Economist's View

Thomas Schelling on Climate Change

Conor Clarke interviews Thomas Schelling on the implementation of climate change policy (the excerpts run across several questions):

An Interview With Thomas Schelling, Part Two, by Conor Clarke: This is the second part of my interview with Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling. Part one is here. In this part we talk very generally about climate change...

...It's not obvious that averting global climate change is in the rational self-interest of anyone ... alive today. The serious consequences probably won't occur until 2080 or 2100 or thereafter..., [and] those consequences are going to be distributed in a radically uneven way. The northwest of the United States might actually benefit. So how does a negotiation process work? How does a generation today negotiate on behalf of future generations? And how do we negotiate when the costs are distributed so unevenly?

Well I do think that one of the difficulties is that most of the beneficiaries aren't yet born. More than that: Most of the beneficiaries will be born in ... the developing world. By 2080 or 2100 five-sixths of the population, at least, will be in places like China, India, Indonesia, Africa and so forth. And what I don't know is whether Americans are really willing to understand that and do anything for the benefit of the unborn Chinese.

It's a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. And you can in fact find ways to make the threat serious. I think there's a significant likelihood of a kind of a runaway release of carbon and methane ... that will create a huge multiplier effect, and it could become very serious. ...

If I were to come clean to the American public I would say that, except for a very low probability of a very bad result -- which is the disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which would put Washington DC under water -- we are probably going to outgrow any vulnerability we have to climate change. ... You know, very little of the US economy is susceptible to climate. All of agriculture is less than 3% of our gross product. Forestry may be endangered. Fisheries may be endangered. But recreation might actually benefit!

So if we can double our GDP in the next 70 or 80 years,... -- even if we lose 10% of our GDP from climate change -- we're still ahead so much that the effect of climate change wouldn't be noticed. But it would be pretty disastrous in a lot of the less developed parts of the world. And that's why I think it's crucially important not to demand anything of China, India and so forth that will significantly impede their economic progress. ...

[I]f the developed countries ... are really serious, they'll tell India and China and Brazil, "we're going to provide enormous assistance to help reduce your dependence on fossil fuels. And we don't expect you to pay for it yourselves. We will pay for it because we're rich and you're not." ...

But while people talk about this..., nobody that I know of is thinking about how in the world you organize so that the rich countries can agree what you do with the poor. You need to know who divides the money, and who the monitors is. We're going to need a whole new set of institutions...

It's very hard to get Americans to engage in what they think will be suffering not just for the polar bears but for the poor around the world who will indeed suffer if they can't outgrow their vulnerability to climate change. ...

I think you have to realize that most people have very strong moral feelings. I think in a lot of cases they're misdirected. I wish moral feelings about a two-month old fetus were attached to hungry children in Africa. But I think people have very strong moral feelings. In fact, I'm always amazed by the number of people who at least pretend they're worried about the polar bears.

And one thing that I think ought to help but doesn't is that -- and my impression is that maybe this is slightly changing -- the organized churches in America don't take seriously preserving the heritage that God gave us. ... I get no impression that Protestants and Catholics are sermonizing on the importance of preserving the bounty of the earth, the richness of the species, or preserving the planet as we would like to know it. ... I think the churches don't realize that they could have a potent effect in not letting so much of gods legacy -- in terms of flora and fauna -- be destroyed by climate change.

But I tend to be rather pessimistic. I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening -- you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth -- that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don't think that's going to happen.

Exaggerating the threat won't help. When people find out that you are doing that -- and they will at some point -- you lose credibility and end up further behind than when you started. Also, though this is a bit picky -- this qualification is often omitted to simplify the discussion -- the costs are not fully captured by the loss of GDP. If, for example, some species become extinct due to climate change, that is only included in the costs to the extent that it lowers the output of goods and services. But our concerns are broader than that. Finally, I don't think we should, even just sometimes, wish that horrid things would happen to people no matter how much good might come of it. There are better ways to get there.

"Half of the World's Emissions Came from Just 700 Million People"

I'm on the run at the moment and have only given this a quick scan, hopefully the comments can take it up in more detail, but here is, according to the hype, the solution to all our global warming problems [Scientific American comments on the proposal here.]:

New Princeton method may help allocate carbon emissions responsibility among nations, EurekAlert: Just months before world leaders are scheduled to meet to devise a new international treaty on climate change, a research team led by Princeton University scientists has developed a new way of dividing responsibility for carbon emissions among countries.

The approach is so fair, according to its creators, that they are hoping it will win the support of both developed and developing nations, whose leaders have been at odds for years over perceived inequalities in previous proposals.

The method is outlined in a paper, titled "Sharing Global CO2 Emissions Among 1 Billion High Emitters," published online in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to the authors, the approach uses a new fairness principle based on the "common but differentiated responsibilities" of individuals, rather than nations.

"Our proposal moves beyond per capita considerations to identify the world's high-emitting individuals, who are present in all countries," the team says in the introduction. The authors include Stephen Pacala ... and Robert Socolow... Pacala and Socolow's concept of "stabilization wedges," a strategy that proposed concrete ways to prevent global emissions of greenhouse gases from rising for the next five decades, was featured in "An Inconvenient Truth," former Vice President Al Gore's 2006 film about climate change. The concept has given the climate change policy community a common unit for discussing how to reduce emissions and for allowing a comparison of different carbon-cutting strategies.

Paul Krugman: HELP Is on the Way

We can afford health care reform:

HELP Is on the Way, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: The Congressional Budget Office has looked at the future of American health insurance, and it works.

A few weeks ago there was a furor when the budget office “scored” two incomplete Senate health reform proposals — that is, estimated their costs and likely impacts over the next 10 years. One proposal came in more expensive than expected; the other didn’t cover enough people. Health reform, it seemed, was in trouble.

But last week the budget office scored the full proposed legislation from the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). And the news — which got far less play in the media than the downbeat earlier analysis — was very, very good. Yes, we can reform health care. ...

[A] look at the U.S. numbers makes it clear that insuring the uninsured shouldn’t cost all that much, for two reasons.

An "Ethical Dilemma" in End of Life Care

This looks at the costs of extending the end of life by a short period of time and tries to draw a boundary between those cases when treatment should be applied, and those when it is not worth it to do so (the conclusion is that "studies powered to detect a survival advantage of two months or less should test only interventions that can be marketed at a cost of less than $20,000 for a course of treatment").

How do we draw this line (and if you don't think we should, how do we avoid drawing it)? Usually, I would give the standard answer that we should employ these life-extending procedures up until the point where the marginal cost of the treatment equals the marginal benefit, and let someone else worry about how to actually measure the costs and benefits. But in this case the measurement of the benefits - life itself - seems particularly hard to quantify, and trying to account for quality of life complicates it further, and it is not clear to me that a market test is even appropriate when there may not be a tomorrow and standard opportunity cost tradeoffs are missing from the evaluation (update: thinking more, I suppose this is just "cap-T" in our models, which isn't too hard to handle in the deterministic case, i.e. where T is known in advance with certainty, but the evaluation still seems problematic due to the other reasons that are cited). So I don't think there is a good answer to this question, at least not one that standard economic models can deliver:

How much is life worth? The $440 billion question, EurekAlert: The decision to use expensive cancer therapies that typically produce only a relatively short extension of survival is a serious ethical dilemma in the U.S. that needs to be addressed by the oncology community, according to a commentary published online June 29 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Tito Fojo, M.D., Ph.D., of the Medical Oncology Branch, Center of Cancer Research at the National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda, Md., and Christine Grady, Ph.D., of the Department of Bioethics, the Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health, ... illustrate cost-benefit relationships for several cancer drugs, including cetuximab for treatment of non-small cell lung cancer, touted as "practice changing" and new standards of care by professional societies, including the American Society of Clinical Oncology. ...

According to Fojo and Grady,... 18 weeks of cetuximab treatment for non-small cell lung cancer, which was found to extend life by 1.2 months, costs an average of $80,000, which translates into an expenditure of $800,000 to prolong the life of one patient by 1 year. At this rate, it would cost $440 billion annually ... to extend the lives of 550,000 Americans who die of cancer annually by 1 year.

To address the issue, the commentators recommend that studies powered to detect a survival advantage of two months or less should test only interventions that can be marketed at a cost of less than $20,000 for a course of treatment.

Every life is of infinite value, the authors say, but spiraling costs of cancer care makes this dilemma inescapable.

"The current situation cannot continue. We cannot ignore the cumulative costs of the tests and treatments we recommend and prescribe. As the agents of change, professional societies, including their academic and practicing oncologist members, must lead the way," the authors write. "The time to start is now."

A Public Plan

[I'm hoping this education example will give some insight into the public health care plan, or at least give you another way to think about it.]

Suppose that education is only available from private sector schools, and that education within this system is very expensive. Because of the expense, millions of people do not have access to education. Further suppose that due to the characteristics of the education market, there is reason to believe that the private institutions are bloated with excess costs (and, in addition to all the other excess costs, 30% of their expenditures came from competition for students rather than delivering education). To make matters worse, the already too high costs are expected to escalate rapidly in the future and further limit access to education. (And there's more. If costs aren't controlled, the government's Educare program for the very young will begin to eat up a huge share of the federal budget.)

Now suppose the government decides to solve both the access and cost problems by setting up a public plan for education. Here's how it works.

The government will build schools, staff them, purchase supplies, and so on, but there's a catch. The schools will have to run without any government subsidies, none at all, not a dime (so this is different than what we actually do since some or all of the education bill is subsidized, some for college, all for lower grades).

If these schools provide exactly the same education as the private sector schools but cost less to attend, then that would either force the private sector schools to find a way to compete by bringing costs down, and they ought to be able to match the government run institution, or they would go out of business. It's true that the public institutions might have an advantage in buying books in bulk, that sort of thing, and they could probably get books and other supplies for less than individual private schools could get them, but what's wrong with scale economies? And to the extent that it is the power that comes from their size as public institutions rather than actual efficiencies, it's important to remember that the publishers aren't without their own countervailing market power, so this makes the playing field more level.

As to access, one option is to do as we do with schools now and implicitly subsidize everyone who attends, rich and poor alike, by giving government subsidies to the schools (tuition falls by the amount of the subsidy, to zero for public elementary and high schools, part way to zero for colleges). But that would violate the no government help rule we imposed above. The other way to do this is to take the money that would have been used to subsidize the schools and instead give it out to individuals who couldn't attend school otherwise (perhaps graduated by income). That avoids giving subsidies to those who don't need them, and the subsidies can then be concentrated on those who do. The additional help available to those who need it would, in turn, allow more people access to education, a key goal of the policy.

So, the idea is to build government schools that must run without any help from taxpayers, and the public schools will compete side by side with the private schools. Rather than limiting choice, this adds one more choice, and it's a choice nobody has to make if the public schools turn out to be more expensive than than the competing private schools. Then, to increase access to education, give individuals the tuition subsidies they need to make it possible for them to attend the public school. Finally, for any conservatives opposed to the public plan, notice that if individuals can use the subsidy on either a public or a private sector school, this is basically a voucher system. However, in this case the goal of the voucher system is to reduce costs in the overly expensive private sector rather than to discipline the public institutions, something the private sector shouldn't fear if, in fact, it is the least cost provider of education.

Why Op-Eds?

Here's something I've been wondering. Now that we have blogs and the internet, why do high ranking government officials - Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers today in the Washington Post, or Peter Orszag in the Financial Times for example - publish op-eds behind paywalls?

Why should people be forced to pay to hear read important policy discussions? Doesn't that exclude a lot of people from participating in the discourse? Even if the policy discussions aren't behind paywalls, other papers don't reprint the remarks in full, at least hardly ever, so the distribution is still limited.

When, say, the president wants to say something, why publish it on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, etc.? Why not simply post it on the White House web site, and make it absolutely clear that anyone who wants to can republish it in its entirety. Instead of one paper publishing the remarks, wouldn't they likely appear in several if not all major papers, or at least be discussed in some fashion, and wouldn't the remarks also be reprinted in local papers and in many blogs? Wouldn't a lot more people be able to read the discussion, and, in fact, wouldn't it be likely that a lot more people would read it?

So why do they still use the old model? Is it because the general public isn't the real target of these communications, or have I missed something essential? [Note: added a bit more in comments.]

Update: My daughter Amy is political consultant, and she helps politicians and others build support for their candidacy or for a particular side of an issue (and her dad thinks she is very good at it). She sends this along to straighten me out:

There are a few reasons for putting op-eds in Tier 1 newspapers:

1.  Having your op-ed in a newspaper that is well-established gives your point a seal of legitimacy.

2.  Once your op-ed is published, the goal is to move it around to bloggers, other reporters, etc. who will reprint it. But, being in “old media” gives your point gravitas.

3.  The audience is NEVER the general public, ever. Your audience is always opinion leaders, policy makers and lobbyists. Oh, and reporters who may be covering your issue.

4.  There is value to being able to use the masthead of the paper where your op-ed was published in campaign commercials, mailers, etc. You can only do that if it’s been published.

5. Not everyone is new media savvy.

That’s all.

"Something’s Got to Give in Medicare Spending"

Tyler Cowen is not a fan of Obama's health care reform plan. He thinks we should use comparative effectiveness studies to "cut areas of Medicare spending." (Update: In comments, Tyler says, "I don't quite agree with your opening sentence characterizing my piece.  I think Obama would like to do something along the lines of what Cutler proposes and along the lines of what I defend.  I think it is Congress that will not let him."):

Something’s Got to Give in Medicare Spending, by Tyler Cowen, Commentary, NY Times: Medicare expenditures threaten to crush the federal budget... It’s not the profits of the drug companies or the overhead of the insurance companies that make American health care so expensive, but the financial incentives for doctors and medical institutions to recommend more procedures, whether or not they are effective. So far, the American people have been unwilling to say no.

Drawing upon the ideas of the Harvard economist David Cutler, the Obama administration talks of empowering an independent board of experts to judge the comparative effectiveness of health care expenditures; the goal is to limit or withdraw Medicare support for ineffective ones. This idea is long overdue ...

Paul Krugman: Keeping Them Honest

Will the health care reform plan include an effective public option?:

Keeping Them Honest, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: “I appreciate your efforts, and look forward to working with you so that the Congress can complete health care reform by October.” So declared President Obama in a letter this week to Senators Max Baucus and Edward Kennedy.

The big health care push is officially on. But ... reform will fail unless we get serious cost control... So let me offer Congress two pieces of advice:

1) Don’t trust the insurance industry.

2) Don’t trust the insurance industry.

...It’s a sign of the way the political winds are blowing that ... the president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry lobby known as AHIP, has explicitly accepted the need for “much more aggressive regulation of insurance.”

What’s still not settled, however, is whether regulation will be supplemented by competition, in the form of a public plan that Americans can buy into as an alternative to private insurance.

Now nobody is proposing that Americans be forced to get their insurance from the government. The “public option,” if it materializes, will be just that — an option Americans can choose. And the reason for providing this option was clearly laid out in Mr. Obama’s letter: It will give Americans “a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep the insurance companies honest.”

Those last five words are crucial because history shows that the insurance companies will do nothing to reform themselves unless forced to do so.

Consider the seemingly trivial matter of making it easier for doctors to deal with multiple insurance companies. Back in 1993,... William Kristol ... acknowledged that some things needed fixing, calling for, among other things, “a simplified, uniform insurance form.”

Fast forward to the present. A few days ago, major players in the health industry laid out what they intend to do to slow the growth in health care costs. Topping the list of AHIP’s proposals was “administrative simplification.” Providers, the lobby conceded, face “administrative challenges” because ... each insurer has its own distinct telephone numbers, fax numbers, codes,... forms and administrative procedures. “Standardizing administrative transactions,” AHIP asserted, “will be a watershed event.”

Think about it. The insurance industry’s idea of a cutting-edge, cost-saving reform is to do what William Kristol — William Kristol! — thought it should have done 15 years ago. ...

The ... purpose of the public option is to make sure that the industry doesn’t waste another 15 years — by giving Americans an alternative if private insurers fall down on the job.

