problems and even the financial analysts whose job it is to know everything about banks. The banks did not call attention to what they were doing, and the analysts following banking didn't even raise the point. But while most people completely missed the problem, Warren Buffett saw it coming.
"So you noticed it? You sure did, I noticed it. Is that why you saw it and sold so many of the banks? They've been old friends for 25 years, but I don't like it when people get too focused on the earnings number."
While none of the banks Buffett previously owned faced the specific problems SVB had, the reason he sold them was the same reason the banks, to varying degrees, became more obsessed with short-term profits rather than sticking to fundamental banking principles. So with that in mind, does Warren Buffett think people should be worried about further cracks in the financial system?
Before I get to those clips, I want to quickly talk about the sponsor of today's video, The Daily Upside. The financial media landscape is enormous: cable networks, newspapers, YouTube channels, and tech talks all shoving sensationalist headlines down your throat, so it can be really difficult to find reliable sources of business news. The Daily Upside is one of my favorites. It's a free financial brief sent to your email each morning, covering the most important news about investing and the economy. It's concise, informative, and witty, and it leads you into more detailed stories from around the globe, including corporate news, economic and policy changes, and investing news, all from a team of financial professionals. I personally read it every morning to figure out what's moving the markets that day and to find unique stories and angles for content.
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People shouldn't be worried about losing the deposits they have in an American bank, and today they have no reason to worry. There are a number of differences between the banking crisis today and the ones of the past, but the most important is the protection systems in place today, such as the FDIC. The FDIC is effectively a peculiar mutual insurance operation run by the government but financed by the banks.
One of the biggest misconceptions about this banking crisis is that once again the U.S. government is using taxpayer dollars to bail out executives and shareholders of big corporations and banks. That's actually not true at all. The FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, is a government agency funded entirely by the banking sector. Financial institutions in the United States are required to pay into the FDIC's fund, and if one or more banks face a problem where customer deposits are at risk, the FDIC uses those funds, which came from financial institutions, to cover customer deposits. At no point is the government using taxpayer dollars to cover deposits, and shareholders are certainly not getting bailouts.
"The shareholders at SVB will lose everything. Well, they should lose money. I mean, I don't have any problem with people losing money if they do dumb things. But the system isn't perfect, and one of the bigger issues is moral hazard. Technically, banking executives work on behalf of shareholders, but there's a pretty large disconnect between the two parties, and it often means executives bear little of the responsibility for the mess they create. They've got to have something to lose themselves. In 2008, all kinds of trouble was caused by the banks, but no bank executive... they all continued to live fine. They may have lost their jobs, but they got their pensions."
So are we through this banking crisis, or is there more trouble coming down the road? Bank shareholders may have lost a lot of money, but the depositors haven't had a crisis. You don't need to turn a dumb decision by managers into panic across the whole citizenry of the United States about something they don't need to panic about.
Buffett believes it's possible we could see more bank failures in the coming months or years, and it has a lot to do with cracks forming in the commercial real estate market. Commercial real estate, or office space specifically, faces two key problems at the same time: declining demand for office space, since the pandemic accelerated work-from-home options, and rapidly rising interest payments on loans. Analysis by respected investors such as Jamie Dimon and Steve Eisman points to a large portion of commercial real estate projects that were started with extremely low-interest debt, which will roll into much higher rates within the next couple of years. That leaves banks with another problem. If many of those loans end up in default, say the banking system loses 100 billion dollars, most banks can absorb some of it, and their shareholders will lose money, but depositors won't. Banks that lent for commercial real estate projects that just don't make sense in a higher-rate environment will ultimately have to take those losses. As the old saying goes, "when the tide goes out, you learn who's been swimming naked."
Turning away from the banking sector for a moment, Warren Buffett also gave his insights on inflation. It has been improving in the US but still remains a very big problem, and elsewhere, such as the UK or Europe, it's very persistent. As of March 2023, US inflation fell to an annual rate of 5 percent, a steep drop from the 9 percent recorded just nine months earlier. But the UK just recorded 10.1 percent inflation, and eurozone inflation is almost 7 percent.
Buffett says there's one key underlying factor creating the inflation we see around the world: "It's fun sending money out to people if you want to stay in office and you want their vote, and that's always been a problem." He points to government spending as the underlying driver of inflation. In most circumstances, inflation comes from some imbalance between supply and demand, and the last couple of years have been the perfect storm for an inflation crisis. Supply was reduced as manufacturing slowly recovered after shutting down during COVID, and that combined with excess demand as people received huge government stimulus while staying home and unable to spend it. You have excess cash, people with a massive desire to spend after being locked in their homes, and very limited supply of goods and services. That's the perfect storm for rapid inflation.
Sometimes people see four or five percent inflation and think it's a small number, and they have a hard time appreciating the massive impact that little number can have. The price level was probably 15 times what it was when I was a kid. The interesting thing is that the price of a Coca-Cola is maybe twice what it was, while the price of the New York Times has gone up 40 or 50 times. It's a very uneven thing. The headline inflation figure is really just an average, and different things experience different levels of inflation. Depending on your household's circumstances, you'll feel inflation to a greater or lesser degree. For example, in the current crisis, a person with a variable-rate mortgage who drives a lot for work has experienced a much greater increase in the cost of living than someone who owns their home outright and rides a bike to work.
Have we seen the worst of inflation? Is it rolling over, is it coming down steadily? Inflation is always a possibility, and in extreme cases it's one of those factors we just can't predict. We can't know for sure that it's coming down the road. But as Buffett said earlier, the US has always done a pretty good job dealing with inflation, and the same can be said for Australia. All you can really do is make sure you're financially prepared for things to get worse temporarily. We don't know that they will, but you want to be prepared. That might mean tracking your expenses, reducing unnecessary spending, and using the extra money to build an emergency fund, not because we have a crystal ball, but because we don't know whether things will get worse. At the end of the day, you'd rather go outside with an umbrella and not need it than find yourself without one in the middle of a torrential downpour.
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