Archive for June 2011
Christine Lagarde And The Demand For Dollars
By Simon Johnson
After receiving US support at the critical moment, Christine Lagarde was named Tuesday as the next managing director of the International Monetary Fund. In campaigning for the job, Ms. Lagarde – the French finance minister – made various promises to emerging markets with regard to improving their relationships with the IMF. But such promises count for little and the main impact of her appointment will be to encourage countries such as South Korea, Brazil, India, and Russia to back away from the IMF and to further “self-insure” by accumulating larger stockpiles of foreign exchange reserves – the strategy that has been followed by China for most of the past decade.
Seen from an individual country perspective, having large amounts of dollar reserves held by your central bank or in a so-called sovereign wealth fund makes a great deal of sense; this is a rainy day fund in a global economy prone to serious financial floods. But from the perspective of the global economy, such actions represent a major risk going forward – because it will further push down US interest rates, feed a renewed build up in private sector dollar-denominated debt, and make it even harder to get policymakers focused on a genuine fix to our long-term budget problems. Read the rest of this entry »
What Is This “Washington”?
By James Kwak
(Warning: Very elementary post ahead. Most of you probably know all this already.)
Mitch McConnell, Senate Republican Leader, quoted in Bloomberg: “We have seen the consequences of giving Washington a blank check. My message to the president is simple: It’s time for Washington to focus on fixing itself. It’s time Washington take the hit, not the taxpayers.”
That sounds good (if you don’t like “Washington,” that is), but what does it mean? McConnell wants people to think that their tax dollars go to feed some animal named “Washington,” and therefore our budget problems can be solved by simply feeding Washington less — without “taxpayers” taking the hit.
That might be true if “Washington” simply consumed money for its own sake, but the problem is that most of the federal budget isn’t consumed by the federal government.
Straight Talk
By James Kwak
Gary Gensler, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has gotten a fair amount of credit for being one of the good guys when it comes to financial regulation after the financial crisis. Kambiz Foroohar has a very favorable portrayal of Gensler in Bloomberg Magazine. It’s pretty much the usual, but I appreciated Gensler’s bluntness when it comes to his past positions on derivatives (as an official in the Rubin-Summers Treasury):
“As a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) partner and then Treasury undersecretary, Gensler had lined up with the hands-off- derivatives crowd behind the $601 trillion global market.
“He says the near-collapse of the world’s financial system changed his mind about regulation.
“’My thinking has evolved,’ Gensler says in his ninth- floor Washington office, which is decorated with artwork by his three daughters. ‘I was part of the consensus view on derivatives, and it’s fair to say that the consensus missed it. We should have done more to protect the American people.’”
That’s about the closest thing to an apology you’ll hear from anyone involved in creating the financial crisis.
Could The US Have An “Expansionary Fiscal Contraction”?
By Simon Johnson. My full written testimony to Tuesday’s hearing of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress is available here.
The US has a large budget deficit and a debt-to-GDP ratio that, in most projections, continues to rise over time. Some House and Senate Republicans are arguing strongly that this situation calls for large and immediate cuts to government spending, for example as part of any agreement to increase the federal government’s debt ceiling.
The Joint Economic Committee of Congress held a hearing on Tuesday to discuss whether such spending cuts would be “contractionary” or “expansionary” for the economy in the short-run. My assessment, after participating as a witness at the hearing, is that large immediate spending cuts would tend to slow the economy (a webcast of the hearing is here). Read the rest of this entry »
China and the Saving of Europe
By Simon Johnson
The Greek government owes more than it can afford to pay, now or in the near future, at market interest rates. There are two options: reduce the payments through some form of restructuring, or move the debt into the hands of people who are willing to charge below market rates for the foreseeable future.
In this decision, the International Monetary Fund has relatively little say – this is really a political decision to be made by the European Union, with discrete backing from the US and China. Read the rest of this entry »
“The Elderly” for Beginners
By James Kwak
As the AARP says that it is open to modest cuts in Social Security benefits, it’s worthwhile asking a more fundamental question: are Social Security and Medicare programs that benefit the elderly?
