Month: May 2009

Can The US Save The World? (House Testimony)

Yesterday I testified to the House Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade (part of the House Financial Services Committee). The hearing’s title was “Implications of the G-20 Leaders Summit for Low Income Countries and the Global Economy,” and the main topic was whether Congress should support an extra $100bn for the IMF that the Obama Administration agreed at the G20 summit in early April (witness list, webcast, and written testimony).

The committee was mostly in favor of the US continuing to play a leading role in supporting the IMF, but pressed the witnesses to explain whether the IMF could lose this money (highly unlikely), how this would protect American jobs (definitely, but hard to quantify precisely), and if the broader package of IMF reform should also be supported (e.g., the proposed gold sales are being reassessed, to see they could generate more resources for aid to developing countries).

Politico is reporting that US funding for the IMF is likely to be attached to the war supplemental spending bill. The subcommittee’s chairman, Gregory Meeks, seemed positive – as did all the Democrats who spoke, along with Gary Miller, the Ranking Member/Senior Republican. But, based on remarks made by at least two Republican members of the subcommittee, there is likely to be a big public fight at some point. My guess is that the Democratic side will press hard for President Obama to more publicly explain why supporting the IMF (and the G20) is very much in the US interest.

The main points from my written testimony are below. While Treasury represents the US vis-a-vis the IMF and traditionally has considerable scope for action, the views of Congress on IMF details are very important as both guidance and constraints. In our advice on the wide range of IMF-related issues below, both I and the other witnesses laid out broadly similar views with varying emphasis – there was actually much more disagreement among committee members than at the witness table. Continue reading “Can The US Save The World? (House Testimony)” →

Law, Economics, and Regulation

One of the curious things about coming to law school was discovering the very high regard that “economics” is held in, at least in some areas like torts and contracts, where “law and economics” has become the primary theoretical construct. In essence, this school of thought holds either that the law has developed in such a way as to promote efficient economic outcomes, or that it should promote efficient economic outcomes. There is now an empirical branch of law and economics, but historically the law and economics approach was largely theoretical. For example, in United States v. Carroll Towing Co., 159 F.2d 169 (2d Cir. 1947), Judge Learned Hand wrote that the whether behavior is negligent should be determined by multiplying the probably of an accident by the cost of the accident and comparing that to the cost of taking precautions. Twenty-five years later, Richard Posner argued that this rule would lead to the optimal level of accident prevention, because it doesn’t make economic sense to pay more for accident prevention than the corresponding reduction in the expected costs of accidents; at that point, the firm would be better off just paying damages to accident victims. (There, now you don’t need to take first-year torts – just apply that principle everywhere.)

The Hand-Posner principle has filtered into the world of public policy and regulation as the argument that the benefits of regulation must exceed their costs. This argument is ascribed to Cass Sunstein, who “cruised through Tuesday’s Senate confirmation hearing” to be the “regulatory czar” in the new administration, which sounds much more powerful than “Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs” in the Office of Management and Budget. Sunstein is a widely respected law professor who specializes in just about everything (constitutional law, administrative law, regulation, and now behavioral economics – he co-authored Nudge – with a brief foray into the death penalty on the side).In principle, he would be able to review new regulations being defined throughout the executive branch. So the cost-benefit model of regulation – already favored by the previous administration – may become more firmly entrenched in the federal government.

Continue reading “Law, Economics, and Regulation” →

Vote For (Or Against) The IMF

The Washington Post is widely read on Capitol Hill and the reception among key people to The Hearing blog (run by us and the Post) has been generally very positive. Members of Congress and their staff want to get you more involved in their discussions around economic policy, and we’re experimenting with ways that will help your opinions – whatever they are – get across at a time and in a manner that increases their impact.