Be warned, however. The insurance industry will do everything it can to avoid being held accountable. At first the insurance lobby’s foot soldiers in Congress tried to shout down the public option with the old slogans: private enterprise good, government bad. ...

The most recent ruse is the proposal for a “trigger” — the public option will only become available if private insurers fail to meet certain performance criteria. The idea, of course, is to choose those criteria to ensure that the trigger is never pulled.

And here’s the thing. Without an effective public option, the Obama health care reform will be simply a national version of the health care reform in Massachusetts: a system that is a lot better than nothing but has done little to address the fundamental problem of a fragmented system, and as a result has done little to control rising health care costs.

Right now the health insurers are promising to deliver major cost savings. But history shows that such promises can’t be trusted. As President Obama said in his letter, we need a serious, real public option to keep the insurance companies honest.

Reich: What is the Purpose of the Bailout?

I should let Robert Reich finish his conversation on the future of American workers and car companies:

The Future of Manufacturing, GM, and American Workers (Part III), by Robert Reich: ...US taxpayers who have forked out more than $60 billion to buy [GM]. But why would US taxpayers want to own today’s GM? Surely not because the shares promise a high return when the economy turns up. GM has been on a downward slide for years..., it seems doubtful that taxpayers will even be repaid our $60 billion. But getting repaid cannot be the main goal of the bail-out. Presumably, the reason is to serve some larger public purpose. But the goal is not obvious.

It cannot be to preserve GM jobs, because the US Treasury has signaled GM must slim to get the cash. ... Plans call for laying off another 18,000 U.S. workers by the end of 2010.

The purpose cannot be to create a new, lean, debt-free company that might one day turn a profit. That is what the private sector is supposed to achieve on its own and what a reorganization under bankruptcy would do.

Nor is the purpose of the bail-out to create a new generation of fuel-efficient cars. Congress has already given auto makers money to do this. Besides, the Treasury has said it has no interest in ... telling the industry what cars to make.

The only practical purpose I can imagine for the bail-out is to slow the decline of GM to create enough time for its workers, suppliers, dealers and communities to adjust to its eventual demise. Yet if this is the goal, surely there are better ways to allocate $60 billion than to buy GM? The funds would be better spent helping the Midwest diversify away from cars... And eventually, for the reasons stated in Parts I and II of this series, diversify away from manufacturing assembly. Cash could be used to retrain car workers, giving them extended unemployment insurance as they retrain.

But US politicians dare not talk openly about industrial adjustment because the public does not want to hear about it. ...

So the Obama administration is ... is not telling anyone the complete truth: GM will disappear, eventually. The bail-out is designed to give the economy time to reduce the social costs of the blow.

Behind all of this is a growing public fear, of which GM’s demise is a small but telling part. Half a century ago, the prosperity of America’s middle class was one of democratic capitalism’s greatest triumphs. ...

But starting three decades ago, these trends have been turned upside down. Middle-class jobs that do not need a college degree are disappearing. Job security is all but gone. And the nation is more unequal. GM in its heyday was the model of economic security and widening prosperity. Its decline has mirrored the disappearance of both.

Middle-class taxpayers worry they cannot afford to bail out companies like GM. Yet they worry they cannot afford to lose their jobs. ...[W]hat has been bad for GM has been bad for much of America. The answer is not to bail out GM. It is to smooth the way to a new, post-manufacturing economy.

A Lump of Coal for Obama

More disappointment with the new leader:

Obama walks a fine line over mining, by Tom Hamburger and Peter Wallsten, LA Times: With the election of President Obama, environmentalists had expected to see the end of the "Appalachian apocalypse," their name for exposing coal deposits by blowing the tops off whole mountains.

But in recent weeks, the administration has quietly made a decision to open the way for at least two dozen more mountaintop removals. ... The list included some controversial mountaintop mines. ...

The administration's decision ... sheds on relations between the mining industry and the Obama White House,... environmentalists ... say they feel betrayed...

The issue is politically sensitive because environmentalists were an active force behind Obama's election, and the president's standing is tenuous among Democratic voters in coal states. ... Moreover,... halting mountaintop mining could eliminate jobs and put upward pressure on energy prices in a time of economic hardship.

Coal advocates have solicited help from officials as high up as White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. And the issue has sparked contentious debates within the administration, including one shouting match...

Although environmentalists had expected the new administration to put the brakes on mountaintop removal, Rahall and other mining advocates have pointed out that Obama did not promise to end the practice and was more open to it than his Republican opponent, Arizona Sen. John McCain.

A review of Obama's campaign statements show that he had expressed concern about the practice without promising to end it. ... And his EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson, has said that the agency ... would "use the best science and follow the letter of the law in ensuring we are protecting our environment." Soon afterward, the agency in effect blocked six major pending mountaintop removal projects...

But this month, after a series of White House meetings with coal companies and advocates..., the EPA released the little-noticed letter giving the green light to at least two dozen projects. ...

Ed Hopkins, a top Sierra Club official, said some of the projects that have now obtained the EPA's blessing "are ... large and potentially destructive..." "It makes us wonder what standards -- if any -- the administration is using," Hopkins said. ...

Environmentalists were stunned to learn from Rahall's office May 15 that the EPA had given its blessing to 42 out of the 48 mine projects it had reviewed so far -- including two dozen mountaintop removals.

The news came in a letter ... from ... the EPA's acting assistant administrator, who wrote, "I understand the importance of coal mining in Appalachia for jobs, the economy, and meeting the nation's energy needs."

Carbon Offsets

Robert Frank argues for carbon offsets as a complement to carbon taxes or cap-and-trade:

Carbon Offsets: A Small Price to Pay for Efficiency, by Robert H. Frank, Commentary, NY Times: Are carbon offsets a good thing? They are intended to reduce the environmental impact of consumption. Traveling by plane, for example, causes carbon dioxide to be emitted into the atmosphere, so travelers can pay a specialist to offset those emissions some other way — perhaps by planting vegetation or installing renewable-energy technologies. It all sounds reasonable.

Yet carbon offsets have drawn sharp criticism, even ridicule. ... But the criticism is misguided. If our goal is to reduce carbon emissions as efficiently as possible, offsets make perfect economic sense.

Consider the decision of whether to buy a hybrid car. ... Many people drive so little that they wouldn’t save enough on gasoline to recoup the higher cost. Yet many such people buy hybrids anyway, because they think they are helping the environment. Well and good, but they could help even more by buying a standard car and using the savings to buy carbon offsets. ...

Of course, carbon offsets alone won’t eliminate global warming. People also need stronger incentives to take into account the environmental consequences of their actions.

President Obama has proposed attacking the problem with a carbon cap-and-trade system. ... This approach was first used in the United States to address acid rain... Compared with more traditional regulatory measures, the auction method substantially reduced the cost of achieving the law’s air-quality target.

As people learn more about such an approach, they seem less likely to oppose it. ... A carbon cap-and-trade system is functionally similar to a carbon tax. ... Carbon offsets are no substitute for the stronger incentives inherent in carbon taxes or cap-and-trade, but they can reinforce their effects. Both carbon taxes and permit auctions would also generate revenue that could be used to buy additional carbon offsets. ... Carbon offsets, though much maligned, are an excellent idea. If you want to help reduce carbon emissions, consider buying some.

Paul Krugman: Empire of Carbon

Paul Krugman says that if we want to save the planet from global warming, China's participation will be required:

Empire of Carbon, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: I have seen the future, and it won’t work.

These should be hopeful times for environmentalists. Junk science no longer rules in Washington. President Obama has spoken forcefully about the need to take action on climate change; the people I talk to are increasingly optimistic that Congress will soon establish a cap-and-trade system... And once America acts, we can expect much of the world to follow our lead.

But that still leaves the problem of China, where I have been for most of the last week. Like every visitor to China, I was awed by the scale of the country’s development. Even the annoying aspects — much of my time was spent viewing the Great Wall of Traffic — are byproducts of the nation’s economic success.

But China cannot continue along its current path because the planet can’t handle the strain.

The scientific consensus on ... global warming has become much more pessimistic over the last few years. ... Why? Because the rate at which greenhouse gas emissions are rising is matching or exceeding the worst-case scenarios. And the growth of emissions from China ... is one main reason for this new pessimism.

China’s emissions, which come largely from its coal-burning electricity plants, doubled between 1996 and 2006. ... And the trend seems set to continue: In January, China announced that it plans to continue its reliance on coal... That’s a decision that, all by itself, will swamp any emission reductions elsewhere.

So what is to be done about the China problem?

Nothing, say the Chinese. Each time I raised the issue..., I was met with outraged declarations that it was unfair to expect China to limit its use of fossil fuels. After all, they declared, the West faced no similar constraints during its development; while China may be the world’s largest source of carbon-dioxide emissions, its per-capita emissions are still far below American levels; and anyway, the great bulk of the global warming that has already happened is due not to China but to the past carbon emissions of today’s wealthy nations.

And they’re right. It is unfair to expect China to live within constraints that we didn’t have to face when our own economy was on its way up. But that unfairness doesn’t change ... that letting China match the West’s past profligacy would doom the Earth as we know it.

Historical injustice aside, the ... climate-change consequences of Chinese production have to be taken into account somewhere. And anyway, the problem with China is not so much what it produces as how it produces it. ...

The good news is that the very inefficiency of China’s energy use offers huge scope for improvement. Given the right policies, China could continue to grow rapidly without increasing its carbon emissions. But first it has to realize that policy changes are necessary.

There are hints ... that the country’s policy makers are starting to realize that their current position is unsustainable. But I suspect that they don’t realize how quickly the whole game is about to change.

As the United States and other advanced countries finally move to confront climate change, they will also be morally empowered to confront those nations that refuse to act. Sooner than most people think, countries that refuse to limit their greenhouse gas emissions will face sanctions, probably in the form of taxes on their exports. They will complain bitterly that this is protectionism, but so what? Globalization doesn’t do much good if the globe itself becomes unlivable.

It’s time to save the planet. And like it or not, China will have to do its part.

How Will the CBO Score Today's Health Care Announcement?

Mathew Yglesias explains that the importance of today's announcement that major health organizations believe it possible to reduce the escalation in health care costs is the effect the announcement may have on how the CBO scores savings from the health care plan:

The Significance of Today’s Health Care Announcement, by Mathew Yglesias: Paul Krugman and Jonathan Cohn wax enthusiastic about the news that representatives for the nation’s major health care provider organizations ... will come to the White House and announce that they believe it’s possible to achieve $2 trillion in cost savings over ten years without compromising patient care. Ezra Klein is more skeptical, worrying that these groups haven’t really made any firm commitments to anything in particular.

But the real import of today’s event isn’t in its signal for what industry insiders may do in the future, it’s for the Congressional Budget Office. The main impediment to a health care deal, at this point, is cost. The up-front costs are large. To cover these costs, the Obama administration proposed several exceedingly reasonable tax changes, focused on curbing deductions for high-income taxpayer. This is the most economically efficient possible way of raising revenue, so naturally congressional Democrats rejected it out of hand.

That means that to make the costs work, it’s going to be necessary to rely on reform’s inherent potential to wring some of the massive waste out of the system. The problem here is that the CBO has been reluctant to “score” such savings in its official account of the bill. As Igor Volsky emphasizes, this industry statement is an important challenge to that CBO reluctance:

Early reports indicate that the signers ... hope to contain costs by implementing “aggressive efforts to prevent obesity, coordinate care, manage chronic illnesses and curtail unnecessary tests and procedures; by standardizing insurance claim forms; and by increasing the use of information technology, like electronic medical records.”

The industry is suggesting that these cost containment measures — which don’t score too well with the Congressional Budget Office — would in fact yield cost savings and help finance health reform. The letter ... takes on the CBO, whose models are likely under-scoring the savings from reforms.

Whatever kind of backstabbing these industry groups may or may not do in the future, they won’t be able to take back the fact that once upon a time they stood beside the White House in agreeing that it’s possible to achieve massive cost-savings without compromising patient care. That argument may well prove hugely important, politically, to getting a package through congress.

The idea is to pay for reform in part through the CBO scoring procedure, but if CBO won't recognize anticipated savings, then this strategy doesn't work and reform would have to be paid for by raising taxes instead, something congress is reluctant to do. The hope is that today's announcement from health industry representatives that cost savings are possible will change the CBOs willingness to score these cost savings. If the cost savings don't actually materialize later, then some way of making up for the increased costs will have to be found, but for the moment the focus is on getting a bill through congress (this is also the motivation for the administration's recent announcement of the intent to raise 210 billion over 10 years by changing the rules on the use of offshore tax havens, the saving would be used to offset the cost of health care reform).

Update: Ezra Klein:

Is it All about the CBO?, by Ezra Klein: It's true that legislators are very concerned that the Congressional Budget Office won't score likely savings. That will mean the bill's total price tag is higher and the legislation is harder to pay for. But this letter doesn't obviate that problem. It doesn't even change it. The issue isn't that a CBO price tag is credible, and so you need another credible price tag if you want to argue against it. It's that the CBO number is one used by the budget committees, and so if health care is going to pass under pay-go rules -- and my understanding is that it will -- then you have to find revenues that match whatever CBO says the cost is. The revenues can't just match what the industry says the cost is. For much more on the importance of CBO and the price tag it selects, read this piece.

The other option here is something called "directed scoring." Under this scenario, Congress would essentially order the CBO to score health reform in a certain way. I know that some quarters are discussing this possibility, but I don't think most people believe you can get very far with it. More on this later.

"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.

The "Apparent Abdication of Responsibility"

Tyler Cowen says congress is letting others take the responsibility - and the potential blame - for decisions it ought to be making:

There’s Work to Be Done, but Congress Opts Out, by Tyler Cowen, Economic View, NY Times: The longer the financial crisis runs, the more policy makers at the Treasury, the White House and the Federal Reserve are working around Congress rather than with it. It’s not that anyone is behaving illegally or unconstitutionally, but rather that Congress seems to want to be circumvented and to delegate more power to the executive branch as well as to the Fed, at least temporarily.

While Congressional leaders are consulted on the major policies, Congress is keeping its distance, perhaps to minimize voter outrage. This way, Congress can claim credit if a recovery comes, but deny responsibility if the price tag ends up higher than advertised or if banks seem to be receiving unfair benefits from the government.

Trillions of dollars of financial commitments have been made without explicit Congressional approval. ... The traditional division of labor among policy makers was that the Fed determined the quantity of money in the economy — it set monetary policy — and Congress decided precise government expenditures — it handled fiscal policy. These new programs blur that distinction and, in essence, the Fed is running some fiscal policy. ... A full description of important financial policies handled outside of Congress would more than fill this column and would add up to trillions of dollars in potential commitments and guarantees.

Many economists are happy to see technocrats play such a big role in the current emergency in the belief that the Obama administration and the Fed have more economic expertise — and more incentives to care about policy at the national level — than Congress does. But if that is true, we should be nervous about the future. A Congress that won’t accept much responsibility for the financial bailouts, for example, is unlikely to rise to the occasion when the time comes to make tough decisions on the budget. ...

Both Democrats and Republicans are at fault for this apparent abdication of responsibility. The Republicans are focused on blaming the Democrats for bailouts, since they know the policies can go through without their support. The Democrats want to enjoy the benefits of making commitments and guarantees without accepting accountability or responsibility for them.

It's a common theme in American history that crises expand the power of the executive branch of government, and that is part of what is happening here. Even the Federal Reserve, which ... is supposed to be quasi-independent, has ceded much of its power to the Treasury. ... Just as the Bush administration brought a growth of executive power in foreign policy and surveillance, so executive power has grown when it comes to economic policy; that development spans the administrations of both Mr. Obama and George W. Bush.

On any single policy, the abdication of Congressional responsibility may not be a problem. Sometimes it is good to let the technocrats have their way. In the longer run, though, the United States requires a Congress courageous enough to accept responsibility for potentially unpopular policies. We are moving further away from that every day.

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.

"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.)

"No Time to Dither"

Brad DeLong:

There is no time to dither in a meltdown, by J. Bradford DeLong, Project Syndicate: Are the world's governments capable of keeping the world economy out of a deep and long depression? Three months ago, I would have said yes, without question. Now, I am not so certain.

