Month: April 2009

Bankruptcy Cramdowns Defeated in Senate

President Obama, he of the 68% approval rating, asked Congress to allow bankruptcy judges to reduce the principal amounts of mortgages on primary residences (they can already modify almost all other loans in bankruptcy). The goal was to pressure mortgage lenders, or the investors who now own those mortgages, to modify the mortgages themselves to give homeowners a better option than foreclosure. Because, you know, we have a housing foreclosure crisis going on. But after passing the House, the measure got only 45 votes in the Senate, with zero Republican support and twelve Democrats defecting.

Banks campaigned against the measure by – get this – threatening that it would destabilize financial markets. The New York Times reported:

A letter signed by 12 industry organizations this week to senators warned that the legislation would “have the unintended consequence of further destabilizing the markets.” 

Translation: banks are weak; weak banks are dangerous; therefore Congress should not do things that might be bad for banks.

According to the Washington Post:

[Senator Richard] Durbin negotiated with Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo for weeks, hoping their support would bridge the gap. Even after the proposal was weakened significantly, the financial services industry refused to sign on.

I know the main legitimate argument against bankruptcy cramdowns: it increases the riskiness of mortgages, and therefore mortgage rates would have to go up a little for everyone. (Which sounds fine with me.) But the way this issue played out had nothing to do with what would be best for the country as a whole; it had everything to do with what the banks wanted. 

Instead of bankruptcy cramdowns, the Times reports that the banks got a reduction in the insurance premiums they will pay the FDIC for deposit insurance – which is like a group of car owners voting themselves lower premiums on their auto insurance. But because there is zero chance the government will let insured depositors lose money, any shortfall in the premiums paid by banks to the FDIC will be made up by the taxpayer.  

Not that this should surprise anyone.

By James Kwak

GDP Growth Rates for Beginners

For a complete list of Beginners articles, see Financial Crisis for Beginners.

My post about French sociology got a wide range of comments, ranging from “Without a doubt, your best post yet” to “Reading this post made me think, for the first time, of ignoring Baseline Scenario from now on,” which I guess indicates we have a wide range of readers. In any case, for today I’m returning to something much more mundane: GDP growth rates. Like many Beginners articles, this one starts out with some basics, and then gets (a little) more interesting, but its main goal is to help you decipher the news that you already read.

To a casual reader, yesterday’s GDP announcement was that Gross Domestic Product (an aggregate measure of economic activity) fell by 6.1% or, more precisely, at an annual rate of 6.1%. What does this mean?

For those of you who have never visited the BEA website, this is what the raw numbers look like. (They give you  columns B and E, I calculated the rest.) Note that this is all in 2000 dollars, so inflation has been taken out.

gdp1

Continue reading “GDP Growth Rates for Beginners” →

The People v. The Flu

In Plagues and Peoples, published in 1976, William McNeill argued that human history can be thought of as the co-evolution of our societies and the “microparasites” to which we are prone.  The emergence of settled agriculture, major historial movements of people, and industrialization all brought with them new or more intense diseases.  Eventually, most societies figured out how to survive – but of course some didn’t (see Jared Diamond‘s work for details) and many people died young along the way.

You don’t need to buy McNeill’s full view in order to take away the following point.  We have to invest and innovate to stay ahead of disease – there is no sense in which these are likely to be completely “conquered” – because they change as we do.  Investments are needed not just in the relevant science, but also in how it is used to combat potential epidemics – as well as more general endemic disease.

As I argue this morning on the NYT’s Economix, regarding the current swine H1N1 flu outbreak, global public health officials are doing much better than our friends who watch over financial systems.  In terms of reaction speed, communications, and the legitimacy of response agencies, economics has much to learn from the people who fight against epidemics. Continue reading “The People v. The Flu” →

The Importance of Battlefield Nuclear Weapons

I’ve been writing a lot about the game of chicken recently, most often in connection with the GM and Chrysler bailouts. On the Chrysler front, the game is in its last hours. Even after a consortium of large banks agreed to the proposed debt-for-equity swap, some smaller hedge funds are holding out for more money, and even the extra $250 million that Treasury agreed to kick in seems unlikely to keep Chrysler out of bankruptcy.