To that end, we’re developing on-line polls in which you can register your views on questions that are currently being debated – either in general terms or as specific legislation – on the Hill (of course, longer comments are also welcome; it’s a blog, after all). Today’s question is about whether the United States should provide an additional $100bn to the IMF, as was agreed at and immediately after the recent G20 summit; this is for a hearing held by a subcommittee of House Financial Services, which starts at 10am. Continue reading “Vote For (Or Against) The IMF” →

Antitrust For Banks? Ask Carl Shapiro

The Department of Justice seems to thinking, at least in principle, about potential antitrust action in and around banking. Assistant Attorney General Christine Varney spoke about this yesterday, but her exact wording is open to interpretation, “”I have to ask if too big to fail is a failure of antitrust enforcement.” (The press release was uninformative on this point)

More encouraging was the background briefing given to the New York Times, as seen in this paragraph,

“Ms. Varney is expected to say that the Obama administration will be guided by the view that it was a major mistake during the outset of the Great Depression to relax antitrust enforcement, only to try to catch up and become more vigorous later. She will say the mistake enabled many large companies to engage in pricing, wage and collusive practices that harmed consumers and took years to reverse.”

The thinking among antitrust experts has been that there is not much market power, conventionally defined, in financial services. But this thinking may change, for at least three reasons. Continue reading “Antitrust For Banks? Ask Carl Shapiro” →

Insurance and Health Insurance

I’ve been meaning to write a post on health insurance ever since hearing Karen Tumulty on Fresh Air. (She was discussing her Time article on underinsurance.) I happen to think that a free market for insurance works pretty well in most circumstances (and I did co-found an insurance software company); for example, if you can afford the house, you can generally afford the insurance for the house. But it doesn’t work very well for health care, because many people are simply uninsurable under free market principles (expected health care costs exceed their income, let alone their ability to pay), and hence would be left to die. We think we have a private, for-profit insurance system today, but we can only avoid its disturbing implications by hedging it in with public backstops and regulations.

Since the Senate Finance Committee is taking up health care reform this week, I finally wrote that post today for The Hearing.

By James Kwak

Stress Tests: The Questions Continue

From Felix Salmon:

Why did Treasury switch from TCE to the even-more-obscure common capital metric? Quite possibly to help Bank of America and Citigroup get the amount of capital they needed to raise down to a number within the realms of possibility. After all, these tests were designed so that they couldn’t be flunked. And that might have seemed a real possibility back when Treasury was still using TCE.

By James Kwak

That Was Fast

The Obama administration is strengthening its antitrust enforcement policy.

That said, this in itself probably wouldn’t have done anything about the “too big to fail” problem. It might have increased scrutiny over large bank mergers – like Nations-Bank of America, Bank of America-Fleet, or JPMorgan Chase-Bank One, but frankly those probably would have gone through anyway; the banking industry is just not that concentrated compared to some others. Too big to fail is a combination of size, interconnectedness, and the critical role of finance for the economy. But the signal that the administration will actually enforce antitrust law is a step in the right direction.

By James Kwak

Is Larry Summers The Next Gordon Brown?

Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, is in big trouble. It turns out that a medium-sized industrialized democracy like the UK can be run in pretty much the same way as a traditional emerging market – fiscal irresponsibility (cyclically-adjusted general government deficit now forecast at 12.2 percent of GDP for 2010) gives you a boom for a while, but the eventual day of reckoning is economically painful and politically disastrous. If you also need to deal with an oversized bubble finance sector, that makes the adjustment even more painful.

It is of course sensible to use fiscal stimulus to offset a fall in private demand, and to some extent this can be effective – with a lag. But if you lose control over public spending and borrow too heavily (helped by the fact people like to hold your currency), it ends badly.

From the beginning, we’ve expressed concern here that the entire Summers Plan was overweight fiscal, i.e., not enough resources for recapitalizing banks and addressing housing directly (for the context of this assessment, see our full baseline view). Back in December/January, this was a strategic choice worth arguing about; now it’s a done deal and following the (very) limited recapitalization outcome of the bank stress tests, it seems likely that household and firm spending will remain sluggish. If that is the case, the Administration’s logic implies throwing another big fiscal stimulus into the mix – and the Summers’ team is already preparing the groundwork.

