Author: James Kwak

Larry Summers on Preventing and Fighting Financial Crises

This fall I am taking a course on the “international financial crisis” taught by Jon Macey and Greg Fleming (yes, the former COO of Merrill Lynch). The first assigned reading is a speech that Larry Summers gave at the AEA in 2000 entitled “International Financial Crises: Causes, Prevention, and Cures,”* summarizing the state of the art in preventing and combating financial crises. It’s based on experiences from emerging market crises in the 1990s, and doesn’t even contain a hint that something similar might happen here; however, few people could fault Summers for making that oversight back in 2000, and I certainly won’t.

Many people, including Simon and me, have discussed the similarities between our recent financial crisis and the emerging market crises of the 1990s, so I’ll be brief. The main similarities are excessive optimism that creates an asset price bubble, a sudden collapse of confidence that causes the rapid withdrawal of money and credit, a liquidity crunch, and rapid de-leveraging that threatens solvency. (We have also argued that there are political similarities, but let’s leave that aside for now.) The biggest difference is that instead of being compounded by flight from the affected country’s currency and government debt, in our case the exact opposite happened; investors fled toward the U.S. dollar and Treasuries, making things easier for us than for, say, Thailand. Also, to a partial extent, the parallel requires an analogy between emerging market countries and United States banks; for example, the issue of bailouts and moral hazard arises in the context of the IMF bailing out Indonesia and in the context of the United States government bailing out Citigroup.

Summers’s speech makes a lot of sense, so I’ll just highlight a few points he makes that I think are particularly instructive given our recent experience. I think these are all excellent points. For each one, I’ll quote from Summers, and then comment on its relevance to our situation.

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A Sad Day

I have nothing new or insightful to add, but it feels wrong to go back to blogging without paying respects to Ted Kennedy. When I was younger and perhaps more idealistic, I used to carry around a copy of his speech at the 1980 Democratic National Convention. He was a man who cared about the poor, the unemployed, and the sick, even as their cause became less and less fashionable over the past four decades. He believed that justice went beyond formalistic legal rights and extended to economic and social conditions as well. The Senate needs another person like him, but sadly will not find one.

By James Kwak

Medicare and the Public Option

Simon and I have our latest weekly column up at the Washington Post. The topic is contradictions: opponents of the public option who bill themselves as defenders of Medicare, opponents of cost savings who support private health insurers, and so on. It’s also about a world without a public option:

Imagine health-care reform without a public option: Insurers have to charge the same price regardless of customers’ medical history; everyone has to buy insurance; and poor people get subsidies to help them afford it. From the insurers’ perspective, they get more than 40 million new customers, they subsidize the old and sick by overcharging the young and healthy (who have to overpay because of the mandate), and the government even pays people to buy their product. There are no new competitors (additional choices for customers), and there is no pressure to reduce costs. What could be better?

As we’ve said before, I think this is still far better than the current situation. Ezra Klein recently made the point much more forcefully. But still, reform without the public option could be a recipe for private insurers to charge whatever they feel like charging. Alex Tabarrok, not the first person you would expect to write a post called “In Defense of the Public Option,” writes:

Since escape via non-purchase will no longer be a potential response to higher prices, mandatory purchase will reduce the elasticity of demand giving firms an incentive to increase prices. Moreover, in oligopolistic markets, a more homogeneous product can increase the ability of firms to collude.

I believe that health insurance reform will increase the market power of insurance firms and drive up prices. In this scenario, the public option at least has a raison d’etre, although whether it actually fulfills it’s purpose is an open question.

By James Kwak

Change or More of the Same?

Matt Yglesias‘s comments on James Surowiecki on the health care reform debate triggered a few thoughts in my head.

First, Surowiecki (after describing how people fear reform because they tend to fear change):

Because it’s hard for individuals to get affordable health insurance, and most people are insured through work, keeping your insurance means keeping your job. But in today’s economy there’s obviously no guarantee that you can do that. On top of that, even if you have insurance there’s a small but meaningful chance that when you actually get sick you’ll find out that your insurance doesn’t cover what you thought it did (in the case of what’s called “rescission”). In other words, the endowment that insured people want to hold on to is much shakier than it appears. Changing the system so that individuals can get affordable health care, while banning bad behavior on the part of insurance companies, will actually make it more likely, not less, that people will get to preserve their current level of coverage.

This is basically what Simon and I argued in the Washington Post a couple weeks ago, and I’m glad that someone with a much bigger platform is saying it, too.