The problem is not that governments are unsure about what to do. The standard checklist of what to do in a financial crisis ... has been gradually worked out over two centuries...

The problem comes when expansionary monetary policy ... and central-bank guarantees of orderly markets prove insufficient. Economists disagree about when ... governments should move beyond these first two items on the checklist.

Should governments try to increase monetary velocity by selling bonds, thereby boosting short-term interest rates? Should they employ unemployed workers directly, or indirectly, by bringing forward expenditures or expanding the scale of government programs? Should they explicitly guarantee large financial institutions' liabilities and/or classes of assets?

Should they buy up assets at what they believe is a discount from their long-run values, or buy up assets that private investors are unwilling to trade, even at a premium above their likely long-run values? Should governments recapitalize or nationalize banks? Should they keep printing money even after exhausting their ability to inject extra liquidity into the economy via conventional open-market operations, which is now the case in the United States and elsewhere?

Three months ago, I said that ... trying a combination of these items - even a confused and haphazard combination - was better than doing nothing. All five of the world's major economies implemented their own confused and haphazard combinations of monetary, fiscal, and banking stimulus policies during the Great Depression, and the sooner they did - the sooner each began its own New Deal - the better. ...

The conclusion that I draw from this is that we should try a combination of all checklist measures - quantitative monetary easing; bank guarantees, purchases, recapitalizations, and nationalizations; direct fiscal spending and debt issues - while ensuring that we can do so fast enough and on a large enough scale to do the job.

Yet I am told that the chances of getting more money in the US for an extra round of fiscal stimulus this year is zero, as is the chance of getting more money this year to intervene in the banking system on an even larger scale than America's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

There is an 80 percent chance that waiting until 2010 and seeing what policies look appropriate then would not be disastrous. But that means that there is a 20 percent chance that it would be.

"Washington Consensus a Thing of the Past Now"

Is the "Beijing Consensus" on the rise, even within the U.S.?:

‘Washington Consensus’ a thing of the past now, by Jonathan Holslag, Project Syndicate: ...[T]he “Washington Consensus” about how the global economy should be run is now a thing of the past. The question now is what is likely to replace it.

Although China is often said to lack “soft power”, many of its ideas on economics and governance are coming into ascendance. Indeed, in pursuit of national economic stability, the Obama administration is clearly moving towards the kind of government intervention that China has been promoting over the past two decades.

In this model, the government, while continuing to benefit from the international market, retains ... strict control over the financial sector, restrictive government procurement policies, guidance for research and development in the energy sector, and selective curbs on imports of goods and services. All these factors are not only part of China’s economic rescue package, but of Obama’s stimulus plan as well. ...

Rather than obsessing about elections, the US now seeks to build pragmatic alliances to buttress its economic needs. This requires, first of all, cozying up with China and the Gulf states – the main lenders to the US Treasury – as well working with Iran and Russia to limit the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As the US backtracks on its liberal standards, it is flirting with what can be called the “Beijing Consensus”, which makes economic development a country’s paramount goal and prescribes that states should actively steer growth in a way that suits national stability. What matters in this worldview is not the nature of any country’s political system, but the extent to which it improves its people’s wellbeing. ...

This ... realism is ... a reversal of the neo-conservative muscle-flexing of the George W Bush years. ... For example, in times of crisis it is no shame for a government to be mercantilist, but by behaving in this way, the US has lost the moral high ground as a champion of free trade. ...

As we move from a unipolar international order to one with multiple regional powers,... [t]he result will be a new concert of powers... Instead of entrusting America with the arduous task of safeguarding international stability on its own, the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) will assume a more prominent role in policing their own backyards. Russia can have its Caucasus, and if the generals in Myanmar should go mad, it would become China’s and India’s problem to sort out. ...

Whether America is able to strengthen its global influence in the future will depend not so much on its moral esteem, but on the extent to which it succeeds in revamping its economy and forging new alliances. The same will apply for other powers.

But this rising Beijing Consensus offers no guarantee of stability. A concert of powers is only as strong as its weakest pillar, and requires a great deal of self-discipline and restraint. It remains to be seen how the American public will respond to its national U-turn.

If one main player slides back into economic turmoil, nationalism will reduce the scope for pragmatic bargaining. ... And, if China comes out of the crisis as the big winner and continues to boost its power, zero-sum thinking will soon replace win-win co-operation. 

I don't agree with every word of this, but I have to hit the road in a few minutes and will have to leave the response to all of you.

A Bad Sign for Geithner's Toxic Asset Plan

The TALF program intended to increase auto loans, student loans, and credit card lending has a lot in common with the Geithner public private investment plan to remove toxic assets from bank balance sheets, including the valuable non-recourse loan feature. The fact that the TALF program is not living up to expectations - not even close - leads to questions about whether the Geithner plan will encounter similar problems:

Federal Program to Boost Private Lending Struggles to Get Money to Consumers, by Neil Irwin, Washington Post: In its first two months, the government's signature initiative to support consumer lending has fallen well short of expectations, deploying only a fraction of the amount officials had hoped to extend to stimulate auto loans, student loans and credit card lending. ...

Under [the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, or] TALF, private investors ... put up a relatively small amount of money to be matched with a larger loan from the Federal Reserve. The combined funds are then used to purchase newly created, highly rated securities, which in turn fund a wide range of consumer and business lending.

If the securities become more valuable, the private investors stand to repay their government loans and make a healthy profit; if the securities plummet in value, the investors can lose only what they put up originally...

Officials envisioned TALF supporting tens of billions of dollars a month in new lending, saying it could eventually total $1 trillion. But in March, when it was launched, it backed only $4.7 billion in auto loans and credit cards. For April, it logged only $1.7 billion.

Sources involved in the program said private investors have been reluctant to work with the government, which they view as an unreliable business partner. ... There are restrictions on the business activities of participants in the program. ... But perhaps more significant ... is a fear that the government could retroactively change the terms, exacting new limits on what investors can pay their executives, for example, or trying to claw back profits that firms make in the program. ...

Federal Reserve officials have privately urged President Obama and congressional leaders to publicly state that the government views investors in voluntary programs such as TALF differently than it does companies that need a federal bailout.

Investors are not the only ones who need comforting, though. The Fed relies on primary dealers, or brokerage houses, to play a key role as intermediaries in TALF...

But the primary dealers have been extremely cautious..., hobbling the program's progress... Lawyers at the New York Fed ... have been working to help the brokers and investors work through the issues, and government officials are hopeful about the program's future. ...

The Public-Private Investment Program, designed to buy loans and securities from banks, is structured similarly to TALF. ...

And the differences between the PPIP and TALF programs that I can think of, e.g. that the PPIP has toxic assets as part of the bargain, and some of the banks will need a bailout so the reassurances about executive pay, etc. can't be made in these cases, are additional factors working against the PPIP's success.

Policy and Uncertainty

Robert Stavins:

What Baseball Can Teach Policymakers, by Robert Stavins: ...Uncertainty is an absolutely fundamental aspect of environmental problems and the policies that are employed to address those problems. Any analysis that fails to recognize this runs the risk not only of being incomplete, but misleading as well. ...

To estimate proposed regulations’ benefits and costs, analysts frequently rely on inputs that are uncertain – sometimes substantially so. Such uncertainties in underlying inputs are propagated through analyses, leading to uncertainty in ultimate benefit and cost estimates...

Despite this uncertainty, the most prominently displayed results ... are typically single, apparently precise point estimates of benefits, costs, and net benefits (benefits minus costs), masking uncertainties inherent in their calculation and possibly obscuring tradeoffs among competing policy options. Historically, efforts to address uncertainty ... have been very limited...

Over the years, formal quantitative uncertainty assessments — known as Monte Carlo analyses — have become common in a variety of fields, including engineering, finance, and a number of scientific disciplines...

The first step in a Monte Carlo analysis involves the development of probability distributions of uncertain inputs to an analysis. These probability distributions reflect the implications of uncertainty regarding an input for the range of its possible values and the likelihood that each value is the true value. Once probability distributions of inputs to a benefit‑cost analysis are established, a Monte Carlo analysis is used to simulate the probability distribution of the regulation’s net benefits by carrying out the calculation of benefits and costs thousands, or even millions, of times. With each iteration of the calculations, new values are randomly drawn from each input’s probability distribution and used in the benefit and/or cost calculations. ... Importantly, any correlations among individual items in the benefit and cost calculations are taken into account. The resulting set of net benefit estimates characterizes the complete probability distribution of net benefits.

Uncertainty is inevitable in estimates of environmental regulations’ economic impacts, and assessments of the extent and nature of such uncertainty provides important information for policymakers evaluating proposed regulations. Such information offers a context for interpreting benefit and cost estimates, and can lead to point estimates of regulations= benefits and costs that differ from what would be produced by purely deterministic analyses (that ignore uncertainty). In addition, these assessments can help establish priorities for research.

Due to the complexity of interactions among uncertainties in inputs..., an accurate assessment of uncertainty can be gained only through the use of formal quantitative methods, such as Monte Carlo analysis. Although these methods can offer significant insights, they require only limited additional effort... Much of the data required for these analyses are already obtained...; and widely available software allows the execution of Monte Carlo analysis in common spreadsheet programs on a desktop computer. ...

Formal quantitative assessments of uncertainty can mark a truly significant step forward in enhancing regulatory analysis... They have the potential to improve substantially our understanding of the impact of environmental regulations, and thereby to lead to more informed policymaking.

Macroeconomic policy uses the same type of framework for looking at uncertainty, but with additional twists, the addition of model uncertainty, and the addition of parameter uncertainty within a given model. The steps above are carried out over a variety of different policies, models, and a distribution of parameter values, and the goal is to find the most likely outcomes as well as the distribution of outcomes for each policy. The monetary and fiscal authorities then choose policies that, for example, avoid the chance that the policies will backfire and cause severe problems. But if the true model (or a close approximation to it) is not well represented by the models used in the uncertainty analysis, big policy errors are still possible. That's something we tend to forget when we do these types of analyses characterizing the degree of uncertainty that we face.

Paul Krugman: Green Shoots and Glimmers

Glimmers of nope, not yet:

Green Shoots and Glimmers, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Ben Bernanke ... sees “green shoots.” President Obama sees “glimmers of hope.” And the stock market has been on a tear. So is it time to sound the all clear? Here are four reasons to be cautious....

1. Things are still getting worse. Industrial production just hit a 10-year low. Housing starts remain incredibly weak. Foreclosures ... are surging again. The most you can say is that there are scattered signs that ... the economy isn’t plunging quite as fast as it was. And I do mean scattered...

2. Some of the good news isn’t convincing. The biggest positive news in recent days has come from banks, which have been announcing surprisingly good earnings. But some of those earnings reports look a little ... funny.

Wells Fargo, for example, announced its best quarterly earnings ever. But ... reported earnings ... depend a lot on the amount the bank sets aside to cover expected future losses on its loans. And some analysts expressed considerable doubt about Wells Fargo’s assumptions...

Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs announced a huge jump in profits... But as analysts quickly noticed, Goldman changed its definition of “quarter” ... so that — I kid you not — the month of December,... a bad one..., disappeared from this comparison.

I don’t want to go overboard... Maybe the banks really have swung from deep losses to hefty profits in record time. But skepticism comes naturally in this age of Madoff.

Oh, and for those expecting the Treasury Department’s “stress tests” to make everything clear: the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, says that “you will see in a systematic and coordinated way the transparency of determining and showing to all involved some of the results of these stress tests.” No, I don’t know what that means, either.

3. There may be other shoes yet to drop. Even in the Great Depression, things didn’t head straight down. There was, in particular, a pause in the plunge about a year and a half in — roughly where we are now. But then came a series of bank failures on both sides of the Atlantic, combined with some disastrous policy moves...

Can this happen again? Well, commercial real estate is coming apart at the seams, credit card losses are surging and nobody knows yet just how bad things will get in Japan or Eastern Europe. We probably won’t repeat the disaster of 1931, but it’s far from certain that the worst is over.

4. Even when it’s over, it won’t be over. The 2001 recession officially lasted only eight months... But unemployment kept rising for another year and a half. The same thing happened after the 1990-91 recession. And there’s every reason to believe that it will happen this time too. Don’t be surprised if unemployment keeps rising right through 2010. ... Employment will eventually recover... But it probably won’t happen fast.

So now that I’ve got everyone depressed, what’s the answer? Persistence.

History shows that one of the great policy dangers, in the face of a severe economic slump, is premature optimism. F.D.R. responded to signs of recovery by cutting the Works Progress Administration in half and raising taxes; the Great Depression promptly returned in full force. Japan slackened its efforts halfway through its lost decade, ensuring another five years of stagnation.

The Obama administration’s economists understand this. They say all the right things about staying the course. But there’s a real risk that all the talk of green shoots and glimmers will breed a dangerous complacency.

So here’s my advice, to the public and policy makers alike: Don’t count your recoveries before they’re hatched.

More than Projected, Less than Feared

David Altig wonders if there's any lessons in the parallels he sees between the current financial crisis and the "saga of the Resolution Trust Corporation":

Déjà vu all over again, by David Altig: I have, recently, been experiencing a strange sense of familiarity watching the Congressional Budget Office's (CBO) efforts to monitor the budgetary implications of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). On the one hand, the long-term costs are rising...

On the other hand, the CBO wants to book less spending in the near term than what the Treasury has in mind, for reasons that have to do with accounting procedures and the pace of actual TARP spending...

After a few minutes of pondering why it seemed like I had seen this before, I flashed back to my early days in the Federal Reserve System and the saga of the Resolution Trust Corporation, the Congress-created vehicle that helped the country work its way through the aftermath of the 1980s savings and loan crisis. ...

The last great experiment in working through financial crisis took longer than expected, involved some accounting pushing and shoving at the outset, confronted a skeptical Congress, and cost more than initially projected, but quite a lot less than feared.

Make of it what you will.

The Need for Cooperative Economic Policy

At TPMCafe Bookclub:

...This is not an imagined problem, we've seen the difficulties in coordinating monetary and fiscal policy across countries in response to the present crisis, we've seen moves toward protectionism, and I hope we can find a way to improve and do collectively what Kindleberger would have had the global leader do. That will require, for one, that the US realize that it must be part of a team rather than the person in charge giving all the orders, and giving the rest of the world the respect it deserves in formulating these decisions. There have been some encouraging signs, notably the decision at the recent G20 meetings to enhance the resources available to the IMF, the meetings themselves seemed to move toward a more cooperative governing structure, something that certainly wasn't hurt by having a new US administration, and some common views on global financial regulation emerged. But at the same time there was little cooperation on fiscal policy measures, and many of the initiatives were more show than substance. So we shall see.

How Long?

This argues that the administration is in denial about the need to recapitalize the banking system:

Geithner and Summers need to address the banking problems square-on, by Michael Pomerleano, Economists' Forum: The Obama administration program to address the fragility of the banking system is based on a two major initiatives. First, it has proposed the Geithner- Summers Plan to buy subprime securitized assets from the banks. The toxic assets plan deals with less that 40 percent of the balance sheet of the banks that is in marketable securities. It does not deal with the 60 percent of the balance sheets of US banks that are loans and are not marked to market. Further, it will take six months to get the program in motion. The plan elicited deserved criticism...

The second part of the administration program is the now famous stress test of the nation’s largest banks. ... This article argues that The Obama administration is in denial regarding the problems in the financial system. The losses in the banking system are not an “unknown unknown”. As shown below, the stress test calculations can be conducted by any informed analyst, and the losses are known with a reasonable degree with approximation. The stress test is simply a “smoke screen” designed to postpone the inevitable moment when the administration has to deal with the well known and severe problems in the banking system. ...

The banking system is severely undercapitalized, with numerous insolvent banks. Clearly a more robust banking system requires far more capital and a robust loan loss reserve adding to the capital cushion. Until the trillion plus of impaired assets are removed and the banking system is recapitalized, credit flows will be restricted. In this context, it is puzzling why the administration is tinkering at the fringes with programs designed to enrich Wall Street. Geithner and Summers need to address the banking problems square-on.

