(Reuters) - Europe needs to agree common positions on international issues at the International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said on Saturday.

"I call on Europe to have a unified position," he said, adding that that was his personal opinion and the bank had no official position on the issue.

Trichet's comments at a conference in Cernobbio, on the shore of Lake Como near Milan, follow a stand-off over Europe's strong presence on the IMF board, with the United States pressing for more power for emerging countries.

The world's richest clients often come with "impossible demands," push margins down and cause internal conflict with investment banking colleagues, said the vice chairman of Barclays Plc's wealth management unit.

People with at least $30 million to invest, known as ultra high net worth individuals, insist on paying less for services, Gerard Aquilina of Barclays Wealth, told a conference in Zurich. They also ask for credit to invest in property, which may not generate private banking fees, and demand help with getting children into schools or last-minute concert tickets, he said.

"Beware of the complexities of dealing with ultra high net worths," said Aquilina, who until 2006 was chief executive officer for the Americas at HSBC Holdings Plc. "Demanding and often unreasonable" requests may create "impossible demands on the organization," he said.

The ultra rich saw their wealth rise by almost 22 percent in 2009, faster than other millionaires' 19 percent returns, according to a June report by Capgemini SA and Merrill Lynch. The report attributed the higher gain to a "more effective reallocation of assets."

Record low levels of demand continue to haunt the U.S. housing market with July pending home sales re-confirming previous crash-level readings.

Three months of data after the end of free down-payments, the inventory of purchase contracts rose just 5.25%. The inventory is still is at a record low with the exception of the two previous months - each of which were record lows in themselves (Please see the chart above showing how radically far demand has fallen. The three worst months are the last three months.).

The index of unclosed contracts to buy a home increased from 75.5 to 79.4. In the previous two months demand had fallen a record 30% and then 2.8% more. The July 2010 reading released today is 19% lower than July 2009.  The forecast was for a one percent fall according to 37 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

Freddie Mac also announced today that the 30-year fixed rate mortgage has fallen to another record low -- 4.32%. Outstanding rates and a price fall of 30 percent since the peak of the bubble has failed to ignite demand in our current market. Existing home sales represent 90% of residential housing transactions. The low reading of today will carry through to actual closed sales for July and August.

Noting the disagreement over the utility of naked credit default swaps the authors set forth a framework for evaluation that accounts for the varying degrees of optimism and pessimism among investors regarding any specific loan and then analyze the effects of allowing naked credit default swaps on the behavior of the market.

(The authors) have attempted to develop a framework within which such questions can be addressed and to provide some preliminary answers. We argue that the existence of naked credit default swaps has significant effects on the terms of financing, the likelihood of default, and the size and composition of investment expenditures. And we identify three mechanisms through which these broader consequences of speculative side bets arise: collateral effects, rollover risk, and project choice.

The authors note the heterogeneity of belief about the risk of particular loans due to different information and to different interpretations of common information and state that their belief that this factor is a fundamental driver of speculation in the real world.

When credit default swaps are unavailable, the investors with the most optimistic beliefs about the future revenues of a borrower are natural lenders: they are the ones who will part with their funds on terms most favourable to the borrower. The interest rate then depends on the beliefs of the threshold investor, who in turn is determined by the size of the borrowing requirement. The larger the borrowing requirement, the more pessimistic this threshold investor will be (since the size of the group of lenders has to be larger in order for the borrowing requirement to be met). Those more optimistic than this investor will lend, while the rest find other uses for their cash.

