Economist's View

"Let The Good Times Roll Again?"

The question of how to interpret Goldman Sachs' unexpectedly large earnings has been addressed here and here (with an addendum at the bottom of the second post). One lesson appears to be that the bad incentives underlying executive compensation are still be present. However, exactly why that is the case - other than the sheer size of the profits - has not been fully addressed. This argument from Lucian Bebchuk takes a step in that direction by noting that the Goldman Sachs' bonuses are a reward for short-term gains, when we ought to be tying compensation to long-run performance. Thus, the problematic incentive to take on large amounts of risk in pursuit of immediate profits is still present. (Though it's not included below, he also argues that compensation should be based upon the long-run value of a broad basket of securities, not just common shares as has been typical in the past, to avoid distorting incentives in a way that gives executives another reason to take on too much risk):

Let the good times roll again?, by Lucian Bebchuk, Commentary, Project Syndicate: Goldman Sachs announced this month plans to provide bonuses at record levels, and there are widespread expectations that bonuses and pay in many other firms will rise substantially this year. Should the good times start rolling again so soon?

Not without reform. Indeed, one key lesson of the financial crisis is that an overhaul of executive compensation must be high on the policy agenda.

Indeed, pay arrangements were a major contributing factor to the excessive risk-taking by financial institutions that helped bring about the financial crisis. By rewarding executives for risky behaviour, and by insulating them from some of the adverse consequences of that behaviour, pay arrangements for financial-sector bosses produced perverse incentives, encouraging them to gamble.

One major factor that induced excessive risk-taking is that firms’ standard pay arrangements reward executives for short-term gains, even when those gains are subsequently reversed. Although the financial sector lost more than half of its stock-market value during the last five years, executives were still able to cash out, prior to the stock market implosion, large amounts of equity compensation and bonus compensation.

Such pay structures gave executives excessive incentives to seek short-term gains ... even when doing so would increase the risks of an implosion later on. ...

Following the crisis, this problem has become widely recognised... But it still needs to be effectively addressed: Goldman’s recent decision to provide record bonuses as a reward for performance in the last two quarters, for example, is a step in the wrong direction.

To avoid rewards for short-term performance and focus on long-term results, pay structures need to be re-designed. As far as equity-based compensation is concerned, executives should not be allowed to cash out options and shares given to them for a period of, say, five years after the time of “vesting”...

Similarly, bonus compensation should be redesigned to reward long-term performance. For starters, the use of bonuses based on one-year results should be discouraged. Furthermore, bonuses should not be paid immediately, but rather placed in a company account for several years and adjusted downward if the company subsequently learns that the reason for awarding a bonus no longer holds up. ...

A thorough overhaul of compensation structures must be an important element of the new financial order.

The latest I'm aware of on this topic is draft legislation Barney Frank circulated today:

All publicly traded U.S. companies, and particularly financial firms, would face new executive-compensation requirements under draft legislation circulated Friday by a top lawmaker in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The measure proposed by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., would give shareholders a greater ability to weigh in on compensation packages, require compensation consultants to satisfy independence criteria established by the government and would ensure that compensation committees are made up of independent directors. ...

Banks, broker-dealers, investment advisers and all other financial firms would be required to disclose any incentive-based compensation structures, while federal regulators would be able to limit "inappropriate or imprudently risky" pay practices.

The panel is expected to take up some form of the legislation next week.

This legislation would give regulators the power to limit executive pay structures that they believe are excessively risky, but exactly what types of compensation structures would be allowed or required under this legislation is a bit vague. It doesn't sound like it will be as restrictive as Lucian Bebchuk would like, but we shall see.

There are two related issues here. First, was the compensation fair in terms of being a reward for productive activities such as directing capital where it was most needed, or distributing and reducing risk? Before the crash, some people tried to make that argument, but for financial executives, it seems clear that the compensation was based upon bubble rather than fundamental values, and that this lead to inflated rewards relative to the value that was actually created. But even for non-financial executives, it's hard to believe that the generous compensation high-level managers and executives received in recent years is due entirely to their superior productivity. The "say on pay" part of the proposed legislation tries to give shareholders a greater voice in setting compensation levels, and is directed at this problem.

The second issue is whether the compensation structures that have been used in the past lead to incentives to accumulate more risk than is optimal. It appears that they did, and the second part of the proposal is an attempt to overcome this problem by giving regulators the ability to limit systemically risky practices.

There are two types of excessive risk to be worried about, but only one is a systemic risk, i.e. a risk to the overall economy. First, a particular executive compensation structure may give an executive the incentive to take on too much risk - more than shareholders desire - but there is no danger to the overall financial system. This type of excessive risk taking needs to be prevented, but it is not a danger to the overall economy, and regulators are generally concerned with microeconomics questions concerning optimal incentive structures. Second, there is excessive risk that endangers the entire financial system and the broader economy. This is systemic risk that is the target of the proposed legislation, the kind of risk regulators such as the Fed are concerned with, and the kind we must do our best to eliminate if we want to avoid a repeat of the present crisis.

To me, both elements of the proposed legislation - the part that gives shareholders the power to limit compensation levels and the part that gives regulators the power to limit risky compensation schemes - seem vague and rather weak. I hope that changes as the legislation develops.

Paul Krugman: The Joy of Sachs

What can we learn from the fact that Goldman Sachs earned record profits despite the stagnation in the broader economy?:

The Joy of Sachs, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us?

First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away.

Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has ... made another crisis more likely.

Let’s start by talking about how Goldman makes money.

Over the past generation — ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan years — the U.S. economy has been “financialized.” The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared...

Such growth would be fine if financialization really delivered on its promises — if financial firms made money by directing capital to its most productive uses, by developing innovative ways to spread and reduce risk. But can anyone, at this point, make those claims with a straight face? ...

Goldman’s role in the financialization of America was similar to that of other players, except for one thing: Goldman didn’t believe its own hype. ... Goldman, famously, made a lot of money selling securities backed by subprime mortgages — then made a lot more money by selling mortgage-backed securities short, just before their value crashed. All of this was perfectly legal, but the net effect was that Goldman made profits by playing the rest of us for suckers.

And Wall Streeters have every incentive to keep playing that kind of game.

The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other people lose. ... You have every reason, then, to steer investors into taking risks they don’t understand.

And the events of the past year have skewed those incentives even more, by putting taxpayers as well as investors on the hook if things go wrong. ... Wall Street in general, Goldman very much included, benefited hugely from the government’s provision of a financial backstop — an assurance that it will rescue major financial players whenever things go wrong.

You can argue that such rescues are necessary if we’re to avoid a replay of the Great Depression. In fact, I agree. But the result is that the financial system’s liabilities are now backed by an implicit government guarantee.

Now, the last time there was a comparable expansion of the financial safety net, the creation of federal deposit insurance in the 1930s, it was accompanied by much tighter regulation, to ensure that banks didn’t abuse their privileges. This time, new regulations are still in the drawing-board stage — and the finance lobby is already fighting against even the most basic protections for consumers.

If these lobbying efforts succeed, we’ll have set the stage for an even bigger financial disaster a few years down the road. The next crisis could look something like the savings-and-loan mess of the 1980s, in which deregulated banks gambled with, or in some cases stole, taxpayers’ money — except that it would involve the financial industry as a whole.

The bottom line is that Goldman’s blowout quarter is good news for Goldman and the people who work there. It’s good news for financial superstars in general, whose paychecks are rapidly climbing back to precrisis levels. But it’s bad news for almost everyone else.

The other reason we are more vulnerable is, as this story points out, is that "two giants" are emerging from the financial crisis, and they are "starting to tower over the handful of financial titans that used to dominate the industry." Thus, if other competitors cannot recover similarly, and if the government does not use regulation and other means to level the playing field, the banking industry could end up even more concentrated and vulnerable than it was before (a point I wish I'd made here).

"Congress Must not Touch the Federal Reserve"

Mark Gertler says the Fed's independence should not be compromised:

Congress must not touch the Federal Reserve, by Mark Gertler: The economy was experiencing the worst recession since the war. In Congress, members were beginning to wonder whether the Federal Reserve’s intervention strategy was extracting too great a toll on the economy. Some started to suggest publicly that it may be time to rein in the central bank’s independence.

Sound familiar? Though they bear a strong resemblance to ... today, the events I refer to in fact happened in the early 1980s, in the midst of what was then the most serious economic crisis since the Depression. The head of the institution under threat of losing its independence was none other than Paul Volcker.

Of course, Mr Volcker would go on to be recognised as one of the great central bankers of modern times. He would do so by standing firm against political pressures. By continuing on the course he set out, the economy recovered and a new era of price and output stability began. ... In the Volcker era, the political outcry occurred in the midst of the economic contraction that the Fed had engineered to tame inflation. The costs of the policy were plain to see, but the long-term benefits that would eventually emerge were difficult for many to imagine at the time.

The Fed’s role has been different this time round. Rather than trying to slow the economy, it has been acting to contain the damage brought on by the most complex financial crisis of modern history. By the accounts of many, the Fed has acted masterfully under difficult circumstances. ...

Given that hard times remain, nonetheless, it is natural that Congress is questioning the Fed, just as it did in the early 1980s. ... Unfortunately, the Fed cannot demonstrate what would have happened to the economy if it had not intervened in the way it did. Many observers agree that the situation would be far worse than it is today. Yet discussions of reining in central bank powers proceed as if the financial system would have stabilised itself without any Fed intervention.

The Fed well understands the lesson from the Volcker era that it can be effective only when it resists political attempts to influence its decisions. One can only hope that sober voices in Congress who appreciate the importance of central bank independence will help keep Capitol Hill from taking any measures that do permanent damage to the Fed.

A more constructive route for Congress would be to proceed with regulatory reform that would prevent a repeat of the current situation. At the core of the crisis is an antiquated regulatory system that permitted large financial institutions to take excessive risks. By giving the Fed the ability to monitor risk-taking by these institutions, Congress would diminish greatly the likelihood the central bank would again need to intervene directly in private credit markets.

The Fed may not have been perfect in its response to this or previous crises, but that doesn't mean that a less independent Fed would have done better. Taking away Fed independence - including subjecting the Fed to audits by the GAO - would be a mistake. In addition, if we are going to strengthen regulatory authority so that we can better monitor and reduce systemic risk that threatens the financial system - and we should - that authority needs to be in the hands of an independent entity, and the Fed is the natural place for this. Finally, its role in regulating system-wide risk is complementary to many of its other activities. For example, its role as a systemic risk regulator would involve monitoring risk within large institutions. Should a bank get into trouble, that would be helpful in assessing whether the bank should be granted access to the discount window in its capacity as lender of last resort.

We need to maintain an independent Fed, to give the Fed the powers it needs to monitor and regulate the level of overall risk, and to give the Fed the authority it now lacks to put banks through an orderly bankruptcy process so it can avoid bailing out financial institutions that are in trouble and a threat to overall the financial system.

Update: See Willem Buiter for a longer, more detailed version of many of the same points, e.g.:

Probably the single most damaging  failure of the US Treasury, the US Congress and the US financial regulators was there inability/unwillingness to create a special resolution regime (SRR) with structured early intervention and prompt corrective action for all systemically important financial institutions (those too big, too complex, to interconnected, too international or too politically connected to fail in the ordinary Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 way).  ...

But however weak its past performance and credentials, they are rock-solid compared to those of the other candidate institutions. ...

Only the Fed can fulfill the macro-prudential regulator-supervisor role.  That is because it has the short-term deep pockets.  It is the source of the ultimate, unquestioned liquidity in the economy, through its monopoly of the issuance of base money.  Without the short-term deep pockets, a macro-prudential regulator/supervisor cannot act as lender of last resort, market maker of last resort or provider of enhanced credit support.  It would be ... toothless...

He also makes this point:

The problem with this solution of the macro-prudential regulator/supervisor problem is that it is incompatible with central bank operational independence as interpreted since 1989 or thereabouts. ... When the central bank plays a quasi-fiscal role, as the Fed has been doing on an unprecedented scale in the current crisis, the fullest possible degree of accountability to the Congress, the tax payer and the citizens is essential.  The Fed has no mandate to engage in quasi-fiscal operations, even when it is for a good cause.  ...

If the same institution, the central bank, has to be in charge of both normal monetary policy and systemic risk regulation (albeit jointly with the Treasury for the systemic risk role), there is no elegant, first-best solution.  Either monetary policy will be driven by politicians whose macroeconomics is limited to a partial understanding of the Keynesian cross and whose monetary policy views can be summarised by the proposition that the have never seen an official policy rate so low they would not want it even lower, or the central bank continues to act as an off-budget, off-balance sheet special purpose vehicle of the Treasury.

You pick.

Okay. As much as possible, monetary policy should be kept out of the hands of politicians.

Update: Jim Hamilton (I also signed the petition a day or two ago):

I joined many of my colleagues in urging Congress and the President to remember just how valuable an independent central bank is for the ordinary citizens of this country. You may not pay much attention to central bank independence. But you'll miss it when it's gone.

"Ideas and Rules for the World in the Aftermath of the Storm"

This is a summary of the "causes and nature" of the financial crisis. I've added a few comments along the way:

Lessons for the future: Ideas and rules for the world in the aftermath of the storm, Part I, by Guido Tabellini, Vox EU: Almost two years after the beginning of the financial crisis that has overwhelmed the world economy, it may be time to draw some conclusions and outline the main lessons for the future. Is it really a turning point for market economies, a systemic crisis that will radically change the division of tasks between state and market? Or will everything be back to normal once a number of important technical problems concerning financial regulation are solved?

Market failure

Let us start with the market failure. There is no doubt that the crisis has revealed a serious failure in one of the most sophisticated markets in the world – modern finance. One of the crucial tasks of financial markets is allocating risk. They have failed stunningly. Risk has been underestimated, and many intermediaries took excessive risks. The reasons for this failure and the implications for economic policy, however, are less clear.

One possible explanation is that it was just due to poor judgement. Financial innovation has been so fast that even sophisticated operators were not always able to fully understand the degree of risk of the financial instruments that were constructed. The systemic implications of those instruments were even less clear. As a consequence, many investors overestimated global financial markets’ capacities, overlooking the systemic risk and the illiquidity risk that proved crucial in this crisis. This mistake can partly be explained by the difficulty of correctly evaluating the probability of rare or infrequent events. If this were all, there would be no need to worry. This crisis will not be forgotten, and it will certainly leave a mark on risk management practices and organisation models of financial intermediaries.

There is also a less benevolent explanation for the failure of financial markets, however, that highlights a systematic distortion of individual incentives rather than a mistake. First of all, the “originate and distribute” model, which separates the concession of the loan from the financial investment decision, entails obvious moral hazard problems. Secondly, rating agencies, paid by those issuing the very assets being rated, experience an obvious conflict of interest. Third, managers’ remuneration schemes encourage myopic behaviour and excessive risk taking – if the bonus depends on short-term performance indicators, each individual manager is induced to take risks that are large but rare. If this is true, it means that we cannot trust the ability of markets to learn. Distorted incentives must also be redressed, through new, stricter regulation, even at the cost of significantly slowing down financial innovation or giving up some of its beneficial effects.

It's worth pointing out that there are distinct market failures here because the best policy to overcome the market failure depends upon the type of market failure it addresses. I would have also highlighted the asymmetric information problem in these markets since the desire for reliable information on risks is what drives the need for the ratings agencies, and I would have also noted that the mal incentives extended beyond just the "originate and distribute" model, homeowners (with no recourse loans), real estate agents (who want to sell as many houses as they can for as much as they can to increase commissions), appraisers (who share some of the conflicts that ratings agencies have and also exist to solve an information problem), and so on. So it wasn't just banks and brokers responding to the bad incentives of the originate and distribute model, just about every link in the chain had bad incentives that distorted outcomes in ways that encouraged the build up of excessive risk.

Also, these two explanations are not mutually exclusive. The market failures can lead to excessive risk accumulation, and the extent of this risk could be misperceived. I think it was the interaction of the market failures and the misperception, not predominantly one or the other. If the market failures do not allow dangerous risk levels to accumulate, misperceiving it is not nearly so dangerous.

Regulatory failure

Mistakes in risk management cannot be only attributed to private operators. Supervisors have made major mistakes as well, allowing banks to accumulate off-balance-sheet liabilities and tolerating an excessive growth of leverage (i.e. the ratio of total assets to shareholders' equity) and indebtedness. This could be due to capture of supervisors by banks, arbitrage and international competition among supervising agencies, or implementation deficiencies. But more importantly, there has been a fundamental conceptual mistake –monitoring each financial institution solely on an individual basis, considering as the value at risk of the individual intermediary without taking systemic risk into any consideration. This is the same mistake that the individual intermediaries made.

I agree with the conceptual mistake noted here, but there was another one too. Everyone thought it was a good idea to get risk off of the traditional banking systems balance sheet. Somehow the notion was present that this would - through worldwide distribution of risks - reduce the chances of a meltdown to nearly zero, i.e. to reduce systemic risk. This, of course, turned out to be wrong since risk did, in fact, get concentrated in dangerous ways.

A crisis of these proportions cannot have stemmed exclusively from mistakes in risk management. The reason is that high-risk investments were relatively small compared to the overall dimension of global financial markets (Calomiris 2007). Many observers expected that the American real estate bubble would burst. But few imagined that that would overwhelm financial markets all over the world. If this has happened, it must be that the shocks hit important amplifying mechanisms. This amplification can largely be attributed to financial regulation. In other words, even more than a market failure, the crisis was triggered by a failure of regulation (see the eleventh ICMB-Geneva Report, summarised by Wyplosz 2009).

Not so much that regulation was too lenient, or that deregulation had gone too far – rather, the very founding principles of regulation have amplified the effects of a shock that in reality was not that large. Subprime mortgages, the financial products whose insolvency has originated the current crisis, amount to about one trillion dollars. It is a large number in absolute terms, but small with respect to the total of about 80 trillion dollars of financial assets of the world banking system. As a comparison, consider that the losses originally estimated in 1990 during the savings and loans crisis were about 600-800 millions of dollars, less than the total of subprime mortgages, but the total amount of financial assets was much smaller then. Yet, that crisis was quickly overcome without major upheavals. Why has it been so different this time?

There are two aspects of regulation that have amplified the effects of the initial shock: (i) the procyclicality of leverage, induced by constraints on banks’ equity, and (ii) accounting principles that require assets to be evaluated according to their market value. In case of a loss on investments, which erodes the capital of financial intermediaries, capital adequacy constraints under the Basel accord require reduced leverage and thus force banks to sell assets to obtain liquidity. The problem is thus exacerbated: forced sales reduce the market price of assets, worsening the balance sheets of other investors and inducing further forced sales of assets, in a vicious circle. Exactly the opposite happens during a boom: capital gains on portfolio assets allow intermediaries to expand leverage, which means taking on more debt in order to acquire new assets, in such a way that the price of assets is pushed up and other intermediaries become indebted chasing increasingly high prices. In sum, banking regulation has created a mechanism that amplifies the effects of shocks and accentuates cyclic fluctuations in the indebtedness of financial intermediaries.