The problem is that bankruptcy is the only weapon Chrysler and Treasury have in this fight, and it’s a strategic nuclear weapon. Bankruptcy is the only threat that can get the bondholders to agree to a swap; but because a bankruptcy carries some risk of destroying Chrysler (because control will lie in the hands of a bankruptcy judge – not Chrysler, Treasury, the UAW, or Fiat), and taking hundreds of thousands of jobs with it, everyone knows that Treasury would prefer not to use it. The bondholders are betting that they can use Treasury’s fear of a bankruptcy to extract better terms at the last minute. (And it’s even possible that the large banks agreed to the swap knowing they could count on the smaller, less politically exposed hedge funds to veto it.) But Treasury may still press the button, because it needs to make a statement in advance of the bigger GM confrontation scheduled for a month from now.

But there’s a much bigger, slower game going on at the same time, and the administration’s basic problem is the same: all it has is strategic nuclear weapons that it absolutely does not want to use. The New York Times had an article today about how “a growing number of banks are resisting the Obama administration’s proposals for fixing the financial system.”  It didn’t have a lot of new information, but it summarized the outlines of the game.

Continue reading “The Importance of Battlefield Nuclear Weapons” →

Pierre Bourdieu, Tim Geithner, and Cultural Capital

France in the 1960s and 1970s was the source of a tremendous amount of new philosophical, literary, and critical thinking – Foucault, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, Baudrillard, Barthes, etc. But in my opinion, the most important member of that intellectual generation was the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. In Distinction, Bourdieu’s best-known work, he described how economic class is reinforced by cultural capital: economic elites create cultural distinctions, and pass on to their children the ability to make those distinctions, in order to use cultural sophistication as a means of perpetuating class dominance. This may sound abstract, but think about the example that is the subject of Bourdieu’s The Love of Art: museums. Upper-class parents take their children to fine art museums and teach them how to talk about Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso; later in college, job interviews, and cocktail parties, the ability to talk about Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso is one of the markers that people use, consciously or unconsciously, to identify people as being from their own tribe. (Note that democratizing museums – making them open to anyone – doesn’t undermine cultural capital, because the key is not looking at paintings, but learning how to talk about them.)

We used the term “cultural capital” in our Atlantic article as a way of describing the influence of Wall Street over Washington. By this, we meant that one of the primary means by which Wall Street got its way in Washington was by creating and propagating the understanding – among sophisticated, educated, cultured people, as opposed to “populists” or the “rabble” that showed up at anti-globalization protests – that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country as a whole. We didn’t mean to say that old-fashioned campaign contributions and lobbying did not play an important role. (We did, however, say that we thought out-and-out corruption of the Jack Abramoff variety was probably a minor factor – not because we have any insider knowledge one way or the other, but simply because such criminal behavior was simply unnecessary given the other levers available.) But I don’t think that implicit quid pro quo bargaining is a sufficient explanation, because I believe it entirely possible that there are honest politicians and civil servants who really, truly believe that they are acting in the public interest when they come to the aid of the largest banks.

Tim Geithner may very well be such a man.

Continue reading “Pierre Bourdieu, Tim Geithner, and Cultural Capital” →

Larry Summers’ New Model

Larry Summers spoke on Friday afternoon at the InterAmerican Development Bank in Washington DC.  As he was addressing a group with  much experience living through and dealing professionally as economists with major crises, he spoke the “language of economics” (as he called it) and largely cut to the analytical chase.

Summers made five points that reveal a great deal about his personal thinking – and the structure of thought that lies behind most of what the Administration is doing vis-a-vis the crisis.  Some of this we knew or guessed at before, but it was still the clearest articulation I have seen. Continue reading “Larry Summers’ New Model” →

Guest Post: Too-Big-To-Fail and Three Other Narratives

This guest post is contributed by StatsGuy, one of our regular commenters. I invited him to write the post in response to this comment, but regular readers are sure to have read many of his other contributions. There is a lot here, so I recommend making a cup of tea or coffee before starting to read.

In September, the first Baseline Scenario entered the scene with a frightening portrait of the world economy that focused on systemic risk, self-fulfilling speculative credit runs, and a massive liquidity shock that could rapidly travel globally and cause contagion even in places where economic fundamentals were strong.