Six months "to get the program in motion"? That detail is new to me, but if that's the case, if they are kicking the can down the road that far, that's far too long to wait. Six months?

Blinder: Focus on Winning the War

Alan Blinder says you may need to hold your nose as the financial sector is repaired. The repair is necessary, but the fix stinks:

Restore Order and Win a Financial War, by Alan Blinder, Commentary, NY Times: Many Americans are bewildered, aggrieved and even angry about the financial shenanigans that led to the current mess...

A bunch of wealthy, supposedly smart financial “experts” made irresponsible bets that went bad, pushing our economy to the brink and taking the rest of us down with them. ... And taxpayers are being handed monstrous bills for mistakes that were not their doing.

It is maddening that hardly any of the miscreants have been punished, not to mention that many remain well paid. But foolishness is not a crime, and most of them broke no laws. ...

“Cap-and-Trade is a Tax"

Thomas Friedman says that opponents of policies to reduce the accumulation of greenhouse gases are going to point out that cap and trade is equivalent to a carbon tax, and make a political issue out of it, so why not go for the real thing?

Show Us the Ball, by Thomas Friedman, Commentary, NY Times: ...Last week, House Democrats, with administration support, introduced a 600-page draft bill ... to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions through a complicated cap-and-trade system. These people have the very best of intentions, but I wish they would step back and ask again: Can cap-and-trade pass? Will it really work? And is it the best strategy, with all the bureaucracy it will require to monitor, auction emissions permits and manage the trading?

Advocates of cap-and-trade argue that it is preferable to a simple carbon tax because it ... “hides the ball” — it doesn’t use the word “tax” — even though it amounts to one. ...

That was true as long as no one thought cap-and-trade could ever pass, but ... opponents are not playing hide the ball anymore. In the past two weeks, you could hear a chorus of Republicans, coal-state Democrats, right-wing think tanks and enviro-skeptics all singing the same tune: “Cap-and-trade is a tax. Obama is going to raise your taxes and sacrifice U.S. jobs to combat this global-warming charade... Worse, cap-and-trade will be managed by Wall Street. If you liked credit-default swaps, you’re going to love carbon-offset swaps.” ...

They could easily kill this effort. So, if the Obama team cares about ... a stronger America and a more livable planet,... I hope it will consider an alternative strategy, message and messenger.

STRATEGY Since the opponents of cap-and-trade are going to pillory it as a tax anyway, why not go for the real thing — a simple, transparent, economy-wide carbon tax? ...

People get that — and simplicity matters. Americans will be willing to pay a tax for their children to be less threatened, breathe cleaner air and live in a more sustainable world with a stronger America. They are much less likely to support a firm in London trading offsets from an electric bill in Boston with a derivatives firm in New York in order to help fund an aluminum smelter in Beijing, which is what cap-and-trade is all about. People won’t support what they can’t explain.

MESSAGE Climate change is a real threat to a healthy planet... But because the worst effects are in the future, many Americans have more immediate concerns. That is why our energy policy should be focused around “American renewal,” not mitigating climate change.

We need a price on carbon because it will stimulate massive innovation in ... energy technology. ... I.T. could be the foundation for a second American industrial revolution, plus it would tip the whole planet onto a greener path. So American economic renewal is the goal, but mitigating climate change would be the great byproduct.

MESSENGER The Obama administration’s carbon tax spokesman — the one who should sell this to the country — should be the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, not the environmentalists. The imposing former head of the Marine Corps could make a powerful case that ... the country with the most powerful clean-technology industry in the 21st century will have the most energy security, national security, economic security, healthy environment, innovative companies and global respect. That country must be America. So let’s stop hiding the ball and have a strategy, message and messenger that tell it like it is — and make it so.

The tax changes can be made revenue neutral so that there is a change in the incentive to consume goods with high carbon content, but no change (implicit or explicit) in the overall tax burden (e.g. see here for a carbon tax example - a cap and trade equivalent exists). In addition, such rebates, if properly distributed, could help with the political problem Friedman is worried about.

"Steady through This Storm"

Ricardo Caballero believes that if we stick with the Geithner plan, the economy will recover in the near future:

Steady Through This Storm, by Ricardo J. Caballero, Commentary, Washington Post: President Obama recently stated that he is a big believer in "persistence," and he provided examples of how he will persist in many areas of economic policy. That word and his examples gave me more hope for the future of the U.S. economy than I have had in some time.

"Why Creditors should Suffer Too"

Tyler Cowen:

Why Creditors Should Suffer, Too, by Tyler Cowen, Economic View, NY Times: The Obama administration’s proposals to reform financial regulation sound ambitious enough as they aim to bring companies like A.I.G. under a broader umbrella of government rule-making and scrutiny.

But there is a big hole in these proposals,... the new proposals immunize the creditors and counterparties of such firms by protecting them from their own lending and trading mistakes.

This pattern has been evident for months, with the government aiding creditors and counterparties every step of the way. Yet this has not been explained openly to the American public.

In truth, it’s not the shareholders of the American International Group who benefited most from its bailout; they were mostly wiped out. The great beneficiaries have been the creditors and counterparties at the other end of A.I.G.’s derivatives deals — firms like Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, Barclays and UBS.

These firms engaged in deals that A.I.G. could not make good on. The bailout, and the regulatory regime outlined by Timothy F. Geithner..., would give firms like these every incentive to make similar deals down the road. ...

What the banking system needs is creditors who monitor risk and cut their exposure when that risk is too high. Unlike regulators, creditors and counterparties know the details of a deal and have their own money on the line. ...

A simple but unworkable alternative is to let major creditors make their claims in the bankruptcy courts, as was done with Lehman Brothers. But that is costly for the economy and, after the fallout from the Lehman failure, politically impossible now. Instead, the key to effective regulatory reform is to find a credible means of imposing some pain on creditors.

Here is one possibility. The government has restricted executive pay at A.I.G. and banks receiving government funds, but this move fails to recognize that the richest bailout benefits go to creditors. Restricting compensation at these creditor firms would have more force — if it is done transparently, in advance and in accordance with the rule of law. A simple rule would be that some percentage of bailout funds should be extracted from the bonuses of executives on the credit or counterparty side of transactions.

Such a rule would make lenders more conservative, which would generally be a good thing. ...

Here is another option..., credit agreements should provide for the possibility of a future, prepackaged bankruptcy. Those agreements should require that the creditors themselves would suffer some of the damage — even if the government stepped in to bail out the afflicted firm.

There is a risk that these sacrifices will not be extracted when the time comes, but the prospect might still check the worst excesses of leverage. ...

This poses a very difficult public relations problem for the government, because the Federal Reserve and the Treasury do not want to discuss the importance of the creditors too publicly right now. ... The challenge isn’t easy, and we can’t start on it today, but one way or another a new regulatory plan has to move some risk back to creditors.

These seem like good ideas, but I'm not so sure that these options pose a threat that is credible enough to "check the worst excesses of leverage" as much as is needed. Given the propensity for bank runs in both the traditional and non-traditional banking sectors when depositors/creditors are threatened - they will want to get their money out of institutions that look to be headed for trouble, i.e. to stop being creditors, before the firm is declared insolvent and these restrictions cause them to incur losses that they would be protected from otherwise - would the government step in with guarantees that keep them whole even if, a priori, they had declared they wouldn't in order to avoid the negative fallout from such runs?

The possibility that the government would keep its word and enforce the losses, along with the possibility of being unable to get money out in time and then coming under the regulatory restrictions, ought to check behavior to some degree. But to get substantial effects we need to have a substantial probability that the government will keep its word about imposing losses. However, I'm not so sure that the belief that the government will keep its word is as widely held as is needed, particularly if too large to fail, politically powerful institutions are allowed to persist.

"How to Improve the Geithner Plan"

Sandro Brusco explains how the Geithner plan can be improved by having bank managers put part of their own compensation at risk when purchasing toxic assets, and by using future profits and any executive compensation above some minimum amount as collateral for the loans:

How to improve the Geithner plan, by Sandro Brusco: Two major criticisms have been moved against the Geithner plan

First, the plan fails to activate a true process of price discovery in the market for mortgage backed assets. Instead, the plan tries to fill the gap between the willingness to pay of the potential buyers and the price at which the banks are prepared to sell with a public subsidy. The presence of the subsidy, in the form of no-recourse loans at a presumably low interest rate, implies that the prices that will be determined in the auctions will probably be of little help for the future.

Second, the plan places a lot of risk on the FDIC and the Fed. Given the nature of these institutions, if they end up substaining heavy losses, the general public will pay directly or indirectly a high price.

I believe that both criticisms are very valid. I have discussed elsewhere a possible alternative approach, and other sensible plans have been submitted. But the Geithner plan is what we have now. Thus, although maybe not optimal, we should try to see whether the plan can be amended in such a way that the two above-mentioned problems can be at least partially fixed. I believe this is possible, and here is what I propose.

Is America repeating Japanese history?

Free Exchange looks at whether we are repeating the mistakes the Japanese made in dealing with their financial crisis, and finds worrying similarities:

Is America repeating Japanese history?, Free Exchange, The Economist: Early in his tenure, Tim Geithner, the treasury secretary, promised that American policymakers would not make the same mistakes Japan did in tackling its financial crisis. But as politics threaten to upend his efforts, Mr Geithner should take a second to consider why Japan made its mistakes.

Japanese officials took too long to commit substantial public money to recapitalising their banks. But it was not because they were ignorant of the dangers or Andrew Mellon acolytes hell-bent on liquidating speculators. Like Mr Geithner, they feared being shot down by voters and politicians furious that taxpayers might bail out overpaid bankers.

One Japanese official told me that when he sees Treasury officials testifying before congress with protesters waving anti-banker placards behind them, it reminds him of pictures in Tokyo newspapers in the 1990s. At the time, he and his colleagues knew that saving the financial system would require a lot of public money, but also felt it would be politically impossible to propose it until all other avenues had been tried.

This sentiment is eerily similar to what prevailed inside the Treasury in mid-2008. ... [...continue reading...]

"The US Can't Go It Alone"

My reaction to the final communique from the G20 summit in London:

G20: The US Can't Go it Alone, by Mark Thoma, Comment is Free: The outcome of the G20 summit was mixed. With all the competing interests at play and the difficulty achieving consensus in large groups, complete success on every issue was far too much to expect. So the question is whether the G20 countries made reasonable progress, not whether they achieved every goal and solved every problem. And historically, reasonable progress means getting anything done at all. ...
[...continue reading...]

Sachs: Will Geithner and Summers Succeed in Raiding the FDIC and Fed?

Chris Carroll supports the Geithner plan, but I don't think we can say the same about Jeff Sachs:

Will Geithner and Summers Succeed in Raiding the FDIC and Fed?, by Jeffrey Sachs, Vox EU: Geithner and Summers have now announced their plan to raid the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and Federal Reserve (Fed) to subsidize investors to buy toxic assets from the banks at inflated prices. If carried out, the result will be a massive transfer of wealth -- of perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars -- to bank shareholders from the taxpayers (who will absorb losses at the FDIC and Fed). Soaring bank share prices on the morning of the announcement, and in the week of leaks and hints that preceded it, are an indication of the mass bailout at work. There are much fairer and more effective ways to accomplish the goal of cleaning the bank balance sheets.

Here’s how it works

A major part of the plan works as follows. One or more giant investment funds will be created to buy up toxic assets from the commercial banks. The investment funds will have the following balance sheet. For every $1 of toxic assets that they buy from the banks, the FDIC will lend up to 85.7 cents (six-sevenths of $1), and the Treasury and private investors will each put in 7.15 cents in equity to cover the remaining balance. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) loans will be non-recourse, meaning that if the toxic assets purchased by private investors fall in value below the amount of the FDIC loans, the investment funds will default on the loans, and the FDIC will end up holding the toxic assets.

Taxpayer giveaway explained with a numerical example

To understand the essence of the giveaway to bank shareholders, it's useful to use a numerical illustration. Consider a portfolio of toxic assets with a face value of $1 trillion. Assume that these assets have a 20 percent chance of paying out their full face value ($1 trillion) and an 80 percent chance of paying out only $200 billion. The market value of these assets is given by their expected payout, which is 20 percent of $1 trillion plus 80 percent of $200 billion, which sums to $360 billion. The assets therefore currently trade at 36 percent of face value.

Investment funds will bid for these assets. It might seem at first that the investment funds would bid $360 billion for these toxic assets, but this is not correct. The investors will bid substantially more than $360 billion because of the massive subsidy implicit in the FDIC loan. The FDIC is giving a "heads you win, tails the taxpayer loses" offer to the private investors.

Specifically, the FDIC is lending money at a low interest rate and on a non-recourse basis even though the FDIC is likely to experience a massive default on its loans to the investment funds. The FDIC subsidy shows up as a bid price for the toxic assets that is far above $360 billion. In essence, the FDIC is transferring hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer wealth to the banks.

Back of envelope calculation: $276 billion

With a little arithmetic, we can calculate the size of that transfer. In this scenario, the private investors (who manage the investment fund) will actually be willing to bid $636 billion for the $360 billion of real market value of the toxic assets, in effect transferring excess $276 billion from the FDIC (taxpayers) to the bank shareholders! Here's why.

Under the rule of the Geithner-Summers Plan, the investors and the TARP each put in 7.15 percent of the purchase price of $636 billion, equal to $45 billion. The FDIC will loan $546 billion. (All numbers are rounded). If the toxic assets actually pay out the full $1 trillion, there will be a profit of $454 billion, equal to $1 trillion payout minus the repayment of the FDIC loan of $546 billion. The private investors and the TARP will each get half of the profit, or $227 billion.

Since this outcome occurs only 20 percent of the time, the expected profits to the private investors are 20 percent of $227 billion, or $45 billion, exactly what they invested. Similarly, the TARP's expected profits are also equal to the TARP investment of $45 billion. Thus, both the TARP and the private investors break even. As competitive bidders, they have bid the maximum price that allows them to break even.

The bank shareholders, however, come out $276 billion ahead of the game, while the FDIC bears $276 billion in expected losses! This transfer occurs because the investment fund defaults on the FDIC loan when the toxic assets in fact pay only $200 billion, an outcome that occurs 80 percent of the time. When that happens, the investment fund is "underwater" (holding more in FDIC debt than in payouts on the toxic assets). The investment fund then defaults on its debt to the FDIC. The FDIC gets $200 billion instead of repayment of $546 billion, for a net loss of $346 billion. Since this outcome occurs 80 percent of the time, the expected loss to the taxpayers is 80 percent of $346 billion, or $276 billion. This is exactly equal to the overpayment to the banks in the first place.

You know it’s a bank shareholder bailout when …

Soaring bank stock prices during the last week, and then again on the day of the announcement, demonstrate the bailout in action. From March 9 to March 20, the KBW bank index rose by 33 percent, while the overall Dow Industrials rose by only 11 percent, indicating how the rumors were especially good for the banks. This morning, bank shares across the board soared in value. Citibank has tripled in value since its low in early March. The value of the bailout dwarfs the AIG and Merrill bonuses, but since the bailout is much less obvious than the bonuses, the public's reactions have been muted, at least at the start.

A better plan

The plan should not go forward on such unfair terms. Under the law, Congress should apply the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990, which requires budget appropriations to cover expected losses on government loans programs, which would presumably include the expected losses on FDIC and Treasury loans under the Geithner-Summers Plan. With proper credit accounting, the entire operation in our little illustration would require a budget appropriation of $276 billion, equal to the expected losses of the FDIC and Treasury. If the Administration goes to Congress for such an appropriation it will be shot out of the water. The public will not accept overpaying for the toxic assets at taxpayers' expense. Thus, it is very likely that the Administration will attempt to avoid Congressional oversight of the plan, and to count on confusion and the evident "good news" of soaring stock market prices to justify their actions.

