Author: James Kwak

Blaming It on Obama

Last week I wrote a post about “government debt hysteria” that has gotten a lot of attention because of a link from Paul Krugman. (As Felix Salmon, said, “blogging is a lottery on the individual-blog-entry level.”) The main point of last week’s post was not that it’s wrong to be concerned about the national debt (I think everyone is concerned about it — the question is what to do about it and when), but that it’s irresponsible to title a column “Could America Go Broke?” and talk about hyperinflation without providing some evidence, or at least a logical argument that goes beyond tautology, that hyperinflation is something we should be worrying about it.

Here’s something else that’s irresponsible. In that same column, Robert Samuelson says, “The Congressional Budget Office reckons the Obama administration’s planned budgets would increase the debt-to-GDP ratio from 41 percent in 2008 to 82 percent in 2019″ (emphasis added).

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Government Debt Hysteria

I don’t spend a lot of time trying to police the economic news media — Dean Baker and Brad DeLong are much better on that — but I found myself reading a two-week-old Newsweek column by Robert Samuelson that enraged me enough to type this out. (I read it on old-fashioned paper, but here’s the WaPo version.) The title of the WaPo version is “Could America Go Broke?” and here’s the last paragraph:

“Deprived of international or domestic credit, defaulting countries in the past have suffered deep economic downturns, hyperinflation, or both. The odds may be against a wealthy society tempting that fate, but even the remote possibility underlines the precariousness and the novelty of the present situation. The arguments over whether we need more ‘stimulus’ (and debt) obscure the larger reality that past debt increasingly constricts governments’ economic maneuvering room.”

Deep economic downturns! Hyperinflation! “Precariousness and novelty of the present situation!” You’d think there was some actual reason to be afraid.

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The AIG-Maiden Lane III Controversy

As everyone knows by now, Neil Barofsky, special inspector general for TARP, has a new report out on the decision by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York last Fall to make various AIG counterparties (primarily some very big banks with names you know) whole on the the CDS protection they had bought from AIG to cover their risk on some CDOs. The potentially juicy bit has to do with the Maiden Lane III transaction (New York Fed summary here).

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CRA Bashing, Nth Generation

The Community Reinvestment Act is a law originally passed in 1977 that directed federal regulatory agencies to ensure that the banks they supervised were not discriminating against particular communities in making credit available.The onset of the subprime mortgage crisis triggered a flood of sloppy, lazy attacks on the CRA claiming that since the crisis was created by excess lending to the poor, and the CRA was intended to increase lending to the poor, the CRA must have caused the crisis. These arguments suffered from a mistaken premise (subprime lending had a modest negative correlation with income, but many subprime loans were used by the middle class to buy expensive houses in the suburbs and exurbs of California and Nevada) and a failure to check their facts (“Only six percent of all the higher-priced loans were extended by CRA-covered lenders to lower-income borrowers or neighborhoods in their CRA assessment areas, the local geographies that are the primary focus for CRA evaluation purposes.” — Randall Kroszner, former Fed governor appointed by President George W. Bush, in a Federal Reserve study that also found that subprime loan performance was no worse in CRA-covered zip codes than in slightly more affluent zip codes not covered by the CRA.)

Yesterday at a Cato Institute conference, Edward Pinto, chief credit officer at Fannie from 1987 to 1989 and currently a real estate financial services industry consultant (according to recent Congressional testimony), rolled out the new line. The new argument is a curious mirror image of the old argument (which Pinto himself may not have made): now the subprime explosion did not cause the housing bubble, but was caused by the housing bubble and … wait for it … the CRA caused the housing bubble, along with the affordable housing goals of Fannie and Freddie.

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Auto Race to the Bottom

This guest post was contributed by Raj Date, head of the Cambridge Winter Center for Financial Institutions Policy and a former McKinsey consultant, bank senior executive, and Wall Street managing director. For further information on the auto dealer exemption, see the recent study by the Cambridge Winter Center.

Over the past several months, Congress has debated ways to strengthen and rationalize consumer protection in financial services.  Central to that debate is the proposed creation of a new agency focused exclusively on this issue, the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (the “CFPA”).

Even among proponents, however, there are varying conceptions of the scope and function of the CFPA.  For example, the CFPA as envisioned by the House Financial Services Committee would exclude auto dealers from the CFPA’s coverage.  The Administration’s original proposal would have included them.  Starting this week, the Senate Banking Committee will have to wrestle with the same question.

