Who Wins and Who Loses

A Short History of Bubblenomics

By MIKE WHITNEY
Assets bubbles require massive amounts of leverage. But too much leverage can destabilize the system, so it needs to be regulated. But Wall Street doesn't like restrictions on leverage because it can make more money by borrowing like crazy, inflating a ginormous bubble, skimming off the profits, and cashing in before the crash. So, the Fed ignores Wall Street's "gearing" operations and pretends not to see what's going on. It becomes a bubble "enabler" by lowering interest rates, easing credit and waving-off tighter regulations. It's all part of the game. The Fed works to help its core constituents while everyone else is put at risk.
But there's another reason for bubbles, too. Stagnation is a chronic problem in mature capitalist economies. As businesses become more efficient in their various widget-making operations, demand for their products drops off making it harder for owners to find profitable outlets for investment. And when investment starts to flag, then grip of economic inertia begins to tighten. As author Robert Skidelsky says, "investment fills the gap between production and consumption", so when investment hits a speed-bump, spending starts to wither and the economy slows to a crawl.
The Fed's remedy: Zero rates, easy money and more bubbles; Professor Bernanke's one-size-fits-all, magic elixir for sclerotic economies. In other words, the emerging stock and commodities bubbles are not a sign that the Fed is flubbing the policy. Bubbles are the policy, and have been for a very long time. Bernanke is no fool. He knows that each business cycle is weaker than the last, creating fewer jobs, more slack in the economy, and more anemic growth. His job is to endlessly tweak the process in order to maintain profitability for the people at the top of the economic foodchain, his real bosses.
Here's a clip from an interview with history professor Robert Brenner who sums it up perfectly:
Robert Brenner:

"... Economic forecasters have underestimated how bad the current crisis is because they have over-estimated the strength of the real economy and failed to take into account the extent of its dependence upon a buildup of debt that relied on asset price bubbles. In the U.S., during the recent business cycle of the years 2001-2007, GDP growth was by far the slowest of the postwar epoch. There was no increase in private sector employment. The increase in plants and equipment was about a third of the previous, a postwar low. Real wages were basically flat. There was no increase in median family income for the first time since World War II. Economic growth was driven entirely by personal consumption and residential investment, made possible by easy credit and rising house prices. Economic performance was weak, even despite the enormous stimulus from the housing bubble and the Bush administration's huge federal deficits. Housing by itself accounted for almost one-third of the growth of GDP and close to half of the increase in employment in the years 2001-2005. It was, therefore, to be expected that when the housing bubble burst, consumption and residential investment would fall, and the economy would plunge." ("Overproduction not Financial Collapse is the Heart of the Crisis", Robert P. Brenner speaks with Jeong Seong-jin, Asia Pacific Journal)

Sound familiar? Flat wages, weak demand, slow growth and more and more debt? All signs of an aging, hobbled system that's slipping inexorably into stagnation. This is why the Fed adopted its present policy of bubblemaking, because the only way to avoid stagnation is by increasing the debt-load. Authors John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff traced the origins of the policy back to the 1970s. They revealed what their findings in an article in The Monthly Review titled "Financial Implosion and Stagnation". Here's an excerpt:

"It was the reality of economic stagnation beginning in the 1970s, as heterodox economists Riccardo Bellofiore and Joseph Halevi have recently emphasized, that led to the emergence of "the new financialized capitalist regime," a kind of "paradoxical financial Keynesianism" whereby demand in the economy was stimulated primarily "thanks to asset-bubbles." Moreover, it was the leading role of the United States in generating such bubbles—despite (and also because of) the weakening of capital accumulation proper—together with the dollar's reserve currency status, that made U.S. monopoly-finance capital the "catalyst of world effective demand," beginning in the 1980s. But such a financialized growth pattern was unable to produce rapid economic advance for any length of time, and was unsustainable, leading to bigger bubbles that periodically burst, bringing stagnation more and more to the surface.
A key element in explaining this whole dynamic is to be found in the falling ratio of wages and salaries as a percentage of national income in the United States. Stagnation in the 1970s led capital to launch an accelerated class war against workers to raise profits by pushing labor costs down. The result was decades of increasing inequality." ("Financial Implosion and Stagnation", John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, Monthly Review)