The Geithner-Summers plans for the FDIC are not the only off-budget transfers to bank shareholders taking place. Other parts of the plan support subsidized loans from the Treasury and, even more, from the Fed. The Fed is already buying up hundreds of billions of dollars of toxic assets with little if any oversight or offsetting appropriations. Since the Federal Reserve profits and losses eventually show up on the budget, the Fed's purchases of toxic assets also should fall under the Federal Credit Reform Act and should be explicitly budgeted.

There are countless preferable and more transparent courses of action. The toxic assets could be sold at market prices, not inflated prices, making the bank shareholders bear the costs of the losses of the toxic assets. If the banks then need more capital, the government could invest directly into bank shares. This would bail out the banking system without bailing out the bank shareholders. The process would be much fairer, less costly, and more transparent to the taxpayer.

Take insolvent banks into receivership instead: a bailout needs a workout plan

Banks that are already insolvent should be intervened directly by the FDIC, that is temporarily taken into receivership. The shareholder value would be wiped out, except perhaps for some residual claims in the event that the toxic assets vastly outperform their current market expectations.

As I've written before, the allocation of bank shares between the taxpayers and the current bank shareholders could be make contingent on the eventual value of the toxic assets, ensuring fairness between the shareholders and the taxpayers.

"Why are we Bailing Out Foreigners?"

Ben Bernanke, via Andrew Leonard, explains why U.S. tax dollars were used to bail out foreign banks:

Why are we bailing out foreigners?, by Andrew Leonard: Why did American taxpayer money help AIG pay its debt to foreign counterparties? Representatives from both parties raised the question during Tuesday's House Financial Services committee hearing on AIG. On the surface, the question seems perfectly reasonable. Why are American taxpayers bailing out foreign companies? Shouldn't their own governments be taking responsibility for their welfare? ...

Few people seem inclined to accept that as far as the global financial system is concerned, there's really not that much difference between foreign and domestic financial institutions -- the web of interconnections tying all the big players together is so tangled and intricate that if one link in the chain goes down, everyone stands a chance of collapsing. (And yes, that's a bug, not a feature.) If the goal is preventing systemic collapse, then everybody gets bailed out, regardless of jurisdiction. But Bernanke followed up an answer along those lines with an even more effective riposte: Hey, Europe has been bailing us out too!

BERNANKE: ...The critical issue was, was AIG going to default and create enormous chaos in the financial markets, or was it going to meet all of its obligations, including those to foreign counterparties?

I would point out that the Europeans have also saved a number of major financial institutions. And the issue of whether those institutions owed American companies money has not come up. So I think that there is a sense that we all have the obligation to address the problems of companies in our own jurisdictions.

In particular, the Europeans could appropriately point out that it was under U.S. regulation or lack of regulation and U.S. law that AIG failed. And in their sense, we do bear some responsibility.

Good answer. ... All in all, I thought Ben Bernanke had a pretty good day on Monday -- he's clearly gotten more comfortable dealing with rampant Congressional irrationality over the last two years. ... And when he claimed that after learning of the AIG bonuses he wanted to file suit to stop the payments, he sounded believable.

This is another case (DeLong response) where having procedures worked out in advance can help with both the politics and the economics. It's best if we don't have to waste time bickering over who should pay for what while the economies of both countries are going down in flames, and policies made in the heat of the moment aren't always the best policies, particularly when they are made in combative political environments. But all of that can be avoided if the polices are thought through carefully and dispassionately in advance, and have the approval of the appropriate authorities.

"Will the Geithner Plan Work?"

The question is, "Will the Geithner plan work?" There are responses from Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, Simon Johnson, and me:

How to Tell It’s Working, by Mark Thoma, Room for Debate, NY Times Blogs: A bailout plan must do two things to be effective. It must remove toxic assets from bank balance sheets, and it must recapitalize banks in a politically acceptable manner. I believe the Geithner plan has a chance of doing both of these things, but it’s by no means a sure bet that it will.

How will policymakers be able to tell if the plan is working? The first thing to watch for is whether private money is moving off the sidelines and participating in the program to the degree necessary to solve the problem. If the free insurance against downside risk that comes with the non-recourse loans the government is offering doesn’t induce sufficient private sector participation, then it will be time to end the Geithner bank bailout. Even if increasing the insurance giveaway would help, legislative approval would be unlikely and the political fight that would ensue would hurt the chances for nationalization.

The second factor to watch is the percentage of bad loans the government makes as part of the program. These non-recourse loans are the source of the free insurance against downside risk. Borrowers can walk away if there are large losses, and if the number of bad loans is unacceptably high (a potential political nightmare), then policymakers will need to act quickly and pull the plug on the program.

Unfortunately, however, the loan terms make it unlikely that we’ll have timely information on the percentage of bad loans. But there is something else we can watch to assess the health of the loans: the price of the toxic assets purchased with the loans. If the price of these assets is increasing sufficiently fast, then the loans will be safe. But if the prices do not respond to the program, then the loans will be in trouble.

In that case, we will need to end the program as quickly as possible and minimize losses. The next step will have to be bank nationalization, though the political climate will be difficult. Sticking with the plan until it completely crashes and burns on the hope that a little more time is all that is needed will make nationalization much more difficult.

[The discussion is supposed to continue through today.]

Update: I made similar points in a discussion at Foreign Policy (which is based upon this post):

There were three plans to choose from: the original Paulson plan in which the government buys bad paper directly, the Geithner plan in which the government gives investors loans and absorbs some of the downside risk in order to induce private sector participation, and outright nationalization.

So which plan is best? Any plan that does two things -- removes toxic assets from balance sheets and recapitalizes banks in a politically acceptable manner -- has a chance of working. The Paulson plan does this if the government overpays for the assets, but the politics of that are horrible (as they should be). The Geithner plan also has the two necessary features, though it has a "lead the (private sector) horse to water and hope it will drink" element to it that infuses uncertainty into the plan. This option also comes with its own set of political problems -- problems that will worsen if the loans to private sector "partners" turn out to be as bad as some fear. Finally, the plan for nationalization also includes these two features, but it suffers from the political handicap of appearing (to some) to be "socialist," and there are arguments that the Geithner plan provides better economic incentives (though not everyone agrees with this assertion).

I am not wedded to a particular plan. Each has its good and bad points. Sure, some seem better than others, but none is so off the mark that I am filled with despair because we are following a particular course of action.

Thus, I am willing to get behind this plan and to try to make it work. It wasn't my first choice; I still think nationalization is better overall. But trying to change the plan now would delay the rescue for too long, and more delay is not something we dare risk at this point.

Update: A second entry at the NY Times blog:

Random Actions on Failing Banks, by Mark Thoma: Mark Thoma responds to Simon Johnson:

One of Simon Johnson’s points is very much worth emphasizing. When this crisis hit, we did not have the procedures in place for an orderly resolution for banks that were failing. Thus, because there were no well known procedures to follow, the actions that the government took when faced with a failing bank appeared ad hoc, almost random, because they were constructed on the fly to deal with problems at individual banks.

The first thing we need to do is to change the regulatory structure so that banks cannot get too big and too interconnected to fail. When they are too big, their failure puts policymakers and the public in a position where there is no resolution that can confine the costs to those who were responsible for the problem. The dynamic is bad both ways: If the bank is allowed to fail, people who did nothing to cause the crisis are hurt. But if the bank is saved the people responsible are let off the hook at taxpayer expense, at least to some degree, and that brings up issues of both moral hazard and equity.

But despite our best efforts, banks may become too large or too interconnected anyway, particularly if the interconnections are not transparent until trouble hits, and that’s where we need to do much, much better than we did in the present crisis. We need to have procedures available to resolve problems that are backed with a credible enforcement threat so that everyone understands in advance exactly what will happen to institutions that are deemed insolvent. We simply cannot repeat the uncertainty generating ad hoc, case by case approach that was used in the present case.

[And Brad DeLong has a second entry responding to Paul Krugman.]

Dissent on "Which Plan is Best?": Dark Musings

This is from Steve Waldman at Interfluidity. I have a few comments at the end:

Dark musings, by Steve Waldman: I often wish I were Mark Thoma. If I were Mark Thoma, I could be smart and paying attention without being bitter.

So I am not wedded to a particular plan, I think they all have good and bad points, and that (with the proper tweaks) each could work. Sure, some seem better than others, but none — to me — is so off the mark that I am filled with despair because we are following a particular course of action.

Unfortunately, I have a darker temperament, a spirit less generous and optimistic than Mark's. I am filled with despair, not because what we are doing cannot "work", but because it is too unjust. This is not my country.

The news of today is the Geithner plan. I think this plan might work very well in terms of repairing bank balance sheets.

Of course the whole notion of repairing bank balance sheet is a lie and misdirection.

"Which Plan is Best?" Follow-Up: Who Can At Least Tolerate the Geithner Plan?

James Surowiecki reacts to the post "Which Plan is Best?":

Who Can At Least Tolerate the Geithner Plan?, by James Surowiecki: Most of what’s been written about Tim Geithner’s plan ... has been, unsurprisingly, negative, since Geithner’s plan does not involve the preferred solution of most bloggers and pundits: nationalizing the banks. But there are some interesting exceptions. The most useful post in terms of understanding the thinking behind the plan is Brad DeLong’s FAQ. ... And Mark Thoma of Economist’s View, who is actually an advocate of nationalization, has nonetheless written two excellent posts explaining why there are problems in the market for toxic assets and why the Geithner plan, while not ideal, could work in solving them.

Thoma’s conclusion to his second post, which comes after his analysis of three options for dealing with the banking system (the original Paulson plan, nationalization, and now the Geithner plan) is especially interesting:

"Which Plan is Best?" Follow-Up: Some Positive Comments on the Geithner Toxic Plan

Calculated Risk on "Which Plan is Best?":

Some Positive Comments on the Geithner Toxic Plan: From Mark Thoma at Economist's View: Which Bailout Plan is Best?

... I prefer nationalization because it provides a certainty in terms of what will happen that the other plans do not provide, the Geithner plan in particular, but it also appears to suffer from the political handicap of appearing (to some) to be "socialist," and there are arguments that the Geithner plan provides better economic incentives than nationalization (though not everyone agrees with this assertion). The Geithner plan also has its political problems, problems that will get much worse if the loans that are part of the proposal turn out to be bad as some, but not all, fear.
...
I am willing to get behind this plan and to try to make it work. It wasn't my first choice, I still think nationalization is better overall, but I am not one who believes the Geithner plan cannot possibly work. Trying to change it now would delay the plan for too long and more delay is absolutely the wrong step to take. There's still time for minor changes to improve the program as we go along, and it will be important to implement mid course corrections, but like it or not this is the plan we are going with and the important thing now is to do the best that we can to try and make it work.

I tend to agree with Mark on this. The Geithner plan is suboptimal, but it is probably the best we can get in the current environment. I'd add a caveat: this plan is easy for the banks to game or arb - and if a bank is caught gaming this plan, the AIG bonus flap will seem like a light Summer breeze.

"Toxic Car" Follow-Up: The Role of Regulatory Capture and Incentives

Sachi Mukherjee follows up on the toxic car analogy:

On toxic cars, by The Compulsive Theorist: Mark Thoma comes up with a terrific analogy for the issues around "toxic" assets held by financial institutions. Among other things, he gives a particularly clear explanation of the Paulson, Geithner and "Swedish" plans for dealing with these assets.

Thoma concludes with the important point that even if a government intervention loses the taxpayer money on the toxic assets themselves, it may still in a broader sense be a good strategy, once we account in our risk function for the high probability of very severe economic disruption absent any intervention.

Suppose we agree, on these grounds, that some intervention is better than no intervention, even if it loses the taxpayer money in the narrow sense of a book loss on the toxic assets. The question then shifts to which of the plans on offer is best (or least bad)?

"Toxic Car" Follow-Up: The Free Insurance in TALF

The post on toxic cars prompts an explanation of the free insurance that is part of the Geithner plan:

The Geithner CDS, by Cheap Talk: This post from Mark Thoma is useful in spelling out some of the accounting behind the Geithner plan and its old incarnation due to Paulson and co.  But we cannot assess the policy unless we come to grips with the Treasury’s motives for intervening in the first place.  When we do the picture changes a lot and it becomes clear that this amounts to a blanket insurance policy for the banks.

Which Bailout Plan is Best?

Which plan is best, the original Paulson plan where the government buys bad paper directly, the Geithner plan where the government gives investors loans and absorbs some of the downside risk in order to induce private sector participation, or straight up nationalization?

Last March, before Paulson had announced his plan, I said that I thought it was time for the government to begin aggressively purchasing toxic assets to solve this problem once and for all:

I’m starting to think that the Fed should drop the term part of the TSLF and instead trade permanently for risky assets (with the haircut sufficient to provide some compensation for the risk), bonds for MBS, money for MBS, or whatever, and don’t limit trades to banks.

The Fed would act as “risk absorber of last resort.” Why should it do this? There has been an unexpected earthquake of risk, a financial disaster on the scale of a natural disaster like Katrina, and the government can step in and sop some of it up by trading non-risky assets (money, bonds, etc.) for risky assets at an attractive risk-adjusted price. ...

I still think that this would have worked then, I called the government a "risk absorber of last resort," and the prices of the assets at that time were high enough to keep banks solvent. But it would have involved a massive transfer to the banks without giving taxpayers any share of the upside. In addition, as time has passed and prices have fallen, solvency issues have come to the forefront - the balance sheet problems are no longer hidden by overpriced assets - and the solvency problems must be addressed directly. That means that if there is no separate program to provide an infusion of capital, simply removing the toxic assets from the balance sheets through government purchases at current prices - prices so low that the banks are insolvent - won't be resolve the problem.

So if it was to work, the Paulson plan had to be amended, it needed to both get assets off the banks' books somehow, and it also needed to provide recapitalization in a way that is politically acceptable (which means no giveaways - the asset purchase plan I proposed above would have been a giveaway without some sort of redistributive mechanism attached to the plan).

So which plan is best? Any plan that does these two things, removes toxic assets from balance sheets and recapitalizes banks in a politically acceptable manner has a chance of working. The Paulson plan does this if the government overpays for the assets, but the politics of that are horrible (as they should be). The Geithner plan also has these two features, though it has a "lead the (private sector) horse to water and hope it will drink" element to it that infuses uncertainty into the plan. The plan for nationalization most certainly has these features, but it has political problems as well.

So I do not take a binary (or, I suppose, trinary), either/or approach to the proposals where I think one plan will work and the others will fail miserably. All three plans have their pluses and minuses. The politics of the Paulson plan make it a non-starter, I have no quarrel with the view that it constitutes a giveaway that is not justified, so the only way the Paulson plan will work is if we can convince people that equity stakes or some other mechanism makes the plan sufficiently equitable. I prefer nationalization because it provides a certainty in terms of what will happen that the other plans do not provide, the Geithner plan in particular, but it also appears to suffer from the political handicap of appearing (to some) to be "socialist," and there are arguments that the Geithner plan provides better economic incentives than nationalization (though not everyone agrees with this assertion). The Geithner plan also has its political problems, problems that will get much worse if the loans that are part of the proposal turn out to be bad as some, but not all, fear. So all three plans do the requisite things - get assets off the books and provide recapitalization - and each comes with its own set of political worries.

So I am not wedded to a particular plan, I think they all have good and bad points, and that (with the proper tweaks) each could work. Sure, some seem better than others, but none - to me - is so off the mark that I am filled with despair because we are following a particular course of action.

The post quoted above was from over a year ago, and we had been aware of growing problems in the financial sector for some time before that. There were programs in place, but nothing of sufficient scale to get the bad paper off the books, so we've been at this for a long time without any big, decisive, effective policy action. What's important to me is that we do something, that we adopt a reasonable plan that has a decent shot at working and that satisfies the political test it must pass (though the administration could certainly do more to sell the plan to the public and help with this part, so passing the test is partly a reflection of the effort that is put into selling it). We've been spinning our wheels for too long, and it's time to get this done. We can't wait any longer.