The answer may seem obvious. After all, the bulk of Social Security Old Age and Survivors Insurance benefits go to people over 62, and almost all Medicare beneficiaries are over 65. So it’s often observed in passing that our long-range budget issues are the product of transfers to the elderly. For example, in Restoring Fiscal Sanity 2005, Alice Rivlin and Isabel Sawhill write, “These big programs, which benefit primarily the elderly, will drive increases in federal spending in the longer run” (p. 36). Other commentators have occasionally argued that the problem is that the elderly have become too powerful and therefore claim too large a share of government spending, especially compared to the very young.* When you add to that the frequent complaint that, by running budget deficits, we are imposing burdens on our grandchildren, this age-based inequity seems even greater.
But the problem with this framing is that “the elderly” change every year. There’s nothing inherently wrong or unfair with a program in which you pay insurance premiums while you work and collect benefits when you retire. Saying such a program benefits the elderly is like saying that life insurance doesn’t benefit the insured, only the beneficiaries: it’s true in a trivial sense, but people still want and buy life insurance anyway.
Basel, Tomato, And Mozzarella
By Simon Johnson
The bank lobbyists have a problem. Last week, they lost a major battle on Capitol Hill with the failure to suspend implementation of the new cap on debit card fees. Despite the combined efforts of big and small banks, the Corker-Tester bill attracted only 54 votes in the Senate – when it needed 60.
On debit cards, the retail lobby proved a surprisingly effective counterweight to the financial sector. On the next big issue, the bankers have a different problem: it’s highly technical, more within the purview of regulators than legislators, and often perceived as boring. Or, as one bank executive put it to Reuters, speaking of the capital requirements agreed between countries in the so-called Basel III framework,
“When you do mention Basel, your average member of Congress thinks ‘that pairs well with tomato and mozzarella.’” Read the rest of this entry »
Jamie Dimon’s New Math
By Simon Johnson
On Tuesday, June 7, Jamie Dimon (CEO of JPMorgan Chase) pressed Fed Chair Ben Bernanke on the costs of bank regulation after the financial crisis of 2008. Could this be what is slowing the economic recovery? Bernanke was very polite in his response, but the question – as posed – made no sense at all. (The full tape of his question is here,)
Most of what Jamie Dimon lists under the heading of changes are just symptoms of the crisis itself, e.g., badly run firms and crazy products disappeared. His substantive issue appears – from his question – to be just about capital requirements.
But the implication of Dimon’s question – that higher capital requirements will slow growth – is simply wrong. I explain this in a column now running on Bloomberg. Here’s the link: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-09/the-missing-math-in-dimon-s-economic-argument-simon-johnson.html.
The Banking Emperor Has No Clothes
By Simon Johnson
In a major speech earlier this week to an American Bankers Association conference, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner laid out his view of what went wrong in the financial sector prior to 2008, how the crisis was handled 2008-10, and what is now needed with regard to implementation of reforms. As chair of the Financial Stability Oversight Council and the only senior member of President Obama’s original economic team remaining in place, Mr. Geithner’s influence with regard to the banking system is second to none.
Unfortunately, there are three major mistakes in Mr. Geithner’s speech: his history is completely wrong; his logic is deeply flawed; and his interpretation of the Dodd-Frank reform does not mesh with the legal facts regarding how the failure of a global megabank could be handled. Added together, this suggests one of our most powerful policymakers is headed very much in the wrong direction. Read the rest of this entry »
And in This Corner . . .
By James Kwak
Over in the less-prestigious and less-well-paid online section of the Times, Bruce Bartlett has a good column on the comparative tax burden across advanced economies. He makes the point that one reason European taxes look higher is that we provide subsidies through the tax code while they do it through spending programs like family allowances — another example of how aggregate statistics are distorted by calling something a “tax credit” as opposed to “spending.” His other main point is that the main substantive reason why we pay lower taxes is that we pay for less of our health care spending through the government — and that isn’t working out so well for us.