Baseline identified the Fed’s response to Lehman as a “dramatic and damaging reversal of policy”, and offered major recommendations that focused on four basic efforts: FDIC insurance, a credible US backstop to major institutions, stimulus (combined with recapitalizing banks), and a housing stabilization plan.

Moral hazard was acknowledged, but not given center stage, with the following conclusion: “In a short-term crisis of this nature, moral hazard is not the preeminent concern.  But we also agree that, in designing the financial system that emerges from the current situation, we should work from the premise that moral hazard will be important in regulated financial institutions.”

Over time, and as the crisis has passed from an acute to a chronic phase, the focus of Baseline has increasingly shifted toward the problem of “Too Big To Fail”.  The arguments behind this narrative are laid out in several places: Big and Small; What Next for Banks; Atlantic Article.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Too-Big-To-Fail and Three Other Narratives” →

More Convergence of Views

Yesterday I highlighted an op-ed written by Desmond Lachman, a veteran of the IMF and Salomon Smith Barney (and currently at the American Enterprise Institute), comparing the United States and the current crisis to an emerging market crisis.

Saturday evening, Nicholas Brady, Secretary of the Treasury from the end of the Reagan administration through the entire Bush I administration, gave a speech at the Institute of International Finance – comparing the current crisis in the United States to an emerging market crisis, only in that case the banks were in the U.S. and the bad assets were in the emerging markets.

There are uncanny parallels between the situation we find ourselves in today and the one the Bush administration confronted a generation ago. . . . First of all there was a serious LDC [Least Developed Country] debt crisis. It’s easy to forget that in 1988 our banking system was in dire straits because the commercial banks held billions of dollars of loans in countries whose economic prospects had ground to a halt.

The solution, according to Brady, was identifying the fundamental problems and forcing all parties to recognize them.

Among the indisputable points we laid out were that new money commitments had dried up in the past 12 months and that many banks were negotiating private sales of LDC paper at steep discounts while maintaining their claim on the countries that the loans were still worth 100 cents on the dollar. There were more, and they were equally sobering. We used these irrefutable facts as a starting point in all subsequent meetings. Our rule was that no suggestions were permitted to be discussed if they didn’t accept the Truth Serum. They were off the table. Goodbye. Don’t waste time. . . . [W]e persuaded the international commercial banks—at first with great difficulty—to write down the stated value of the loans on their books to something close to market value in exchange for that lesser amount of host-country bonds backed by U.S. zero-coupon Treasuries.

Continue reading “More Convergence of Views” →

Guest Post: Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth

This post was written by my friend Ilya Podolyako, an occasional contributor here and a third-year student (though not for much longer!) at the Yale Law School.

In the last couple of days, a few disparate news pieces attracted my interest. First, as I mentioned in my last post on industrial policy, an accelerating, worldwide decrease in consumer disposable incomes is beginning to percolate through the manufacturing sector. As a result, Caterpillar, DuPont, and United Technologies posted double-digit declines in sales. Second, reports surfaced that Fiat, Obama’s designated buyer for Chrysler LLC, was looking instead to purchase GM’s Opel division. Third, Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) introduced a “cash-for-clunkers” bill that would provide a credit of up to $4500 toward the price of a fuel-efficient car for individuals or government-owned fleet operators who turn in a low-mpg “clunker.”

What do all these data points have to do with each other? In my mind, they highlight the need for a structured approach to the U.S. industrial sector. The current policies are completely random and occasionally conflicting, which is not surprising, considering that they are coming from different branches of government who seem reluctant to talk to each other. For example, the purpose of the Feinstein bill seems to be to support the auto industry by lowering the effective price of a new car while also boosting aggregate fuel efficiency. Presumably, these measures would help the ailing American automakers transition from making money on SUVs to making money on hybrids. Yet in this context, a government-financed sale of Chrysler to Fiat doesn’t make very much sense. If we are concerned about rescuing the American auto industry from the bottom up, why are we selling bits and pieces of this industry to foreign companies? Imagine if GM, Chrysler, and Ford did not exist – in this world, the government could surely find a better way of spending money to combat climate change than paying Toyota and Honda to chop 20% off the sale price of a new car. Just because other countries do it, doesn’t mean we should too.