The IMF is now warning against the risks of this approach, albeit using carefully worded language. Continue reading “Is Larry Summers The Next Gordon Brown?” →

James Surowiecki and Me

Back when I had time to read The New Yorker, I was a big fan of James Surowiecki. I would always look for his column; if it was there, it was usually the first thing I would read. Unfortunately, he’s no fan of mine.

Surowiecki makes three points about our recent long post on nationalization:

If the government were to take over a large bank like Citigroup, it would not be able to sell it into the private sector quickly, but would most likely own it for several years, which constitutes nationalization.
Recent U.S. history, by which he means the S&L crisis, shows that the right strategy is “exercising regulatory forebearance, cutting interest rates sharply (which raises bank profit margins), and helping the banks deal with their bad assets” – not bank takeovers.
We were misleading in citing the IMF’s $4.1 trillion number instead of the lower $1.1 trillion number for U.S. financial institutions. “I assume they used the $4.1 trillion number because it’s much scarier, and offers a much gloomier picture of the state of the U.S. financial system. Unfortunately, it also offers a much more misleading picture of the system.”

Sigh. I guess it’s impossible to make everyone like me.

I’ll take the points in reverse order.

Continue reading “James Surowiecki and Me” →

“Nationalization” (A Weekend Comment Competition)

Writing in the Financial Times on January 27th, 2009, Peter Boone and I expressed our opposition to bank nationalization in no uncertain terms,

If you want to end up with the economy of Pakistan, the politics of Ukraine, and the inflation rate of Zimbabwe, bank nationalization is the way to go.

Most others who recently advocated a managed bankruptcy process – or FDIC-type intervention – for big banks (with or without the injection of new government capital) were careful, at least initially, to avoid using the word nationalization. And many took pains to explain in detail why their proposals were quite different from nationalization.

But at some point this became a debate in which informed bystanders perceived the sides as being for or against “nationalization” – a semiotic transition that has obviously helped the big bankers, at least in the short term.

This weekend’s comment competition is in two parts. Who first made “nationalization” the central word for the U.S. bank discussion? And who was most influential in establishing that the national debate be defined in these terms?

Stress Tests: What Was the Point Again?

There was been a lot of drama over the last week, which we have certainly contributed to, about the stress tests. It was all very exciting, finally seeing numbers purporting to show how healthy or unhealthy each bank was. But let’s recall what the point of this whole exercise was.

Depending on your perspective, the goal is either to restore confidence in the health of the financial system, or to ensure the health of the financial system, which are obviously closely related. We care about the health of the financial system because the financial system is critical for the health of the economy as a whole: without banks that are willing to lend money for people to buy houses, cars, and consumer goods, or for businesses to invest in real estate, factories, inventory, software, etc., none of these things will happen. So the ultimate goal is to ensure the availability of credit.

There are ways to measure the availability of credit directly. One of them is the Fed’s quarterly survey on bank lending practices, which was released earlier this week (hat tip Calculated Risk, as usual). For a quick overview, I recommend the charts. The charts show you, for each quarter, the change in supply of or demand for credit in that quarter – in other words, they are you showing you the first derivative.

Continue reading “Stress Tests: What Was the Point Again?” →

Chrysler and Bankruptcy Law in Gory Detail

I was talking to an old friend last night about the Chrysler bankruptcy and, in particular, whether Chrysler (and Treasury, and the UAW) will be able to get around the order of priority of creditors in bankruptcy – which ordinarily would favor the senior secured lenders who are trying to block the proposed plan. I thought I would do a little research, but then (again via Calculated Risk) I found Steve Jakubowski’s analysis of precisely this issue, which apparently everyone on the Internet has already been linking to. It’s actually Part 3 of a series; you may want to start with Part 1.

My summary, for those who don’t like reading citations from court opinions: The issue with the “restructuring initiative” agreed-upon by Chrysler, the government, Fiat, and the UAW, is that it only pays the senior secured creditors $2 billion in cash for $6.9 billion in secured debt; since secured creditors’ claims should come first, they argue they would get more from a liquidation. In particular, the VEBA created to fund retiree benefits is owed $8.5 billion; it is getting $4.6 billion debt and 55% of the equity in New Chrysler.