Foster and Magdoff do a fine job of explaining how the system has been rejiggered to overcome stagnation. Financial assets provide a place where surplus capital can go and grow via paper profits. But this type of investment does not add to productive capacity or real wealth; it merely enlarges the amount of money capital while creating the means for transferring wealth from one class to another. And that's the point. Every burst bubble thrusts middle class households further and further into the red, while bank moguls and Wall Street tycoons get even richer. It is all by design, nothing is left to chance.
It might surprise you to know that the Fed has become so skilled at bubble-making, that the condition of the underlying economy doesn't really matter any more. By fixing interest rates below the rate of inflation and attaching a liquidity-tailpipe to the stock market (QE2), the Fed has been able engineer a boom in equities, while the so-called "real" economy languishes in a near-Depression. In fact, consumer credit is actually shrinking (excluding student loans) while margin debt (the amount that speculators borrow to buy stocks) continues to soar. This is an astonishing development. The Fed has created a bifurcated market where bankers and hedge fund managers are able to rake in billions off their gaming operations while 300 million working Americans remain mired in debt.
But there are a few drawbacks to the Fed's policy. After all, one can only hollow out the economy for so long before the society begins to unravel. But, unfortunately, widening inequality and destitution don't show up in GDP, which continues to balloon even while working people slip further into debt. What's missing in the GDP-readings is the fact that we are getting poorer as a nation and weaker as an economic force in the world. Here's how Rob Arnott of Research Affiliates summed it up in an article in Fortune magazine:

"We are, in a word, considerably poorer than we imagine – something politicians of all stripes should, but probably won't, consider as they grapple with our massive deficit. GDP that stems from new debt — mainly deficit spending — is phony: it is debt-financed consumption, not prosperity," Arnott writes. "Net of deficit spending, our prosperity is nearly unchanged from 1998, 13 years ago."...
"Instead of the financial world being the lubricant for business, they are out there manufacturing products with no utility whatsoever except for generating fees," he said. "Somebody's got to do something about Wall Street. It is destroying the country." ("Lost decade? We've already had one, Fortune)

The growth we see in rising GDP is mainly "attributable to debt-financed spending, rather than real wealth creation." Indeed, Bernanke is merely leveraging his way out of a Depression. But the calamitous downstream effects of the policy are obvious; the middle class is being decimated, the dollar is getting hammered, and the productive sectors of the economy are being cannibalized. These are the failures of bubblemaking, a theory whose sole purpose is to further enrich a tiny segment of the population that's already as rich as Croesus.
But the Fed is not the worst offender in this regard. The real problem is the banks.
The Fed can induce spending by lowering interest rates, easing credit or buying bonds, but the banks do the heavy lifting. That's where the zillions in leverage are created via off-balance sheets operations, repo transactions and derivatives contracts. These asset-pumping operations remain largely concealed from the public, so no one really knows what's going on. That's why the connection between money supply and financial asset prices is so tenuous and misleading, because the banks create money that doesn't appear in the data. That's what off-balance sheets operations are all about. They generate unknown amounts of credit which stimulates activity, but remains invisible. The printing presses have essentially been handed over to private industry. Here's how it all works according to Independent Strategy's David Roche