They shouldn’t have to wrestle long:  Even by the low analytical standards applied to hastily arranged, crisis-driven corporate welfare initiatives, the exemption of auto dealers from the CFPA appears profoundly ill conceived.  Exempting auto dealers would simultaneously be bad for consumers, bad for industry stability, and bad for what remaining sense of free-market integrity we still have.

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Slow Cat, Fast Mouse

One of our readers pointed me to a paper by Edward Kane with the unfortunately complicated title “Extracting Nontransparent Safety Net Subsidies by Strategically Expanding and Contracting a Financial Institution’s Accounting Balance Sheet.” The paper is an extended discussion of regulatory arbitrage — not the specific techniques (such as securitization with various kinds of recourse) that banks use to finesse capital requirements, but the larger game played by banks and their regulators. This is how Kane frames the situation:

“Regulation is best understood as a dynamic game of action and response, in which either regulators or regulatees may make a move at any time.  In this game, regulatees tend to make more moves than regulators do.  Moreover, regulatee moves tend to be faster and less predictable, and to have less-transparent consequences than those that regulators make.

“Thirty years ago, regulatory arbitrage focused on circumventing restrictions on deposit interest rates; bank locations; charter powers; and deposit institutions’ ability to shift risk onto the safety net.  Probably because regulatory burdens in the first three areas have largely disappeared, the fourth has become more important than ever.  Today, loophole mining by financial organizations of all types focuses on using financial-engineering techniques to exploit defects in government and counterparty supervision.”

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Steve Randy Waldman on Financial Regulation

I would like to strongly recommend Steve Randy Waldman’s recent post on “Discretion and Financial Regulation.” He begins like this: “An enduring truth about financial regulation is this: Given the discretion to do so, financial regulators will always do the wrong thing.” It gets better from there.

In fact, I’d recommend it over anything I’ve written this morning, so why don’t you head over now.

By James Kwak

Economics Puzzler of the Day

Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times (hat tip Calculated Risk) reports that the recent Worker, Homeownership and Business Assistance Act of 2009 (which included the expansion of the homebuyer tax credit) included a curious tax break for money-losing companies:

“a tax break that lets big companies offset losses incurred in 2008 and 2009 against profits booked as far back as 2004. The tax cuts will generate corporate refunds or relief worth about $33 billion, according to an administration estimate.

“Before the bill became law, the so-called look-back on losses was limited to small businesses and could be used to counterbalance just two years of profits. Now the profit offset goes back five years, and the law allows big companies to take advantage of it, too.”

Morgenson focuses on the fact that some of the biggest beneficiaries will be the massive home-building companies that raked in huge profits during the height of the boom, and that they have no apparent plans to hire new workers. “After spending its $210,000, Pulte will receive $450 million in refunds. And Hovnanian, after spending its $222,000, will get as much as $275 million.” (If you’re not enraged by the behavior of some of these companies, you should read Chapter Five of Our Lot by Alyssa Katz.)

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One Cost of Too Big to Fail

A reader pointed out a quick analysis done by Dean Baker and Travis McArthur of the Center for Economic Policy and Research back in September. They estimate the value of being “too big to fail” by looking at the spread between the cost of funds for banks above $100 billion in assets and banks below that level. The spread averaged 0.29 percentage points from 2000 through 2007, but rose to 0.78 percentage points from Q4 2008 through Q2 2009, an increase of 0.49 percentage points. Alternatively, the spread peaked at 0.69 percentage points from Q4 2001 through Q2 2002 at the end of the last recession; by comparison, the spread this time around was only 0.09 percentage points higher. Using 0.09 and 0.49 percentage points as their low and high estimates, Baker and McArthur come up with an estimate of the aggregate value of being TBTF that ranges from $6.3 billion to $34.2 billion per year.

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Note to Jamie Dimon: Repeating Something Doesn’t Make It True

Note: I’ve updated this post at the end with another response to Jamie Dimon, this one by James Coffman. Coffman served in the enforcement division of the SEC for over twenty years, most recently as an assistant director of enforcement, and previously wrote a guest post for this blog.

In the Washington Post, Jamie Dimon asserts that we shouldn’t “try to impose artificial limits on the size of U.S. financial institutions.” Why not?

“Scale can create value for shareholders; for consumers, who are beneficiaries of better products, delivered more quickly and at less cost; for the businesses that are our customers; and for the economy as a whole.”