I am coming around on the need to regulate leverage, and it does appear to have important cyclical variations. As to the mark to model versus mark to market debate, I still don't like the bad incentives and the possibility for error that exists with the mark to model framework. But the general question of how to best value the assets on a balance sheet during a time like this is an area where I still have some uncertainty.

One of the main lessons to be drawn from this crisis is that we need to deeply reconsider financial regulation and ask ourselves what its ultimate objective is – correcting distorted incentives of agents, creating buffers that reduce procyclicality of leverage, or reducing risks, and, if so, which risks? A sound regulatory system should address two concerns:

1. Correct distorted incentives of individual intermediaries or financial operators;
2. Reduce negative externalities and systemic risk, bearing in mind that evaluating risk management practices within individual intermediaries is not sufficient.

Finally, inevitably, this will have to translate into rules that reduce the size of leverage in absolute terms and its procyclicality.

And just to amplify a point from above, since a variety of problems caused the crisis, no single solution can fix them all. It will take a variety of fixes to shore up the system going forward.

Mistakes in managing the crisis

It is widely held that the current situation is mostly the result of economic policy mistakes (in regulation, in supervision and, according to some, monetary policy) made before the outbreak of the crisis. The corollary of this thesis is that it is sufficient to correct these mistakes in order to avoid the next crisis. But the truth is that many serious mistakes have been made during the management of the crisis and have significantly contributed to worsening the situation.

The unclear causes of the crisis have resulted in its management being improvised from step one without a clear path in mind. Bear Stearns was saved, Lehman Brothers failed, AIG was saved. Each decision was improvised, guided by neither pre-established criteria nor a sound and consistent strategy. The result is that, rather than boosting confidence, economic policy interventions have contributed to increasing confusion, panic, and fear.

I have made this point many times as well, and believe it created a lot of additional uncertainty. The handling of Lehman was a costly misstep.

Loss of confidence is always at the heart of any financial crisis. Expectations concerning the behaviour of authorities and other operators play a fundamental role in determining whether there will be contagion or whether the shock will be absorbed. But in order to influence expectations and restore confidence, policymakers must act according to procedures and criteria that are agreed upon and well understood, identifying the ultimate objectives and the policy tools to reach them. There has never been such clarity in this crisis, and that is an important lesson. To avoid repeating similar mistakes, it will be necessary to elaborate new and detailed procedures for managing complex phenomena such as the bankruptcy of large banks and more general policies aimed at preventing the worsening of systemic crises.

I agree, but how do we make these plans credible? We cannot bind future policymakers - they can do as they please - so how do credibly commit to these plans? When the next crisis hits and we have bankruptcy plans for a too big to fail institution, will we actually carry through or will we worry that it might not work out so well after all and step in as we did this time? Still, I think it's important that we try, and if the plans are good ones, we at least have a chance.

Given that large banks with systemic implications are typically multinational, these procedures will need to be coordinated at the international level. This is not easy, since, after all, only the state, and hence taxpayers, can cover systemic risk. Taxpayers must take on the burden of failing institutions’ debts, at least temporarily. But which state, which taxpayers, when the institution is a large multinational bank?

Although difficult, this problem is not new. Financial crises in developing countries, which occurred almost yearly in the 1990s, have now become less frequent and less devastating thanks to the procedures of crisis management elaborated within the International Monetary Fund. It is now time to learn from those experiences, adapting them to the specific problems of large multinational banks.

Yes, we need an institution that can serve as a global and modern version of a lender of last resort.

In my next column, I will outline where we might go from here.

One final comment. I think there are dangers when political power becomes concentrated in too interconnected to fail financial institutions, and this potential contributor to the crisis deserves more emphasis.

References

Brunnermeier, Markus K, Andrew Crockett, Charles A Goodhart, Avinash Persaud, and Hyun Song Shin (2009). The Fundamental Principles of Financial Regulation. Centre for Economic Policy Research and International Center for Monetary and Banking Studies.
Calomiris, Charles (2007). “Not (Yet) a ‘Minsky Moment’” VoxEU.org, 23 November.
Wyplosz, Charles (2009). “The ICMB-CEPR Geneva Report: ‘The Future of Financial Regulation’” VoxEU.org, 27 January.

This article may be reproduced with appropriate attribution.

Loonie Network Effects

Nick Rowe use California's IOUs and Canadian Tire money to illustrate possible outcomes when two currencies circulate side by side:

The State(s) Theory of Money: California and Canadian Tire, by Nick Rowe: I learn via [this] that there is a distinct chance that California will allow taxes to be paid in the new scrip it issued when it ran out of funds. I have no idea whether this will happen, or whether the Federal government will stop it. Let me just assume that it does happen, and that the Federal government does not stop it. I'm (almost) hoping that it does happen, and that the Fed doesn't stop it, because it would be such a fascinating experiment in monetary theory.

Assuming this experiment does go ahead, what are the chances that California scrip will circulate as a medium of exchange, and be generally acceptable, not just at banks, but in exchange for all or most goods and services?

Another way to ask this question: what's the difference between California and Canadian Tire?

For non-Canadian readers let me explain that Canadian Tire corporation is a large chain of stores selling a wide range of automotive supplies, hardware, sports and camping equipment, gasoline, etc., that has many outlets across Canada. And it issues Canadian Tire "Money". CT money consists of small paper notes, about the same size as US dollar bills, in denominations ranging from a few cents up to a couple of dollars. When you buy something at Canadian Tire, you get CT money with a face value of a couple of percent of the purchase price. Canadian Tire money is redeemable for merchandise, at par with Canadian dollars, at all Canadian Tire stores.

That last sentence is crucial. If the State of California accepts California scrip for payment of taxes, at par with US dollars, it is just like Canadian Tire. Sure, you have to pay taxes, and you don't have to shop at Canadian Tire, but most Canadians do shop at Canadian Tire, and do so more times a year than most Californians pay taxes (if we are talking about annual income taxes, at least). So the frequency with which Canadian Tire money can be redeemed at its issuer will exceed that of California scrip.

But Canadian Tire "Money" does not normally circulate as a generally accepted medium of exchange. In special circumstances, someone (other than Canadian Tire) might accept Canadian Tire money in payment for goods, but only as a favour if you have run out of "real" money, or at a discount. It is not generally used outside of Canadian Tire stores. People generally redeem it as soon as they next visit a Canadian Tire store (or just leave it stashed away until they remember to do so).

And we can understand why Canadian Tire money does not circulate as a medium of exchange. This is a case where, contrary to Gresham's Law, good money drives out bad. (Gresham's Law does not apply because there is no legal tender law saying that merchants have to accept Canadian Tire money at par, and only Canadian Tire does so).

We have known since Carl Menger that money, like language, has network effects. If the people with whom you interact are already speaking a particular language, or using a particular medium of exchange, that increases your incentive to adopt that same language or medium of exchange. Conventions can arise spontaneously, and have the force of custom. Canadian Tire money would have to be, not just as good as, but significantly better than the Loonie, in order to compete with the Loonie as a medium of exchange. It isn't. You can redeem Canadian Tire money at par in Canadian Tire stores, and below par elsewhere, so everybody just redeems it at Canadian Tire stores. It doesn't circulate.

So California scrip would end up like Canadian Tire money - being kept in the glove box until your next visit to the issuing store - except for one thing: California scrip pays 3.5% interest; Canadian Tire money pays none. In that one respect at least, California scrip is better than US dollars.

Suppose California scrip does end up circulating as a medium of exchange, being generally acceptable at par to US dollars. Is that possible? I don't think it is, because then Gresham's Law would kick in. If I hold both in my pocket, and merchants will accept both, at par, I would pay with US dollars, and hoard the California scrip, to collect the interest.

It's hard to model a stable equilibrium in which two different monies could circulate side-by-side. If one money gains any slight advantage over the other, and becomes more widely accepted, that makes people even more willing to use it, and less willing to use the other, until one money dominates. And that's what we normally see, except in "bilingual" border zones.

And I just find it hard to imagine that California scrip could ever displace the US dollar as the preferred medium of exchange, even in California. The 3.5% interest might offset any risk of default or depreciation, but the sheer force of custom should outweigh both.

How Should We Interpret Goldman Sach's Unexpectedly Large Earnings?

The NY Times Room for Debate is discussing how we should interpret Goldman Sach's compensation pool, which will be an $11.36 billion set aside for the first half of 2009. Here's the unedited version of my entry (you may like the shorter, edited version better):  

Returning to High-Risk Strategies, Room for Debate, NY Times, by Mark Thoma: What does the size of Goldman's compensation pool tell us? It signals several things. First, it gives some indication that the financial sector is improving, and that is good news. There's no guarantee, however, that the overall economy will follow anytime soon. Even with improvements in the financial sector, the recovery of the broader economy is likely to be a slow process.

One of the reasons I expect the recovery to be slow despite improvements in the financial sector is that the economy cannot go back to where it was before the crisis hit. The financial and housing sectors need to shrink, too many economic resources were used unproductively in support of these activities, and the automobile sector is also in transition.

And it's not just that the financial sector needs to get smaller so that resources can be used productively elsewhere, the financial sector also needs to change its ways so that risk accumulations do not threaten the financial system and the broader economy. As Robert Reich notes today, Goldman's chief financial officer tells Bloomberg News that "Our model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same." Thus, a second signal from Goldman's unexpectedly large earnings is that firms such as Goldman Sachs are returning to the same high-risk strategies backed by too big to fail government guarantees that got us into trouble in the first place, and that aspect of Goldman's success is worrisome. It's a signal that the excesses that led to the high incomes of financial executives have not ended.

Why aren't the profits and the bonuses paid to executives justifiable? Don't they signal the superior talents of Goldman employees, and don't those talents deserve to be rewarded by the marketplace? I think we can legitimately question whether this is a reward for superior talent. Goldman was helped by bailout funds -- there's some debate about whether it actually needed a direct infusion of funds -- but it's certainly true that Goldman benefitted when its counterparties such as AIG were bailed out. Goldman is also benefitting from its early escape from government constraints that still inhibit the ability of other firms to compete on equal - though perhaps overly slippery and risky - footing.

 So Goldman's earnings are not simply the product of the superior talent of Goldman's executives, there is more to the story. In addition, the bad incentives that executive compensation structures provide was one of the factors that caused the crisis, and the size of the compensation pool tells us there is work yet to be done to fix this problem.

Other entries from William K. Black, Yves Smith, Charles Geisst, David Merkel, and Jeffrey Miron.

Consumer Protection Elitists? Hardly

Richard Green takes on Peter Wallison's arguments against establishing a Financial Product Safety Commission:

Peter Wallison calls Consumer Protection Elitist: He writes:

Traditionally, consumer protection in the United States has focused on disclosure. It has always been assumed that with adequate disclosure all consumers -- of whatever level of sophistication -- could make rational decisions about the products and services they are offered. No more. If the administration's plan is adopted, many consumers will be told that they cannot have particular products or services because they are not sophisticated, educated or perhaps intelligent enough to understand what they have been offered.

Conservatives have always argued that liberals are elitists who do not respect ordinary Americans; this legislation seems to prove it. For example, the administration's plan would allow the educated and sophisticated elites to have access to whatever financial services they want but limit the range of products available to ordinary Americans.

This unprecedented result comes about because, under the proposed legislation, every provider of a financial service (a term that includes organizations as varied as banks, check-cashing services, leasing companies and payment services) is required to offer a "standard" product or service -- to be defined and approved by the proposed agency -- that will be simple and entail "lower risks" for consumers. These standard products are called "plain vanilla" in the white paper that the administration circulated in advance of the legislation.

Such protection is actually not unprecedented. For example, people must be deemed to be "accredited investors" or (for more complicated products) "qualified purchasers" in order to invest in certain types of hedge funds. And stock brokers have an obligation to make sure their clients' investments are "suitable."

But beyond the issue of precedence, there is a broader issue of safety. We reasonably forbid or require a variety of actions in the interest of safety. We require people to wear seatbelts. Be don't allow people to buy certain type of narcotics over the counter. Perhaps Mr. Wallison thinks such protections are a bad idea too, in which case he is consistent, if not also ridiculous. Mortgages can be dangerous products. Let's turn it over to Richard Thaler:

Fast forward to 2008, and the world of mortgage shopping had become a much more complicated place. Borrowers were quoted low initial “teaser” rates that would jump later to some higher level, depending on market interest rates at the time, and there were prepayment penalties for paying off the loans early. For such mortgages, an A.P.R. was no longer an adequate measure of the loan’s cost.

How can we help people make sense of all this?

One extreme approach would be to ban complex mortgages entirely: we could just go back to the world of uniform fixed-rate mortgages. But the cost of simplicity is an end to innovation. ...

A better approach is to strive for maintaining diverse options but helping consumers make smart choices and avoid the most common pitfalls. ... As the administration plan describes it, lenders could be required to offer some mortgages they call “plain vanilla,” with uniform terms. There might be one vanilla 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage and one five-year, adjustable-rate mortgage. The features of these plain mortgages would be uniform, much as in a standard lease used in most rental agreements.

Lenders would also be free to offer other exotic mortgages — perhaps called “rocky road” mortgages? — along with the vanilla variety, but these offerings would receive more intense scrutiny from regulators.

I am not sure what is so elitist about this, other than the fact that those who are hostile to regulations tend to like to use elitist as an epithet for their opponents. So I guess I have two questions for Mr. Wallison:

(1) If I gave him an HP12C calculator, assumptions about an interest rate path, and the terms of an option-ARM mortgage, would he be able to tell me the payment on that mortgage in, say, month 62? Perhaps he could, but I don't know too many lawyers (and he is a lawyer) who could do that calculation. ... The point is ... to emphasize a fact--most of us do not have the equipment to make informed judgments about complex financial products.

(2) I am curious how often Mr. Wallison hangs out with those who are not elite. Does he socialize with, say, median income people? ... Perhaps he does, in which case he is entitled to refer to "the elite" as an other. But I have my doubts.

I would be hesitant to endorse this banks weren't "free to offer other exotic mortgages," but that's not a problem.

Why make these products identical, i.e. why have a plain vanilla option? Have you ever tried to compare the price of mattresses at different stores? It's almost impossible - intentionally - to find matching model numbers and exactly identical products, so you are never quite sure which is the better deal. That uncertainty gives the stores pricing power. If stores were required to offer two or three identical mattresses, such comparison shopping would no longer be a problem and you'd expect competition to drive the price down its minimum level. There would still be exotic mattresses at each store, nobody would make you purchase the standard option, you would still have choices. But even if you aren't a mattress expert and hence have little idea if the exotic mattresses are worth the price, at least there would be two or three choices where you could be sure that the mattresses were priced fairly and that they adhered to particular quality and safety standards.

Of course, since such a proposal would take away pricing power of firms selling mattresses, and they would be opposed to such a requirement. It's no different for financial firms, and Simon Johnson doesn't think the administration is being aggressive enough in countering efforts to undermine and weaken the proposed consumer protection legislation:

Waiting For The Big Push: Selling The Consumer Protection Agency For Financial Products. by Simon Johnson: ...[T]he administration’s major remaining initiative is its version of a Financial Product Safety Commission - something that would be clearly beneficial for the public.  And the skepticism – and outright opposition – comes from the banking sector. ...

As far as I can see, [the administration is] not pushing this new consumer protection/safety agency hard enough. Some sources claim that Secretary Geithner is fully on board with the Agency...  But there is no sign of the frenzied effort that accompanied efforts to launch the PPIP – when, for example, almost every economist in the administration seemed pressed into service to call potential critics and ask them to “give it a chance.”

One symptom of this “effort gap” is that counter-arguments and disinformation about the proposed agency begin to gain the upper hand.  One senior executive recently told me that this agency would have unprecedented powers to determine the design of individual products – “something not even the FDA can do.”

Of course, this is nonsense.  The new agency would be powerful – and thus it is feared by the industry – and presumably it would be able to prevent sufficiently toxic products from being sold.  Hopefully, it will also be able to require that all financial institutions also offer some vanilla products, to make consumers’ choices easier.  But the idea that an agency would design the details of all products for any sector is both implausible and a malicious rumor being spread by opponents (actually, it reminds me of the pushback from meatpackers, and others, early in the 20th century). 

If Treasury is so supportive of this new Agency, now is the time to launch public, high profile, and clever counterattacks.  By the time the legislation is being voted on, it will be too late.

And in this context, the administration should push hard on one of the great ironies here.  Financial sector executives like to stress the importance of “consumer confidence,” and they urge the government to take steps to restore this confidence...

But the same people completely reject the idea that consumers will feel more confident about financial products if there is finally some serious consumer protection around those products.  Whenever people learn – or just fear – that a particular food product is unsafe, they stop buying it.  When the stock market ripped people off in the late 1920s, it took legislation with real teeth to rebuild investor confidence – take a look at, for example, the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. ...

If Treasury and the administration really wants a Consumer Protection/Safety Agency for finance, they need to kick their support campaign into much higher gear immediately.

Consumers have a big information disadvantage when it comes to mortgages and understanding which product fits their needs without exposing them to unnecessary risk, and in some cases they may not even be presented with the full spectrum of mortgage products that are available when they apply for a loan. And though it's better than it used to be, it's also difficult to shop around due to the transactions costs involved. The information problem combined with the difficulty in comparison shopping give brokers the opportunity to steer people toward products that are more profitable, but not as good a fit for the borrower. Having a few common options that are available across brokers makes comparison shopping easier and helps to overcome the information problem.

Update: More at Rortybomb.

Update: Tim Fernholz disagrees with Simon Johnson:

Simon Johnson writes that the administration isn't supporting the proposed Consumer Financial Products Agency enough. Since I wrote a piece arguing the exact opposite last week, I thought I'd respond, though I do agree with Simon in so far as he administration could never do too much to support the creation of the agency.

The Shadow Knows

Awhile back there was some controversy over the role of the shadow banking system in the financial crisis. Resetting the stage:

Much Ado About the Shadow Banking System, The Hearing: Occasionally, a blog post will flower into a wide-ranging debate in what is usually called the "economics blogosphere." Last Friday's guest post on regulation by Mark Thoma triggered just such a debate. I'll quote the controversial passage at some length:

Deregulation beginning with the Reagan administration combined with financial innovation and digital technology led to the emergence of what is known as the shadow banking system. These are financial institutions that, for all intents and purposes, function just like banks but are not subject to the same rules and regulations and, in some cases, are hardly regulated at all.

The development of the shadow banking system is important because the troubles we are seeing today are not the result of problems in the traditional, regulated sector of the financial industry. The problems began in the unregulated shadow banking system.

We need to bring the shadow banking system – essentially any institution that takes deposits and makes loans either directly or indirectly – under the same regulatory umbrella as the traditional banking system.

Dr. Manhattan, an anonymous blogger at The Atlantic, focused on that middle paragraph in a post called "Sentences That Don't Compute," arguing that the crisis was due to problems at regulated financial institutions, such as AIG, not the shadow banking system.

Brad DeLong defended Thoma, drawing the line between commercial deposit-taking banks (heavily regulated) and other institutions (lightly regulated).