"The reason for the exponential growth in credit, but not in broad money, was simply that banks didn't keep their loans on their books any more – and only loans on bank balance sheets get counted as money. Now, as soon as banks made a loan, they "securitized" it and moved it off their balance sheet.
There were two ways of doing this. One was to sell the securitized loan as a bond. The other was "synthetic" securitization: for example, using derivatives to get rid of the default risk (with credit default swaps) and lock in the interest rate due on the loan (with interest-rate swaps). Both forms of securitization meant that the lending bank was free to make new loans without using up any of its lending capacity once its existing loans had been "securitized."
So, to redefine liquidity under what I call New Monetarism, one must add, to the traditional definition of broad money, all the credit being created and moved off banks' balance sheets and onto the balance sheets of nonbank financial intermediaries. This new form of liquidity changed the very nature of the credit beast. What now determined credit growth was risk appetite: the readiness of companies and individuals to run their businesses with higher levels of debt." ("The Global Money Machine", David Roche, Wall Street Journal)

The Fed is not the main culprit in this new paradigm where banks and shadow banks stealthily add to the money supply without any oversight. The problem is the lack of regulation. There needs to be strictly enforced guidelines on the amount of leverage a bank can use and--more importantly--any financial institution that acts like a bank must be regulated like a bank. (Dodd-Frank reforms don't fix this problem.)
The present system is doomed because it depends on the willingness of bankers to behave ethically when all the incentives are pulling them in the opposite direction. The rewards for gouging the public are just too great to resist. All one has to do is lend tons of money to people who can't repay the debt, sell those same loans to investors looking for higher yield, skim-off the profits in stock options and bonuses, and find a safe place when the bubble bursts. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The IMF released a report last week that confirms this basic theory. The report aptly titled "A Fistful of Dollars" shows how the worst offenders deployed their lobbyists to ease regulations in order to legalize the type of sleight-of-hand that triggered the crash. Here's an excerpt:

"We find that lobbying was associated with more risk-taking during 2000-07 and with worse outcomes in 2008. In particular, lenders lobbying more intensively on issues related to mortgage lending and securitization (i) originated mortgages with higher loan-to-income ratios, (ii) securitized a faster growing proportion of their loans, and (iii) had faster growing originations of mortgages. Moreover, delinquency rates in 2008 were higher in areas where lobbying lenders' mortgage lending grew faster. These lenders also experienced negative abnormal stock returns during the rescue of Bear Stearns and the collapse of Lehman Brothers, but positive abnormal returns when the bailout was announced. Finally, we find a higher bailout probability for lobbying lenders. These findings suggest that lending by politically active lenders played a role in accumulation of risks and thus contributed to the financial crisis......
CONCLUSION
.....We carefully construct a database at the lender level combining information on loan characteristics and lobbying expenditures on laws and regulations related to mortgage lending and securitization. We show that lenders that lobby more intensively on these specific issues engaged in riskier lending practices ex ante, suffered from worse outcomes ex post, and benefited more from the bailout program."
("A Fistful of Dollars: Lobbying and the Financial Crisis", Deniz Igan, Prachi Mishra, and Thierry Tressel, Research Department, IMF

There it is in black and white. The bankers gamed the system and raked in trillions, all according to plan. Not surprisingly, they used their political clout to create a safety net for themselves (TARP) when the bubble burst, while everyone else watched as their retirement savings and home equity went up in smoke.
There's no disputing that massive leverage played a critical role in the crash of '08. Nor is there any doubt that hawking mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and other garbage assets (CDOs, ABS) to credulous investors was the main vehicle for executing the heist. So, why hasn't the Fed acknowledged its mistakes and stepped up its supervision of the banks? Is Bernanke so "captured" by Wall Street that he'd rather see another meltdown than take steps to reign in leverage? That seems to be the case.
Here's how Bernanke responded to Keith Ellison, when the congressman explicitly warned Bernanke of "excessive leverage" that had reached "stratospheric levels" putting the entire system in danger.
Bernanke: "The Board's authority and flexibility in establishing capital requirements, including leverage requirements, have been key to the Board's ability to require additional capital where needed based on a banking organization's risk profile...
We note that in other contexts, statutorily prescribed minimum leverage ratios have not necessarily served prudential regulators of financial institutions well." ("Excessive Leverage Helped Cause the Great Depression and the Current Crisis ... And Government Responds by Encouraging MORE Leverage", Washington's blog)
"Minimum leverage ratios" will not make the system safer and more stable?!? You gotta be kidding me?
This is Bernanke's way of saying that he understands the risks, but plans to do nothing.
But, why?
Because Bernanke's job is to assure that Wall Street's massive looting operation continues apace. That's Job#1. And, while "systemic instability" may be a concern, it's largely irrelevant. Maintaining profitability for uber-rich speculators takes precedent over everything else. That's the way Bubblenomics is designed to work.