Continue reading “Chrysler and Bankruptcy Law in Gory Detail” →

The Other Stress Test (For Bankers)

There is nothing you can teach Wall Street titans regarding the timing of news flow. Stephen Friedman, the former head of Goldman Sachs, resigned last night as chair of the New York Fed’s board, after committing essentially a rookie error. In December/January, he traded the stock of a company (Goldman) overseen by the NY Fed, while helping to pick a new head of the Fed (formerly from Goldman), and presumably being aware of other potentially nonpublic information regarding bank rescues (benefiting Goldman both directly and indirectly). The real error, given the Federal Reserve System’s incredibly lax rules on potential conflicts of interest at this level, was failing to disclose this information to the NY Fed – they learned it from WSJ reporters and that cannot have been a good moment.

If you have to resign, pick your time of day carefully, and Friedman is obviously advised by the best people in the business. I’m looking at the hard copies of four newspapers. The news of his departure does not make the front page of the NYT (not even the small stuff at the bottom) or the front page of their Business Day section. There is nothing on the front page of the FT or Washington Post. Even the WSJ only manages three paragraphs on the front page, before sending you to look for p.A10. (It was on cnn.com from 5:55pm last night, together with his resignation letter.)

I haven’t checked who first broke the news, but Friedman’s resignation was of course the major development of yesterday. The bank stress test results were hard-baked a long time ago, and almost all the icing on that cake had already been leaked. But the stress test for bankers is still underway. Continue reading “The Other Stress Test (For Bankers)” →

Grading on a Curve

Mark Thoma has a great analogy for the stress tests. He picks up on this statement by Tim Geithner:

Some might argue that this testing was overly punitive, while others might claim it could understate the potential need for additional capital. The test designed by the Federal Reserve and the supervisors sought to strike the right balance.

Then this is Thoma:

I’ve given a lot of tests over the years, and I can pretty much make the mean on a test come out how I want through the design of the questions and how I score the answers. If I want a mean of 70, or around there, I can get it, and if a mean of 50 is the target, that’s possible too. . . .

If we choose a score of “70” as the dividing point between being solvent and being insolvent, then the percentage of banks passing the test is a function of the difficulty of the stress test: how the items on the balance sheets – the answers to the questions – are interpreted.

The whole thing is a fun read. I don’t think it’s a crucial point, but I like this part of the analogy:

Why did the government negotiate the outcome with banks and how lenient were they in those negotiations? There are always students who want to argue about the result of a test, to have sections regraded, and how you respond to attempts to “negotiate” a grade can affect the percentage passing the class, particularly when – as with the stress tests – there aren’t a lot of students/banks taking the test.

By James Kwak

Help

Has anyone figured out how to make the numbers in Table 3 (PDF p. 10) in the stress test results add up? I understand what all the lines mean individually, but the presentation seems incomplete. Looking at Citi for example, I know that they expect 104.7 in losses on existing assets, but they expect Citi to make 49.0, for a net loss of 55.7. Common capital on 12/31/08 was 22.9, and 22.9 – 55.7 = -32.8, so absent recapitalization that would leave Citi at -32.8 on 12/31/10. The “SCAP buffer” (which seems like the opposite of a buffer, but whatever) is 92.6, so with the buffer Citi would have 59.8 on 12/31/10. But 59.8 is well over 4% of Citi’s risk-weighted assets of 996.2.

Maybe the model has Citi’s assets climbing up to $1.5 trillion? Or maybe the losses and “resources to absorb losses” do not have a dollar-for-dollar effect on common capital?

Anyway, it seems like at least one number is missing. If you can explain this, or link to someone who can, I will . . . be grateful.

Update: The most common theory is that 59.8 is 6% of 996.2. But I don’t think that is the explanation, for the reasons I cite in this comment reply and that Nemo also flagged. Also, Erich Riesenberg points out that the fact that this works out to 6% for Citi is a pure coincidence, if you look at the same calculation for other banks.

By James Kwak