The Baseline Scenario

By James Kwak

(Yes, I know that isn’t saying much.)

Most people think that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had something to do with the financial crisis. Some people think that they were the major reason the crisis happened, which (to them) proves that activist government policy was the cause of the crisis. Other people, including me, think they were a modest contributing factor because they did buy a lot of securities that were backed by subprime loans, but they were well behind the curve when it came to mortgage “innovation” and the creation of toxic assets. But that’s not the question here.

The question now is what to do about them. Although they had been private, profit-seeking companies for forty years, they were taken over by government regulators in September 2008 when they had become clearly insolvent, and are still being operated in conservatorship. Because Fannie and Freddie were very, very long housing, they have suffered massive losses since the financial crisis began. But because the private mortgage securitization market has collapsed, they are the bulk of the secondary mortgage market at the moment, which means the housing market could collapse without them.

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By Simon Johnson

On the fringes of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos this week, there was plenty of substantive discussion – including about the dangers posed by our “too big to fail”/”too big to save” banks, the consequences of widening inequality (reinforced by persistent unemployment in some countries), and why the jobs picture in the U.S. looks so bad.

But in the core keynote events and more generally around any kind of CEO-related interaction, such themes completely failed to resonate.  There is, of course, variation in views across CEOs and the people work intellectual agendas on their behalf, but still the mood among this group was uniformly positive – it was hard to detect any note of serious concern.

Many of the people who control the world’s largest corporations are quite comfortable with the status quo post-financial crisis.  This makes sense for them – and poses a major problem for the rest of us. Read the rest of this entry »

By Simon Johnson

President Obama is embarked on a major charm offensive with regard to the business sector, as seen for example in the appointments of Bill Daley (ex-JP Morgan; now White House chief of staff) and Jeff Immelt (still head of GE, now also the president’s top outside economic adviser). This should not be an uphill struggle – much of the corporate sector, particularly bigger and more global businesses, is doing well in terms of profits and presumably C-suite remuneration.

But when exactly will this approach deliver jobs and reduce unemployment? And it store up risks for the future?

Republican rhetoric over the past two years was relentless on one point – that the Obama administration was anti-business. Supposedly this White House attitude undermined private sector confidence and limited investment.

In reality, the opposite was the case. Read the rest of this entry »

By James Kwak

Although I have written many blog posts pointing out that people are not actually rational maximizers (that is, they don’t know what their preferences are, and even if they did they don’t make rational choices to maximize those preferences), I actually try to be a rational maximizer as much as possible. That is, when making decisions, I try to think about what my expected utility (admittedly, some vague combination of immediate happiness, reflective happiness, reduction in stress, and increase in leisure time*) is from each course of action and decide accordingly. When I was working and very, very busy, this translated into the $25 rule: for personal stuff, I valued my time at $25 per hour.** So if I had to return something to the store, but it cost $10 and it would take me half an hour, I wouldn’t bother.

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By Simon Johnson

Following President Obama’s State of the Union address, there is a great deal of discussion about whether we might now be edging our way towards fiscal responsibility.

Unfortunately, most of our political elite – both left and right – is still living in a land of illusions.  They cannot even seriously discuss what would be required to bring our true fiscal position under control – remember that most of the recent damage to our collective balance sheet was done by big banks blowing themselves up.  No one who refuses to confront the power of those banks can be taken seriously as a fiscal conservative.

Even those interest groups that prominently espouse fiscal responsibility refuse to confront this reality.  There are no fiscal conservatives in the United States; at this stage it is all pretence.

Pretence is apparently all we are likely to get, as long as the money keeps rolling in (see Argentina for details).

By Simon Johnson.  This post is the first few paragraphs of a column now available at Project Syndicate.

The United States continues to be riven by heated debate about the causes of the 2007-2009 financial crisis. Is government to blame for what went wrong, and, if so, in what sense?

In December, the Republican minority on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC), weighed in with a preemptive dissenting narrative. According to this group, misguided government policies, aimed at increasing homeownership among relatively poor people, pushed too many people into taking out subprime mortgages that they could not afford.

This narrative has the potential to gain a great deal of support, particularly in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election. But, while the FCIC Republicans write eloquently, do they have any evidence to back up their assertions? Are poor people in the US responsible for causing the most severe global crisis in more than a generation?

Not according to Daron Acemoglu of MIT (and a co-author of mine on other topics), who presented his findings at the American Finance Association’s annual meeting in early January.  (The slides are on his MIT website.)

To read the rest of this column, please click here or cut and paste this address: http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/johnson16/English.