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Resiliencia macroeconómica

Tomado de Macroeconomic Resilience The Great Divide between Academics and Practitioners with 2 comments In an excellent article, Mark Thoma highlights the great divide between academics and practitioners in economics. He also identifies the fundamental reason for this divide – practitioners typically rely on intuition and rough heuristics whereas academics rely on rigorous theoretical constructs. In Herbert Simon's terminology, practitioners are satisficers, not optimisers. In a recent post, I outlined my preferred framework to analyse monetary policy as an attempt to influence the real rate curve. Clearly, this viewpoint is not rigorous but for my purposes transforming this framework into a theoretically watertight construct is not worth the effort. The aim of the framework is simple to give me a quick and dirty but useful way to process information and market data. It is also almost certain that in some scenarios, this framework will break down – but instead of thinking about all such scenarios in advance, I simply trust that my experience and my gut instinct will warn me when such a scenario occurs. To most academics, the process I have outlined above would seem to be a distinctly unscientific and "irrational" method. But as I have argued before, heuristics and intuition are rational responses in an uncertain environment where time and resources are scarce. Herbert Simon and Gerd Gigerenzer have both done excellent work on the role of heuristics but the most relevant research on the role of intuition has been undertaken by Gary Klein and other researchers in the field of 'Naturalistic Decision Making' (NDM). NDM originated from Klein's work in analysing the decision-making of firefighters – as Klein explains in this recent interview, expert firefighters follow a process that is far removed from the conventional definition of rational choice. They "build up a repertoire of patterns so that they can immediately identify, classify, and categorize situations, and have a rapid impulse about what to do. Not just what to do, but they're framing the situation, and their frame is telling them what are the important cues. That's why they're always looking, or usually looking, in the right place. They know what to ignore, and what they have to watch carefully." There's nothing magical about this: "Intuition is about expertise and tacit knowledge. I'll contrast tacit knowledge with explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is knowledge of factual material. I can tell people facts, I can tell them over the phone, and they'll know things. I can say I was born in the Bronx, and now you know where I was born. That's an example of explicit knowledge, it's factual information. But there are other forms of knowledge. There's knowledge about routines. Routines you can think of as a set of steps. But there's also tacit knowledge, and expertise about when to start each step, and when it's finished, when you're done and ready to start the next one, and whether the steps are working or not. So even for routines, some expertise is needed. There are other aspects of tacit knowledge that are about intuition, like our ability to make perceptual discriminations, so as we get experience, we can see things that we couldn't see before…. Judgments based on intuition seem mysterious because intuition doesn't involve explicit knowledge. It doesn't involve declarative knowledge about facts. Therefore, we can't explicitly trace the origins of our intuitive judgments. They come from other parts of our knowing. They come from our tacit knowledge and so they feel magical. Intuitions sometimes feel like we have ESP, but it isn't magical, it's really a consequence of the experience we've built up." Larry Summers is correct in noting that the solution is not for practitioners to become academics. It is for more academics to rigorously analyse the intuitive and heuristic-based methods and explanations that practitioners use. The real gap is in the paucity of applied economists and the misguided view of applied work with data-crunching rather than practical knowledge. As Daniel Kahneman explains in his introduction to Gary Klein's interview: "In the US, the word "applied" tends to diminish anything academic it touches. Add the word to the name of any academic discipline, from mathematics and statistics to psychology, and you find lowered status.  The attitude changed briefly during World War II, when the best academic psychologists rolled up their sleeves to contribute to the war effort. I believe it was not an accident that the 15 years following the war were among the most productive in the history of the discipline.  