Thoma also responded on his own blog, pointing to the fact that AIG's problems, for example, were caused by the unregulated part if its business - the Financial Products derivatives-trading business.

Arnold Kling (who usually blogs here) responded to DeLong at The Atlantic, saying that failures of regulation of commercial banks were also a problem.

Finally, Rortybomb has a careful review of the issues, showing how different people mean different things by "shadow banking system." Ultimately he sides with Thoma on this point: money shifted into a sector of the financial system where there was no backstop against a liquidity crisis - unlike the regulated operations of the commercial banks, where deposit insurance plays that role. This is a problem that needs to be fixed.

Mike Rorty follows up today in The Atlantic's business blog with an interview with Perry Mehrling on shadow banking and its role in the crisis. Mehrling's bottom line for regulators is a "new Bagehot Rule" for modern markets: Insure freely but at a high premium.

Here's part of the interview:

Are Small Banks the Answer for Developing Countries?

This week at The Economist:

Justin Lin, the World Bank’s chief economist,... in his guest Economics focus column ... argues that developing countries should base their financial systems on small, local banks:

The size and sophistication of financial institutions and markets in the developed world are not appropriate in low-income markets. Small local banks are the best entities for providing financial services to the enterprises and households that are most important in terms of comparative advantage—be they asparagus farmers in Peru, cut-flower companies in Kenya or garment factories in Bangladesh. The experiences of countries such as Japan, South Korea and China are telling. Those countries managed to avoid financial crises for long stretches of their development as they evolved from low-income to middle- and high-income countries. It helped greatly that they adhered to simple banking systems (rather than rushing to develop their stock markets and integrate into international financial networks) and did not liberalise their capital accounts until they became more advanced.

Mr Lin concludes:

Leave the developed markets to worry about how to reform their highly evolved financial systems. To make sustained progress in lifting the weight of the extreme poverty that will remain after the crisis has subsided, low-income countries need to make their financial institutions small and simple.

Over the course of the next week, we will devote this blog to a discussion of Mr Lin’s column, posting responses from our correspondents, invited experts from the academic and policy worlds, and our commenters. We'll be collecting the entire series of posts here. Do stop by and contribute to the debate.

Here is the lead Essay: Walk, Don't Run by Justin Lin

Here are the responses so far:

• Big bank advantages, by The Economist: London
• Why favour local tiddlers?, by The Economist: London
• Is small really beautiful?, by Asim Khwaja
• Passive voice, by Tyler Cowen
• Difficult trade-offs, by Abhijit Banerjee
• Leave room for growth, by Luigi Zingales
• Function, not form, by Ross Levine
• Scale matters, by Antoinette Schoar

Here is my response:

Small banks need help, by Mark Thoma: I agree with many of the points in the article regarding the potential that small and simple banks provide. But while small and simple banks can help to overcome many problems, by themselves they may not be enough fully serve the financial needs within developing countries.

There are two issues here. The first is to determine the types of financial products that best suit the needs of people and businesses within developing countries, and the second is how to best deliver those products to the people and businesses who could benefit from using them.

Small banks and microfinance of the type emphasised in the article can meet many of the financial needs in developing countries, for example the need that farmers have to borrow funds to purchase seed and fertiliser, and then repay the loans at harvest, can be met in this way. But other needs require more sophisticated financial products. The ability to hedge price risk through futures markets, the need for insurance against crop failure, the need to purchase farm equipment through pooling arrangements that share the costs among end users, and the problems brought about by seasonality require more sophisticated products and arrangements. The point is that not all of the financial needs in agricultural, small scale manufacturing, and services are simple, even in developing countries.

Can these more complex financial needs be satisfied, or are there important barriers within developing countries that prevent these products from being used?

"The Fall of the Toxic-Assets Plan"

I have the same worries, so I would like to hear why we shouldn't be concerned that banks are holding overvalued assets on their balance sheets. What's the counterargument to this?:

The Fall of the Toxic-Assets Plan,  by Lucian Bebchuk, Real Time Economics: The plan for buying troubled assets — which was earlier announced as the central element of the administration’s financial stability plan — has been recently curtailed drastically. The Treasury and the FDIC have attributed this development to banks’ new ability to raise capital through stock sales without having to sell toxic assets. ...

What happened? Banks’ balance sheets do remain clogged with toxic assets, which are still difficult to value. But the willingness of banks to sell toxic assets ... has been killed by decisions of accounting authorities and banking regulators. ...

Armed with ample government funding, the private managers running funds set under the program would be expected to offer fair value for banks’ assets. Indeed, because the government’s ... non-recourse financing, many have expressed worries that such fund managers would have incentives to pay even more than fair value... The problem, however, is that banks now have strong incentives to avoid selling toxic assets at any price below face value even when the price fully reflects fair value.

A month after the PPIP program was announced, under pressure from banks and Congress, the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board watered down accounting rules and made it easier for banks not to mark down the value of toxic assets. For many toxic assets..., banks may avoid recognizing the loss as long as they don’t sell the assets. ...

In another blow to banks’ potential willingness to sell toxic assets,... bank supervisors conducting stress tests ... explicitly didn’t take into account the decline in the economic value of toxic loans and securities that mature after 2010 and that the banks won’t have to recognize in financial statements until then.

Together, the policies adopted by accounting and banking authorities strongly discourage banks from selling any toxic assets maturing after 2010 at prices that fairly reflect their lowered value. ... [S]elling would require recognizing losses and might result in the regulators’ requiring the bank to raise additional capital...

While the market for banks’ toxic assets will remain largely shut down, we are going to get a sense of their value when the FDIC auctions off later this summer the toxic assets held by failed banks taken over by the FDIC. If these auctions produce substantial discounts to face value, they should ring the alarm bells. ... In the meantime, it must be recognized that the curtailing of the PIPP program doesn’t imply that the toxic assets problem has largely gone away; it has been merely swept under the carpet.

Was it Risk Concentration or Leverage?

Ricardo Caballero hasn't given up on his argument that it was the excessive concentration or risk, not leverage, that caused problems in financial markets (and it's an argument I'm sympathetic to):

Economic Witch Hunting, by Ricardo Caballero, Commentary, Economists Forum: Perhaps one of the economic phenomena most akin to witch-hunting is the diagnostic and policy response that develops during the recovery phase of a financial crisis. Understandably, pressured politicians and policymakers rush to find culprits... All too often they find a ready supply of these in preconceptions and superficial analyses of correlations. This time around the scapegoats are global imbalances and leverage.

Global imbalances are the victim of preconceptions: Many economists and commentators argued before the crisis that large global imbalances would lead to the demise of the U.S. economy... The crisis indeed came, but rather than destabilizing the US economy, capital flows helped to stabilise it, as flight-to-quality capital sought rather than ran away from US assets. ...

The fact that the actual mechanism behind the crisis had nothing to do with that which was used to explain the forecast of doom has long being forgotten, false idols have been erected,... global imbalances have been indicted for witchcraft, and ever more exotic rebalancing and currency proposals make it to the front pages of newspapers around the world.

Leverage is the victim of superficial analyses of correlations: In my view one of the main factors behind the severity of the financial crisis was the excessive concentration of aggregate risk in highly-leveraged financial institutions. Note that the emphasis is on the concentration of aggregate risk rather than on the much-hyped leverage. The problem in the current crisis was not leverage per se, but the fact that banks had held on to AAA tranches of structured asset-backed securities which were more exposed to aggregate surprise shocks than their rating would, when misinterpreted, suggest.

Thus, when systemic confusion emerged, these complex financial instruments quickly soured, compromised the balance sheet of their leveraged holders, and triggered asset fire sales which ravaged balance sheets across financial institutions. The result was a vicious feedback loop between assets exposed to aggregate conditions and leveraged balance sheets.

The distinction emphasized in the previous paragraph may seem subtle, but it turns out to have a first order implication for economic policy... The optimal policy response to this problem is not to increase capital requirements (or to deleverage), as the current fashion has it, but to remove the aggregate risk from systemically important leveraged financial institutions’ balance sheets. This should be done through prepaid and often mandatory macro-insurance type arrangements, which can accommodate valid too-big or too-complex to fail concerns, but without crippling the financial industry with the burden of brute-force capital requirements. ...

We shouldn't assume that the next potential financial crisis will be identical to this one in terms of how it comes about or how it expresses itself, so we need to ensure that the system can withstand different types of financial shocks. Given that these shocks can come from unexpected places, it's not clear to me that insurance discussed above will stop all of the ways in which financial market problems can lead to harmful deleveraging. Hence, we may want to put the type of insurance plan Ricardo Caballero would like to see instituted in place, and then buttress that protection with enhanced capital requirements to safeguard against unexpected causes of harmful deleveraging.

What Caused the Housing Bubble?

Ed Glaeser says that if people were as smart as he is, they would have realized housing price increases were unsustainable and there wouldn't have been a housing bubble:

In Housing, Even Hindsight Isn’t 20-20, by Edward L. Glaeser: ...[Is] the housing market ... starting to hit bottom? ... One major point of economics is that predicting asset prices is extremely hard... Moreover, the last seven years should make everyone wary about predicting housing price changes. ...

The housing price volatility of the last six years has been so extreme that it confounds conventional economic explanations. Over a four-year period — from February 2002 to February 2006 — the Case-Shiller index increased ... about 50 percent in constant dollars.

Certainly, those price increases cannot be explained by increases in average income. Income growth was quite modest from 2002 to 2006. Nor can the boom be explained by a dearth of new housing supply. Construction rose dramatically during the boom...

A number of pundits place the blame for the bubble on ... Alan Greenspan. They argue that loose monetary policy caused housing prices to rise. While lower interest rates are correlated with higher prices, the relationship is far too weak to explain the price explosion that America experienced. ... To get a 50 percent real increase in housing prices, real interest rates would have had to decline by more than ...10 percentage points..., which is not what happened. ... Real rates actually rose slightly between 2002 and 2006.

While low interest rates, on their own, cannot make sense of the bubble, perhaps the increased availability of credit to subprime borrowers has more explanatory power. ... Yet the correlation between housing price growth and subprime lending across markets is as likely to indicate that lenders took more risks in booming markets as that those risks caused markets to boom. ...

The most plausible explanations of the bubble require levels of irrationality that are difficult for economists either to accept or explain.

For many years, the creators of the housing index, Chip Case and Robert Shiller, have argued that housing bubbles were fueled by irrationally optimistic beliefs about future housing price appreciation. More recently, Monika Piazzesi and Martin Schneider have documented the rise in optimistic beliefs about housing price appreciation over the recent boom. Using some elegant algebra, they suggest that overly optimistic beliefs could cause a boom even if those beliefs were held by only a small share of the population.

It is hard to argue with this view. The only way that anyone could justify spending bubble-level prices in Las Vegas was by having the incorrect belief that those prices would increase.

I once thought that the Las Vegas housing market was so straightforward (vast amounts of land, no significant regulation) that no one could be deluded into thinking that prices could long diverge from construction costs, but I was wrong. I underestimated the human capacity to think rosy thoughts about the value of a house.

Yet even if ridiculously rosy beliefs are a major part of bubbles, we cannot say that we understand those bubbles until we understand the sources of such beliefs. Economists like to link beliefs to reality, but these views weren’t grounded in sound statistics. The housing boom was a great wildfire that spread from market to market, but it is hard to make sense of its flames. ...

I don't think people believed that housing prices would never, ever go down, what they thought is that housing prices would go up in real terms, on average, over time - that housing was a good long-run investment. They knew there would be variation around that trend, but they expected the variation to be relatively mild, they didn't expect the severe variation in prices and associated problems that actually occurred.

But as Shiller argues, the belief that real housing prices rise over time is false, the evidence suggests that real housing prices are relatively flat over the long-run. Because people expected prices to rise on average when they should have expected them to remain flat, the correction - the variation in prices - was far larger than anticipated and many homeowners weren't able to simply ride out the short-run variation like they thought they would be able to do.

But this still leaves a question unanswered. Why did people have this false belief about the long-run trajectory of prices? Shiller explains that this happened because people believed that both land and building materials were becoming relatively more scarce over time, a belief he says is false, but that just pushes the "but why did they believe that" question back one step from housing prices to the prices of land and raw materials.

So let me take a quick stab at an explanation (I'm not pushing this, it's just a quick thought). People are told (or were at that time) that stock markets are a great long-run investment. If you have the time to ride out the short-run fluctuations you can earn 8% per year. Just dump your money in an index fund that duplicates the market portfolio, and forget about it until many, many years later and you will do fine. Risk adjusted real returns on assets ought to equalize across markets through arbitrage, so shouldn't housing yield a real return similar to stocks (adjusting for risk)? Shouldn't there be a real return on housing just like in stock and other asset markets, and if so, doesn't that mean real prices will rise on average over time? This still requires beliefs about long-run prices at odds with (Shiller's) evidence though.

One more note. I may be wrong to assert that people thought that housing prices would rise forever. If you know that there is a bubble in an asset market, but you believe you can sell fast enough once the market hits a turning point to still make a profit, or at least not lose much in any case, then you may be willing to make an investment that tries to exploit the short-term surge in prices. But while I think that may apply to stock markets, or other markets where assets can be sold quickly (the belief that is, the reality is quite different when everybody tries to sell at once), I'm not sure this applies to housing where sales can be notoriously slow. But it's still possible that people would know there is a bubble in housing prices, but still be willing to make an investment because they believe that housing prices would fall so slowly that, if necessary, they could sell their house before taking a loss. It just doesn't seem to me that this explanation works as well in housing as it does in stock markets.

Stiglitz: The UN Takes Charge (Update: and The Economic Lessons of the Iraq War)

Joseph Stiglitz says the UN has a key role to play in "reforming the global financial and economic system":

The UN Takes Charge, by Joseph Stiglitz, Commentary, Project Syndicate: ...On June 23, a United Nations conference ... reached a consensus both about the causes of the downturn and why it was affecting developing countries so badly. It outlined some of the measures that should be considered and established a working group to explore the way forward...

The agreement was ... in many ways ... a clearer articulation of the crisis and what needs to be done than that offered by the G-20, the UN showed that decision-making needn’t be restricted to a self-selected club, lacking political legitimacy, and largely dominated by those who had considerable responsibility for the crisis in the first place. Indeed, the agreement showed the value of a more inclusive approach – for example, by asking key questions that might be too politically sensitive for some of the larger countries to raise, or by pointing out concerns that resonate with the poorest, even if they are less important for the richest.

One might have thought that the United States would have taken a leadership role, since the crisis was made there. Indeed, the US Treasury (including ... members of President Barack Obama’s economic team) pushed capital- and financial-market liberalization, which resulted in the rapid contagion of America’s problems around the world. ...[M]any participants were simply relieved that America did not put up obstacles..., as would have been the case if George W. Bush were still president. ...

The most sensitive issue touched upon by the UN conference – too sensitive to be discussed at the G-20 – was reform of the global reserve system. ... On the last day of the conference, as America was expressing its reservations about even discussing ... this issue..., China was once again reiterating that the time had come to begin working on a global reserve currency. Since a country’s currency can be a reserve currency only if others are willing to accept it as such, time may be running out for the dollar.

Emblematic of the difference between the UN and the G-20 conferences was the discussion of bank secrecy: whereas the G-20 focused on tax evasion, the UN Conference addressed corruption, too, which some experts contend gives rise to outflows from some of the poorest countries that are greater than the foreign assistance they receive.

The US and other advanced industrial countries pushed globalization. But this crisis has shown that they have not managed globalization as well as they should have. If globalization is to work for everyone, decisions about how to manage it must be made in a democratic and inclusive manner... The UN, notwithstanding all of its flaws, is the one inclusive international institution. This UN conference ... demonstrated the key role that the UN must play in any global discussion about reforming the global financial and economic system.

Update: Just noticed something else from Stiglitz, along with Linda J. Bilmes, on the economic lessons of the Iraq war:

The U.S. in Iraq: An economics lesson, by Linda J. Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, Commentary, LA Times: Tuesday, the U.S. "stood down" in Iraq, finalizing the pullout of 140,000 troops from Iraqi cities and towns -- the first step on the long path home. ...

But not so fast. The conflict that began in 2003 is far from over..., and the next chapter -- confronting a Taliban that reasserted itself in Afghanistan while the U.S. was sidetracked in Iraq -- will be expensive and bloody. ...

Meanwhile, in Iraq,... U.S. officials have said we are likely to station 50,000 troops at military bases in the country for the foreseeable future. This is because the ... country ranks high on lists of the most dangerous places on Earth, with a continual stream of suicide bombings and murders...

Moreover, the U.S. has barely begun to face the enormous financial bill for the war.

"The Revival of the Big Markets vs. State Planning Debate"

The possibility of an outbreak of protectionism has been raised frequently as a potential byproduct of the recession, but that may not be the biggest concern with regard to developing countries. When Stiglitz and Easterly agree, that's noteworthy:

Joe Stiglitz preaches markets to poor countries!, by William Easterly: Stiglitz in the current issue of Vanity Fair is afraid how poor countries will respond to the global crisis and the record of American hypocrisy on economic policy (like what America prescribed for itself in 2008-2009 vs. what it prescribed for Asia during 1997 crisis). All of this will tarnish market economics so much, fears Stiglitz, that poor countries will turn away from markets altogether in favor of some heavy-handed state planning and socialism. Stiglitz, who is not usually considered market economics’ best friend, is right to be scared. ...

One of the reasons to be worried is the precedent from the 1930s Depression – not the usual worry about a huge wave of global protectionism. No, the worry is about the intellectual precedent that the Depression so discredited markets that government planning and intervention became the default model of development economics for the next 30 years – the 1950s through the 1970s.

I’m thrilled to have a heavyweight like Joe Stiglitz to make this case better and more credibly than I could.... The issue now is not subtleties about the right type of financial regulation, global vs. local standards, or calibrating fiscal stimulus. The issue in development now is the revival of the big markets vs. state planning debate. Let’s hope it comes out differently this time than it did for early development economics after the Depression.

Here's a small part of Stiglitz' essay:

Wall Street’s Toxic Message, by Joseph Stiglitz: ...[N]o crisis, especially one of this severity, recedes without leaving a legacy. And among this one’s legacies will be a worldwide battle over ... what kind of economic system is likely to deliver the greatest benefit to the most people. Nowhere is that battle raging more hotly than in the Third World... In much of the world,... the battle between capitalism and socialism—or at least something that many Americans would label as socialism—still rages. While there may be no winners in the current economic crisis, there are losers, and among the big losers is support for American-style capitalism. This has consequences we’ll be living with for a long time to come. ...

I worry that, as [other countries] see more clearly the flaws in America’s economic and social system, many in the developing world will draw the wrong conclusions. A few countries—and maybe America itself—will learn the right lessons. They will realize that what is required for success is a regime where the roles of market and government are in balance, and where a strong state administers effective regulations. They will realize that the power of special interests must be curbed.