Continue reading “Guest Post: Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth” →

Why Pay Tuition?

One of our goals here at The Baseline Scenario is to explain basic economics, finance, and business concepts and how they apply to the things you read about in the newspaper. I think I’m pretty good at this. But if you prefer video and diagrams, I may have found something much better (thanks to a reader suggestion).

Salman Khan has created dozens of YouTube videos covering the basics of banking, finance, and the credit crisis. (There is also a series on the Geithner Plan that doesn’t seem to be on the main index page yet.) I’ve only watched a few, but they are very clear and from what I can see everything looks accurate.

But what’s really exciting is that he also has many, many more videos on math – from pre-algebra through linear algebra and differential equations – and physics. My wife and I watched the one on the chain rule and implicit differentiation and she gave it two thumbs up. (My wife is an economics and statistics professor.) So the next time you – or your child – needs to derive the quadratic formula, just head on over to his web site. Hours and hours of fun.

By James Kwak

IMF Emerging Markets Veteran on the U.S.

One of the central themes of our Atlantic article was that the current crisis in the U.S. is very similar to the crises typically seen in emerging markets, and that resolving the crisis will require (some of) the measures often prescribed for emerging markets. This, Simon said, would be the assessment of IMF veterans who had worked on emerging markets crises.

At the exact same time that we were writing that article, Desmond Lachman – who worked at the IMF for 24 years, and then worked on emerging markets for Salomon Smith Barney for another seven years – was writing an article for the Washington Post saying many of the same things.* Here are the first three paragraphs:

Back in the spring of 1998, when Boris Yeltsin was still at Russia’s helm, I led a group of global investors to Moscow to find out firsthand where the Russian economy was headed. My long career with the International Monetary Fund and on Wall Street had taken me to “emerging markets” throughout Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, and I thought I’d seen it all. Yet I still recall the shock I felt at a meeting in Russia’s dingy Ministry of Finance, where I finally realized how a handful of young oligarchs were bringing Russia’s economy to ruin in the pursuit of their own selfish interests, despite the supposed brilliance of Anatoly Chubais, Russia’s economic czar at the time.

Continue reading “IMF Emerging Markets Veteran on the U.S.” →

The Next Big Hearing? (Bill Moyers Tonight)

Bill Moyers asked me to join his conversation this week with Michael Perino – a law professor and expert on securities law – who is working on a detailed history of the 1932-33 “Pecora Hearings,” which uncovered wrongdoing on Wall Street and laid the foundation for major legislation that reformed banking and the stock market.

My role was to talk about potential parallels betweeen the situation in the early 1930s and today, and together we argued out whether the Pecora Hearings could or should be considered a model for today.

Bill has a great sense of timing.  On Wednesday night the Senate passed, by a vote of 92-4, a measure that would create an independent commission to investigate the causes of our current economic crisis; we taped our discussion on Thursday morning.  In the usual format of Bill’s show, a segment of this kind would be 20+ minutes, but I believe that tonight our conversation will occupy the full hour (airs at 9pm in most markets; available on the web from about 10pm). Continue reading “The Next Big Hearing? (Bill Moyers Tonight)” →

Irreversible Errors

The Administration’s top thinkers on banking regard themselves as avoiding “irreversible errors” – meaning precipitate moves on banking.  They argue that “wait and see” may work out and, if it doesn’t, they can always take more dramatic action later (e.g., of the Hoenig variety).

Writing in the NYT.com’s Economix today, Peter Boone and I argue that this line of reasoning makes sense, but needs to be taken to its logical conclusion.  Specifically, we should recognize that delay in banking crises almost always and pretty much everywhere leads to lower growth and higher fiscal costs – the price of eventual bailouts increases and the amount of fiscal stimulus required goes up.  The jobs lost, the longer recovery, and the higher national debt are all costs that must be weighed in the balance.  And that balance, in our view, indicates moving faster and in a more comprehensive manner in the direction suggested by Thomas Hoenig – a senior Federal Reserve official who has a great deal of experience dealing with insolvent banks. Continue reading “Irreversible Errors” →