Old methods were discarded, old methodological taboos were dropped, and common sense prevailed over stale theoretical disputes. However, the word "applied" did not retain its positive aura for very long. It is a pity. Gary Klein is a living example of how useful applied psychology can be when it is done well. Klein is first and mainly a keen observer. He looks at people who are good at their job as they exercise their skills, sometimes in life-and-death situations, and he reports what he sees in clear and eloquent prose.  When you read his descriptions of real experts at work, you feel that it is the job of theorists to accommodate what he has seen – instead of doing what we often do, which is to scan the "real world" (when we think of it at all) for illustrations of our theoretical notions." The divide that Mark Thoma identifies is not restricted to economics – in the age of 'Big Data', all academic disciplines are moving away from the sort of work that requires researchers to get their hands dirty. In an excellent post, Jennifer Jacquet explains how field ecologists like Robert Paine are a dying breed, being replaced by ecologists more at home on a computer than in the field. This is not a criticism of mathematical ecology, simply an assertion that the kind of insights that Bob Paine derived from spending "45 years knee-deep in kelp and invertebrates on Washington State's coast" are valuable and cannot be replicated by other means. This presumption that data and theory can substitute for experience on the ground is symptomatic of the broader problem of the downgrading of tacit and contextual knowledge highlighted by many other changes in academic economics, most notably the neglect of economic history and institutional detail. One of the most striking deficiencies in economic theory that was exposed during the crisis was the disconnect between monetary economics and the institutional reality of the new regime of shadow banking and derivatives. Hyman Minsky's theories are relevant not because of their theoretical elegance but because of their firm grounding in the institutional evolution of the post-war monetary and banking system, a topic that he researched in great detail. An example of how this balance between the theoretical and applied fields can be restored is provided by the collaborative work between Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein. Kahneman and Klein have spent their entire careers tackling the same field (the psychology of decision-making) with diametrically opposed approaches – Kahneman focuses on controlled lab experiments, comparisons of decision-making performance to an objective optimum, and a generally skeptical stance towards human cognition. Klein focuses on research in real-world organisations, analysis of actual performance through more subjective variables and a generally admiring stance on human cognition. Yet they were able to collaborate and find common ground, the results of which are summarised in a fascinating paper. Economics could do with more applied researchers like Gary Klein as well as more theoretical researchers like Daniel Kahneman who are open to applied practical insights. ++++++++++ A great divide holds back the relevance of economists Jul 26, 2011 08:45 EDT economics | forecasts By Mark Thoma The opinions expressed are his own. Reuters invited leading economists to reply to Mark Thoma's Op-Ed on the "great divide" in economics and will be publishing the responses. Here are responses from Ashwin Parameswaran, James Hamilton, Dean Baker, Lawrence Summers, and a recap of Paul Krugman's. How much confidence would you have in the medical profession if the teaching faculty in medical schools had very little experience actually treating patients, and very little connection to – even a lack of respect for – the practitioners in the field? Would your confidence be improved if medical research had little to do with the questions that are important to the doctors trying to serve patients? Unfortunately, that's a pretty good description of how economics has been practiced. The questions academic economists are trying to answer have little connection to the problems faced by business economists trying to help their firms make good, profitable decisions (and vice-versa). And though academics pay some attention to government policy, particularly Federal Reserve policy, addressing the problems faced by government economists trying to help policymakers make the best possible choices is not the main focus of this research. This division between academic, government, and business economists is driven by the fact that economic theory and econometrics can be used for two different things. One is learning about how the world works. These "how and why" questions