But, for many other countries, the consequences will be messier, and profoundly tragic. The former Communist countries generally turned, after the dismal failure of their postwar system, to market capitalism, replacing Karl Marx with Milton Friedman as their god. The new religion has not served them well. Many countries may conclude not simply that unfettered capitalism, American-style, has failed but that the very concept of a market economy ... is ... unworkable under any circumstances. Old-style Communism won’t be back, but a variety of forms of excessive market intervention will return. And these will fail. The poor suffered under market fundamentalism—we had trickle-up economics, not trickle-down economics. But ... these new regimes ... will not deliver growth. Without growth there cannot be sustainable poverty reduction. There has been no successful economy that has not relied heavily on markets. ... The ... governments brought to power on the basis of rage against American-style capitalism ... will lead to more poverty. ...

Faith in democracy is another victim. In the developing world, people look at Washington and see a system of government that allowed Wall Street to write self-serving rules which put at risk the entire global economy—and then, when the day of reckoning came, turned to Wall Street to manage the recovery. They see continued re-distributions of wealth to the top of the pyramid, transparently at the expense of ordinary citizens. They see, in short, a fundamental problem of political accountability in the American system of democracy. After they have seen all this, it is but a short step to conclude that something is fatally wrong, and inevitably so, with democracy itself. ...

Francis Fukuyama ... was wrong to think that the forces of liberal democracy and the market economy would inevitably triumph, and that there could be no turning back. But he was not wrong to believe that democracy and market forces are essential to a just and prosperous world. The economic crisis, created largely by America’s behavior, has done more damage to these fundamental values than any totalitarian regime ever could have. ...

"The Treasury View"

Free Exchange:

The Treasury view, Free Exchange: ...Noam Scheiber has a nice post up examining the view of PPIP—the plan to sell subsidised toxic assets at auction—from inside the Treasury. Here's a quote from a Treasury official:

...If you had asked--I don’t want to speak for the secretary--what’s problem number one? I think he'd say capital. Problem two? Capital. Problem three? Capital. Everything was in the service of that view. The legacy loans program was meant to help clean balance sheets. It was not an independent good in itself. It was seen as friendly to equity raising. Now people say the legacy loans thing is not gaining as much traction, so is that a failure? But because we had a good outcome in terms of raising equity, [the banks] were able to raise equity without shedding assets ... you should be okay with that.

Mr Scheiber also reprints a quote from a Goldman Sachs employee, originally in the Wall Street Journal, noting that PPIP is "the greatest program that never occurred... [because it] created confidence in the markets so banks can raise equity capital".

I don't know that I buy the Treasury spin—that they saw that banks needed more capital than the government could provide, and so they crafted an incredibly generous asset purchase plan understanding that it would boost Wall Street spirits, allowing banks to raise private capital and thereby making actual deployment of the plan unnecessary. Remember just how dire things appeared at the time of the plan's construction, and recall how many defenders of the plan—myself included—argued that there were no other options with tolerable risk levels available. Meanwhile, it's not clear that PPIP (as opposed to other interventions or the natural resolution of the crisis) had anything to do with the market's rebound, which began well after the initial description of the administration's proposal and well before the release of key programme details.

Which isn't to say that no one in the administration foresaw this possibility or planned for it. I would argue, however, that the current state of affairs was not really the expected outcome, and that the banking plan benefitted enormously from events outside of Treasury's control.

I don't disagree with that. But if it's true that the plan inspired confidence, intended or not, and that caused private investors to put capital into these institutions based upon the assumption that the banks would be made healthier by ridding themselves of toxicity through the PPIP, and now the government says "just kidding," isn't that a double-cross? Would the private investors have still put capital into the banks had they known the double-cross was coming? And if they wouldn't have, doesn't the continued presence of these assets on the books mean there's more risk present than we ought to be comfortable with?

Bankslaughter?

Paul Collier says we should hold financial institutions responsible for reckless behavior if we want to temper their inclination to take excessive risk:

A law to tame wild bankers, by Paul Collier, Commentary, CIF: Deregulation of the banks was built on two intellectual pillars. One was that regulation was not necessary because banks would self-regulate in order to protect their reputation. Please stop laughing. The other was that regulation would not work because regulators would always be one step behind the bankers. And unfortunately we cannot laugh this one off. Indeed, the technical problems facing regulation are now compounded by political impediments. Green shoots, lobbying by the banks, and turf wars among the regulators have eroded the momentum for action. So if banks cannot effectively be regulated by the authorities, what can be done?

The Turner review came up with two solutions. One is radically to raise the capital requirements of banks so that shareholders have something to lose if management goes wrong. The other is to change incentive payments for managers so bonuses depend on the past three years of performance. The increase in capital requirements makes sense. But the three-year rule is weak. The inherent problem facing shareholders is that incentive payments cannot go negative. However much damage a manager inflicts, wiping out both shareholders and depositors, the consequences cannot be remotely commensurate. As a result, even bonuses with a three-year lag bias the system towards risk-taking. If you thought big bonuses were history you have missed BAB, the new banking mnemonic: yes, Bonuses Are Back.

So how can we avoid another Northern Rock? While shareholders cannot impose genuine penalties, governments can. Fear of jail would discourage excessive risk. Before bankers huff about blunting incentives, yes, I realise that without carrots, bankers will just sit and gaze at the office ceiling. Bankers, set your minds at rest: the introduction of penalties would permit BABEL: that is, the carrots for genuinely smart behaviour could be Even Larger.

The key problem with using the law against bankers has been the difficulty of getting a conviction: surely, the managers of Northern Rock did not intend to profit at our expense. We do not need to set the burden of proof that high. Intention misses the point. Faced with a corpse and a killer, police do not need to prove ill intent: manslaughter sets the hurdle lower than murder. It is enough to show the killer was irresponsible. That is the standard we need; we need a crime of managing a bank irresponsibly: in other words, bankslaughter.

On Turner's proposal a manager can still benefit from recklessness – as long as the bank does not blow up within three years. After that, if the bank crashes he can be off playing golf. With bankslaughter, when the bank blows up – even if it is a decade later – a criminal investigation traces back to determine whether crucial decisions were reckless. If a reasonable banker faced with the information available at the time would not have taken those risks, the person responsible is dragged off the golf course and jailed.

Once bankslaughter was on the books, bonuses would be less dangerous. Managers would have to weigh the balance between risk and return and take defensible decisions. I doubt hyper-caution would be a problem: the overly cautious would not get bonuses. Surely we can rely on our bankers to exhibit the necessary degree of greed.

Bankslaughter would target the wild fringe rather than the average banker. The wild fringe matters: sometimes it generates a crisis that becomes systemic. We now know that as early as 2004, the Bank of England anticipated that Northern Rock would implode. Its business model was so risky that other banks had not adopted it. But in the short term, reckless behaviour looks smart, and so wiser management teams were coming under pressure to emulate it. By the time of its demise, the Rock was doing a fifth of British mortgages.

By curtailing the wild fringe, bankslaughter would complement Turner's approach, which is to make the average bank behave better. Both are needed. Turner's concern about performance is manifestly necessary. But the crisis has revealed that some banks are more rotten than others. In Britain, the two Scottish banks and Northern Rock were pioneers of imprudence. In Ireland two banks run by an alliance of construction firms and politicians swept the country to ruin. Even if shareholder capital is at risk, some banks are likely to suffer because of poor corporate governance.

Had bankslaughter been on the books, the management of Northern Rock would now perhaps be in the dock. But, vengeful as we feel, the point of criminal sanction would not be to punish reckless behaviour but to discourage it. If this law had existed, would our financial knights have been so errant?

Should We Pop Bubbles?

This may help Brad DeLong settle his inner conflict over whether Greenspan made an error by not moving interest rates to limit the housing boom. Guillermo Calvo and Rudy Loo-Kung argue that the benefits of bubbles almost always outweigh their costs (and thus there's no need for regulation to prevent them).

I think the authors are correct to point out that distributional issues are omitted from the analysis. Also, the assumption that social welfare depends only upon consumption is important as it rules out any utility costs associated with losing a home, a job, changing schools, etc. over and above the loss of consumption. In addition, using the aggregate consumption level of a composite commodity to index social welfare doesn't capture the costs associated with producing the subotimal mix of goods (e.g. too much housing, not enough of other goods), all that matters is the total quantity that is produced and consumed. Finally, I was surprised that the downturn and upturn phases of the cycle were assumed to be of equal length as I thought a slower return to normal growth (as compared to the downturn) - something that would increase the costs of the collapse - was the normal scenario:

Should we rush to further regulate financial institutions?, by Guillermo Calvo and Rudy Loo-Kung, Vox EU:

‘Tis better to have loved and lost,
Than never to have loved at all.
Tennyson, 1850.

In times of systemic financial distress, hunting for culprits becomes a popular sport. The Madoffs of this world are easy targets because crisis makes crookery harder to conceal. While there is no question that crooks should be sent to jail, increasing financial regulation is a different issue and requires careful analysis. Rushing to impose tighter regulations may hamper recovery and growth. Empirical evidence strongly supports the view that growth and financial development go hand in hand (Demirgüç-Kunt and Levine 2008). Although it is much harder to establish that financial development causes growth, few would doubt that, at least temporarily, financial deregulation could promote higher growth. A genuine concern, however, is that the financial sector is prone to crises, which are typically associated with serious effects on output and employment.

We cannot reach definite conclusions about the desirability of risky financial arrangements in a short column. Our objective is much more modest. We examine the welfare implications of financial deregulations that result in higher growth but end in tears and perform the exercise in the context of a benchmark case in which consumption is the ultimate source of welfare, ignoring possibly relevant behavioural finance and political economy considerations. We base our analysis on estimates of the costs of financial crises in emerging market economies (since the 1980s), a cauldron of financial crises in the last thirty years. Our results support deregulation even under those dire circumstances.¹

Rapid Resolution Plans

No disagreement with this. The failure to have dissolution plans for systemically important institutions on the shelf and ready to go turned out to be costly, so credible dissolution plans are certainly needed. However, the argument seems to assume that too big and too interconnected firms cannot be avoided, something I'm not ready to concede:

A sound funeral plan can prolong a bank’s life, by Anil Kashyap, Commentary, Financial Times: Buried within the 88-page Obama administration proposal to overhaul financial regulation is an overlooked option called a “rapid resolution plan”. It mandates that systemically important financial companies be required regularly to file a “funeral plan”: a set of instructions for how the institution could be quickly dismantled should the need to do so arise. ... It could be implemented now, without the need for legislative action. Regulators should do so immediately.

The first benefit is that regulators would gain a stronger negotiating position with a dying institution. Throughout this crisis the authorities have had to intervene without knowing exactly what hidden traps might emerge if a bank were to be closed down. The bankers know this and can exploit the fear of the unknown to press for bail-outs.

It is remarkable that such rules do not already exist. ... The crisis has shown us that the sudden unwinding of a large, complex financial institution is terrifying for the financial system. ...

A second immediate benefit would be to force bank managers to think much more carefully about the complex financial structures they have created. If bankers had to explain every single step needed (and the associated consequences) to shut down their subsidiaries in all the various jurisdictions in which they operate, they would have a big incentive to simplify their organisations. ...

Over the medium term, there would be additional benefits. The headline component of the plan would be the requirement for banks to estimate the number of days it would take to shut down. Banks that require longer to close would have to hold more capital. This would place management under serious pressure to improve their plans...

Senior members of the management team and the board would have to understand the funeral plan. Crucially, they would be forced to sign off on its accuracy. This might also lead to closer scrutiny of new products or lines of business if they jeopardised an orderly unwinding. ...

This proposal is far from a cure-all. One big problem is that resolution rules themselves, especially when multiple legal systems are involved, are quite complicated. But the plan has an extremely high benefit-to-cost ratio and could be put in place right away. ...

Paul Krugman: Out of the Shadows

The good, the bad, and the ugly parts of the administration's financial reform proposal:

Out of the Shadows, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NYTimes: Would the Obama administration’s plan for financial reform do what has to be done? Yes and no. ...

Let’s start with the good news. Our current system of financial regulation dates back to a time when everything that functioned as a bank looked like a bank. As long as you regulated big marble buildings with rows of tellers, you pretty much had things nailed down.

But ..., as Mr. Geithner pointed out, by 2007 more than half of America’s banking ... was being handled by a “parallel financial system” — others call it “shadow banking” — of largely unregulated institutions. These non-bank banks, he ruefully noted, were “vulnerable to a classic type of run, but without the protections such as deposit insurance that the banking system has in place to reduce such risks.”

When Lehman fell, we learned just how vulnerable shadow banking was: a global run on the system brought the world economy to its knees. One thing financial reform must do, then, is bring non-bank banking out of the shadows.

The Obama plan does this by giving the Federal Reserve the power to regulate any large financial institution it deems “systemically important” ... whether or not that institution is a traditional bank. ... And the government would have the authority to seize such institutions if they appear insolvent — the kind of power that ... has been lacking with regard to institutions like Lehman or A.I.G.

Good stuff. But what about the broader problem of financial excess?

President Obama’s speech outlining the financial plan described the underlying problem very well. Wall Street developed a “culture of irresponsibility,” the president said. Lenders didn’t hold on to their loans, but instead sold them off to be repackaged into securities, which in turn were sold to investors who didn’t understand what they were buying. “Meanwhile,” he said, “executive compensation — unmoored from long-term performance or even reality — rewarded recklessness rather than responsibility.”

Unfortunately, the plan as released doesn’t live up to the diagnosis.

True, the proposed new Consumer Financial Protection Agency would help control abusive lending. And the proposal that lenders be required to hold on to 5 percent of their loans, rather than selling everything off to be repackaged, would provide some incentive to lend responsibly.

But 5 percent isn’t enough to deter much risky lending, given the huge rewards to financial executives who book short-term profits. So what should be done about those rewards?

Tellingly, the administration’s executive summary of its proposals highlights “compensation practices” as a key cause of the crisis, but ... [gives] a description of what should happen, rather than a plan to make it happen.

Furthermore, the plan says very little of substance about reforming the rating agencies, whose willingness to give a seal of approval to dubious securities played an important role in creating the mess we’re in.

In short, Mr. Obama has a clear vision of what went wrong, but aside from regulating shadow banking — no small thing, to be sure — his plan basically punts on the question of how to keep it from happening all over again, pushing the hard decisions off to future regulators.

I’m aware of the political realities: getting financial reform through Congress won’t be easy. And even as it stands the Obama plan would be a lot better than nothing.

But to live up to its own analysis, the Obama administration needs to come down harder on the rating agencies and, even more important, get much more specific about reforming the way bankers are paid.

"Unlearned Lessons"

Did the false belief that land suitable for building houses was becoming scarce help to drive the housing bubble?:

Unlearned lessons from the housing bubble, by Robert J Shiller, Project Syndicate: There is a lot of misunderstanding about home prices. Many people all over the world seem to have thought that since we are running out of land in a rapidly growing world economy, the prices of houses and apartments should increase at huge rates.

That misunderstanding encouraged people to buy homes for their investment value – and thus was a major cause of the real estate bubbles around the world whose collapse fuelled the current economic crisis. This misunderstanding may also contribute to an increase in home prices again, after the crisis ends. Indeed, some people are already starting to salivate at the speculative possibilities of buying homes in currently depressed markets.

But we do not really have a land shortage. Every major country ... has abundant land in the form of farms and forests, much of which can be converted someday into urban land. ...There are often regulatory barriers to converting farmland into urban land, but these barriers tend to be thwarted in the long run if economic incentives to ... become sufficiently powerful. It becomes increasingly difficult for governments to keep telling their citizens that they can’t have an affordable home because of land restrictions. ...

Many people seem to think that the US experience is not generalisable, because the US has so much land relative to its population. ... But, to the extent that the products of land (food, timber, ethanol) are traded on world markets, the price of any particular kind of land should be roughly the same everywhere. ...

Shortages of construction materials do not seem to be a reason to expect high home prices, either. For example, in the US, the ... Building Cost Index ... has actually fallen relative to consumer prices over the past 30 years. To the extent that there is a world market for these factors of production, the situation should not be entirely different in other countries.

The ... expectations for real estate prices ... during the recent bubbles were often totally unrealistic. A few years ago Karl Case and I asked random home buyers in US cities undergoing bubbles how much they think the price of their home will rise ... on average over the next ten years. The median answer was sometimes 10% a year. ... Home prices cannot have shown such increases over long time periods, for then no one could afford a home.

The sobering truth is that the current world economic crisis was substantially caused by ... speculative bubbles ... made possible by widespread misunderstandings of the factors influencing prices. These misunderstandings have not been corrected, which means that the same kinds of speculative dislocations could recur.

In general, even though I don't always share Shiller's psychological approach to economic problems, it seems to be a bad idea to bet against his forecasts, in this case that people will once again misperceive that the real cost of housing is flat or slightly declining in the long-run, instead they will forecast long-run increases, and this will generate yet another housing bubble.

Update: Richard Green says "Shiller is largely right but for two things."

Obama's Wall Street Joural Interview

Given recent debates around here on regulating the shadow banking sector, it was nice to see that the first thing Obama mentions in response to a question about why financial markets failed is an outdated "regulatory system that ... did not encompass the non-bank sector":

Transcript of Obama’s Interview With the Journal, Washington Wire:  A transcript of The Journal’s interview with President Obama, which touches on financial-regulatory reform, the power of free markets, health care and Bernanke’s future at the Fed. ...

Question: Thank you for doing this, very much. ... Obviously a lot of things went wrong in the markets in the last year. Where do you think they failed?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there are some immediate and obvious culprits. We had a regulatory system that was outdated that did not encompass the non-bank sector. We had a securitization market that had separated borrowers and lenders and investors in ways that allowed everybody to take risks, with nobody feeling accountable or feeling their money was at stake. We had I think banks who were incented to boost their profits with some of these same risky financial instruments, and you didn’t have the kind of systemic oversight that would anticipate the enormous failures that could arise if any link in the chain broke. So that set of regulatory problems is what we are looking to solve in the proposals I’ll put forward tomorrow.

You then have, though, just to finish up, I think you’ve got a broader structural problem in our economy in which our last two recoveries had been based on bubbles, and a massively overleveraged consumer, a massively overleveraged corporate sector, and a financial system that didn’t have much restraint.

And so the question for us is how do we create the foundation for a more sustainable model of economic growth, one that doesn’t impinge on the dynamism of the free market, the innovative products that are critical and the entrepreneurship that creates jobs, but also recognizes that the levels of debt and a model that’s premised on an endless supply of foreign dollars is not one that is going to be sustainable over the long term. ...

"Atlantic Business and the Shadow Banks"

Mike at Rortybomb:

Atlantic Business and the Shadow Banks, Rortybomb: So Mark Thoma wrote a piece saying “The development of the shadow banking system is important because the troubles we are seeing today are not the result of problems in the traditional, regulated sector of the financial industry. The problems began in the unregulated shadow banking system.” The Atlantic Business Dr. Manhattan responded:

the systemic breakdowns we have been experiencing over the past 18 months have been caused by problems at the major banks (even the former investment-only banks which weren’t regulated by the Fed or FDIC cannot be called part of the “shadow banking system”), AIG (regulated by the state insurance commissioners, even if they’d rather you didn’t remember) and let’s not forget Fannie and Freddie, which had their own regulator.

Brad Delong declares [the Atlantic's reply] a “crash and burn” with some fun Watchmen allusions.