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Fun with Derivatives

Fresh off my vacation, I have jury duty tomorrow, but today I got a jump on my fun reading for the courthouse – Traders, Guns, & Money, the anecdote-packed overview of derivatives by Satyajit Das, a prolific consultant, author, and commentator on the topic. Das says that his book “does not attempt to make a case for and against derivatives” (p. xiii), and it’s true that he does point out some of the useful, value-creating functions of derivatives. But this passage (p. 41) is probably more typical, and one I thought deserved being typed out:

We needed ‘innovation’, we were told. We created increasingly odd products. These obscure structures allowed us to earn higher margins than the cutthroat vanilla business. The structured business also provided flow for our trading desks. The more complex products were stripped down into simpler components that traders hedged. …

New structures that clients actually wanted were not that easy to create. Even if somebody came up with something, everybody learned about it almost instantaneously. They reverse-engineered the structure and then launched identical products.

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More by Arindrajit Dube

Last month Arindrajit Dube wrote a guest post for us analyzing private insurer stock market returns following the news that the Senate Finance Committee “Group of Six” would be dropping the public plan; he estimated that avoiding a public plan would be worth $28-35 billion to three major insurers. Last week he did a similar analysis based on last Sunday’s comments by Kathleen Sebelius and Robert Gibbs indicating potential willingness to drop the public plan (something the administration has tentatively backpedaled from). I was on vacation, but his analysis is available on Economist’s View, and his bottom-line number is $32 billion, or 40% of their market value.

Dube also co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times on San Francisco’s experience with comprehensive, government-mandated health insurance. One of their points is that in an environment where all competitors are forced to pay something for health insurance, this creates a level playing field where all companies can pass on the higher costs to consumers – as opposed to a situation where companies race to the bottom by cutting benefits in order to minimize costs.

By James Kwak

At the Beach

I will be at the beach with my family for a week. I’m not certain about this, but there is a strong possibility that I will not be using a computer, let alone checking email or blogging. (Computers are useful when traveling, especially since I don’t have an iPhone or a Blackberry, but if you have one then there is the temptation to check your email, and then you are on a slippery slope to hell.)

Luckily for you, Mike Konczal, aka Mike Rorty, of Rortybomb and The Atlantic, has agreed to be my stand-in for the week and will be guest-blogging here. Mike is a bona fide financial engineer with the good sense to live in the San Francisco area, and is a natural with economics, finance, public policy, and the English language.

Enjoy.

(Simon will probably still be blogging, although he will also be on vacation; in fact, he has been on vacation for the past week.)

By James Kwak

Management Consulting for Humanities Ph.D.s

Ezra Klein referred me to a 2006 article, “The Management Myth,” by Matthew Stewart, which has just led to a new book by the same name. Stewart has a Ph.D. in nineteenth-century German philosophy and was a founding partner of a management consulting firm; I have a Ph.D. in twentieth-century intellectual history and spent three years as a management consultant (at McKinsey) before co-founding a software company, so I thought I might find a kindred soul. Also, I’ve been thinking for years that I should write a book about my strange journey through the business world, but will probably never get around to it, so I was wondering what that book might have looked like.

Well, we’re not so kindred after all, although my criticisms of the management consulting industry certainly overlap with his. One difference: I have never, ever found myself thinking, “I’d rather be reading Heidegger!,” although (or perhaps because) I read my share of Heidegger back in the day – Being and Time was on my orals list. (That said, I have also never read books about management, which is what Stewart was doing when he was wishing for Heidegger.)

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An Inside Perspective on Regulatory Capture

We received the following email from James Coffman in response to Bond Girl‘s recent guest post, “Filling the Financial Regulatory Void.” Coffey agreed to let us publish the email. As he says below, he spent 27 years in the enforcement division of the SEC.

Bond Girl’s “Filling the Financial Regulatory Void” provided insight into human deficiencies in the current financial regulatory system. But it overplays the human failings of regulators and concludes with a proposed solution that, in all likelihood, would turn out worse than the current situation. But first, in the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that I retired two years ago from a management position in the enforcement division at the SEC after 27 years. So I was (and in my heart, I suppose I still am) a financial regulator. That background probably should be taken into account by anyone who reads this response.

There is no doubt that “regulatory capture” exists and is a meaningful factor in the recent failures of our regulatory system. Many of us in the enforcement division dealt with the problem regularly when we sought input from those in the agency who were responsible for regulating aspects of the securities markets. Over time, regulatory policies and practices had emerged that seemed to contradict the purpose if not the letter of the law. In other cases, over-arching issues (e.g., increases in fees charged by investment companies despite growth that should have resulted in economies of scale and decreasing fees) simply were not addressed in any meaningful way.

