I strongly believe that this is not true. If a proper restructuring is to be done, professional restructuring people without historical relations to the customer should do it. Whenever I have been persuaded otherwise I have later been proved wrong. The second argument for transferring the non-performing assets is related to this. When the management of a bank has a large number of bad credits to take care of, that is exactly what they do. All their capacity is used up taking care of problems and there is no time - and no money - to think about the future. This is disastrous for the whole organisation, which tends to become backward looking and defensive instead of forward looking and offensive. Only when the bad assets are out of the books of the bank, the minds of the management and thus of the employees can become aimed towards the future. Having decided to transfer the bad assets, the next obstacle will be to decide on the prices. The bank usually considers the non-performing assets to be quite valuable, at least in the long run. Selling at what might be considered present market prices will create too big a hole in the balance sheet to make management comfortable. The management of the new AMC quite naturally has a different view. It has no wish to get assets into its balance sheet at values that later turn out to be excessively high.
The macroeconomic reasons for the occurrence of the current crisis could further be divided into two groups: a) problems related to unbalances in the international claims and b) problems caused by the maintenance of low real interest rates over a longer period. The first group of macroeconomic reasons includes unbalances in the current accounts of balance of payments among economies, which, in turn, brought about unbalances between the capital accounts. In that process of creating unbalances, especially in the decade before the crisis, the capital spilled over from the developing countries to the developed economies, particularly to the US. The second group of macroeconomic reasons resulted from the excessively long maintenance of low real interest rates. The historically low real short-term interest rates actually reflected adjustable anti-deflation monetary policy. The low long-term interest rates, on the other hand, largely reflected the high savings rate in the capital-exporting countries, particularly in the Asian developing countries and several oilexporting countries. These countries, seeking for sound financial instruments to place their savings, increased the demand for long-term government securities issued by the governments of the developed countries, thus contributing towards reduction of the long-term interest rates. The low interest rates had multiple effects, including the acceleration of the credit growth in a number of industrial countries, swift growth in the prices of properties and share; and generally, taking high risks during the contest for generating higher earnings. The financial crisis, however, demonstrated that there are serious problems in the area of microeconomics, as well.