So I am willing to get behind this plan and to try to make it work. It wasn't my first choice, I still think nationalization is better overall, but I am not one who believes the Geithner plan cannot possibly work. Trying to change it now would delay the plan for too long and more delay is absolutely the wrong step to take. There's still time for minor changes to improve the program as we go along, and it will be important to implement mid course corrections, but like it or not this is the plan we are going with and the important thing now is to do the best that we can to try and make it work.

Paul Krugman: Financial Policy Despair

We'll likely only get one attempt at rescuing the banking sector, and Paul Krugman prefers we use the "time-honored procedure for dealing with the aftermath of widespread financial failure" rather than the Geithner plan:

Financial Policy Despair, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, New York Times: Over the weekend The Times and other newspapers reported leaked details about the Obama administration’s bank rescue plan... If the reports are correct, Tim Geithner ... has persuaded President Obama to recycle ... the “cash for trash” plan proposed, then abandoned, six months ago by ... Henry Paulson.

This is more than disappointing. In fact, it fills me with a sense of despair. ... It’s as if the president were determined to confirm the growing perception that he and his economic team are out of touch, that their economic vision is clouded by excessively close ties to Wall Street. ...

Right now, our economy is being dragged down by our dysfunctional financial system... As economic historians can tell you, this is an old story... And there’s a time-honored procedure for dealing with the aftermath of widespread financial failure...: the government secures confidence in the system by guaranteeing many (though not necessarily all) bank debts. At the same time, it takes temporary control of truly insolvent banks, in order to clean up their books.

That’s what Sweden did in the early 1990s. It’s also what we ourselves did after the savings and loan debacle of the Reagan years. And there’s no reason we can’t do the same thing now.

But the Obama administration, like the Bush administration, apparently wants an easier way out. The common element to the Paulson and Geithner plans is the insistence that the bad assets on banks’ books are really worth much, much more than anyone is currently willing to pay... In fact, their true value is so high that if they were properly priced, banks wouldn’t be in trouble.

And so the plan is to use taxpayer funds to drive the prices of bad assets up to “fair” levels. Mr. Paulson proposed having the government buy the assets directly. Mr. Geithner instead proposes a complicated scheme in which the government lends money to private investors, who then use the money to buy the stuff. The idea, says Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, is to use “the expertise of the market” to set the value of toxic assets.

But the Geithner scheme would offer a one-way bet: if asset values go up, the investors profit, but if they go down, the investors can walk away from their debt. So this isn’t really about letting markets work. It’s just an indirect, disguised way to subsidize purchases of bad assets. ...

But the real problem with this plan is that it won’t work. Yes, troubled assets may be somewhat undervalued. But the fact is that financial executives literally bet their banks ... that there was no housing bubble, and the related belief that unprecedented levels of household debt were no problem. They lost that bet. And no amount of financial hocus-pocus — for that is what the Geithner plan amounts to — will change that fact.

You might say, why not try the plan and see what happens? One answer is that time is wasting: every month that we fail to come to grips with the economic crisis another 600,000 jobs are lost.

Even more important, however, is the way Mr. Obama is squandering his credibility. If this plan fails — as it almost surely will — it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to persuade Congress to come up with more funds to do what he should have done in the first place.

All is not lost... But time is running out.

Geithner: My Plan for Bad Bank Assets

Timothy Geithner explains and defends his new plan to repair financial markets:

My Plan for Bad Bank Assets, by Timothy Geithner, Commentary WSJ: ...Over the past six weeks we have put in place a series of ... initiatives ... to help lay the financial foundation for economic recovery. ... Together, actions over the last several months by the Federal Reserve and ... initiatives by this administration are already starting to make a difference. ...

However, the financial system as a whole is still working against recovery. ... Today, we are announcing another critical piece of our plan to increase the flow of credit and expand liquidity.

Our new Public-Private Investment Program will ... purchase real-estate related loans from banks and securities from the broader markets. Banks will have the ability to sell pools of loans to dedicated funds, and investors will compete to have the ability to participate in those funds and take advantage of the financing provided by the government.

The funds established under this program will have three essential design features. First, they will use government resources in the form of capital from the Treasury, and financing from the FDIC and Federal Reserve, to mobilize capital from private investors. Second, the Public-Private Investment Program will ensure that private-sector participants share the risks alongside the taxpayer, and that the taxpayer shares in the profits from these investments. ...

Third, private-sector purchasers will establish the value of the loans and securities purchased under the program, which will protect the government from overpaying for these assets.

Government Intervention in the Market for Toxic Cars

Imagine a car lot that has 100 cars on it. However, some of these cars have problems. Half of them will have engine troubles that total the cars - the engines blow up and the cars are then worthless - and this will happen just after purchase. The other half are perfectly fine. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell prior to purchase which type of car you will get no matter how hard you try. Thus, half of the assets on the car dealer's "balance sheet" - the cars on its lot - are toxic, and lack of transparency makes it impossible to tell which ones are bad prior to purchase.

If all the cars were in perfect shape, they would sell for $20,000 each. Thus, there are (50)*($20,000) = $1,000,000 in assets on the books according to one way of doing the accounting, but that doesn't necessarily represent the true value of the cars on the lot.

The town where this dealership is located relies upon this business for jobs, it is essential, but, unfortunately, business has fallen off to nothing. Nobody is willing to risk losing $20,000 by purchasing a car that might die just after purchase, so the price has fallen. The expected value of a car is $10,000, but it's an all or nothing proposition, the car runs or it dies, and since people are risk averse nobody is wiling to pay the $10,000 expected value. In fact, the highest price they are willing to pay, $6,000, is lower than the minimum price the dealer is willing to accept (I've assumed a reservation price of $7,500 for illustration, and a horizontal supply curve to make the illustration easier):

So how could the government fix the problem?

1. Government purchases of toxic cars

The government could buy the cars itself, say at $7,500 per car, or $750,000 total for the lot, drive them around a bit (stress test them), wait for the bad ones to blow up, then sell the 50 good cars back to the public (who will no longer be fearful since the bad cars are out of the mix). If they can get anything more than $15,000 for each good car, they will make money on the deal (well, there would be overhead and other costs to cover, but let's abstract from minor details). But if cars end up selling for less than $15,000, they will take a loss.

(In the graph, the government intervention shifts the demand curve outward until it intersects at the kink in the supply curve at Q=100).

The problem with this option is knowing what price to offer for the cars. There is no market, and the firm's reservation price may be too high, i.e. paying the reservation price will eventually lead to a loss. And it's worse. In this example the percentage of bad cars is known, but the percentage of bad cars would also be unknown in a more realistic example, so there's no way to know how many good cars there are for sure, and what price they will sell for after the defective cars have been culled out of the herd. If the government pays $7,500 per car, and more than 62.5% of them go bad (not that much more than the 50% estimate), then taxpayers will lose money even if they sell for $20,000. With the percentage unknown, there's no way to know for sure what the breakeven price will be.

This is, in essence, the original Paulson plan. The only twist is that the price - the $7,500 in the example above, would be determined by an auction among many dealers with the government accepting the lowest bid (which could be $7,500 in this example since that is the price the firm is willing to accept). As you can see by thinking this through, there are questions about what price such an auction would reveal.

One danger in this plan is that if you overpay for the cars, e.g. give $7,500 when the breakeven price was, say, actually $5,000, then you have given the owner of the car lot $250,000 more than the cars were actually worth (this will be the loss to taxpayers). The dealer may need this money to stay solvent and stay in business, but, nevertheless, it is a windfall.

There are a lot of uncertainties here, and lots of ways to lose money. But it's possible to make money too.

2. Subsidies and Public-Private partnerships

Here, the government offers a subsidy to private sector buyers. Suppose that the demand curve intersects the vertical line in the graph (at Q=100) at a price of $4,000. Then in order to sell 100 cars, the government must subsidize buyers by $3,500 so that the $4,000 offer is raised to the $7,500 the firm is willing to accept (notice that the buyer willing to pay $6,000 gets a $2,000 windfall, so, except at the margin, this plan gives surplus to people purchasing the assets - as with the first plan, this shifts the demand curve out until it intersects at the kink in the supply curve).

However, once again, the government will not know if it is getting this right or not. Suppose it offers a $1,000 subsidy thinking that is generous enough. In this example, that won't bridge the gap between the highest offer of $6,000, and the reservation price of $7,500. Thus, the subsidy would be too small to restart the market and the plan would fail. So the answer is to make the subsidy large enough to encourage buyers, but the problem is that if it is too large, the government will be giving money away unnecessarily.

And there's another problem. If there's a large gap between what people are willing to pay and what dealers are willing to accept(the gap between $6,000 and $7,500 in the example), this would be problematic politically since it would require subsidies that are unacceptably large.

And I should note that it doesn't have to be a subsidy. That's one way to do this - as a giveaway - but another way is through a no recourse loan (what is being called a partnership). Suppose that the government gives (up to) a $3,500 loan to a private sector buyer to purchase the car for $7,500. If it's a good car and the value rises above $7,500, say to $15,000, then government will get paid back (with interest) since the asset can be sold profitably (another option is for the government to demand a share of this profit through warrants or other means). But if it's a bad car, the price falls to zero and the loan is forgiven - it does not need to be repaid. So the private sector agents only have to put up a fraction of the price to control the asset, and their losses are limited to the amount they put up while the gains are potentially large.

This is, in essence, the Geithner Plan. If many of the loans are not repaid, or if the subsidy is too large, it could lose a lot of money, but it could also make money too.

3. Nationalization

Now for the Saab story. Another option is for the government to simply take over the car dealership. The dealership is essential to the economy of the town, without it people will struggle, and the government - for that reason - might consider temporarily taking over the dealership to prevent failure. In doing so, it would make an evaluation of the company's assets, pay off the people who loaned the business money up to this amount, which may require having them take a haircut, i.e. accept some percentage of what they are owed on the bad loans they made, and the owner would simply be wiped out (which is a benefit since the business is insolvent and this allows the owner to escape the loans that cannot be paid through liquidation).

After taking over, the government would stress test the cars it now owns, put the bad ones in the junk pile, and sell the rest back to the public. So long as it didn't pay the creditors too much when it took over, i.e. the haircut is sufficiently large, it ought to make money on the deal. But it could lose money here too.

The Point

But, and I want to stress this, the point of these plans is not to make money, the point is to keep the economy of the town going, to keep people employed. If people place a large value on security, then even if the government takes a loss on paper, it may not be an economic loss. That is, we must put a value on the jobs that are saved and the security it brings (simply imagine that the utility function has risk as one of its arguments - by lowering the risk of job loss and the associated household disruption, you have made the agent better off, and this must be counted against any loss from any of the programs above). There is value in economic stability and security over and above whatever the government makes (or loses) on the actual financial transactions, and this must be factored into the evaluation of the policy.

"Despair over Financial Policy"

Reactions to the leaked details of the administration's bank bailout plan. If I find any posts in support of the plan, I will add those in an update.

First, Paul Krugman:

Despair over financial policy, by Paul Krugman: The Geithner plan has now been leaked in detail. It’s exactly the plan that was widely analyzed — and found wanting — a couple of weeks ago. The zombie ideas have won.

The Obama administration is now completely wedded to the idea that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the financial system — that what we’re facing is the equivalent of a run on an essentially sound bank. As Tim Duy put it, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets. And if we get investors to understand that toxic waste is really, truly worth much more than anyone is willing to pay for it, all our problems will be solved.

To this end the plan proposes to create funds in which private investors put in a small amount of their own money, and in return get large, non-recourse loans from the taxpayer, with which to buy bad — I mean misunderstood — assets. This is supposed to lead to fair prices because the funds will engage in competitive bidding.

But it’s immediately obvious, if you think about it, that these funds will have skewed incentives. In effect, Treasury will be creating — deliberately! — the functional equivalent of Texas S&Ls in the 1980s: financial operations with very little capital but lots of government-guaranteed liabilities. For the private investors, this is an open invitation to play heads I win, tails the taxpayers lose. So sure, these investors will be ready to pay high prices for toxic waste. After all, the stuff might be worth something; and if it isn’t, that’s someone else’s problem. ...

This plan will produce big gains for banks that didn’t actually need any help; it will, however, do little to reassure the public about banks that are seriously undercapitalized. And I fear that when the plan fails, as it almost surely will, the administration will have shot its bolt: it won’t be able to come back to Congress for a plan that might actually work.

What an awful mess.

Calculated Risk:

Geithner's Toxic Asset Plan, Calculated Risk: The NY Times has some details ...

Toxic Asset Plan Foresees Big Subsidies for Investors: The plan to be announced next week involves three separate approaches. In one, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will set up special-purpose investment partnerships and lend about 85 percent of the money that those partnerships will need to buy up troubled assets that banks want to sell.

In the second, the Treasury will hire four or five investment management firms, matching the private money that each of the firms puts up on a dollar-for-dollar basis with government money.

In the third piece, the Treasury plans to expand lending through the Term Asset-Backed Secure Lending Facility, a joint venture with the Federal Reserve.

More approaches doesn't make a better plan.

The FDIC plan involves almost no money down. The FDIC will provide a low interest non-recourse loan up to 85% of the value of the assets. ...

With almost no skin in the game, these investors can pay a higher than market price for the toxic assets (since there is little downside risk). This amounts to a direct subsidy from the taxpayers to the banks.

Oh well, I'm sure Geithner will provide details this time ...

Yves Smith:

Private Public Partnership Details Emerging, Yves Smith:  The New York Times seems to have the inside skinny on the emerging private public partnership ... program. And it appears to be consistent with (low) expectations: a lot of bells and whistles to finesse the fact that the government will wind up paying well above market for crappy paper. ...

If the money committed to this program is less than the book value of the assets the banks want to unload (or the banks are worried about that possibility), the banks have an incentive to try to ditch their worst dreck first.

In addition, it has been said in comments more than once that the banks own some paper that is truly worthless. This program won't solve that problem. ...

And notice the hint of skepticism from the Times regarding the Administration's supposition that the bidding will result in fair prices. Huh? First, the banks, as in normal auctions, will presumably set a reserve price equal to the value of the assets on their books. If the price does not meet the reserve (and the level of the reserve is not disclosed to the bidders), there is no sale; in this case, the bank would keep the toxic instruments.

Having the banks realize a price at least equal to the value they hold it at on their books is a boundary condition. If the banks sell the assets as a lower level, it will result in a loss, which is a direct hit to equity. The whole point of this exercise is to get rid of the bad paper without further impairing the banks.

So presumably, the point of a competitive process (assuming enough parties show up to produce that result at any particular auction) is to elicit a high enough price that it might reach the bank's reserve, which would be the value on the bank's books now.

And notice the utter dishonesty: a competitive bidding process will protect taxpayers. Huh? A competitive bidding process will elicit a higher price which is BAD for taxpayers! ...

Paul Krugman again:

More on the bank plan, Paul Krugman: Why was I so quick to condemn the Geithner plan? Because it’s not new; it’s just another version of an idea that keeps coming up and keeps being refuted. It’s basically a thinly disguised version of the same plan Henry Paulson announced way back in September. ...

[W]e have a bank crisis. Is it the result of fundamentally bad investment, or is it because of a self-fulfilling panic?

If you think it’s just a panic, then the government can pull a magic trick: by stepping in to buy the assets banks are selling, it can make banks look solvent again, and end the run. Yippee! And sometimes that really does work.

But if you think that the banks really, really have made lousy investments, this won’t work at all; it will simply be a waste of taxpayer money. To keep the banks operating, you need to provide a real backstop — you need to guarantee their debts, and seize ownership of those banks that don’t have enough assets to cover their debts; that’s the Swedish solution, it’s what we eventually did with our own S&Ls.

Now, early on in this crisis, it was possible to argue that it was mainly a panic. But at this point, that’s an indefensible position. Banks and other highly leveraged institutions collectively made a huge bet that the normal rules for house prices and sustainable levels of consumer debt no longer applied; they were wrong. Time for a Swedish solution.

But Treasury is still clinging to the idea that this is just a panic attack, and that all it needs to do is calm the markets by buying up a bunch of troubled assets. Actually, that’s not quite it: the Obama administration has apparently made the judgment that there would be a public outcry if it announced a straightforward plan along these lines, so it has produced what Yves Smith calls “a lot of bells and whistles to finesse the fact that the government will wind up paying well above market...”