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Health Care’s Senior Moment

Seniors have recently emerged as an important battleground in the health reform war. Katharine Seelye of the New York Times has a post on the “new generation gap” separating the elderly from the not-so-elderly, and multiple polls have shown that seniors are more resistant to reform, at least when it is phrased broadly. In addition, the nonsense about “death panels” has worried at least some seniors, enough for the AARP to pitch in to try to shoot it down.*

This should seem ironic, given that people over 65 are the one group that has already most benefited from health care reform – only their reform happened in the 1960s, when Medicare was created. But hey, it’s a democracy, and people don’t have to wish for others the benefits they themselves enjoy.

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The Problem with Disclosure

Felix Salmon has a good example of why disclosure (the preferred consumer-protection regime of free-market conservatives and bankers) doesn’t work, courtesy of Ryan Chittum. The topic is no-interest balance transfers offered by credit card companies.

As Salmon points out, most people probably realize what the game is. That is, most people know that banks aren’t in the business of lending money for free; they know that the bank is betting that it can raise the interest rate before they pay off the balance. It’s possible that you will end up getting a free loan: “If you’re smart and disciplined and lucky, you might be able to game the system and pay no interest at all on that balance. Bank of America, for its part, does its very best to make you think that you’ll be able to do just that, essentially getting one over on The Man.” But the bank knows it has the numbers on its side; and most consumers know it too, because they know that’s the only reason the bank would make the offer.

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Yet More on Health Insurance

Simon and I have a kind of synthesis of our recent thoughts on health care reform, along with some more data and thoughts about the employer-based system, up at The Hearing. It seems to have 167 comments – people really like to talk about health care, don’t they?

On a related note, we will be modifying the format of our Washington Post gig. We’re moving in the direction of a weekly, substantive opinion and analysis piece, rather than trying to keep up with Congressional hearings from day to day. We’ll get you a new link when that is fully up and running.

By James Kwak

What Do the People Want?

To the New York Times’s credit, they asked them. And this is what they found (from the beginning of the article, entitled “New Poll Finds Growing Unease on Health Plan”):

President Obama’s ability to shape the debate on health care appears to be eroding as opponents aggressively portray his overhaul plan as a government takeover that could limit Americans’ ability to choose their doctors and course of treatment, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Americans are concerned that revamping the health care system would reduce the quality of their care, increase their out-of-pocket health costs and tax bills, and limit their options in choosing doctors, treatments and tests, the poll found. The percentage who describe health care costs as a serious threat to the American economy — a central argument made by Mr. Obama — has dropped over the past month.

The article does cite several statistics from the poll, and does show several signs that are favorable to President Obama, including that the public overwhelmingly favors him over the Republicans when it comes to health care, and overwhelmingly thinks that he is trying to work with Republicans more than the converse. But the overall impression you get is that Americans are afraid of health care reform.

But are they?

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Filling the Financial Regulatory Void

This guest post was contributed by Bond Girl, a frequent commenter on this site and author of The Bond Tangent, a very good blog on the esoteric but important world of municipal bonds. I invited her to write it after reading her comments on the topic of financial regulation on this post.

In June, the Obama administration released a report outlining various financial regulatory reforms. The proposed reforms are intended to meet five objectives, essentially: (1) to eliminate regulators’ tunnel vision; (2) to regulate certain financial products and market participants that have so far evaded supervision; (3) to protect consumers from unfair and deceptive sales practices; (4) to provide a framework for responding to financial crises and the failure of major financial institutions; and (5) to promote these efforts globally. Much of the subsequent policy debate has been focused on whether or not the reforms detailed in the report address these objectives. This is a political triumph for the administration because it distracts from the report’s one glaring omission – how to address a culture of sustained affinity between the supervisors and the supervised.

The administration’s proposal appears to portray the financial crisis as nothing more than an accident of reasoning. Because financial regulation in our country evolved in a fragmented manner, regulators’ perceptions of risk were determined by their respective niches when a holistic understanding of risk was required to predict a market failure of this magnitude. It logically follows then that the administration’s preference would be to create a meta-regulator (in this case, by extending the powers of the Federal Reserve and establishing an advisory council) to oversee the supervisory project as a whole and seek out system-wide threats.

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The Problem That Won’t Go Away

With everyone hoping for positive GDP growth in Q3 and Goldman Sachs analyst Jan Hatzius now predicting growth at an annual rate of three percent in the second half of the year, the banks, investors, and politicians are all hoping that that nasty problem of foreclosures would just go away already. Unfortunately for everyone – especially the people losing their houses – there’s no reason for it to go away.

Unemployment is always a lagging indicator, and given the record low number of average hours worked, it will turn around especially slowly this time. Until then, people will continue to lose their jobs and wages will remain flat, and any small rebound in housing prices is unlikely to help more than a few people refinance their way out of unaffordable mortgages. So unless the other part of the equation – monthly payments – changes, the number of foreclosures should just continue to rise.

Calculated Risk provides this great chart from Matt Padilla (see the CR post for definitions of the categories):

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