When people mention “The Unregulated Shadow Banking System” (TUSBS) they are often talking about different things and thus past each other, so let’s refocus. In general, I hear three things people invoke when they mention TUSBS. ...

I don’t feel that Thoma’s critics are getting his point, much less providing a counter-narrative. Now granted, there were government agents hanging around all these firms. So correct me if I’m wrong, there were no mechanism to handle this liquidity-backstop-for-regulation prior to the crisis. And that’s a problem that we all need to deal with.

There's quite a bit more in his post, including a substantive argument to support his conclusion.

Original post at The Hearing
My response to Dr. Manhattan

Reich and Soros: Steps to Financial market Reform

First, Robert Reich:

The Three Essentials of Financial Reform, by Robert Reich: As the White House unveils its long-awaited proposals to prevent another Wall Street meltdown in the future, keep a lookout for three essentials. Without them the Street will revert to its old ways as soon as the coast clears. ...

1. Stop bankers from making huge, risky bets with other peoples’ money. At the least, require they back their bets with a large percentage of their own capital, and bar them from raising money off their balance sheets through derivative trades. Also require they take their pay in stock options or warrants that can’t be cashed in for at least three years, so they’ll take a longer-term view. Best of all would be a requirement that investment banks return to being partnerships and the capital on their books be their own, not yours or your pension fund’s. When investment banks were partnerships, every partner took an active interest in what every other partner and trader was doing. The real mischief started once they started selling shares to the public.

2. Prevent any bank from becoming too big to fail. Separate commercial from investment banking... Combining the basic utility with the casino only made bankers far richer and subjected you and me to risks we didn’t bargain for. If separating commercial from investment banking isn’t enough to bring all banks down to reasonable size, use antitrust laws to break them up.

3. Root out three major conflicts of interest. (1) Credit-rating agencies should no longer be paid by the companies whose issues are being rated; they should be paid by those who use their ratings. (2) Institutional investors like pension funds and mutual funds should not be getting investment advice from the same banks that profit off their investments... (3) the regional Feds that are responsible for much bank oversight should no longer be headed by presidents appointed by the region’s bankers; non-bankers should have the major say, and the regional presidents should have to be confirmed by the Senate.

..[T]he big bankers will fight every one of these with all guns blazing, and their lobbyists in full force. ... Bottom line: Genuine financial reform will be almost as difficult to achieve as real universal health care. Immense private interests are amassed against the public interest in both cases because staggering amounts of money are at stake. ...

Second, George Soros:

The three steps to financial reform, by George Soros, Commentary, Financial Times: ...I am not an advocate of too much regulation. ... While markets are imperfect, regulators are even more so. ... Three principles should guide reform. First, since markets are bubble-prone, regulators must accept responsibility for preventing bubbles from growing too big. Alan Greenspan ... expressly refused that responsibility. ...

Second,... we must also control the availability of credit..., we must ... use credit controls such as margin requirements and minimum capital requirements. ... Margin and minimum capital requirements should be adjusted to suit market conditions ... to forestall ... bubbles.

Third, we must reconceptualise the meaning of market risk. The efficient market hypothesis postulates that markets tend towards equilibrium and deviations occur in a random fashion...

But the efficient market hypothesis is unrealistic. Markets are subject to imbalances... If too many participants are on the same side, positions cannot be liquidated without causing a discontinuity or, worse, a collapse. In that case the authorities may have to come to the rescue. That means that there is systemic risk ... in addition to the risks most market participants perceived prior to the crisis.

The securitisation of mortgages added a new dimension of systemic risk. Financial engineers claimed they were reducing risks through geographic diversification: in fact they were increasing them by creating an agency problem. The agents were more interested in maximising fee income than in protecting the interests of bondholders. ...

To avert a repetition, the agents must have “skin in the game” but the five per cent proposed by the administration is more symbolic than substantive. ...

It is probably impractical to separate investment banking from commercial banking as the US did with the Glass Steagull Act of 1933. But there has to be an internal firewall...

Finally, I have strong views on the regulation of derivatives. The prevailing opinion is that they ought to be traded on regulated exchanges. That is not enough. The issuance and trading of derivatives ought to be as strictly regulated as stocks. ... Custom made derivatives only serve to improve the profit margin of the financial engineers designing them. In fact, some derivatives ought not to be traded at all. ... Consider the recent bankruptcy of AbitibiBowater and that of General Motors. In both cases, some bondholders owned CDS and stood to gain more by bankruptcy than by reorganisation. It is like buying life insurance on someone else’s life and owning a licence to kill him. CDS are instruments of destruction that ought to be outlawed.

Third, in response to this, and more generally to the recent argument that calls to extend regulation to the shadow banking sector are unfounded because this sector had nothing to do with the crisis (which is incorrect), for the second time recently here's well-know socialist sympathizer Robert Lucas, the Nobel prize winning economist at the University of Chicago. It seems he also favors extending regulation to the unregulated banking sector:

The regulatory structure that permitted these events to occur will have to be redesigned... The regulatory problem that needs to be solved is roughly this: The public needs a conveniently provided medium of exchange that is free of default risk or "bank runs." The best way to achieve this would be to have a competitive banking system with government-insured deposits.

But this can only work if the assets held by these banks are tightly regulated. If such an equilibrium could be reached, it would still be possible for an institution outside this regulated system to offer deposits that are only slightly more risky but that also pay a higher return than deposits at the regulated banks. Some consumers and firms will find this attractive and switch their deposits. But if everyone does, the regulations will no longer protect anyone. The regulatory structure designed in the 1930s seemed to solve this problem for 60 years, but something else will be needed for the next 60.

And you don't need everyone to switch, just enough to create systemic risk.

Blog Posts that Don't Compute

Someone name Dr. Manhattan at The Atlantic's Business Blog, in a post entitled "Sentences that Don't Compute" says:

Today's entry comes from Mark Thoma, who writes in a guest-blog at the Washington Post:

The development of the shadow banking system is important because the troubles we are seeing today are not the result of problems in the traditional, regulated sector of the financial industry. The problems began in the unregulated shadow banking system.

Is Dr. Manhattan seriously arguing that the financial market troubles began in the traditional, regulated banking sector even though commercial banks with insured deposits are doing just fine, it's the other sectors that are in trouble? Yes he or she is:

...the systemic breakdowns we have been experiencing over the past 18 months have been caused by problems at the major banks (even the former investment-only banks which weren't regulated by the Fed or FDIC cannot be called part of the "shadow banking system"), AIG (regulated by the state insurance commissioners...) ...

Here's why this is wrong. It defines sectors by institutions rather than by particular activities or products. Suppose there is a multi-product firm that produces products A and B, so it operates in two different sectors. Product A is heavily regulated, B is not regulated at all. If product B causes troubles, can we argue that ithis shows that the problems started in the regulated sector? That's what's being argued above.

For example, let's look at the AIG case a bit closer and see where they got into trouble, with the regulated or unregulated part of their business (I bet you can guess which it is):

Propping up a House of Cards, by Joe Nocera, NY Times: Next week, perhaps as early as Monday, the American International Group is going to report the largest quarterly loss in history. Rumors suggest it will be around $60 billion ...

To be sure, most of A.I.G. operated the way it always had, like a normal, regulated insurance company. (Its insurance divisions remain profitable today.) But one division, its “financial practices” unit in London, was filled with go-go financial wizards who devised new and clever ways of taking advantage of Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for mortgage-backed securities..., it sold credit-default swaps.

These exotic instruments acted as a form of insurance for the securities. ... When a company insures against, say, floods or earthquakes, it has to put money in reserve in case a flood happens. That’s why, as a rule, insurance companies are usually overcapitalized, with low debt ratios. But because credit-default swaps were not regulated, and were not even categorized as a traditional insurance product, A.I.G. didn’t have to put anything aside for losses. And it didn’t. ... So when housing prices started falling, and losses started piling up, it had no way to pay them off. ...

So Dr. Manhattan's example proves my point, it was the unregulated component of AIG - the part operating within the shadow banking sector - that caused them problems. Thank you. The Dr. even cites Fannie and Freddie who, as has been well documented, followed the shadow sector down into the dumps when they began losing market share, in no sense did they lead the process. So the Fannie and Freddie example also proves the opposite case. Had the shadow sector been regulated in the same way that Fannie and Freddie were, that market share pressure would not have existed since the regulation would have taken away the advantage enjoyed by the unregulated banks, and Fannie and Freddie would have had no reason to follow the unregulated shadow banks downward.

Here's a simple rule to follow. If you are going to set yourself up as a critic, it's a good idea to have some idea what you're talking about.

Update: See also The Atlantic Monthly Crashes and Burns... by Brad DeLong for more on this.

"Making Financial Regulation Work"

This is something I did for the The Hearing blog at the Washington Post:

Making Financial Regulation Work: 50 More Years, by Mark Thoma: Banking regulation imposed in response to the Great Depression and the recurrent panics of the 1800s and early 1900s gave us 50 years of stability in the financial system without impeding economic growth. That's quite a record to overcome for those who say regulation does not work.
 
But the stability began to break down with the savings and loan problems in the 1980s, and the growing instability since that time is evident in the severe meltdown we are experiencing today.
 
What happened? Deregulation beginning with the Reagan administration combined with financial innovation and digital technology led to the emergence of what is known as the shadow banking system. These are financial institutions that, for all intents and purposes, function just like banks but are not subject to the same rules and regulations and, in some cases, are hardly regulated at all.
 
The development of the shadow banking system is important because the troubles we are seeing today are not the result of problems in the traditional, regulated sector of the financial industry. The problems began in the unregulated shadow banking system.
 
We need to bring the shadow banking system - essentially any institution that takes deposits and makes loans either directly or indirectly - under the same regulatory umbrella as the traditional banking system.
 
What type of regulation should we impose to give us the best chance of achieving another 50 years or more of relative calm?

Initially my concerns were with the economic issues, and the focus was on designing a regulatory system that would overcome the market failures that led to excess risk-taking and to institutions that were too big and too interconnected to fail.

But large financial firms exert more than their share of political power, and this adds another dimension to the problem. Banks that are too big and too interconnected to fail pose an economic risk to the overall economy. However, firms can also be "too big for politicians to ignore." When this happens, they can exert undue influence on legislation or capture the regulatory process in ways that allow them to escape enforcement of rules already in place. So regulation is needed to limit political power as well as economic power.

But that is not enough. The environment the regulatory process operates in must also be changed if we are going to bring about a more stable, more reliable financial system.

Today's problems could have been eased or perhaps even avoided entirely if regulators would have simply enforced regulations already in place, or called for new ones when existing tools were inadequate. But instead, regulations were not enforced to the extent they could have been, and there was little internal opposition when they were lifted.

The attitudes within regulatory agencies were driven by the widely held belief that the discipline of the marketplace would not allow the accumulation of excessive risk. Regulators did not believe that the type of meltdown we have just experienced could occur. Problems could develop in individual markets, and those could be troublesome, but the system-wide, falling-domino-type collapse we've just observed just couldn't happen -- not in modern financial markets with all their digital technology, fancy mathematics, and complicated risk-dispersing products. Or so it was believed.

If you don't believe something can occur, you won't be sensitive to signs that it might be about to happen. Regulators missed the signs of the crash because they didn't think a crash of this breadth and magnitude was possible. Besides, more benign explanations could be made to fit the facts.

We now know that a system-wide financial breakdown was in the realm of possibility, and that should change how regulators view market developments in the future. They won't soon forget that markets can and do collapse when left unattended, and they will interpret developments in financial markets with that in mind.

So what should we do? In very broad terms, we need:

• Regulations that limit both economic and political power and discourage the buildup of excessive risk.
• Regulators willing to assertively enforce existing regulation, think outside the ideological box and take an active role in identifying areas where regulation is inadequate.
• Regulators with the means and power to stand up to the biggest and most powerful financial institutions. Making financial institutions less powerful by breaking them up into smaller entities is one means to this end.
• A culture within regulatory agencies and their supporting institutions that reinforces and encourages the regulatory process.

It won't be easy to bring about the needed regulatory change, not with still-too-powerful financial companies lobbying against it, but it's essential that we do.

[You can leave comments here as usual, and, if you want to extend the reach of what you have to say, you can comment here too.]

Geithner and Summers: A New Financial Foundation

Here is a "brief preview of the administration's forthcoming proposals" to strengthen regulation of the financial sector.

A New Financial Foundation, by Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, Commentary, Washington Post: Over the past two years, we have faced the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression. The financial system failed to perform its function as a reducer and distributor of risk. Instead, it magnified risks, precipitating an economic contraction that has hurt families and businesses around the world. ...

This current financial crisis had many causes. ... But it was also the product of basic failures in financial supervision and regulation. Our framework for financial regulation is riddled with gaps, weaknesses and jurisdictional overlaps, and suffers from an outdated conception of financial risk. In recent years, the pace of innovation in the financial sector has outstripped the pace of regulatory modernization, leaving entire markets and market participants largely unregulated.

That is why, this week ... the administration will put forward a plan to modernize financial regulation and supervision. ... In developing its proposals, the administration has focused on five key problems in our existing regulatory regime...

Financial Community Norms

Bill Easterly:

Rulers, communities, and revolution, by Bill Easterly: ...Some have had a simplistic view of institutions in development as deriving only from top-down formal rules and laws. ...[M]uch research indicates otherwise.

First, formal rules that are incompatible with community norms often have no effect (this extends to things like trying to have registered land titles when the local community already has customary allocation of land rights, research on paper land titles in Africa confirms they have little effect on anything).

Second, if the rulers are especially oppressive they could enforce the incompatible formal rules by force, which would make communities worse off. But in a free society, the community can resist the rulers, which is part of the benefit of a free society.

Third, most rules we live by in a free society are more the product of community norms than they are of formal laws. (Fancy version: Rules emerge out of complex social interactions in a spontaneous order.) This is a good thing, as it makes the rules more responsive to local circumstances and needs. Down with arbitrary rules, up with community norms.

There's a lesson here for regulation. It's not enough to change the rules. If the culture doesn't change to support those rules, the rules won't be effective. The current crisis wasn't just because we had ineffective regulation and all we have to do now to fix things is to change the rules of the game. Attitudes must change as well.

So having just said "I don't really buy the explanation that an erosion of culture played a big role in the crisis," something I stand by with respect to the "post-modernism" argument at dispute in that post, I think there is a sense in which culture must change. If you believe that an invisible hand guides self-interest to maximize societies interests, always and everywhere except for a set with measure zero, then you can also convince yourself that whatever greedy, self-interested action that you take is meritorious in some larger sense. But without the proper social guidance as a check on those actions, that is not the case at all. Some of those checks are formal rules and regulations, but the institutions and community norms that exist are every bit as important.

So yes, we need new regulation, but the financial community also needs to establish new norms, and people who step outside of those norms must be socially ostracized in whatever sense is required in those markets. Rules and regulations are not enough by themselves, community attitudes must change as well.

Will attitudes change enough? It seems like there's been some change, for now at least, though not everyone would agree with that, and we won't really know until the financial sector gets back on its feet -- there's no guarantee that whatever change in attitudes that has occurred will persist. I have my doubts that it will.

The Culture of Blame Game

There's at least one person who doesn't think economists deserve all the blame for the economic crisis. Harold James says other academic disciplines and "a cultural climate that pushed experimentation and the rejection of traditional values" contributed "at least as much":

A financial crisis letting us unmask deceit; but whose deceit?, by Harold James, Commentary, Project Syndicate: Now that the economic crisis looks less threatening (at least for the moment),... an ever more encompassing blame game is unfolding. The financial crisis provides an apparently endless opportunity for unmasking deceit, malfeasance, and corruption. But we are not sure quite who and what should be unmasked.

Leading bankers were initially the most obvious culprits. ... They appeared arrogant and overpaid, and were easily demonized. But what about the political process? Why were the banks not more closely controlled and better regulated? ... Governments are now vulnerable, and politicians are under attack almost everywhere. ...

Today the attacks are not limited to the political and financial establishment. Critics are trying to identify the ideas as well as the interests that were responsible for financial and economic dysfunction. ...

Since it is an economic crisis, most people seeking its intellectual roots are tempted to begin with economists... The founder of the rational expectations revolution, Robert Lucas, is endlessly quoted as having stated in 2003 ... that the "central problem of depression-prevention has been solved, for all practical purposes, and has in fact been solved for many decades." ...

Other academic disciplines have looked rather smugly at ... their colleagues in economics. The non-mathematical appear to have their revenge, as the perils of over-reliance on complex symbolic notation and arcane formulae are relentlessly exposed.

In fact, developments or fashions in other academic disciplines and also in the general culture contributed at least as much to a willingness to engage in absurd risks and to provide and accept valuations of complex and inherently unfathomable securities. The general cultural developments are sometimes termed post-modernism, which involves the replacement of reason by intuition, feeling, and allusion.

But post-modernism has itself been generated by technology, with which it has a deeply ambiguous relationship. In contrast to a steam engine or an old-fashioned automobile, whose operations were easily comprehensible, modern automobiles or airplanes are so complicated that their operators have no idea how the technology they are using actually works. ...

Post-modernism moves away from the rational culture of the so-called "modern era." Many people are finding more analogies with medieval life, in which humans were surrounded by processes that they found difficult to comprehend. As a result, they thought they lived in a world populated by demons and mysterious forces.

The recent era of global finance ... differed from the financial surge of a century ago. Its cultural manifestations also appeared to be novel. It was playful, allusive, and edgy - in short, post-modern. ...

An alliance was formed between financial experts who thought they were selling truly innovative ideas, a political elite that endorsed the philosophy of "regulation lite," and a cultural climate that pushed experimentation and the rejection of traditional values. The result was that every sort of value - including financial values - came to be seen as arbitrary and fundamentally absurd.

When incomprehension no longer produces new heights of prosperity, but rather economic collapse and failure, it is not surprising that it turns to anger. Finding out who is to blame becomes more and more like the late medieval and early modern search for witches: a way of making sense of a disorderly and hostile universe.

I don't really buy the explanation that an erosion of culture played a big role in the crisis, and even if it is to blame the post-modernism explanation seems suspect to me (e.g. believing that scientists, engineers, and so on understand things even if you don't is different than believing things are driven by mysterious forces that nobody understands even if, in the end, the faith in the scientists and engineers was misplaced). What do you think?

Bank Mergers

As the number of banks began declining in the mid 1980s and a few Superbanks were created, the resulting concentration of risk made us Supervulnerable:

Too Few Banks, Too Many Giants: I have repeatedly mentioned Too Big To Succeed as a cause of the most recent crisis, but have you ever wondered HOW we got that way?

One obvious suspect has been the easy M&A environment of the past 20 years. Instead of a very competitive market where mergers for sheer size sake is discouraged, the opposite occurred. The number of bank acquisitions skyrocketed, and the number actual banks got slashed. Where there were once over 18,000 banks in early 1980s, today, the number is less than half, to under 8,500.

Recall that the big acquisitions and mergers in the 1980s were so banks could be competitive with Sumitomo and Mitsubishi and other big Japanese banks. (Why was that again?)

