The Anti-Greenspan

Dani Rodrik wants the Anti-Greenspan - someone who truly distrusts financial markets and the ideology that surrounds them - to be the next Fed Chair:

Let finance skeptics take over, by Dani Rodrik, Commentary, Project Syndicate: ...Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s term ends in January, and President Barack Obama must decide before then: either re-appoint Bernanke or go with someone else...

 [I]n recent decades central banks have become even more significant as a consequence of the development of financial markets. Even when not formally designated as such, central banks have become the guardians of financial-market sanity. The dangers of failing at this task have been made painfully clear in the sub-prime mortgage debacle. ...

This is a job at which former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan proved to be a spectacular failure. ... As a member of the Fed’s Board of Governors under Greenspan..., Bernanke can also be faulted...

What hampered Greenspan and Bernanke as financial regulators was that they were excessively in awe of Wall Street... They operated under the assumption that what is good for Wall Street is good for Main Street. This will no doubt change as a result of the crisis, even if Bernanke remains at the helm. But what the world needs is a Fed chairman who is instinctively skeptical of financial markets and their social value.

Here are some of the lies that the finance industry tells itself and others, and which any new Fed chairman will need to resist.

Prices set by financial markets are the right ones for allocating capital and other resources to their most productive uses. That is what textbooks and financiers tell you, but ... there are far too many “market failures” in finance for these prices to be a good guide for resource allocation. ... Implicit or explicit bailout guarantees, moreover, induce too much risk-taking. ... So the prices that financial markets generate are as likely to send the wrong signals as they are to send the right ones.

Financial markets discipline governments. This is one of the most commonly stated benefits of financial markets, yet the claim is patently false. ... If in doubt, ask scores of emerging-market governments that had no difficulty borrowing in international markets, typically in the run-up to an eventual payments crisis.

In many of these cases ... financial markets enabled irresponsible governments to embark on unsustainable borrowing sprees. When “market discipline” comes, it is usually too late, too severe, and applied indiscriminately.

The spread of financial markets is an unmitigated good. Well, no. Financial globalisation was supposed to have enabled poor, undercapitalised countries to gain access to the savings of rich countries. It was supposed to have promoted risk-sharing globally. In fact, neither expectation was fulfilled. ...

Financial innovation is a great engine of productivity growth and economic well-being. Again, no. Imagine that we had asked five years ago for examples of really useful kinds of financial innovation. We would have heard about a long list of mortgage-related instruments... The truth lies closer to Paul Volcker’s view that for most people the automated teller machine (ATM) has brought bigger benefits than any financially-engineered bond.

The world economy has been run for too long by finance enthusiasts. It is time that finance skeptics began to take over.

My view is that Bernanke should be reappointed.