Hookers, jaguars, and lots of stupid loans - Third World's bank loans

Washington Monthly, Jan, 1987 by Charles Lane

HOOKERS, JAGUARS, AND LOTS OF STUPID LOANS

During the seventies, lending to the ThirdWorld wasn't just a job. It was an adventure. Just ask S.C. Gwynne, who worked in the international credit department of Cleveland Trust during the peak of the boom. Before he was 26, he "had been to 25 countries and was one of four bankers managing a $150 million international loan portfolio. . . . I traveled overseas three to four months a year. In Hong Kong I was met at the airport by a chocolatebrown Rolls Royce, in the Philippines by a red Jaguar, in Saudi Arabia by a stretch Mercedes. I stayed at Claridges while in London, at the Oriental in Bangkok, and at the Meridian in Jeddah. I flew, ate, and drank first class.' Lorenzo the Magnificent never had it so good.

Gwynne's funny, often astonishing, tale* of ayouth spent lending American money south of the equator adds a much-needed dash of color to what is now the dreary and all-too-familiar story of how bankers led the Third World and the industrialized world alike into the sorry mess we now know as the international debt crisis. Furthermore, his experience as a former insider at Cleveland Trust, a "regional' bank, enables him to explain the perspective of banks other than the big money-center operations that dominate finance in New York, Chicago, and California. The big boys' activities in Latin America and elsewhere are more publicized, but the smaller regional banks' role in the lending boom and the debt crisis was in many ways just as important. Collectively, the regionals constitute a major power bloc; they hold 43 percent of the total foreign debt owed to our banks. (The top 15 banks have the rest.)

* Selling Money. S.C. Gwynne. Weidenfeld & Nicholson,$16.95.

"Going global' became imperative for thesebanks in the seventies because their domestic lending opportunities were limited. Interstate retail banking (mortgages, car loans, etc.) was prohibited by the federal Glass-Steagal Act, and many states limited banks' intrastate retail lending to a single city or country. To expand, regionals increasingly turned to supplying loans to corporate clients, which wasn't restricted. These corporate clients, of course, had customers in the Third World, and the banks soon realized they could help their U.S. clients and themselves by lending to these foreign countries. Although the traumatic debt crisis of the eighties--with its "non-performing loans' and looming threat of default or even bank collapse--has caused a certain amount of amnesia about it, the seventies were also a time when the profits on loans to the Third World were as good as, or in many cases, far greater than those that could be gotten by lending at home.

But since the regionals were new at the game,they didn't have any personnel with international experience. So they turned to wet-behind-the-ears types like Gwynne. When he started at Cleveland Trust in 1977, Gwynne had a history degree, a masters from a writing program, and two years experience as a French teacher. "I did not uncerstand how a bank worked,' he reports. Neither Gwynne nor anyone he worked with in the international department knew much about the countries they were lending to. Gywnne got assigned to Latin America because he knew French. Yet he, and hundreds of others like him, performed the quotidian lending chores which, summed up over several years, dozens of countries, and hundreds of banks, led the world into the international debt crisis.

Not that Gwynne's superiors at the bank wouldnecessarily have been interested in intimate knowledge of local circumstances. When he wrote appropriately gloomy assessments of "country risk,' his superiors altered them to sound more optimistic. Skepticism about shaky Third World economies threatened a very profitable activity. The word was lend, lend, lend. What little information the regionals did have came from the countries' own central banks, who often found it expedient to cook the books, or from the big banks, who themselves were flying blind. "Much of their "intelligence gathering' was done from the shelter of first-class hotels and expensive restaurants,' Gwynne explains.

The extravagance of the bankers' lifestyle wasitself dictated by the perverse economics of the lending craze. All the banks were selling the same interchangeable product: money. Everyone was charging about the same interest rate. Therefore, putting on airs was the only method left for distinguishing your bank from the others. Flimflam was built into the system. Everyone, no matter how little he actually earned at home--and Gwynne never earned more than $20,000 in salary--lived like an expense-account king while calling on prospective clients abroad. It was the only way banks knew to impress

potential clients with the importance, wealth, and stability of their institutions. The costs of maintaining loan officers in a princely lifestyle were nothing compared to the typically hefty interest income the banks earned on the loans they made.