are the focus of academic research. For example, academic economists try to understand why demand curves slope downward, how business-cycle fluctuations in GDP come about, and how prices are determined in market economies. The other use of theoretical and empirical economic models is forecasting, for example predicting where the economy is headed so that businesses can react accordingly, and predicting what might happen if various government policy proposals are implemented. These are the "what if" questions that economists in government and business are most interested in. What will happen to tax revenue if business taxes are cut? What will happen to the demand for my product if the Fed raises interest rates? What is the most likely course that the economy will take? Again, a comparison with the medical field is useful. Science can help us to learn about how the body works, and that certainly aids our efforts to battle disease. This is an important area of research, and we wouldn't want to cut it short. But knowing how the body works isn't enough, we also need the ability to diagnose current illnesses and to predict when someone is going to get sick. In addition, we need to have treatments available to fix the problems that we've identified. Periodic checkups, for example, allow us to predict who might get coronary disease, and then take action to avoid much bigger problems down the road. Academic economists have emphasized the "how it works" part of economics; in econometrics, for example,  the focus is on hypothesis testing to determine which model of the economy is best, rather than on forecasting the future of the economy. Academic economists do evaluate policy proposals theoretically and empirically, and they do provide forecasts of the economy. But forecasting in particular is not the main focus of their efforts, , and they've all but ignored – even looked down their noses upon – forecasters and practitioners in the government and business communities. They are often viewed as data grubbers who use old-fashioned models and techniques, and are thus unworthy of attention from high-minded academics. However, a few practitioners saw the housing bubble coming. Shouldn't academic economists try to learn from them? What did they see that the academics missed? In addition, if the practitioners in the field are unaware of or do not have the technical ability to use the best approaches to the problems they face – criticism from academic economists over how business economists used value-at-risk models prior to the recession comes to mind – whose fault is that? Shouldn't academics try to help the practitioners get over this hurdle instead of turning their backs on the problem, and then looking down at them when they don't use or misapply cutting edge techniques? The failure of academic economists to predict the crisis shows just how costly such insularity and arrogance can be. The patient (the economy) didn't need to have a heart attack (financial meltdown), because even though the signs were there, the academic community had little interest in learning how to read them, let alone in developing early warning and intervention strategies for bubbles and other problems. The Fed does some of this, of course, and the financial crisis has motivated some academic interest in developing early warning systems that would have helped us to identify and do something about stock, housing, and other bubbles before they inflated to dangerous levels. The medical profession would do much worse without connections between the practitioners in the field and the how-it-works types in the labs. The questions researchers ask, for example, are shaped by the needs of the practitioners trying to prevent and cure illness. What types of tests can doctors do in their offices and labs to quickly and reliably indicate the current health of a patient and to forecast future health problems? In economics, if reliable tests for bubbles had been available to business economists, that could have saved the economy from considerable losses. Economics has lost the connection between the practitioners and the academics. This may have something to do with the desire among economists to become more of a science – a heavy focus on theory and math is the result. But no matter the cause, if we want to do all that we can to avoid big economic problems, and if we want to use the feedback from those testing economic ideas on real world applications as a way of better understanding how the economy works, then we must reestablish these ties. PHOTO: A stethoscope rests on a container of hand sanitizer inside of the doctor's office of One Medical Group in New York March 17, 2010. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