By Simon Johnson

As required by Section 123 of the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, as chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), has released an assessment on the costs and benefits of potentially limiting the size of banks and other financial institutions.  This report, four-and-a-half pages in a longer “Study of the Effects of Size and Complexity of Financial Institutions on Capital Market Efficiency and Economic Growth”, is represented as a survey of the relevant evidence that should guide policy thinking on this issue. 

Mr. Geithner’s team conclude rather vaguely “there are both costs and benefits to limiting bank size”, and consequently “This study will not make recommendations regarding limits on the maximum size of banks, bank holding companies, and other large financial institutions.”

This is an analytically weak report that presents a skewed and incomplete assessment of the evidence.  Given that the paper was prepared by some of the country’s top experts, who are well aware of the facts, the only reasonable inference is that our leading relevant officials prefer not to take the Dodd-Frank Act seriously with regard to reducing systemic risk.  Instead, on all major points, the Financial Stability Oversight Council is allowing the big banks to prevail – and to pursue whatever global expansion plans they see fit.

Given Treasury’s attitude during the financial reform debate of 2009-10, this is not entirely surprising.  Still there are three major issues with the substance report that should be considered particularly embarrassing to Mr. Geithner and his colleagues. Read the rest of this entry »

By James Kwak

Eric Cantor, House Republican Majority Leader, said the Republicans will demand spending cuts in exchange for the votes necessary to raise the debt ceiling.

Eric Cantor, member of Congress, voted for:

• The 2001 tax cut
• The 2003 tax cut
• The 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit
• The 2010 tax cut

In other words, of the big five budget-busting measures of the past decade, the only one he didn’t vote for was the 2009 stimulus. In other words, he had the opportunity to vote for $3.1 trillion of the 2011 debt, and he voted for 75 percent, or $2.3 trillion — just like most Republicans who were in Congress for those five votes.

For explanation and sources, see this post.

By Simon Johnson

In a column now running on Bloomberg, I review the new Inspector General report on what exactly happened during the “Citi Bailout Weekend” of late November 2008.

The big question lurking in the background is how acutely we face a problem of Too Big To Fail (TBTF) today, i.e., the perception in the credit markets that very big banks will be supported in a crisis, therefore enabling these banks to borrow more cheaply during a boom - and thus enabling them to become larger and increasing their debt relative to equity (leverage).

According to the report, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner now completely backs away from claims that the Dodd-Frank reform legislation ended TBTF. 

Standard and Poor’s appears to be on the right track with their latest revised Bank Ratings methodology – presuming that “potential government support” is, going forward, always available to megabanks.  This is exactly the conclusion of 13 Bankers.  We should worry greatly about the implications.

To read the full column, click here, or cut and paste this address: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-18/-citi-weekend-shows-too-big-to-fail-endures-commentary-by-simon-johnson.html

By James Kwak

Sometime this spring, Congress is going to have to raise the debt ceiling or the federal government will face default. Republicans are going to demand many, many pounds of flesh in exchange, ranging from cuts in discretionary spending to rethinking of entitlement programs, which together could undermine the weak stimulative effect of the December tax cuts. Democrats are probably going to give in to at least some Republican demands for two reasons: politically, they fear that they would be held accountable for a default because the public still associates spending with Democrats, and they hold the White House; pragmatically, they are just not as crazy as the Republican right, and in most negotiations the crazy party gets a better deal.

Of course, this is insane. The deficit problem was created by Congress, through its many votes to increase spending and decrease revenues (otherwise known as taxes). As James Hamilton put it:

“One of the peculiar embarrassments of the American political process is the fact that Congress votes separately on the deficit and debt, as if they were two different decisions. . . .

“A politician who votes for the spending and tax measures that produced the deficit but against a debt ceiling consistent with these is deliberately wasting taxpayer dollars for no purpose other than to grandstand before voters as a ‘fiscal conservative’. Anyone playing such a game has complete contempt for the intelligence of their constituents.”

I know this is a bit early, but I wanted to get some facts out there in advance of the debate. I picked five major bills in the past decade that have significantly increased the national debt: the 2001 tax cut, the 2003 tax cut, the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit, the 2009 stimulus, and the 2010 tax cut. (I left out the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars because it’s hard to pin down Congressional votes specifically authorizing their costs, in part because the famous Senate vote wasn’t actually a vote to go to war, in part because of the peculiar way the costs of the wars were budgeted.)