I don’t know of any serious person who believes this to be true for banks above, say, $100 billion in assets. Charles Calomiris, who studies this stuff, couldn’t find anything stronger to back up the economies of scale claim than a study saying that bank total factor productivity grew by 0.4% per year between 1991 and 1997 — a study whose author thinks that the main factor behind increasing productivity was IT investments.

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The Real Choice on Too Big to Fail

Gillian Tett has an article criticizing the idea that CoCos — contingent convertible bonds — will solve the “too big to fail” problem. (And yes, she calls it “too big to fail,” even though Gillian Tett of all people understands what interconnectedness means.)

Contingent convertible bonds, a.k.a. contingent capital, are the latest fad to hit the optimistic technocracy in Washington and London. A contingent convertible bond is a bond that a bank sells during ordinary times, but that converts into equity when things turn bad, with “bad” defined by some trigger conditions, such as capital falling below a predetermined level. In theory, this means that banks can have the best of both worlds. They can go out and borrow more money today, increasing leverage and profits (which is what they want). But when the crisis hits, the debt will convert into equity; that will dilute existing shareholders, but more importantly it means the debt does not have to be paid back, providing an instant boost to the bank’s capital cushion. In other words, banks can have the additional safety margin as if they had raised more equity today, but without having to raise the equity.

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How Well Prepared Are Americans for Retirement?

The following guest post was contributed by Andrew Biggs. He has studied the issue of retirement savings for a couple of orders of magnitude longer than I, so I wanted to give him the opportunity to outline his perspective on the topic. He regularly blogs on his own blog and, along with about four dozen other people, over here.

After our exchange regarding Tuesday’s blog on The Retirement Problem in the Washington Post (which started over at AEI’s Enterprise blog and continued here),  James generously offered to let me guest-post my thoughts on Americans’ level of preparation for retirement. Overall I’m not so pessimistic, although there are surely problems that must be addressed. But most of the detailed research out there points to problems, but not a crisis.

Both James’s analysis and my own response were built on relatively simple projections using stylized workers who pay into Social Security and participate in 401(k) plans. These illustrations are useful for fleshing out basic issues – plus, in this case, finding how the SSA’s online benefit calculator may have skewed some of the results.

But the best research on retirement preparedness is more involved than this. Most analysis of current retirees uses survey data, such as from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) and the Current Population Survey (CPS). Each survey has strengths and weaknesses.

In addition, broader models of the population are built using this survey data. These models allow for simulations of how policy changes affect current retirees, as well as projecting the population into the future. Such comprehensive models include the Social Security Administration/Urban Institute MINT (Modeling Income in the Near Term) model, the Congressional Budget Office’s CBOLT (CBO Long Term) and the Policy Simulation Group’s PSG suite of models, used by the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Labor for Social Security and private pension projections. While these models, like any others, rely on assumptions regarding a large number of factors, they are also the most closely scrutinized to ensure these assumptions are consistent with current trends.

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Low Savings, Bad Investments

The article below first appeared in our Washington Post column yesterday. I’m reproducing it in full here because there is an important correction, thanks to a response by Andrew Biggs. I’ve fixed the mistake and added notes in brackets to show what was fixed. Also, I want to append some additional notes about the data and some issues that didn’t fit into the column.

Recent volatility in the stock market (the S&P 500 Index losing almost 50% of its value between September and March) has led some to question the wisdom of relying on 401(k) and other defined-contribution plans, invested largely in the stock market, for our nation’s retirement security. For example, Time recently ran a cover story by Stephen Gandel entitled “Why It’s Time to Retire the 401(k).”

However, the shortcomings of our current retirement “system” predate the recent fall in the markets, will not be solved by another stock market boom. The problems are more basic: we don’t save enough, and we don’t invest very well.

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Blankfein Defends Goldman Sachs Against Breakup Advocates

That’s the title of a Bloomberg article that also cites Bernie Sanders and Simon. Here are the direct quotes from Blankfein:

“Our business is very complex, and I won’t deny that, but it’s far, far simpler than most of the competitors. I wonder myself how some of these things get managed.”

“Most of the activities we do, and you can be confused if you read the pop press, serve a real purpose. It wouldn’t be better for the world or the financial system [to change the firm’s activities].”

“We pretty much stuck to our investment-banking knitting. That’s why we have 30,000 people and many of our competitors have well over 200,000 or 300,000 people.”

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