papiers keynesiens, jean paul simonnet,Effet de levier d’endettement

Effet de levier d’endettement

Créé le : dimanche 2 novembre 2008 - Dernière mise à jour : samedi 11 avril 2009 par Simonnet Jean-Paul

L’effet de levier d’endettement permet de comprendre comment la rentabilité économique est liée à la rentabilité financière.
Ces deux notions renvoient à des approches différentes de la rentabilité :
 la rentabilité économique, rapporte le résultat d’exploitation (le plus souvent net de la consommation de capital fixe), au capital non financier, composé du capital productif fixe (les équipements) et du besoin en fond de roulement (les dépenses ordinaires de fonctionnement de l’entreprise). La rentabilité économique reflète l’efficacité du processus productif seul, indépendamment des modes de financement adoptés, c’est-à-dire qu’on ne distingue pas le financement à partir des fonds propres ou à partir des capitaux empruntés
 la rentabilité financière, rapporte aux fonds propres le profit à la disposition des actionnaires après paiement des impôts et des intérêts. La rentabilité financière est celle qui est prise en compte par les investisseurs pour sélectionner leurs acquisitions d’actions par exemple.
Quand une entreprise entreprend un projet d’investissement et qu’elle emprunte pour financer cet investissement, elle s’attend à ce que le résultat d’exploitation dégagée par la nouvelle activité soit supérieur aux charges financières induites par l’endettement. La décision d’achat d’équipement se traduit par un gain supérieur au coût du financement. C’est à cette condition que le résultat courant (résultat d’exploitation - charges financières) augmente et améliore la rémunération des associés.
Si les prévisions portant sur l’efficacité des équipements se réalisent, le taux de rentabilité économique sera supérieur au coût de l’emprunt. L’entreprise est donc incitée à emprunter (à s’endetter) pour augmenter la rentabilité financière.
Le taux de rentabilité financière sera d’autant plus grand que le montant du résultat courant devra rémunérer un montant faible de capitaux propres, ce qui est le cas si le projet a été financé par un endettement important. On dit que les associés bénéficient d’un effet de levier.
Dans le cas contraire de prévisions d’efficacité qui ne se réalisent pas ou d’une hausse sensible du coût réel du financement, la rentabilité financière des associés sera dégradée et elle sera d’autant plus dégradée que les emprunts ont été importants.

Démonstration

Pour simplifier on considère que la rentabilité économique s’écrit :
RE = ENE / K
où ENE est l’excédent net d’exploitation et K le capital fixe productif (donc on néglige le fond de roulement d’exploitation ce qui revient à dire que l’actif de l’entreprise ne contient que les équipements, mais on prend en compte les amortissement).
La rentabilité financière s’écrit pour sa part :
RF = (ENE - FF) / FP
avec FF pour frais financiers réels soient le produit des dettes END par le taux d’intérêt réel r et FP pour les fonds propres (capitaux propres)
Puisque K est égal à l’actif de l’entreprise et que cet actif est égal au passif (endettement noté END et fonds propres FP) on peut écrire :
RF = (ENE / FP) - (FF) / FP]
RF = [(ENE / K)x(END + FP) / FP] - [(END x r) / FP]
RF = RE x [(END / FP) + 1] - [(END / FP) x r]

RF = RE + [(RE - r) x (EN / FP)]

Une application en TD permet de comprendre comment l’effet de levier agit sur la rentabilité financière.
L’effet de levier peut jouer dans les deux sens : s’il peut accroître la rentabilité des capitaux propres par rapport à la rentabilité économique, il peut aussi la minorer quand la rentabilité économique devient inférieure au coût de l’endettement.
Il faut cependant éviter de confondre la rentabilité financière mesurée de cette manière (rapport du bénéfice aux fonds propres) et ce qu’exigent les actionnaires, les pourvoyeurs de fonds ou les créanciers (tous ceux qui sont en situation de financer l’achat des équipements). Le taux de rentabilité économique, le taux de rentabilité financière, le coût réel du financement sont obtenus, mesurés de façon comptable et ils relèvent de l’analyse et du contrôle financiers, ils ne relèvent pas de l’analyse financière qui doit prendre en compte les deux paramètres fondamentaux que sont le risque et la valorisation.
L’effet de levier permet de connaître l’origine d’une bonne rentabilité des capitaux propres qui provient de la rentabilité de l’actif économique et/ou de la pure construction financière qu’est l’effet de levier. C’est son seul intérêt.
Dans la durée, seule une bonne rentabilité économique est le gage d’un niveau de rentabilité des capitaux propres satisfaisant. L’effet de levier ne crée pas de valeur. S’il peut augmenter la rentabilité des capitaux propres, il augmente leur risque en proportion de l’excédent de profit obtenu puisque l’endettement accroît le risque de défaillance en cas de retournement de la conjoncture ou d’erreur dans les anticipations des profits futurs.