Now consider the effects of allowing for naked credit default swaps. Those who are most pessimistic about the future prospects of the borrower will be inclined to buy naked protection, while those most optimistic will be willing to sell it. However, pessimists also need to worry about counterparty risk - if the optimists write too many contracts, they may be unable to meet their obligations in the event that a default does occur, an event that the pessimists consider to be likely. Hence the optimists have to support their positions with collateral, which they do by diverting funds that would have gone to borrowers in the absence of derivatives. The borrowing requirement must then be met by appealing to a different class of investors, who are neither so optimistic that they wish to sell protection, nor so pessimistic that they wish to buy it. The threshold investor is now clearly more pessimistic than in the absence of derivatives, and the terms of financing are accordingly shifted against the borrower. As a result, for any given borrowing requirement, the bond issue is larger and the price of bonds accordingly lower when investors are permitted to purchase naked credit default swaps.

This effect does not arise if credit default swaps can only be purchased by holders of the underlying security. In fact, it can be shown that allowing for only "covered" credit default swaps has much the same consequences as allowing optimists to buy debt on margin: it leads to higher bond prices, a smaller issue size for any given borrowing requirement, and a lower likelihood of eventual default. While optimists take a long position in the debt by selling such contracts, they facilitate the purchase of bonds by more pessimistic investors by absorbing much of the credit risk. In contrast with the case of naked credit default swaps, therefore, the terms of lending are shifted in favour of the borrower. The difference arises because pessimists can enter directional positions on default in one case but not the other.

The authors then discuss the problem of self fulfilling pessimism for cases of high credit risk in which the possibility of bear raids can make rolling over debt impossible.

A key question then is the following: how does the availability of naked credit default swaps affect the range of borrowing requirements for which pessimistic paths (with significant rollover risk) exist? And, conditional on the selection of such a path, how are the terms of borrowing affected by the presence of these credit derivatives?

For reasons that are already clear from the baseline model, we find that pessimistic paths involve more punitive terms for the borrower when naked credit default swaps are present than when they are not. Moreover, we find that there is a range of borrowing requirements for which a pessimistic path exists if and only if such contracts are allowed. That is, there exist conditions under which fears about the ability of the borrower to repay debt can be self-fulfilling only in the presence of credit derivatives. It is in this precise sense that the possibility of self-fulfilling bear raids can be said to arise when the use of such derivatives is unrestricted.

The finding that borrowers can more easily raise funds and obtain better terms when the use of credit derivatives is restricted does not necessarily imply that such restrictions are desirable from a policy perspective. A shift in terms against borrowers will generally reduce the number of projects that are funded, but some of these ought not to have been funded in the first place. Hence the efficiency effects of a ban are ambiguous. However, such a shift in terms against borrowers can also have a more subtle effect with respect to project choice: it can tilt managerial incentives towards the selection of riskier projects with lower expected returns. This happens because a larger debt obligation makes projects with greater upside potential more attractive to the firm, as more of the downside risk is absorbed by creditors.

Considering that both those who take the loan and those who arrange the loan are likely to have better information than those who provide the funds in addition to having ongoing business relationships with each other but not those who provide funds, (the marks), the potential for abuse should be obvious.

James Tobin (1984) once observed that the advantages of greater "liquidity and negotiability of financial instruments" come at the cost of facilitating speculation, and that greater market completeness under such conditions could reduce the functional efficiency of the financial system, namely its ability to facilitate "the mobilisation of saving for investments in physical and human capital... and the allocation of saving to their more socially productive uses." Based on our analysis, one could make the case that naked credit default swaps are a case in point.

This conclusion, however, is subject to the caveat that there exist conditions under which the presence of such contracts can prevent the funding of inefficient projects. Furthermore, an outright ban may be infeasible in practice due to the emergence of close substitutes through financial engineering. Even so, it is important to recognize that the proliferation of speculative side bets can have significant effects on economic fundamentals such as the terms of financing, the patterns of project selection, and the incidence of corporate and sovereign default. (Emphasis added.)

Thus, even though the CDS will "net out" if counter-party risk is not a factor, there are still other consequences to naked CDSs. Sociopathic, self interested corporate management both at the firm doing the borrowing and the firm arranging the issue can collude to skin those who provide the funds. And when things go south they can intone in unison: Who could have known!

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."