When You Don’t Need To Worry About Facts
By James Kwak
Masquerading behind an invocation to “wisdom” in the title, David Brooks today finds his false equivalence (see here for another example) by comparing the the two parties’ approaches to Medicare: the Democrats, he says, favor “top-down centralized planning” while the Republicans favor the “decentralized discovery process of the market.”
David Brooks swallowing Republican talking points whole is not worthy of note, so I’ll just point out one: he calls the Ryan Plan a “premium support plan,” despite the categorial denial by Henry Aaron, the creator of the premium support idea.* But it’s marginally more interesting to point out Brooks’s finely-honed rhetorical dishonesty.
Not All Businessmen Are Smart, You Know
By James Kwak
Stephen Carter, a professor at the Yale Law School and an accomplished novelist, wrote a Bloomberg column based on a conversation with a medium-sized business owner he met on a plane. The gist of the column is that the businessman isn’t hiring more workers because he’s worried about the regulations changing on him. From this, Carter draws a general lesson about business and government:
“For medium-sized firms like his, however, there is little wiggle room to absorb the costs of regulatory change. Because he possesses neither lobbyists nor clout, he says, Washington doesn’t care whether he hires more workers or closes up shop. . . .
“Recessions have complex causes, but, as the man on the aisle reminded me, we do nothing to make things better when the companies on which we rely see Washington as adversary rather than partner.”
Jim Henley (hat tip Brad DeLong) has already pointed out the silliest thing about this column: anyone who has a growing business and isn’t hiring more people, and isn’t hiring them because he’s not sure about future regulatory changes, is making a mistake (or perhaps is in a very unusual business that is heavily exposed to some very particular and very concrete regulatory risk).
Eurozone On The Brink, As Usual
By Simon Johnson; this post comprises the first three paragraphs of a column now running at Bloomberg View.
Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank until October, last week floated two proposals aimed at dealing with Greece and related eurozone public-debt problems.
The first idea would allow European Union authorities to override the policy decisions of member governments that can’t come up with sustainable budgets, implying the creation of an external control board for the likes of Greece. This approach has been used in the past for very weak countries (as well as for the cities of New York and Washington in recent decades). In Europe today, it would have no political legitimacy and would be completely unworkable — imagine the street protests it would spark.
The second idea would, down the road, create a finance ministry for the European Union. It would issue debt and have responsibility for a unified financial sector. This is just as brilliant as Alexander Hamilton’s fiscal and financial integration proposals for the young American Republic and, if implemented properly, would fix the deep problems caused by the original design of the eurozone.
To read the rest of this column, please follow this link to Bloomberg View: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-06-06/europe-needs-trichet-s-unified-finance-ministry-simon-johnson.html
Why Are the French So Determined To Run The IMF – And What Will It Cost You?
By Simon Johnson
Just a few years ago, eurozone countries were at the forefront of those saying that the International Monetary Fund had lost its relevance and should be downsized. The organization was regarded by the French authorities as so marginal that President Nicolas Sarkozy was happy to put forward the name of a potential rival, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to become managing director in fall 2007.
Today the French government is working overtime to make sure that a Sarkozy loyalist and the leader of his economic team – Finance Minister Christine Lagarde – becomes the next managing director. Why do they and other eurozone countries now care so much about who runs the IMF? Read the rest of this entry »
Who Created This Mess?
By James Kwak
Not us, say the Republicans. “We didn’t create this mess,” a Republican said to Tim Geithner in a meeting recently, referring to the national debt and the need to raise the debt ceiling this summer. Yet, as the Times continues,
“Independent analyses have shown that more than half of the $14.3 trillion debt is from policies enacted during the past decade when Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress, and much of the rest from lost revenues and stimulus spending and tax cuts since Mr. Obama took office at the height of the financial crisis and recession.”
I did one of those “independent analyses” (although not one that has made it into the media) myself a few months ago.