Read the rest of this entry »

By James Kwak

For those waiting, the paperback edition of 13 Bankers went on sale on Tuesday to little fanfare. That’s not surprising; all of the crisis books have been dribbling out in paperback, about 8-10 months after the hardcover editions, to little fanfare. It’s a commentary on how quickly times have changed, and also on the fickle nature of the publishing market. While there is still a lot of residual anger and bitterness over the financial crisis — specifically, over the fact that the big banks played a central role in triggering the crisis, then got massive amounts of bailout money, and now have returned to “health” more quickly than the economy as a whole or the typical household — most people seem resigned to a continuation of the pre-crisis status quo, and what energy remains has perversely gone into railing against the national debt.

The whole story also highlights the importance of timing in publishing. Looking back, we couldn’t have gotten any luckier, with the book going on sale during the Senate debate over financial reform and just two weeks before the SEC sued Goldman, which also happened the day that our Bill Moyers appearance aired, which drove our Amazon ranking up to #6. Today we’d be lucky to crack #600.

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By Simon Johnson

To great fanfare, this week Goldman Sachs unveiled the report of its Business Standards Committee, which makes recommendations regarding changes for the internal structure of what is currently the 5th largest bank holding company in the United States.  Some of the recommended changes are long overdue – particularly as they address perceived conflicts of interest between Goldman and its clients.  

What is most notable about the report, however, is what it does not say.  There is, in fact, no mention of any issues that are of first order importance regarding how Goldman (and other banks of its size and with its leverage) can have big negative effects on the overall economy.   The entire 67 page report reads like an exercise in misdirection.

Goldman Sachs is ignoring the main point of the debate made by – among others – Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, regarding why big banks need to be much more financed by equity (and therefore have much less leverage, meaning lower debt relative to equity).  On p.10 of his Bagehot Lecture in October 2010, for example, King was quite blunt: Read the rest of this entry »

By Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers (out in paperback on Monday)

Bill Daley, President Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, is an experienced business executive.  By all accounts, he is decisive, well-organized, and a skilled negotiator.  His appointment, combined with other elements of the White House reshuffle, provides insight into how the president understands our economy – and what is likely to happen over the next couple of years.  This is a serious problem.

This is not a critique from the left or from the right.  The Bill Daley Problem is completely bipartisan – it shows us the White House fails to understand that, at the heart of our economy, we have a huge time bomb. 

Until this week, Bill Daley was on the top operating committee at JP Morgan Chase.  His bank – along with the other largest U.S. banks – have far too little equity and far too much debt relative to that thin level of equity; this makes them highly dangerous from a social point of view.  These banks have captured the hearts and minds of top regulators and most of the political class (across the spectrum), most recently with completely specious arguments about why banks cannot be compelled to operate more safely.  Top bankers, like Mr. Daley’s former colleagues, are intent of becoming more global – despite the fact that (or perhaps because) we cannot handle the failure of massive global banks.  Read the rest of this entry »

By Simon Johnson

Goldman Sachs is investing $450 million of its own money in Facebook, at a valuation that implies the social networking company is now worth $50 billion.  Goldman is also apparently launching a fund that will bring its own high net worth clients in as investors for Facebook.

On the face of it, this might just seem like the financial sector doing what it is supposed to – channeling funds into productive enterprise.  The SEC is apparently looking at the way private investors will be involved, but there are some more deeply unsettling factors at work here.

Remember that Goldman Sachs is now a bank holding company – a status it received in September 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, in order to avoid collapse (for the details, see Andrew Ross Sorkin’s blow-by-blow account in Too Big To Fail.)  This means that it has essentially unfettered access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window, i.e., it can borrow against all kinds of assets in its portfolio, effective ensuring it has government-provided liquidity at any time.

Any financial institution with such access to such government support is likely to take on excessive risk – this is the heart of what is commonly referred to as the problem of “moral hazard.”  If you are fully insured against adverse events, you will be less careful. Read the rest of this entry »

By James Kwak

Ezra Klein points out a new tax expenditure database from The Pew Charitable Trusts. More attention to tax expenditures — exceptions in the tax code that reduce tax revenue or, put another way, subsidies channeled through the tax system* — is always a good thing. But Klein also says something interesting that I don’t agree with:

“they’re basically the welfare state for the middle class, cleverly arranged such that they don’t look like the welfare state for the middle class. If every year, the government sent every American — from the richest CEO to the greenest public-school teacher — a check covering 30 percent of their health-care costs, we’d think that a bit weird. We’d think it much weirder if we only sent the checks to the workers who happened to be at firms that offered benefits. . . .

“Yet that’s pretty much exactly what we do. We just hide it in the tax code rather than write it on a check.”

I agree with all of that, except the bit about the middle class. Tax expenditures primarily benefit the rich, for a few reasons.

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