Why am I so vehement about this? Because I’m afraid that this will be the administration’s only shot — that if the first bank plan is an abject failure, it won’t have the political capital for a second. So it’s just horrifying that Obama — and yes, the buck stops there — has decided to base his financial plan on the fantasy that a bit of financial hocus-pocus will turn the clock back to 2006.

Here is a Defense of Private Funds for Jump-Starting the Market for Troubled Assets by Lucian Bebchuk.

The main objection is that the government will (in essence) overpay for these assets, and that will cost the taxpayers money. In the meantime, the banks - which get a windfall from the overpayment for the assets - could recover and do just fine. If the administration insists on moving in this direction rather than adopting a version of the Swedish plan, why not require some insurance against future taxpayer losses, e.g. require firms participating in the bailout to sacrifice future equity shares equal to the value of any losses that fall on taxpayers? There are probably better ways to structure this, but having such insurance in place could help with the politics of the bailout which the administration does not seem to get. Taxpayers are in no mood to be giving away money to failed banks without assurances that it is justified, that there is no other plan that will well enough to provide a substitute and that they have been protected as much as possible in the process. This plan, at least what we know about it so far, does not meet those conditions. In particular, there are alternative plans such as the proposed derivatives of the Swedish plan that can be expected to work just as well, yet do not involve giveaways to failed banks.

Update: More from Yves Smith, Investor on Private Public Partnership: "One would have to be a criminal to participate in this":

Hoisted from comments:

I am SAC Capital. I get to be one of the bidders on bank assets covered by the program

Citi holds $100mm of face-value securities, carried at $80mm.

The market bid on these securities is $30mm. Say with perfect foresight the value of all cash flows is $50mm.

I bid Citi $75mm. I put up $2.25mm or 3%, Treasury funds the rest.

I then buy $10mm in CDS directly from Citi [or another participant (BOA, GS, etc)] on the bonds for a premium of $1mm.

In the fullness of time, we get the final outcome, the bonds are worth $50mm

SAC loses $2.25mm of principal, but gets $9mm net in CDS proceeds, so recovers $6.75mm on a $2.25mm investment. Profit is $4.5mm

Citi writes down $5mm from the initial sale of the securities, and a $9mm CDS loss. Total loss, $14mm (against a potential $30mm loss without the program)

U.S. Treasury loses $22.75mm

Great program.

It's just a scheme to transfer losses from the bank to the taxpayer with an egregious payout to a middleman (SAC) to effectively money launder the transaction.

You've also transmuted a $30mm economic loss into a $36.75mm economic loss because of the laundering. So its incredibly inefficient.

How did fraud and money laundering become the national economic policy of the US?

One would have to be a criminal to participate in this.

Folks, this IS even worse than I thought, and you know I have a constitutional predisposition to take a dim view of things...

Update: Jamie Galbgraith responds to the plan.

I've just been reading the NYT report. The central Treasury assumption, at least for public consumption, seems to be that the underlying mortgage loans will largely pay off, so that if the PPIP buys and holds, at an above-present-market price governed by auction, the government's loan to finance the purchase will not go bad.

Recovery rates on sub-prime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) so far appear to belie this assumption. ...

The way to find out who is right is ... examination of the underlying loan tapes -- and comparison to the IndyMac portfolio -- would help determine whether these loans or derivatives based on them have any right to be marketed in an open securities market, and any serious prospect of being paid over time at rates approaching 60 cents on the dollar, rather than 30 cents or less.

Note that even a small loss of capital, relative to the purchase price, completely wipes out the interest earnings on the Treasury's loans, putting the government in a loss position and giving the banks a windfall.

If I'm right and the mortgages are largely trash, then the Geithner plan is a Rube Goldberg device for shifting inevitable losses from the banks to the Treasury, preserving the big banks and their incumbent management in all their dysfunctional glory. The cost will be continued vast over-capacity in banking, and a consequent weakening of the remaining, smaller, better- managed banks who didn't participate in the garbage-loan frenzy. ...

If I were a member of Congress, I would offer a resolution blocking Treasury from making the low-cost loans it expects to offer the PPIPs, until GAO or the FDIC has conducted an INDEPENDENT EXAMINATION OF THE LOAN TAPES underlying each class of securitized assets, and reported on the prevalence of missing documentation, misrepresentation, and signs of fraud. In the absence of a credible rating, this is the minimum due diligence that any private investor would require.

I hope what I'm driving at, here, is clear...

Update: From James Kwak, This Time I’m Not the One Calling It a Subsidy.:

Instead of coming up with one plan to buy troubled assets, it looks like the government has come up with three. ... For now, I think the concerns I expressed last month still hold. If we take as given that the government will only negotiate at arm’s length with the banks (meaning the banks can decide at what price they are willing to sell the assets), then the most important thing is for the plan to work. But it’s not clear if the degree of subsidy offered will be enough to close the gap between what investors are willing to pay and what banks are willing to sell at. Having multiple buyers and using cheap Fed financing will increase the willingness-to-pay for these assets, but we won’t know a priori if it will exceed the reserve price of the sellers.

In the best-case scenario: (a) the government’s willingness to bear most of the risk encourages private investors to bid enough to get the banks to sell; (b) the economy recovers and the assets increase in price from the prices paid; (c) the investment funds pay back the Fed (which makes a small spread between the interest rate and the Fed’s low cost of money); and (d) the government gets some of the upside through its capital investments. (I think the main purpose of that government capital is to deflect the criticism that all of the upside belongs to the private sector.) In the worst-case scenario, the market stays stuck because the banks have unrealistic reserve prices. Perhaps the idea is that, in that case, the TALF will allow the government to (over)pay whatever it takes to bail out the banks.

Most encouragingly, the headline in the Times was “Toxic Asset Plan Foresees Big Subsidies for Investors,” indicating that the mainstream media have figured out the game. ...

Update: Brad DeLong in The Geithner Plan FAQ notes that having a large share of the downside also means having a large share of the upside, so if the downtrodden assets appreciate after the government gains control of them, the Geithener plan could make money:

Q: What is the Geithner Plan?

A: The Geithner Plan is a trillion-dollar operation by which the U.S. acts as the world's largest hedge fund investor, committing its money to funds to buy up risky and distressed but probably fundamentally undervalued assets and, as patient capital, holding them either until maturity or until markets recover so that risk discounts are normal and it can sell them off--in either case at an immense profit.

Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn't make back its money?

A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money--for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.

Q: Where does the trillion dollars come from?

A: $150 billion comes from the TARP in the form of equity, $820 billion from the FDIC in the form of debt, and $30 billion from the hedge fund and pension fund managers who will be hired to make the investments and run the program's operations.

Q: Why is the government making hedge and pension fund managers kick in $30 billion?

A: So that they have skin in the game, and so do not take excessive risks with the taxpayers' money because their own money is on the line as well.

Q: Why then should hedge and pension fund managers agree to run this?

A: Because they stand to make a fortune when markets recover or when the acquired toxic assets are held to maturity: they make the full equity returns on their $30 billion invested--which is leveraged up to $1 trillion with government money.

Q: Why isn't this just a massive giveaway to yet another set of financiers?

A: The private managers put in $30 billion, but the Treasury puts in $150 billion--and so has 5/6 of the equity. When the private managers make $1, the Treasury makes $5. If we were investing in a normal hedge fund, we would have to pay the managers 2% of the capital and 20% of the profits every year; the Treasury is only paying 0% of the capital value and 17% of the profits every year.

Q: Why do we think that the government will get value from its hiring these hedge and pension fund managers to operate this program?

A: They do get 17% of the equity return. 17% of the return on equity on a $1 trillion portfolio that is leveraged 5-1 is incentive.

Q: So the Treasury is doing this to make money?

A: No: making money is a sidelight. The Treasury is doing this to reduce unemployment.

Q: How does having the U.S. government invest $1 trillion in the world's largest hedge fund operations reduce unemployment?

A: At the moment, those businesses that ought to be expanding and hiring cannot profitably expand and hire because the terms on which they can finance expansion are so lousy. The terms on which they can finance expansion are so lousy because existing financial asset prices are so low. Existing financial asset prices are so low because risk and information discounts have soared. Risk and information discounts have collapsed because the supply of assets is high and the tolerance of financial intermediaries for holding assets that are risky or that might have information-revelation problems are low.

Q: So?

A: So if we are going to boost asset prices to levels at which those firms that ought to be expanding can get finance, we are going to have to shrink the supply of risky assets that our private-sector financial intermediaries have to hold. The government buys up $1 trillion of financial assets, and lo and behold the private sector has to hold $1 trillion less of risky and information-impacted assets. Their price goes up. Supply and demand.

Q: And firms that ought to be expanding can then get financing on good terms again, and so they hire, and unemployment drops?

A: No. Our guess is that we would need to take $4 trillion out of the market and off the supply that private financial intermediaries must hold in order to move financial asset prices to where they need to be in order to unfreeze credit markets, and make it profitable for those businesses that should be hiring and expanding to actually hire and expand.

Q: Oh.

A: But all is not lost. This is not all the administration is doing. This plan consumes $150 billion of second-tranche TARP money and leverages it to take $1 trillion in risky assets off the private sector's books. And the Federal Reserve is taking an additional $1 trillion of risky debt off the private sector's books and replacing it with cash through its program of quantitative easing. And there is the fiscal boost program. And there is a potential second-round stimulus in September. And there is still $200 billion more left in the TARP to be used in other ways.

Think of it this way: the Fed's and the Treasury's announcements in the past week are what we think will be half of what we need to do the job. And if it turns out that we are right, more programs and plans will be on the way.

Q: This sounds very different from the headline of the Andrews, Dash, and Bowley article in the New York Times this morning: "Toxic Asset Plan Foresees Big Subsidies for Investors."

A: You are surprised, after the past decade, to see a New York Times story with a misleading headline?

Q: No.

A: The plan I have just described to you is the plan that was described to Andrews, Dash, and Bowley. They write of "coax[ing] investors to form partnerships with the government" and "taxpayers... would pay for the bulk of the purchases..."--that's the $30 billion from the private managers and the $150 billion from the TARP that makes up the equity tranche of the program. They write of "the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation will set up special-purpose investment partnerships and lend about 85 percent of the money..."--that's the debt slice of the program. They write that "the government will provide the overwhelming bulk of the money — possibly more than 95 percent..."--that is true, but they don't say that the government gets 80% of the equity profits and what it is owed the FDIC on the debt tranche. That what Andrews, Dash, and Bowley say sounds different is a big problem: they did not explain the plan very well. Deborah Solomon in the Wall Street Journal does, I think, much better. David Cho in tomorrow morning's Washington Post is in the middle.

Update: Paul Krugman responds to Brad DeLong:

Brad DeLong’s defense of Geithner, by Paul Krugman: Brad gives it the old college try. But he shies away, I think, from the central issue: the non-recourse loans financing 85 percent of the purchases.

Brad treats the prospect that assets purchased by public-private partnership will fall enough in value to wipe out the equity as unlikely. But it isn’t: the whole point about toxic waste is that nobody knows what it’s worth, so it’s highly likely that it will turn out to be worth 15 percent less than the purchase price. You might say that we know that the stuff is undervalued; actually, I don’t think we know that. And anyway, the whole point of the program is to push prices up to the point where we don’t know that it’s undervalued.

So default on those non-recourse loans is a substantial possibility, which means that there is a large implicit subsidy involved. That’s why Christie Romer’s claim that we’re relying on the “expertise of the market” rings so hollow: we’re giving investors a big subsidy, so this has nothing to do with letting markets work.

And a final point: I’m with Atrios here. If getting the prices of toxic assets “right” isn’t enough to rescue the banks, that doesn’t mean that we’re doomed; it means that we actually have to, you know, rescue the banks, Swedish style, rather than rely on fancy financial engineering to make the problem go away.

Update: A follow-up post, Government Intervention in the Market for Toxic Cars, attempts to shed light on some of the proposed policy options.

Update: Brad DeLong replies:

I Think Paul Krugman Is Wrong: I find that a scary sentence to write. If the past decade has taught me anything, it has taught me that mistakes are avoided if you follow two rules:

1. Remember that Paul Krugman is right.
2. If your analysis leads you to conclude that Paul Krugman is wrong, refer to rule #1.

So why do I have a positive and Paul a negative view of the Geithner Plan? I see three reasons:

1. The half empty-half full factor: I see the Geithner Plan as a positive step from where we are. Paul seed it as an embarrassingly inadequate bandaid.
2. Politics: I think Obama has to demonstrate that he has exhausted all other options before he has a prayer of getting Voinovich to vote to close debate on a bank nationalization bill. Paul thinks that the longer Obama delays proposing bank nationalization the lower it's chances become.
3. I think the private-sector players in financial markets right now are highly risk averse--hence assets are undervalued from the perspective of a society or a government that is less risk averse. Paul judges that assets have low values beceuse they are unlikely to pay out much cash.

More on this third later...

---

UPDATE: LATER: One way to think about it is that the privates are placing a low market price on distressed securities because they place a high weight on future scenarios in which the prices of distressed securities fall still further: in such scenarios they will really need cash really badly, and the additional losses that would be generated if they further extending their positions and if such scenarios came to past would be extremely painful--institution-destroying, and hence to be avoided at all costs.

The government, however, is the agent of society at large. As such, it is close to risk neutral: only the losses associated with truly great depressions get substantial extra weight. It doesn't care much about bad news that leads to further declines in the values of toxic assets it holds: if worst comes to worst, it can always offset them by printing more money and so generating an inflation that is annoying and painful but not something to be avoided at all costs.

It is this difference between the (extremely low) risk tolerance of private financial intermediaries and the (relatively high) risk tolerance of the government and of society at large that creates the rationale for a program like the Geithner Plan.

"AIG Still Isn't Too Big to Fail"

Lucian Bebchuk says AIG is not too big to fail:

AIG Still Isn't Too Big to Fail, by Lucian Bebchuk, Commentary, WSJ: The AIG bailout -- at $170 billion and rising -- may end up as the costliest rescue of a single firm in history. There is much debate about bonuses paid to AIG's executives. But there is far too little debate on the government's willingness to back all of AIG's obligations.

The company claims any failure by the government to do so would have catastrophic consequences. This claim is exaggerated. Serious consideration should be given to forcing AIG's partners in derivative transactions -- which are mainly buyers of credit default swaps from the company -- to take a substantial haircut. ...

While AIG has thus far been able to cover derivative losses using government funds, the possibility of large additional losses must be recognized. AIG recently stated that it still has about $1.6 trillion in "notional derivatives exposure." Suppose, for example, that AIG ends up with losses equal to, say, 20% of this exposure -- that is, $320 billion. Suppose also that the value of AIG's current assets ... is $160 billion. In this scenario, the government's fully backing AIG's obligations would produce an additional loss of $160 billion for taxpayers. Should the government be prepared to do so?

The alternative would be to put AIG into Chapter 11. In this case, AIG's creditors, including its derivative counterparties, would obtain the company's assets. They would end up with a 50% recovery on their claims, bearing those $160 billion of losses themselves.

AIG recently stated that failure to meet all of the company's obligations could lead to a "run on the bank" by customers seeking to surrender insurance policies and "would have sweeping impacts across the economy." But insurance policyholders wouldn't be at risk if AIG failed to meet its obligations. The insurance subsidiaries are not responsible for the debts of their parent AIG, and insurance policy claims are backed both by the subsidiaries' required reserves and state insurance funds.

Still, what about the concern that losses to derivative counterparties -- which are now known to include major U.S. and foreign banks -- would substantially deplete the capital of some of them? That concern would be best addressed by the U.S. government (or foreign governments in the case of their banks) infusing capital directly -- in return for shares -- into the banks that need it. There is no reason to back AIG's obligations as an instrument for infusing capital (with taxpayers getting nothing in return) into, say, Goldman Sachs or Spain's Banco Santander.