Hence, we end up with a few Superbanks. Ask yourself why Citibank, Bank of America, Washington Mutual, and Wachovia got to be too large to manage. And once again, I am compelled to ask why it is in the country’s interest that 65% of the depository assets are held by only a handful of banks.

To put this into context, consider the chart below, courtesy of banking analyst Dick Bove:

DeLong: The Hidden Purposes of High Finance

Brad DeLong:

The hidden purposes of high finance, by J. Bradford Delong, Commentary, Project Syndicate: No one questions the usefulness of "low" finance. The ability to use checks, banknotes, and credit cards rather than having to cart around chests of silver, scales, and reagents to assay purity, and needing armed guards to protect the silver ... has obvious efficiencies. So does the ability of households to borrow and lend in order not to be forced to match income and expenditure every day, week, month, or year.

But what use is "high" finance? Economists’ conventional description depicts ... three types of utility. First, it allows for many savers to pool their wealth to finance large enterprises that can achieve the efficiencies of scale possible from capital-intensive modern industry.

Second, high finance provides an arena to curb the worst abuses by managers of large corporations. Managers’ fear that if the stock price drops too low they will be out on their ears...

Finally, high finance allows for portfolio diversification, so that individual investors can seek high expected returns without being forced to assume large, idiosyncratic risks of bankruptcy and poverty.

But these are the benefits of high finance as they apply to the ideal world of economists — that is, a world of rational utilitarian actors who are skilled calculators of expected utility under uncertainty, who are masters of dynamic programming. We do not live in such a world. ...

If we take the world as it really is, we see that high finance performs two further tasks that advance our collective welfare. It induces us to save, accumulate, and invest by promising us safe, liquid investments even in extraordinary times.

It is a fact that we are much happier saving and accumulating, and that we are much more likely to do so when we think that the resources we have saved ... are ... liquid... Of course,... financial wealth is not liquid in an emergency. And when we buy and sell, we are enriching not ourselves, but the specialists and market makers.

But we benefit from these delusions. Psychologically, we are naturally impatient, so it is good for us to believe that our wealth is safe and secure, and that we can add to it through skillful acts of investment, because that delusion makes us behave less impatiently. And, collectively, that delusion boosts our savings, and thus our capital stock, which in turn boosts all of our wages and salaries as well.

Seventy-three years ago, John Maynard Keynes thought about the reform and regulation of financial markets from the perspective of the first three purposes and found himself "moved toward... mak[ing] the purchase of an investment permanent and indissoluble, like marriage...." But he immediately drew back: the fact "that each individual investor flatters himself that his commitment is ’liquid’ (though this cannot be true for all investors collectively) calms his nerves and makes him much more willing to run a risk...." ...

It is for these reasons that we have seemed frozen for the past generation or two whenever we have contemplated reforming our system of financial regulation. And it is why, even in the face of a severe financial crisis, we remain frozen today.

Perhaps this played a role, but I would cite the belief in the ability of markets to self-correct and regulate the accumulation of risk - the belief that a meltdown like we've just witnessed was not possible - coupled with a concentration of power into the hands of people who held these beliefs as more important factors in explaining the lack of regulation in these markets presently, and the difficulty we'll have changing that.

Paul Krugman: Reagan Did It

"Reagan’s biggest legacy":

Reagan Did It, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: “This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. ... All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

He was, as it happened, wrong about solving the problems of the thrifts. On the contrary, the bill turned the modest-sized troubles of savings-and-loan institutions into an utter catastrophe. But he was right about the legislation’s significance. And as for that jackpot — well, it finally came more than 25 years later, in the form of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

For the more one looks into the origins of the current disaster, the clearer it becomes that the key wrong turn ... took place ... during the Reagan years. ...

Federal debt as a percentage of G.D.P. fell steadily from the end of World War II until 1980. But indebtedness began rising under Reagan... The increase in public debt was, however, dwarfed by the rise in private debt, made possible by financial deregulation. The change in America’s financial rules was Reagan’s biggest legacy. And it’s the gift that keeps on taking.

The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The ... fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books..., taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.

But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan ... essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending ... that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.

These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped. ...

We weren’t always a nation of big debts and low savings: in the 1970s Americans saved almost 10 percent of their income... It was only after the Reagan deregulation that thrift gradually disappeared..., culminating in the near-zero savings rate ... on the eve of the great crisis. ...

All this, we were assured, was a good thing: sure, Americans were piling up debt,... but their finances looked fine once you took into account the rising values of their houses and their stock portfolios. Oops.

Now, the proximate causes of today’s economic crisis lie in events that took place long after Reagan... — in the global savings glut..., and in the giant housing bubble that savings glut helped inflate.

But it was the explosion of debt over the previous quarter-century that made the U.S. economy so vulnerable. Overstretched borrowers were bound to start defaulting in large numbers once the housing bubble burst and unemployment began to rise.

These defaults in turn wreaked havoc with a financial system that — also mainly thanks to Reagan-era deregulation — took on too much risk with too little capital.

There’s plenty of blame to go around... But the prime villains behind the mess we’re in were Reagan and his circle of advisers — men who forgot the lessons of America’s last great financial crisis, and condemned the rest of us to repeat it.

"Alpha Markets"

Robert Frank says Charles Darwin provides the "true intellectual foundation" for economics, and that his account of "the complex relationship between individual and social interest" is the key to understanding the financial crisis:

Alpha markets, by Robert H. Frank, Commentary, CIF:  Though Adam Smith is almost universally regarded as the father of modern economics, most economists will eventually see Charles Darwin's ideas as the true intellectual foundation of our discipline. Smith's modern disciples celebrate his invisible hand theory, which says markets harness individual self-­interest to serve society's interests. Smith himself was more circumspect, claiming only that self-interested actions often lead to socially benign outcomes. But that claim is remarkable enough. Competition among greedy producers often yields innovations that result in cheaper and better products for everyone.

It was Darwin, however, who better grasped the complex relationship between individual and social interest. And we must turn to his account if we are to understand the recent meltdown in financial markets. His deep insight was that natural selection favours traits and behaviours according to their effect on individual organisms, not groups. Sometimes individual and group interests coincide. But interests at the two levels often conflict.

Male body mass is a case in point. Most vertebrate species are polygynous, meaning that males take more than one mate if they can. The qualifier is important, because when some take multiple mates, others get none. The latter don't pass their genes along, making them the ultimate losers in Darwinian terms. So it is no surprise that males often battle furiously for access to mates. Size matters in those battles. And hence the evolutionary arms races that produce larger males.

Bull elephant seals often weigh more than five times as much as females. But their size is a handicap, making them far more vulnerable to sharks and other predators. Given an opportunity to vote on a proposal to reduce their weight by half, bulls would have every reason to favour it. But they have no such opportunity. And any bull that weighed much less than others would never find a mate.

Similar conflicts arise when individual rewards depend on relative performance. This payoff structure, common in financial markets, helps explain why those markets sometimes fail catastrophically. Wealth managers' salaries depend primarily on how well their investments perform in relative terms. Funds offering higher returns immediately attract cash from rival funds. If the invisible hand functioned as Alan Greenspan and other modern disciples of Adam Smith imagined, there would be no problem. Investors would be fully compensated for any additional risk they took in search of higher returns. But human brains forged by natural selection don't work as assumed in economics textbooks.

As our brains were evolving, immediate threats to survival loomed everywhere. Natural selection thus favoured a nervous system keenly sensitive to immediate relative payoffs, much less so to distant ones. Anyone disinclined to seize immediate gains at the risk of having to incur costs in the future would experience low relative rewards in the short run. And when competition was intense and immediate, such individuals often didn't survive to see the long run.

In market settings, a nervous system biased in favour of short-term relative reward is a recipe for disaster. When the price of an asset like housing is rising steadily, unregulated wealth managers can create leveraged investments that generate enormous rates of return. Even in the early years of this decade, many experienced analysts were warning that several mortgage-backed securities were poised to tumble. But investors faced a tough choice: they could earn high returns by continuing to invest in them, or they could move their money elsewhere. Many rejected the latter strategy because it would have required watching friends and neighbours pass them by.

Wealth managers felt compelled to offer the risky investments, since many customers would otherwise desert them. Managers also knew there would be safety in numbers when things soured, since almost everyone had been following the same strategy. The resulting collapse was inevitable.

Adam Smith's invisible hand is a truly extraordinary insight. But when rewards depend on relative performance, it doesn't always deliver.

The financial meltdown that caught Adam Smith's disciples off guard would not have surprised Darwin. One of his central themes was that because much of life is graded on the curve, wasteful arms races create conflict between individual and social interests. The good news is that unlike other animal species, humans can often resolve such conflicts through intelligent regulation.

Also see Paul Krugman's: What Economists Can Learn from Evolutionary Theorists Synopsis.

Bill Clinton: I Should Have Raised More Hell About Derivatives Being Unregulated

Bill Clinton gives, to use David Leonhardt's term, an "impressively honest" analysis of his role in bringing about the financial crisis, particularly the failure to adequately regulate derivative markets:

Bill Clinton, on His Economic Legacy, by David Leonhardt: Given the range of issues Peter Baker covers in his article about Bill Clinton for the coming New York Times Magazine, there was not room for anything close to Mr. Clinton’s entire comments on his economic record. ... So we’re going to post, below, the transcript of that portion of the discussion between Mr. Clinton and Mr. Baker. ...

NEW YORK TIMES: Speaking of banks and toxic assets... You know that Time magazine named you and said you should have done this, that or the other thing. What do you say to that? Is there anything you would have done differently? ...

Mr. CLINTON: Now, there basically have been three charges,... one, because I enforced the Community Reinvestment Act for the first time and over 90 percent of all lending done under that law was done when I was president, $300 billion, that part of that was a lot of little banks made loans to people they had no business making loans to to buy houses so they could check the box for the Community Reinvestment Act. That’s the right-wing argument.

Then there’s the argument from the left that I shouldn’t have signed the bill that got rid of the Glass-Steagall law because that enabled banks and investment banks in effect to merge their functions.

And then there’s the argument that I make, which is that I should have raised more hell about derivatives being unregulated. I believe the last one is by far the most valid … although I don’t think that the Congress would have permitted anything to be done because Alan Greenspan was against it.

So let’s take them in reverse order. The argument against regulating derivatives, which Greenspan urged — and this is one of the few things I think — I think Bob Rubin and Larry Summers and those guys have gotten a little bit of a bum rap on this lately...

But I do believe on the derivatives they made the argument, the people who were against regulating it, that people like you weren’t buying derivatives. It wasn’t like you were investing your 401(k) in derivatives. You were investing your 401(k) in mutual funds, which were subject at least under normal times to the jurisdiction of the S.E.C., which was supposed to be minding the store. And so because we had a hostile Republican Congress which threatened not to fund ... the S.E.C. because of what Arthur Levitt was doing to try to protect the American economy from meltdowns. They said, “Oh, he’s interfering with a free market” and all that. This is what he’s supposed to do.

They argued that nobody’s going to buy these derivatives, we’ll do it without transparency, they’ll get the information they need. And it turned out to be just wrong; it just wasn’t true. ... That rested on a lot of assumptions, including the fact that the ratings agencies would do a good job, which didn’t happen, in evaluating risk. So I very much wish now that I had demanded that we put derivatives under the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission and that transparency rules had been observed... That I think is a legitimate criticism of what we didn’t do.

On the Glass-Steagall, I’ve really thought about that because No. 1, nonbank banking was already a major part of American life at that time. Letting banks take investment positions I don’t think had much to do with this meltdown. And the more diversified institutions in general were better able to handle what happened. ...

I believe if you look at the blurring of the lines which already existed before that bill was signed — the bill arguably gave us a framework, at least, for which this process, which was happening anyway, could be regulated. So I don’t think that’s such a good criticism.

I think actually, if you want to make a criticism on that, it would be an indirect one; you could say that the signing of that legislation sped up what was happening anyway and maybe led some of these institutions to be bigger than they otherwise would have been and the very bigness of some of these groups caused some of this problem...

And the first argument, I think it’s totally without merit. If you look at the community banks in this country — actually I never believed I’d cite her as an authority, but Arianna Huffington had a great piece on the success of community banks yesterday in the Huffington Post. You ought to get it —

NEW YORK TIMES: Do you read the Huffington Post?

Mr. CLINTON: A lot. I read a lot of the blogs. ...

That’s my take on it. The Time magazine thing,... if you actually read what they said, they kind of hedged. They said “Well, here are some of the things people say.” But if you ask me to write the indictment, I’d say, “I wish Bill Clinton had said more about derivatives. The Republicans probably would have stopped him from doing it but at least he should have sounded the alarm bell.” ...

But you got to understand, again, we were living in a different world. We had a lot of confidence in the S.E.C. We had a lot of confidence in the broad-based nature of our economic growth. We never dreamed there’d be a time like in the first five years of this decade where literally the whole growth of the country would be in the housing, finance and consumer spending because we had no other investment strategy. ...

I made the best call I could. But I do wish — I always felt a little queasy about the derivative issue. Otherwise, I think we did a good job and I do not believe — when anybody asks me that, I ask them, I look at them and ask them, “Do you think this would have happened if we had been there? Look me in the face and say yes.” I haven’t found any takers yet.

That's the part I'm not so sure about. If a Clinton clone had been in charge rather than Bush, would this have still happened? I can't be sure, of course, and maybe the clone administration would have stepped in before things got out of hand, but little cues like the deference to Greenspan he indicates above (who would have opposed trying to prick the bubble if he had admitted a bubble was inflating) makes me wonder. So I think it probably would have happened anyway.

But, and this is important, perhaps the Treasury wouldn't have dragged its feet for months and months only to turn the problem over to the next administration if there had been more continuity, and I believe that acting faster to solve the toxic asset problem could have made a big difference in limiting the severity of the resulting downturn. In addition, without Republicans standing in the way with veto power, the shape of the initial and subsequent stimulus packages would have been different as well. So while I'm not so sure that the outcome would have been different in terms of the bubble, I do believe the response would have been quite a bit different, and much better than what actually occurred.

Geithner Interview

Geithner Dismisses GOP Socialism Charge as 'Ridiculous', Federal Eye: Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner admits private investors are worried about investing in new government-backed commercial mortgage securities and dismisses as "ridiculous" a recent Republican National Committee resolution stating that Democratic policies bordered on socialism. ...

Update: Calculated Risk comments on Geithner's remarks:

Although there were many factors in the housing and credit bubble, the two keys were: 1) rapid innovation in the mortgage industry (securitization, automated underwriting, rapidly expanded wholesale lending, etc), and 2) a complete lack of oversight by regulators. ... Geithner failed to mention the rapid changes in lending and the failure of government oversight as the two critical causes of the bubble. Either Geithner misspoke or he still doesn't understand what happened - and that is deeply troubling.

"Near Sighted Stress Tests"

Lucian Bebchuk argues that banks "could well be in much worse shape than has been suggested by the stress tests" because the tests only looked at losses through the end of 2010. Anticipated losses after that date, which could be big enough to matter, were not included:

Near-Sighted Stress Tests, by Lucian Bebchuk, Forbes: Buoyed by the results of the "stress tests" conducted by banks' supervisors, markets now appear optimistic about the capital positions of U.S. banks. Unfortunately, however, this renewed optimism has a shaky foundation. By design, the stress tests have avoided estimating the declines in the value of many toxic assets owned by banks. As a result, U.S. banks could well be in much worse shape than has been suggested by the stress tests.

The report announcing the results of stress tests stresses that supervisors conducted "a deliberately stringent test" and examined the ability of banks to absorb losses even under an "adverse" scenario... The report concludes that, with a modest aggregate addition of $75 billion in common equity, the banks will be well capitalized at the end of 2010 even under the adverse scenario. ...

However, for a bank that has "troubled assets" ... that do not become due until after 2011, supervisors did not attempt to come up with a precise estimate of the extent to which, at the end of 2010, the economic value of the troubled assets will fall below the $1 billion face value.

This approach overlooks a substantial amount of economic damage imposed on banks by the crisis. Indeed,... even if banks are able to avoid recognizing these declines in value on their financial statements until after 2010, there will still be such economic losses. A bank may be an economic zombie even if its financial statements do not yet show it.

The report acknowledges this major problem in a footnote, noting that its estimated losses "are not full lifetime losses … because the projections are for a two-year forward horizon and thus do not capture losses occurring beyond the end of 2010." ...

To get a full picture of the banks' situation, bank supervisors should estimate also the decline in the economic value of banks' positions with longer maturities. Only then will the stress tests be able to deliver reliable figures for the additional capital necessary to make the banking sector healthy and vigorous. Until such an analysis is done, it would be important to avoid the premature conclusion that the U.S. baking system is largely out of the woods.

Greenspan's Capital Idea

Yves Smith:

Greenspan Says Banks Need More Capital, by Yves Smith: You have to give former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan credit for having no shame. Well, he did once look a bit rattled before Congress for about five minutes and 'fessed up it never occurred to him that people would be so greedy as to run companies so as to leave burned hulks in their wake.

Did he utterly miss reading the news during Enron and the 2002 accounting scandals?

Greenspan also made life difficult for Bernanke in early 2007 more than once. Indeed, prior to Greenspan, no former Fed chairman made frequent pronouncements. This is unseemly, but having a sense of propriety went out of fashion in America some time ago.

Now Greenspan is saying the banks are not OK (if they need a lot more capital, then by definition, they are undercapitalized now) when the powers that be have a full court press on to present precisely that image. And whose responsibility might it be that the banks are in such sorry shape? Might the Greenspan Fed's extreme laissez faire stance have had a wee bit to do with it? ...

This also goes along with his self-exonerating claim that the housing bubble was not caused by Fed policy under his watch, and that the problems could have been avoided if financial firms had larger capital buffers (and, according to Greenspan, all that is needed in terms of regulation is larger reserves against losses, no other regulation is needed, his often noted surprise at the failure of deregulated markets is that firms did not accumulate sufficient reserves on their own).

"How Realistic Were the Economic Forecasts Used in the Stress Tests?"

I, along with many others, have "suggested that the economic forecasts used in the tests are not severe enough." (See also Breathing easier after bank stress tests? You shouldn't.) Here's an opposing view from Ken Beauchemin and Brent Meyer of the Cleveland Fed:

How Realistic Were the Economic Forecasts Used in the Stress Tests?, by Ken Beauchemin and Brent Meyer, FRB Cleveland: The results of the “stress tests” came out last Thursday, and we can now see what three months of intense scrutiny of 19 of the countries largest bank holding companies has revealed about the amount of capital they are likely to need to withstand a worse-than-expected recession. Since the April 24 release of the Federal Reserve white paper describing the process, a number of observers have suggested that the economic forecasts used in the tests are not severe enough, and may result in insufficient capital requirements.

Regulators tested the banks against two sets of assumptions for GDP, unemployment, and housing prices. The “baseline” scenario averaged the February forecasts of real GDP and the unemployment rate from the Blue Chip Survey, Consensus Forecasts, and the Survey of Professional Forecasters. The assumptions for house prices followed a path implied by futures on the Case-Shiller Housing Price Index. The second, “more adverse” scenario represented a longer and deeper recession than the baseline scenario.