It is true that the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September led to a crisis of confidence among depositors..., which had a dramatic effect on markets. Letting AIG's derivative counterparties take a significant haircut, however, should not lead to such a crisis. AIG's obligations are to derivative counterparties, not to depositors. Moreover, governments world-wide are now committed to backing fully the claims of depositors in financial institutions.

It is important to understand that the government can also employ intermediate approaches between fully backing AIG's derivative obligations and no backing. ... At a minimum, the government should conduct "stress tests," estimating potential losses in alternative scenarios, and formulate a policy on the magnitude and fraction of derivative losses it would be willing to cover. A policy that doesn't fully back AIG's obligations should be seriously considered.

Monetary policy makers often run potential policies through a wide variety of models under differing assumptions about the state of the economy, and they avoid policies that have a very bad downside even if the upside is potentially very attractive. The proposal above can be interpreted within this type of risk management approach to policy that tries to insure against really bad policy outcomes. It may very well be that financial markets can withstand the failure of AIG, but the potential downside if that assumption is wrong is very large, larger than any policymaker wants to take the blame for. Thus, in such cases, you often observe policymakers pursuing what they feel is the safest policy that moves the ball forward rather than policies that might have a better upside, but also come with the possibility of, say, market meltdown. I'm sympathetic to the argument that we should put AIG through a carefully managed failure, but saying, as above, that letting "AIG's derivative counterparties take a significant haircut ... should not lead to ... a crisis" still leaves the door open, even if only a crack, to an outcome that no policymaker wants to be responsible for.

Update: James Kwak:

Now, the government has not explicitly guaranteed AIG’s liabilities. But the main reason for bailing out AIG in the first place was the fear that an uncontrolled failure would have ripple effects that would take down many other financial institutions who were dependent in some way on AIG; most commonly, they had bought insurance, in the form of credit default swaps... And a major usage of bailout money has been to make whole AIG’s counterparties...

I still think it was a mistake to let Lehman fail, because of the sudden panic it created. But we are in a very different situation today. Many people now believe that the government may decide to let bank creditors lose some of their money. As Bebchuk says, instead of continually giving AIG taxpayer money that is effectively used to bail out other banks (many of which are in Europe, allowing European governments to free ride on the U.S.), the government could let AIG fail and bail out those other banks directly, thereby at least getting increased ownership stakes in return. Bebchuck also explains that AIG’s insurance subsidiaries would not become insolvent if the AIG holding company went bankrupt, because they have their own reserves. ...  Furthermore, he argues, failure is not an all-or-nothing proposition...

I think that the government could let AIG fail, if - and this is a big if - it can first identify which creditors and counterparties would be hurt, determine which of those cannot be allowed to fail (which should not be all of them), design a program to provide them enough capital directly, and announce everything on the same day. The net cost to the taxpayer cannot be higher than under the Too Big To Fail strategy, which implies a 100% guarantee for all counterparties and creditors...

There was clearly no time to do this between September 15 and September 16. But the government by now has had six months to study the books of AIG and its major domestic counterparties. People are no longer willing to take it on faith that the future of the free world depends on an implicit blanket guarantee for AIG. At least we want to see some evidence.

How sure are we that if we let AIG fail all of the necessary pieces - all the big and little ifs above - will fall into place, how sure are we of any evidence based upon asset valuations when there's no market price for them, and how sure are we that we've thought of all of the things that could go wrong?

Failing to Bailout Lehman Brothers was a Mistake

Lately, the idea that allowing Lehman Brothers to collapse was not the big disaster many have claimed it was has been heard with increasing frequency, especially among those opposed to government bailouts of the financial industry. For example, John Taylor recently said of the "bad turn" financial markets took after Lehman Brothers failed:

Many have argued that the reason for this bad turn was the government's decision not to prevent the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers... A study of this event suggests that the answer is more complicated and lay elsewhere.

Here's a rebuttal of this idea, and of the evidence presented by Taylor:

Why letting Lehman go did crush the financial markets, by Sam Jones: For some time now, the folks over at Clusterstock - notably John Carney - have led a challenge to a particularly virulent piece of received wisdom: that the failure of Lehman was necessarily an inflection point that took the severity of the financial crisis to a whole new level.

And with that the implication that the government’s decision to let Lehman fail was, in itself, a failure.

Until now, that kind of debate might have seemed a little academic - a question for historians. But day by day; bailout by bailout, its pertinence to current events and future policy is growing: politicians and regulators are going to find themselves increasingly under pressure to account for the growing number of expensive opportunities they are being occasioned with to Save The World.

Loath as we are to turn again to the “Japanese Scenario” for appropriate lessons, it’s worth bearing in mind that in Japan, it was ultimately the weight of public opinion, as much as it was economic or financial considerations, that came to shape the way the crisis played out. Distaste for spending taxpayers’ money grew extreme: bailouts became taboo. The way Japan’s authorities consequently pussy-footed their way around problems rather than tackling them head on drew the crisis out for nigh on a decade - dare we now even say, two.

Back now, though, to the specifics of Lehman’s collapse. ... [...continue reading...] ...

"Did Lehman Brothers’s Failure Matter?"

James Surowiecki takes on John Taylor:

Did Lehman Brothers’s Failure Matter?, The Financial Page: By this point, it’s become conventional wisdom that the failure of Lehman Brothers last September was the catalyst for a massive selloff in the credit and stock markets and a general flight to safety from which the markets have yet to recover. ...

In the past few days, though, a new meme has started circulating through the economics blogosphere, suggesting that Lehman’s failure actually did not wreak the havoc that everyone who lived through last September thought it wreaked. This argument ... is based on a paper ... by the Stanford economist John Taylor, which purports to show (pdf) that the credit markets actually did not react all that badly to Lehman going under, and that the crisis was really the product of market uncertainty about the effects of government action. Taylor’s conclusion is based on one piece of evidence: a graph of the 3-Month LIBOR...

The problem is that the graph that Taylor relies on as his only piece of evidence (it’s on p. 16 of his paper) doesn’t demonstrate what he thinks it does. In fact, LIBOR rose sharply in the days just before Lehman failed—evidence that even the prospect of Lehman going under had people worried. It then dropped a little when AIG was rescued, but then went straight up again, so that in the seven days leading up to and just after Lehman’s failure, LIBOR nearly doubled. That’s hardly a sign of the market shrugging off the incident.

More important, Taylor’s assumption in his paper is that investors would have known right away how severe the repercussions of Lehman’s bankruptcy would be. But this is simply untrue—for whatever reasons (some suggest fraud, others panic), the hole in Lehman’s balance sheet was much bigger than people initially thought... As the magnitude of the losses became clearer, so too did banks’ risk aversion, since Lehman’s failure seemed to demonstrate starkly the risks of lending to any other big financial institution.

In any case, no one is arguing that Lehman’s failure alone was responsible for investors’ flight from risk... But it was the first, and crucial, moment in last fall’s market panic... In this case, then, conventional wisdom seems to be right. And in thinking about what Lehman’s failure tells us about how we should deal with tottering financial institutions today, I think Paul Krugman put it well a couple of weeks ago: “The collapse of Lehman Brothers almost destroyed the world financial system, and we can’t risk letting much bigger institutions like Citigroup or Bank of America implode.”

This may seem like an academic debate. But it’s not, because those who want to convince us that Lehman’s failure was not a big deal are doing so in order to shape future policy. In other words, they are arguing that when it comes to institutions like, say, Citigroup, the government can, in fact, let them implode ... without any disastrous effects. Maybe they’re right, but it’s an awful big gamble to take on the basis of a single, dubiously-interpreted graph.

I'm with those who believe that letting Lehman fail was a big mistake.

Blinder: Nationalize?

Alan Blinder is not a fan of nationalization:

Nationalize? Hey, Not So Fast, by Alan S. Blinder, Commentary, NY Times: ...When philosophical conservatives like Alan Greenspan start talking about nationalizing banks, you know you’ve passed into some kind of parallel universe. ... Like Ben Bernanke ... and Timothy Geithner,... I am not convinced that nationalization is the only, or even the best, way out. ...

[D]idn’t Sweden pull this off with great success in the early 1990s? Yes... But this is not Sweden. Let’s think about some of the downsides to nationalizing banks in America.

Where to draw the line? First and foremost, the Swedish government had to deal with only a handful of banks; we have more than 8,300. ... Presumably, no one wants to nationalize all the banks, thousands of which are healthy. But where do you stop, once you start?

Suppose we nationalized four banks. Bank Five would then find itself at a severe disadvantage in competing for funds... Forced to pay higher interest rates... Bank Five might start looking like a candidate for nationalization, too — followed by Banks Six, Seven and so on. ...

The Management Challenge The Swedes ... never had to deal with institutions of the size and complexity of our banking behemoths. Mr. Geithner has emphasized that governments are ill-suited to manage businesses. I’d take the point a step further: Overseeing the management of dozens, or hundreds, or maybe even thousands of nationalized banks is a daunting task.

Political Obstacles The process of nationalization and reprivatization ... in Sweden ... was remarkably free of political interference. Would that happen here? You decide. My bet is no.

The Confidence Question Finally, because nationalization runs counter to deeply ingrained American traditions and attitudes,... it might undermine rather than bolster confidence. ... The Treasury, of course, would never use “nationalization” in public; it would invent some nice euphemism. But the commentariat would not be so constrained.

All of that said, there are arguments in favor of nationalization. Or are there?

One is that financial firms are careening off track, thereby costing taxpayers more and more bailout money. (Think A.I.G.) That’s a ... major reason to seek quick closure. But ... the government already owns shares in many banks, and ... the Fed can pretty much dictate to the banks right now, what additional powers would nationalization bring?

Another argument is that banks’ dodgy assets are hard to value, making it impossible to know how much capital they need — and probably very expensive to provide it. True again. But nationalization doesn’t make these problems disappear.

If the government takes over a bank, the taxpayers ... inherit... all the uncertainties over valuation. And if a bank has negative net worth when it is nationalized, who do you think fills the hole? ...

Worse yet, even talk about nationalization can be harmful if it puts bank stocks under further selling pressure. After all, who wants to own a stock whose value is heading toward zero? Which is why Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Geithner have taken pains to beat down rumors that nationalization is coming.

Unfortunately, their denials can never be categorical. If worst really does come to worst, the other options may evaporate, leaving the government no choice but to nationalize some banks. ... But, please, let’s not rush there. Let’s first at least explore what is called the “good bank, bad bank” approach.

What’s that? While there are many variants, the basic idea is to break each sick institution into two. The “good bank” gets the good assets... As a healthy institution, it can presumably raise fresh capital and go on its merry way as a private company.

The “bad bank” inherits the bad assets and the rest of the capital — which, after appropriate markdowns of the assets, will not be enough. So, again, someone must fill the hole. And, realistically, given the mess we’re in, much of that new capital would likely come from the taxpayers.

Here’s a prediction: We will get to the good-bank, bad-bank solution sooner or later. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was sooner?

Blinder's colleague at Princeton, Paul Krugman:

How many banks?, by Paul Krugman: One objection you keep hearing to nationalization pre-privatization as part of a bank restructuring effort is that the US financial system is just too big and complex. ... But are we really thinking about thousands of banks? Here’s Martin Wolf, today:

The four biggest US commercial banks – JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo – possess 64 per cent of the assets of US commercial banks (see chart) [chart not available online]. If creditors of these businesses cannot suffer significant losses, this is not much of a market economy.

So as far as this discussion is concerned, we’ve got, like, four banks. The “thousands of banks” line is just a diversion.

And:

The truth is that the Bernanke-Geithner plan — the plan the administration keeps floating, in slightly different versions — isn’t going to fly. ...

Think of it this way: by using taxpayer funds to subsidize the prices of toxic waste, the administration would shower benefits on everyone who made the mistake of buying the stuff. Some of those benefits would trickle down to where they’re needed, shoring up the balance sheets of key financial institutions. But most of the benefit would go to people who don’t need or deserve to be rescued.

And this means that the government would have to lay out trillions of dollars to bring the financial system back to health, which would, in turn, both ensure a fierce public outcry and add to already serious concerns about the deficit. (Yes, even strong advocates of fiscal stimulus like yours truly worry about red ink.) Realistically, it’s just not going to happen.

Lucian Bebchuk: In Defense of Private Funds for Jump-Starting the Market for Troubled Assets

Lucian Bebchuk defends his plan to "jump-start the market for troubled assets":

In Defense of Private Funds for Jump-Starting the Market for Troubled Assets, by Lucian Bebchuk: After the WSJ reported on Tuesday that the Treasury is now considering a plan for restarting the market for troubled assets that would be based on providing public capital to privately managed competing funds, initial reactions among economics and finance bloggers – including Paul Krugman, Calculated Risk , Tim Duy, and Simon Johnson – were negative.

In my view, any governmental effort to restart the market for troubled assets should indeed focus on providing funding to competing privately managed funds. I put forward this idea (as an alternative to Paulson’s plan for the government’s directly purchasing such assets) in an article published last September (seems so long ago…). I also proposed a detailed design for a public-private partnership in creating such funds in a paper issued last month, How to Make TARP II Work (summarized in an op-ed piece here). As supporter of such a program, I would like to respond to the skepticism expressed about the competing private funds idea:

(1) Does the Market for Troubled Assets Need Jump-Starting?

Krugman and Duy are concerned that the Treasury is overly optimistic in believing that the troubled assets have fundamental values exceeding the low prices banks can now get for such assets. Duy, and Krugman who quotes him, believe that policymakers “seem incapable of envisioning a world in which this is not the case” and that “[f]or Bernanke and Geithner, there are no bad assets, only misunderstood assets.” On the view of James Kwak, the belief that troubled assets have fundamental values exceeding current market prices is “wishful thinking.”

But while policymakers might not be justified in assuming that current prices must be below fundamental value levels, they are justified in believing that this might be the case. To begin, it is now widely believed that we had in the recent past a bubble in which market participants attached to the assets now labeled troubled assets valuations exceeding fundamental values. We should similarly be willing to accept the possibility that market processes are again not working well, but now in the opposite direction.

The “limits to arbitrage” literature teaches us that prices of assets can substantially deviate from fundamental values. This can happen when money managers with expertise in valuing such assets are unable to get sufficient capital that investors would commit to keep with them until fundamental values are realized. (If money managers can only raise capital that investors are allowed to withdraw after, say, a year, the managers might be reluctant to invest in troubled assets that they know will produce high returns after, say, five years out of fear that they would have to liquidate their portfolios at a loss after one year.) If “limits to arbitrage” lead to prices that are below fundamental value levels, then a governmental program for introducing more capital into the market will be useful.

(2) Enriching Money Managers?

Simon Johnson and others seem to be concerned that the considered program would greatly enrich the private managers (and their affiliated investors) running the funds. But it is possible to design the program to prevent the private side in the established funds from making more than competitive risk-adjusted returns – and thus to ensure that the program’s cost to taxpayers will not exceed the minimum necessary for jump-starting the market for troubled assets. The key is to have private managers compete upfront for participation in the government’s program.

Here is how it could work (I provide fuller details in my paper): Suppose that the government will begin with a "pilot" round in which private funds with an aggregate purchasing power of $200 billion will be established. And suppose that the government will provide capital contributions in the form of debt financing (the design can be adapted to allow for equity participation by the government). The government should invite bids from private managers (and any private investors affiliated with them) seeking to participate in this round.

Each bid should indicate first the maximum fraction of the fund's capital that the private side commits to contribute as private equity capital (rather than using debt financing from the government for this purpose) and second, the size of the fund the private side seeks to establish. Once the bids are made, the government will set the level of its participation under the program at the lowest level that can be set while still allowing for establishing funds that collectively have the total target capital for the program's initial round.

The competition among private groups seeking to participate in the program will eliminate, or at least substantially limit, the ability of the private side to make abnormal returns. To be sure, skeptics might be concerned that there might be a limited amount of capital willing to contribute capital to the funds to be established under the program and that, as a result, the competition for participation in the government’s program would be weak. But if the amount of capital that would be willing to enter the market for troubled assets even with government debt financing is so limited, then we have strong reasons for worrying about the current functioning of this market and for wanting to do something about it.