In the baseline case, real GDP falls by 2.0 percent in 2009 before rebounding to 2.1 percent in 2010; the unemployment rate averages 8.4 percent in 2009 and 8.8 percent in 2010. House prices decline 14.0 percent in 2009 and fall an additional 4.0 percent in 2010.

The more adverse (but not necessarily “worst-case” scenario) assumes a sharp 3.3 percent real GDP contraction in 2009 followed by scant 0.5 percent growth in 2010; the unemployment rate averages 8.9 percent in 2009 and 10.3 percent in 2010. House prices drop 22.0 percent in 2009 and 7.0 percent in 2010.

At the time the assumptions were determined, the advance estimate on fourth-quarter 2009 real GDP growth was −3.8 percent (annualized), and the February employment figures were not known. Subsequently, the Bureau of Economic Analysis slashed the fourth-quarter growth estimate by a stunning 2.5 percentage points, to −6.3 percent. Given the large downward GDP revision, an exceptionally rapid deterioration in the labor market, and yet another large GDP decline (in the first quarter), it is, of course, natural to question the validity of the bank stress tests. It turns out, however, that the most recent forecasts remain in line with the two stress-test scenarios.

First, the most recent GDP growth forecasts still lie within the range covered by the stress-test scenarios. While both the Blue Chip consensus and Macroeconomic Advisors forecasts dip below the baseline-scenario projection for 2009 growth of −2.0 percent, they are quite close to the 2010 baseline and remain firmly within the range between the baseline and more adverse scenarios in both years. Furthermore, only the Blue Chip pessimists’ forecast hits the lower bound of the stress-test scenarios in 2009, and it is 0.4 percentage point above the more adverse scenario for 2010.

Second, while rapid deterioration in the labor market has led to a near-term path for the unemployment rate that will most likely generate a 2009 average in excess of the 8.4 percent rate assumed by the baseline scenario, both the most recent Macroeconomic Advisors and Blue Chip forecasts predict an unemployment rate slightly lower than the 8.9 percent rate assumed by the more adverse scenario. The forecasts for 2010 are also less dire than assumed by the more adverse scenario. As the Federal Reserve noted in its April 24 white paper, “Although the likelihood that unemployment could average 10.3 percent in 2010 is now higher than had been anticipated when the scenarios were specified, that outcome still exceeds a more recent consensus projection by professional forecasters for an average unemployment rate of 9.3 percent in 2010.”

"Financial Policy: Looking Forward"

Susan Woodward and Robert Hall have advice for policymakers:

Financial policy: Looking forward, by Woodward and Hall: Washington is turning its attention to the future, having put out most of the financial fires. The crisis seems to be over, but questions remain about how to manage under-capitalized banks and, especially, how to design a financial system for the future that is more robust to adverse shocks. With fiscal stimulus in place and no likelihood of more, financial policy by the Fed and the Treasury is the only active possibility for further action to offset the recession.

The current state of the economy The stock market thinks that the economy is turning around, and the financial press greeted last Friday’s payroll report with a positive spin, for once. But the news is not good. ...

Apart from the successful effort to prevent the collapse of the financial system, the primary financial action to offset the recession has been the Fed’s  adoption of an interest-rate target for interbank lending of essentially zero. Rates on short-term safe assets–Treasury obligations and private instruments enjoying explicit or implicit government guarantees–are close to zero. But, sadly, rates actually paid by most private decision makers are almost as high, or in some cases higher, than before the recession began. ...

The notion that monetary policy has been highly expansionary–promoted by those looking only at safe government (Treasury) interest rates and at the volume of bank reserves–is plainly incorrect. Rather, higher interest rates are discouraging spending and production.

"Are We Turning Japanese?"

Dissent:

Are We Turning Japanese?, by James Surowiecki: Over the past few days, the idea that the Obama Administration’s failure to nationalize the banks may very well doom the U.S. economy to the kind of Lost Decade that Japan endured has become ubiquitous. (Here are Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Mark Thoma, and Atrios on the danger of turning Japanese.) In the wake of the stress-test results, it’s become obvious to everyone that the Administration is counting on banks to earn their way out of trouble—recapitalizing themselves over the next couple of years via profits. But the skeptics suggest that this is a recipe for disaster, because this didn’t work in Japan, where banks that had been propped up by the government were never able to earn their way back to health, eventually requiring the government to step in and take more decisive action. ...

As I’ve said before, there’s something peculiar about the repeated insistence that Japan’s experience demonstrates that the Obama approach can’t work. Japanese banks may not have been able to earn their way out of trouble in the nineteen-nineties, but American banks did, in both the early nineteen-eighties and the early nineteen-nineties. ...

The assumption behind the invocations of Japan is that the problem with the Japanese economy in the nineteen-nineties was that because the banks were zombies, they weren’t able to lend enough to get the economy moving again, and so it stayed stuck in neutral. ... But let’s accept for the sake of argument that if Japan’s banks had been healthier, the economy would have been significantly stronger. The question, then, is: Why did Japan’s banks stay so weak? In other words, why weren’t they able, as U.S. banks have been, to earn their way out of trouble?

The conventional answer to that question is the zombie explanation. The real answer is that Japan’s banks kept rolling over bad loans to weak borrowers. As this paper by Joe Peek and Eric Rosengreen shows, during the nineteen-nineties, Japanese banks constantly “evergreened”—they kept extending additional credit to companies that already had loans with them. By extending credit, the banks enabled weak corporate borrowers to keep making their interest payments, and to put off bankruptcy. That made the banks’ balance sheets look better, and also kept companies afloat. The economists Ricardo Caballero, Takeo Hoshi, and Anil Kashyap, in fact, found that thirty per cent of publicly-traded firms were “on life support from banks in the early 2000s.”

Evergreening had two effects. First, because the borrowers had little chance of ever actually paying off their debts (because their underlying businesses were so weak), it kept Japan’s economy from making the adjustments necessary to start growing again. ... Second, it limited Japanese banks’ profitability, because it effectively meant that, instead of making good new loans, they were constantly throwing good money after bad. As a result, they were never able to earn their way back to health. ...

In thinking about the relevance of the Japanese experience to our own, what’s important to note is that Japanese banks did not engage in evergreening solely because it temporarily improved their balance sheets. Rather, they did so because social norms and explicit government pressure encouraged them to do so. ... In fact, Peek and Rosengren point out that government-controlled banks were more likely, not less, to keep extending credit to weak firms.

While U.S. banks have come under political attack at various times for being too tough on borrowers, there’s been no concerted attempt to force them to evergreen. And, in contrast to Japanese banks, U.S. banks have proved more than willing in the past to be tough on old borrowers even while extending new loans. The result has been that at times like now—when net profit margins on loans are high—they have been able to become tremendously profitable, and to, in fact, earn their way out of trouble, as the Obama Administration is counting on. Unless you think that this is going to change—that U.S. banks are going to start evergreening their loans, and continuing to pile up new bad debts—then it seems unlikely that we’re really heading down the road that Japan took.

My point has never been that the current strategy to fix the banking system cannot work. I've argued that it might work, and it's cheaper and more politically expedient than nationalization. But we don't know for sure that it will work, and it's not the fastest or most certain way to end the problems in the financial sector. But we didn't choose to nationalize, and now that we are now on the banks can "earn their way out of trouble" path, the politics and budgetary cost of changing course are prohibitive. That's what makes us likely to "muddle along" should the present course of action fail to produce the desired results. We didn't choose the optimal solution to begin with, and we are unlikely to move there any time soon even if the present policies fail, as I think they might. Instead, we'll keep hearing we're almost there and just a little more time and a few more dollars ought to do it and continue to prop up the system. That's why I hope the policies do work, and work well, because if they don't, there are no practical alternative choices to "the muddle-through strategy."

Paul Krugman: Stressing the Positive

Will "the muddle-through strategy" work?:

Stressing the Positive, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Hooray! The banking crisis is over! Let’s party! O.K., maybe not.

In the end, the actual release of the much-hyped bank stress tests ... came as an anticlimax. Everyone knew more or less what the results would say: some big players need to raise more capital, but over all, the kids, I mean the banks, are all right. Even before the results were announced, Tim Geithner ... told us they would be “reassuring.”

But whether you actually should feel reassured depends on who you are: a banker, or someone trying to make a living in another profession. ... What we’re really seeing here is a decision on the part of President Obama and his officials to muddle through the financial crisis, hoping that the banks can earn their way back to health.

It’s a strategy that might work. After all, right now the banks are lending at high interest rates, while paying virtually no interest on their (government-insured) deposits. Given enough time, the banks could be flush again.

But it’s important to ... understand ... that ... the financial system won’t function normally until the crucial players get much stronger financially than they are now. Yet the Obama administration has decided not to do anything dramatic to recapitalize the banks.

Can the economy recover even with weak banks? Maybe. Banks won’t be expanding credit any time soon, but government-backed lenders have stepped in to fill the gap. ... So maybe we can let the economy fix the banks instead of the other way around.

But there are many things that could go wrong. It’s not at all clear that credit from the Fed, Fannie and Freddie can fully substitute for a healthy banking system. If it can’t, the muddle-through strategy will turn out to be a recipe for a prolonged, Japanese-style era of high unemployment and weak growth.

Actually, a multiyear period of economic weakness looks likely in any case..., it’s very hard to see where a real recovery will come from. And if the economy does stay depressed for a long time, banks will be in much bigger trouble than the stress tests — which looked only two years ahead — are able to capture.

Finally, given the possibility of bigger losses in the future, the government’s evident unwillingness either to own banks or let them fail creates a heads-they-win-tails-we-lose situation. If all goes well, the bankers will win big. If the current strategy fails, taxpayers will be forced to pay for another bailout.

But what worries me most ... is ... my sense that the prospects for fundamental financial reform are fading.

Does anyone remember the case of H. Rodgin Cohen...? He briefly made the news in March when he reportedly withdrew his name after being considered a top pick for deputy Treasury secretary.

Well, earlier this week, Mr. Cohen told an audience that the future of Wall Street won’t be very different from its recent past, declaring, “I am far from convinced there was something inherently wrong with the system.” Hey, that little thing about causing the worst global slump since the Great Depression? Never mind.

Those are frightening words. They suggest that while the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration continue to insist that they’re committed to tighter financial regulation and greater oversight, Wall Street insiders are taking the mildness of bank policy so far as a sign that they’ll soon be able to go back to playing the same games as before.

So as I said, while bankers may find the results of the stress test “reassuring,” the rest of us should be very, very afraid.

Stiglitz: The Spring of the Zombies

More on "the muddle-through strategy":

The Spring of the Zombies , by Joseph Stiglitz, Commentary, Project Syndicate: As spring comes to America, optimists are seeing "green sprouts" of recovery... The good news is that we may be at the end of a free fall. The rate of economic decline has slowed. The bottom may be near - perhaps by the end of the year. But that does not mean that the global economy is set for a robust recovery any time soon. Hitting bottom is no reason to abandon the strong measures that have been taken to revive the global economy.

This downturn is complex: an economic crisis combined with a financial crisis. Before its onset, America's debt-ridden consumers were the engine of global growth. That model has broken down, and will not be replaced soon. ... The collapse of credit made matters worse; and firms, facing high borrowing costs and declining markets, responded quickly, cutting back inventories. Orders dropped abruptly ...

We are likely to see a recovery in some of these areas... But examine the fundamentals:... real estate prices continue to fall, millions of homes are underwater..., and unemployment is increasing... States are being forced to lay off workers as tax revenues plummet.

The banking system has just been tested to see if it is adequately capitalized - a "stress" test that involved no stress - and some couldn't pass muster. But, rather than welcoming the opportunity to recapitalize, perhaps with government help, the banks seem to prefer a Japanese-style response: we will muddle through.

"Zombie" banks - dead but still walking among the living - are, in Ed Kane's immortal words, "gambling on resurrection." Repeating the Savings & Loan debacle of the 1980's. the banks are using bad accounting... Worse still, they are being allowed to borrow cheaply from the United States Federal Reserve, on the basis of poor collateral, and simultaneously to take risky positions. ...

The American government, too, is betting on muddling through: the Fed's measures and government guarantees mean that banks have access to low-cost funds, and lending rates are high. If nothing nasty happens - losses on mortgages, commercial real estate, business loans, and credit cards - the banks might just be able to make it through... In a few years time, the banks will be recapitalized, and the economy will return to normal. This is the rosy scenario.

But experiences around the world suggest that this is a risky outlook. Even were banks healthy, the deleveraging process and the associated loss of wealth means that, more likely than not, the economy will be weak. And a weak economy means, more likely than not, more bank losses. ...

Fixing the financial system is necessary, but not sufficient, for recovery. America's strategy for fixing its financial system is costly and unfair, for it is rewarding the people who caused the economic mess. But there is an alternative...: a debt-for-equity swap.

With such a swap, confidence could be restored to the banking system, and lending could be reignited with little or no cost to the taxpayer. It's neither particularly complicated nor novel. Bondholders obviously don't like it - they would rather get a gift from the government. But there are far better uses of the public's money, including another round of stimulus. ...

In spite of some spring sprouts, we should prepare for another dark winter: it's time for Plan B in bank restructuring and another dose of Keynesian medicine.

"How Useful Were Recent Financial Innovations?"

Was recent financial innovation productive? Adam Posen and Marc Hinterschweiger have a hard time finding evidence that it was:

How Useful Were Recent Financial Innovations? There is a Reason to be Skeptical, by Adam S. Posen and Marc Hinterschweiger: Who could be against innovation? That is the argument used by industries that wish to avoid regulation, that excessive government oversight will diminish incentives to innovate ... and we all will be worse off for it. And in the broad, this is a valid concern. ...

But not every innovative product is safe, let alone productive. Unlike pharmaceuticals, aerospace, and a host of other technical fields, financial innovations have been allowed to proliferate unscrutinized and untested for safety or effectiveness. Yet the negative spillovers on the public at large from faulty financial engineering and toxic products have now been clearly demonstrated to be enormous. ...

Like most innovations, the theory behind the most-recent financial developments made sense.... Th[e] mantra of Wall Street investors and financial economists alike implied that expansion in the use of newer derivatives and the like would lead to an expansion in the country’s capital stock, and that these financial products would be useful to nonfinancial companies, not just to banks.

The growth of derivatives and real-sector investment in the United States tell a different story (figure 1).

Figure 1 Notional amount of derivatives and US gross fixed capital formation, 2000–2008

Source: Bank for International Settlements (BIS), International Financial Statistics, via Datastream (IFS) Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC

Between 2003 and 2008, US gross fixed capital increased by about 25 percent, a reasonable number during an economic expansion, but hardly a boom. During the same five-year period, the global amount of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives increased by 300 percent, while derivatives held by the 25 largest US commercial banks rose by 170 percent. ... There only seems to be a weak link, if any, between the growth of the newest complex—and now proven dangerous if not toxic—financial products and real corporate investment.

Another way to assess the presumptive benefits ... of these products is to analyze who made use of derivative instruments. ... Only 11 percent of all counterparties were nonfinancial costumers. Hence, almost 90 percent of all derivative contracts took place between financial institutions. Had their usage by financial institutions generated either a boom in productive lending or a more resilient financial system, then, even if unused by nonfinancial companies directly, these new products could still have been productive. Since we have clearly seen the opposite over this time period, it is a revealing indicator that the nonfinancial companies for whom these products were prescribed did not themselves use them.

Figure 2 OTC derivatives by counterparty as of June 2008 (BIS)

Source: Bank for International Settlements (BIS)

Going forward, the US Congress and its international counterparts will have to decide how much to increase regulation and supervisory oversight of financial institutions. We are already hearing warnings from the financial industry that government should be careful not to overreach in its attempts at reform, for fear of harming financial innovation. While that is a worthy principle, our belief is that the record of recent financial innovations acts as a warning to be skeptical... In fact,... even if many financial innovations are beneficial, all of them need to be monitored over the long term, as well as scrutinized before issuance, by regulators for their safety and effectiveness. ...

Geithner: How We Tested the Big Banks

Timothy Geithner explains how the stress tests were conducted:

How We Tested the Big Banks, by Timothy Geithner, Commentary, NY Times:  This afternoon, Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Reserve will announce the results of an unprecedented review of the capital position of the nation’s largest banks. ...

We ... chose a strategy to lift the fog of uncertainty over bank balance sheets and to help ensure that the major banks, individually and collectively, had the capital to continue lending even in a worse than expected recession.

We brought together bank supervisors to undertake an exceptional assessment of the strength of our nation’s 19 largest banks. The object was to estimate potential future losses, and ensure that banks had enough capital to keep lending even in the face of a deeper recession.

Some might argue that this testing was overly punitive, while others might claim it could understate the potential need for additional capital. The test designed by the Federal Reserve and the supervisors sought to strike the right balance.

The Federal Reserve marshaled hundreds of supervisors to spend 45 days rigorously reviewing the banks’ detailed loan data. They applied exacting estimates of potential losses over two years, along with conservative estimates of potential earnings over the same period, and compared them with existing reserves and capital. The results were then evaluated against strict minimum capital standards, in terms of both overall capital and tangible common equity.

The effect of this capital assessment will be to help replace uncertainty with transparency. It will provide greater clarity about the resources major banks have to absorb future losses. It will also bring more private capital into the financial system, increasing the capacity for future lending; allow investors to differentiate more clearly among banks; and ultimately make it easier for banks to raise enough private capital to repay the money they have already received from the government.

The test results will indicate that some banks need to raise additional capital to provide a stronger foundation of resources over and above their current capital ratios. These banks have a range of options to raise capital over six months, including new common equity offerings and the conversion of other forms of capital into common equity. As part of this process, banks will continue to restructure, selling non-core businesses to raise capital. ...

Banks will also have the opportunity to request additional capital from the government through Treasury’s Capital Assistance Program. Treasury is providing this backstop so that markets can have confidence that we will maintain sufficient capital in the financial system. For institutions in which the federal government becomes a common shareholder, we will seek to maximize value for taxpayers and enable these companies to attract private capital, thereby reducing government ownership as quickly as possible.

Some banks will be able to begin returning capital to the government, provided they demonstrate that they can finance themselves without F.D.I.C. guarantees. In fact, we expect banks to repay more than the $25 billion initially estimated. This will free up resources to help support community banks, encourage small-business lending and help repair and restart the securities markets. ...

This is just a beginning, however. Our work is far from over. The cost of credit remains exceptionally high... The ultimate purpose of these programs is to ensure that the financial system supports rather than impedes economic recovery.

We have not reached the end of the recession or the financial crisis, but the bank stress tests should advance the process of repairing our financial system and provide a better foundation for recovery.

I've given a lot of tests over the years, and I can pretty much make the mean on a test come out how I want through the design of the questions and how I score the answers. If I want a mean of 70, or around there, I can get it, and if a mean of 50 is the target, that's possible too. The other thing that I've learned is that the relative rank of students in the class doesn't change much, the A, B, C, D, and F students will line up pretty much as they always do. But a mean of 50 will lead to much more complaining, lower evaluations, and general dissatisfaction with the course than a mean of 70 even if you grade on a curve so that the grades are identical. So, since I learn the same thing either way in terms of relative understanding of the material, targeting a mean of 70 works out better.

But you have to be careful since there is also an absolute standard to worry about. Someone who gets the mean score and a grade of, say, C, is being stamped with a particular level of competence, and the questions cannot be so easy that a C is awarded to students who do not have this minimal level of understanding.

The people designing the stress tests have the same freedom. Depending on the "questions" they ask the balance sheets, and how the "answers" are scored, they can get whatever mean they desire (e.g. how are assets that cannot be valued in the marketplace are "scored" makes a crucial difference in the outcome). If we choose a score of "70" as the dividing point between being solvent and being insolvent, then the percentage of banks passing the test is a function of the difficulty of the stress test how the items on the balance sheets - the answers to the questions - are interpreted.

That's where, as with the class and awarding a passing grade of C, an absolute standard comes in. If the test is just hard enough, but not too hard, if it hits the Goldilocks sweet spot, or close enough anyway, then the results can be trusted. But does anyone know for sure what that absolute standard is? And if we don't, what do the tests really mean? There will always be uncertainty.

There is a way out of this box, I suppose, and that's to give a test that everyone can plainly see is hard, no doubt about it, and then have most of the banks still pass it. So if officials can convince everyone that this was, in fact, a really, really hard test and banks did well anyway, that could work. But that's not what they did, they sought balance and in doing so, Geithner explicitly admits they are open to the criticism that the test was too easy (of course, if they had designed a hard test and many banks failed, they'd be accused of trying to use a biased test to force politicians to support nationalizing troubled banks).

And there are other problems too. Again, how did they value the toxic assets that nobody has been able to find a way to value? Were the questions biased, i.e. was it proper to apply the same test to the different institutions that were forced to take it, or should the test have been varied to fit the profile of particular banks? A big part of the problem with bank balance sheets is the things we cannot see, do not know about, and cannot predict. How were those things accounted for in the stress tests? If we had such a hard time predicting how bank balance sheets would change until now, then what changed that makes the tests credible? Why should we believe we can now predict what we haven't been able to predict previously? Why did the government negotiate the outcome with banks and how lenient were they in those negotiations? There are always students who want to argue about the result of a test, to have sections regraded, and how you respond to attempts to "negotiate" a grade can affect the percentage passing the class, particularly when - as with the stress tests - there aren't a lot of students/banks taking the test.

I don't think there's an outcome here that is all that helpful. If banks pass the test, for the most part - as government officials are assuring us they will - people will argue the test was too easy, or biased, or invalid for some other reason. If many banks fail (an unlikely event given the rosy talk from Fed and Treasury officials), that will cause even more fear and uncertainty in markets and the tests, which were supposed to bring certainty and calm to financial markets, will backfire (a reason to avoid this outcome as you are scoring the stress test results). I hope I'm wrong and Treasury can, in fact, convince people that the tests are credible, and the outcome is optimistic, but with all the uncertainty surrounding this process, that won't be easy to do.

"If Only"

Richard Posner lists the lessons he thinks we should learn from the economic crisis:

Capitalism in Crisis, by Richard A. Posner, Commentary, WSJ: ...It's not too soon ... to derive some important lessons from the economic crisis:

First, businessmen seek to maximize profits within a framework established by government. ... Rational businessmen will accept a risk of bankruptcy if profits are high... Given limited liability, bankruptcy is not the end of the world for shareholders or managers. But a wave of bank bankruptcies can bring down the economy. The risk of that happening is external to banks' decision-making and to control it we need government. Specifically we need our central bank, the Federal Reserve, to be on the lookout for bubbles, especially housing bubbles... Our central bank failed us.

The second lesson is that we may need more regulation of banking to reduce its inherent riskiness. ... Finally, let's place the blame where it belongs. Not on the bankers, who are not responsible for assuring economic stability, but on the government officials who had that responsibility and failed to discharge it. They failed even to develop contingency plans to deal with what everyone knew could happen in a context of escalating housing prices (it had happened in Japan in the late 1980s and the 1990s). Lacking such plans, the government responded to the crisis with spasmodic improvisations, amplifying uncertainty and mistrust and thus retarding recovery.

And let's not forget to apportion some of the blame to the influential economists who assured us that there could never be another depression. They argued that in the face of a recession the Federal Reserve had only to reduce interest rates and flood the banks with money and all would be well. If only.

Some Strings Attached

Timothy Geithner is changing the rules for financial firms that receive government assistance:

Geithner: If You Want to Cut the Strings, You Need to Cut All the Strings, by Mathew Yglesias: Here’s some good news from the Treasury Department. I’ve been complaining for a while that a number of financial institutions seem inclined to repay their TARP money, and then proclaim themselves free from government meddling, all the while taking advantage of a plethora of other emergency support programs that the government has put into place. Now Tim Geithner is saying, rightly, that a bank that wants to repay its TARP money also needs to cut itself off from the “guarantee of debt issuance offered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.”

That’s the right thing to do. Now the next question becomes one of credibility. The official thinking is that the explicit FDIC guarantee lets banks borrow much more cheaply than they otherwise might. A truly healthy bank can repay its TARP money and cut itself off from the guarantee while paying little price, because a healthy bank won’t need an explicit guarantee to borrow pretty cheaply. But under the current circumstances, is the idea that the government would let a non-guaranteed bank fail and default on its loans really credible?

Consistency in policy is important. When policy is changed unpredictably, it creates uncertainty among firms and households, and that uncertainty can cause reduce or distort economic activity.

Both the Fed and the Treasury have had to alter policy mid course, more so for the Treasury, and that has brought justifiable criticism. It's as though policymakers didn't think the chess game through very many moves ahead, and as the game has unfolded they've been forced to alter their strategy in response. To some extent, policy has appeared ad hoc, developed on the fly as events present themselves to policymakers.

But let me offer some defense of this behavior, and even argue that it can be helpful in some cases.

First, I can't very well criticize policymakers for not putting policies into place fast enough and at the same time criticize them for not closing every possible loophole. If you are trying to put policies in place quickly, then you probably won't think of everything you might have discovered if you'd had the luxury of taking your time. I think policymakers can be rightly criticized for not having plans ready in advance. But given that no such plans existed, the polices that were rushed into place were going to have shortcomings that policymakers would have to deal with down the road.

Second, policymakers will never be able to think of everything, even with the luxury of as much time as they need. They may be able to think the chess game through several steps ahead, but they probably won't be able to think of every possible contingency or play by the opposition.

But what they can do is convey the spirit of the policy and make very clear the types of behaviors they are trying to prevent. And they should also make it clear that should firms that try to bypass the regulations with clever strategies exploiting loopholes in the legislation, those loopholes will be closed immediately in keeping with the spirit of the legislation. If firms know that these avenues will be closed, and if they see that firms that try to engage in this type of behavior are stopped from doing so by policymakers, and that it is therefore costly for them to even try, they won't be (as) tempted to use complicated strategies to bypass the spirit of the legislation.

Policy uncertainty is bad when the changes are ad hoc and cannot be anticipated, but not all mid course corrections to policy come under this heading. In the case just described, given that firms know the intent of the regulations they are under, the response of policymakers can be fully anticipated if they try to subvert the intent of the regulation (firms who are uncertain could ask policymakers if a particular behavior would be frowned upon).

Whether or not the actions described above come under this heading of simply closing off activities that violate the spirit of the rules can be debated, but I'd argue that the change in policy does fit into this framework and is therefore a justifiable correction.

"Staying the Course . . . Toward 1990s Japan?"

I have a guest post at the Washington Post's new blog, The Hearing, run by Simon Johnson and James Kwak. The post responds to Ben Bernanke's testimony this morning before the Joint Economic Committee:

Staying the Course . . . Toward 1990s Japan?

China and the Dollar

Andy Xie expects the dollar to collapse:

If China loses faith the dollar will collapse, by Andy Xie, Commentary, Financial Times: Emerging economies such as China and Russia are calling for alternatives to the dollar as a reserve currency. The trigger is the Federal Reserve’s liberal policy of expanding the money supply to prop up America’s banking system and its over-indebted households. ...[T]he Fed may be forced into printing dollars massively, which would eventually trigger high inflation or even hyper-inflation and cause great damage to countries that hold dollar assets in their foreign exchange reserves.

The chatter over alternatives to the dollar mainly reflects the unhappiness with US monetary policy among the emerging economies that have amassed nearly $10,000bn in foreign exchange reserves, mostly in dollar assets. ...[T]he US situation is unique: it borrows in its own currency, and the dollar is the world’s dominant reserve currency. The US can disregard its creditors’ concerns for the time being without worrying about a dollar collapse. ...

The faith of the Chinese in America’s power and responsibility, and the petrodollar holdings of the gulf countries that depend on US military protection, are the twin props for the dollar’s global status. Ethnic Chinese ... may account for half of the foreign holdings of dollar assets. ...

The US could repair its balance sheet through asset sales and fiscal transfers instead of just printing money. ... The country’s vast and unexplored natural resource holdings could be auctioned off. Americans may view these ideas as unthinkable. It is hard to imagine that a superpower needs to sell the family silver to stay solvent. Hence, printing money seems a less painful way out. ...

Other currencies are not safe havens either. ... Central banks are punishing savers to redeem the sins of debtors and speculators. Unfortunately, ethnic Chinese are the biggest savers.

Diluting Chinese savings to bail out America’s failing banks and bankrupt households, though highly beneficial to the US national interest in the short term, will destroy the dollar’s global status. Ethnic Chinese demand for the dollar has been waning already. ...

America’s policy is pushing China towards developing an alternative financial system. ... Its recent decision to turn Shanghai into a financial centre by 2020 reflects China’s anxiety over relying on the dollar system. The year 2020 seems remote... However, if global stagflation takes hold, as I expect it to, it will force China to accelerate its reforms to float its currency and create a single, independent and market-based financial system. When that happens, the dollar will collapse.

Barry Eichengreen explains why using SDRs as a reserve currency, as has been suggested by the governor of the People's Bank of China, is not as easy as it might seem:

Commercialize the SDR now, by Barry Eichengreen, Commentary, Project Syndicate: Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the People’s Bank of China, made a splash prior to the recent G-20 summit by arguing that the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights should replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. ...

Sympathizers acknowledged the contradictions... Central banks understandably seek more reserves as their economies grow. But if those reserves mainly take the form of dollars, then their rising demand allows the United States to finance its external deficit at an artificially low cost. In turn, this allows unsustainable imbalances to build up, leading to an inevitable crash. ...

But skeptics question whether the SDR could ever replace the dollar as the world’s leading reserve currency, for the simple reason that the SDR is not a currency. It is a composite accounting unit in which the IMF issues credits to its members. Those credits ... cannot be used in the other transactions in which central banks and governments engage. ... This means that the SDR is not an attractive unit for official reserves.

This would not be easy to change. Despite the trials and tribulations of the American economy, dollar securities remain the dominant form of reserves because of the unparalleled depth and liquidity of US markets. Central banks can buy and sell dollar securities without moving those markets. There is also the convenience factor: dollars are widely used in a variety of other transactions. As a result, not even the euro has seriously challenged the dollar as the dominant reserve currency. ...

If China is serious about elevating the SDR to reserve-currency status, it should take steps to create a liquid market in SDR claims. It could issue its own SDR-denominated bonds. ... Of course, an earlier attempt was made to create a commercial market in SDR-denominated claims ... in the 1970’s... But these efforts ultimately went nowhere. The dollar being more liquid, its first-mover advantage proved impossible to surmount.

Overcoming that advantage now would require someone to act as market-maker ... and subsidise the market in its start-up phase. The obvious someone is the IMF. The Fund could stand ready to buy and sell SDR claims to all comers, ... at narrow bid/ask spreads competitive with those for dollars. ...

Transforming the SDR into a true international currency would require surmounting other obstacles. The IMF would have to be able to issue additional SDRs in periods of shortage... The IMF’s management would also have to be empowered to decide on SDR issuance, just as the Fed can decide to offer currency swaps. For the SDR to become a true international currency, in other words, the IMF would have to become more like a global central bank and international lender of last resort.

For worries about inflation, see Inflation Nation by Alan Meltzer (and also see Krugman's response, A History Lesson for Alan Meltzer).

[Note: A lot of people have noted the apparent contradiction in the concern from Krugman over deflation, and from Meltzer over inflation, e.g. Mankiw for one, but here's an example of this from Mankiw's colleague, Martin Feldstein, within the same article. It's simply a short-run, long-run distinction.]

"Troubled Banks Must be Allowed a Way to Fail"

Kansas City Fed president Thomas Hoenig has a plan for allowing large and systemically important banks to fail. If we prevent financial institutions from becoming so large and systemically important in the first place, the plans below wouldn't be needed. But if we going to allow such institutions to exist - not my first choice but for now we have what we have - then this is a reasonable approach to take. One difference I have, though, is that I think that stronger form of guarantee for depositors, a key component of the Swedish plan, is needed. That changes the equity calculations when you look solely at the flow of money to depositors, and the politics of that aren't great, but the improved overall outcome can more than compensate for the cost of the government guarantees:

Troubled banks must be allowed a way to fail, by Thomas Hoenig, Commentary, Financial Times: When the financial crisis began ... in 2007, US policymakers reacted quickly out of fear that ... events would lead to a global economic collapse. In my view, the policy response ... has been ad hoc, resulting in inequitable outcomes among firms, creditors, and investors. Despite taking a number of actions..., uncertainty continues and markets remain stressed.

I believe there is an alternative method for addressing this crisis...: the implementation of a systematic plan to resolve large, problem financial institutions. ... Boiled down..., the plan would require those firms seeking government assistance to make the taxpayer senior to all shareholders, with the government determining the circumstances for managers and directors. ...

Non-viable institutions would be allowed to fail and be placed into a negotiated conservatorship or a bridge institution, with the bad assets liquidated while the remainder of the firm is ... re-privatised as soon as is feasible. ...

This plan has ... management and shareholders bear the costs for their actions before taxpayer funds are committed. This process also is equitable across all firms; is similar to what is currently done with smaller banks; and provides a definitive process that should reduce market uncertainty. ...

In contrast..., the current policy raises a host of issues:

● Certain companies have not been allowed to fail and, as a result, the moral hazard problem has substantially worsened. ...

● So-called “too big to fail” firms have been given a competitive advantage and, rather than being held accountable..., they have actually been subsidised in becoming more economically and politically powerful.

● The US government has poured billions of dollars into these firms without a defined resolution process... The longer resolution is postponed, the greater the losses and the larger the debt burden.

● ...[T]he Federal Reserve is making loans directly to specific sectors of the economy, causing the Fed to allocate credit and take on a fiscal as well as a monetary policy role. This ... may compromise ... independence ... and make it more difficult to contain inflation in the years to come.

● ...We have entrenched these even larger, systemically important, “too big to fail” institutions into the economic system, assuring that past mistakes will be repeated.

Certainly, the approach I suggest for resolving these large firms also is not without substantial cost, but it looks to both the short and long run. ... While I agree that central banks must sometimes take actions affecting the short run, they must keep the long run in focus or risk failing their mission.

The fact that Citibank can negotiate the outcome of the stress tests is, I think, pretty good evidence that banks have become too big and too politically powerful for our collective good. (See here too.)

The Road Ahead

From the new site New Deal 2.0, Stiglitz, Solow, and Johnson:

[more here]

"Genus Institutionalist; Species: Galbraithian"

Jamie Galbraith versus Phil Gramm:

Causes of the Crisis, by James K. Galbraith, Commentary, Texas Observer: Editor’s note: These remarks were delivered ... at a debate between University of Texas professor James Galbraith ... and former Majority Leader Richard Armey, chief instigator of the recent Astroturf “tea party" protests. Armey had begun his remarks by noting that his rule in life was “never trust anyone from Austin or Boston,” and proceeded to declare his allegiance to the “Austrian School” of economics, a libertarian view that regards public intervention in private markets as socialism.

It is of course a pleasure to be with you today. I was born in Boston, and I am proud of it. And I have lived 24 years in Austin—and I’m proud of that.

Leader Armey spoke to you of his admiration for Austrian economics. I can’t resist telling you that when the Vienna Economics Institute celebrated its centennial, many years ago, they invited, as their keynote speaker, my father [John Kenneth Galbraith]. The leading economists of the Austrian school—including von Hayek and von Haberler—returned for the occasion. And so my father took a moment to reflect on the economic triumphs of the Austrian Republic since the war, which, he said, “would not have been possible without the contribution of these men.” They nodded—briefly—until it dawned on them what he meant. They’d all left the country in the 1930s.

My own economics is American: genus Institutionalist; species: Galbraithian.

This is a panel on the crisis. Mr. Moderator, you ask what is the root cause? My reply is in three parts.

First, an idea. The idea that capitalism, for all its considerable virtues, is inherently self-stabilizing, that government and private business are adversaries rather than partners...; the idea that regulation, in financial matters especially, can be dispensed with. We tried it, and we see the result.

Second, a person. It would not be right to blame any single person for these events, but if I had to choose one to name it would be... former Senator Phil Gramm. I’d cite specifically the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act—the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act—in 1999, after which it took less than a decade to reproduce all the pathologies that Glass-Steagall had been enacted to deal with in 1933. I’d also cite the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, slipped into an 11,000-page appropriations bill in December 2000 as Congress was adjourning following Bush v. Gore. This measure deregulated energy futures trading, enabling Enron and legitimating credit-default swaps, and creating a massive vector for the transmission of financial risk throughout the global system. ...

Third, a policy. This was the abandonment of state responsibility for financial regulation... This abandonment was not subtle: The first head of the Office of Thrift Supervision in the George W. Bush administration came to a press conference on one occasion with a stack of copies of the Federal Register and a chainsaw. A chainsaw. The message was clear. And it led to the explosion of liars’ loans, neutron loans (which destroy people but leave buildings intact), and toxic waste. That these were terms of art in finance tells you what you need to know. ...

The consequence ... is a collapse of trust, a collapse of asset values, and a collapse of the financial system. That is what has happened, and what we have to deal with now.

Can “stimulus” get us out?

As a matter of economics, public spending substitutes for private spending. ... But it is not self-sustaining in the absence of a viable private credit system. The idea that we will be on the road to full recovery and returning to high employment in a year or so therefore seems to me to be an illusion. And for this reason, the emphasis on short-term, “shovel-ready” projects in the expansion package, while understandable, was a mistake. As in the New Deal, we need both the Works Progress Administration ... to provide employment, and the Public Works Administration ... to rebuild the country. ...

The risk we run, in public policy, is not inflation. It is lack of persistence, a premature reversal of direction, and of course the fear of large numbers. If deficits in the trillions and public debt in the tens of trillions scare you, this is not a line of work you should be in.

The ultimate goals of policy are not measured by deficits or debt. They are measured by the performance of the economy itself. Here Leader Armey and I agree. He spoke with approval, in his remarks, of the goals of 3 percent unemployment and 4 percent inflation embodied in the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978. Which, as a 24-year-old member of the staff of the House Banking Committee in 1976, I drafted.