Author: James Kwak

What Good Is It, Anyway?

Behind the ephemeral debates over the financial crisis and the bailouts it has spawned, there is a broader debate about the financial sector as a whole: what good is it, how much of it do we need, and how do we know if it is working? 

There are many descriptions of what the financial sector does, but most of them have something to do with moving capital (money) from someone who has more than he needs to someone who could use a bit more. And I think most people would agree that is a good thing, as long as the latter person has some productive use for it. Mike at Rortybomb, in “The Financial Sector We Want,” describes a doctor saving up $1,000 more than she needs for consumption and lending it to a factory, which returns her $1,100 after a year. In real life, we need some kind of a financial sector to get the money from the doctor to the factory, even if it’s just a single local bank. Everyone is happy.

When you start asking how big the financial sector should be, and whether or not it is working properly, things get more complicated. One of the Economist’s Free Exchange bloggers took the position that financial innovation is generally good in and of itself, although it has a high risk of creating “negative spillovers” – a higher risk than for non-financial innovation: “Most financial innovations are positive, and we don’t know ex ante which will be negative, so giving ourselves the power to block certain innovations because they might have negative spillovers is risky.” At first blush, this seems like a reasonable extension from real-world innovation to financial innovation.

However, Mike (Rortybomb) has an interesting counter-argument. Financial innovation, he says, is not like real-world innovation; the former only creates value if it solves an existing market imperfection. Figuring out which factories are worth investing in – so the doctor doesn’t have to worry about it – solves a market imperfection. But his point is that it’s the factory that’s creating the value; the financial sector is helping make that possible. So, he argues, if someone figures out a way to get a higher yield out of a risk-free investment (and that was the point of the CDO boom, where you could create a “super-senior, better-than-AAA” bond that paid a higher yield than Treasuries), then you either have to show what market imperfection it is solving, or it isn’t actually risk-free. In most cases, he suspects, innovation that generates a higher return does so simply by taking on more risk.

So what are we to make of the last quarter-century, when the financial sector got bigger and bigger and the people in it got richer and richer?

An instinctive free-market reaction might be to assume that the financial sector was doing great things, and that the people getting rich deserved to. But from Mike’s perspective, you have to ask: did people suddenly discover how to fix such massive market imperfections that they deserved to make that much money for so long? Ryan Avent put it this way:

Frankly, I have no idea what most of the recent growth in finance was for. . . . To get back to Mike’s original point, when you have a few people taking home billions, that’s a sign of either very good luck or some brilliant new strategy. When you have a lot of people in finance taking home billions, then something has gone badly wrong. Either something unsustainable is building, or there are some serious inefficiencies in the market.

And Felix Salmon, I think, pinpointed the crucial issue. If the financial sector was doing such a good job innovating, then it shouldn’t have continued making so much money. 

[O]ne would hope and expect that between sell-side productivity gains and a rise in the sophistication of the buy side, any increase in America’s financing needs would be met without any rise in the percentage of the economy taken up by the financial sector. That it wasn’t is an indication, on its face, that the financial sector in aggregate signally failed to improve at doing its job over the post-war decades — a failure which was then underlined by the excesses of the current decade and the subsequent global economic meltdown.

Ordinarily, if an industry innovates, a few people make a lot of money, and then most of the benefits flow to that industry’s customers. Let’s take one of the greatest examples of recent history: Microsoft and Intel together probably created a handful of billionaires and a few thousand multi-millionaires out of their employees; but for at least the last ten years, no one going there has gotten anything more than a decent salary and a good resume credential. As computers get smaller, cheaper, and faster, the benefits flow overwhelmingly to their customers – to us. And those are near-monopolies. The general pattern in the technology industry is that a few entrepreneurs make a lot of money, and the vast majority of people make a decent salary; even the highly-educated, highly-trained, hard-working software developers, most of whom could have been “financial” engineers, are making less than a banker one year out of business school.

That’s the way innovation is supposed to work. You invent something great, you make a lot of money, then your competitors copy you, prices go down, and the long-term benefits go to the customers. And you and your competitors all get more efficient, meaning that you can do the same amount of stuff at a lower cost than before. If you want to make another killing, you have to invent something new, or at least invent a better way of doing something you already do.

By contrast, the historical pattern of the financial sector – rising revenues, rising profits, and rising average individual compensation – is what you get if there is increasing demand for your services and, instead of competing to lower costs and prices, you limit supply. Sure, prices fell on some financial products, but financial institutions encouraged substitution away from them into new, more expensive products, with the net effect of increasing profitability (and compensation). Why this happened I won’t try to get into here, but it would be worth understanding if we want to reduce the chances of living through this crisis again in our lifetimes.

By James Kwak

Recession and Recovery: How Long?

I’ve commented earlier that many economic forecasts seem to assume reversion to the mean – here, meaning average economic growth over the last two decades. For a great example, go to the Wall Street Journal and admire the GDP growth rates projected for Q3 2009 through Q2 2010, marching happily up and to the right. (The numbers are 0.6%, 1.8%, 2.3%, and 2.8%.) This recession is different, however, and even if there is a mean to revert to after U.S. households decide how much they want to save, there’s no telling how long it will take.

For one perspective, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace had a session at the end of April featuring a few IMF economists. Marco Terrones (link to PowerPoint at the bottom of the page) looked at the typical duration of a recession and the ensuing recovery. The duration of recovery is measured to the point at which the economy reaches its previous peak output (the output level when the recession began – December 2007 in our case). He looked at 122 recessions since 1960. 

Continue reading “Recession and Recovery: How Long?” →

Foreclosures and Modifications for Beginners

On last week’s This American Life, Chris Arnold of NPR did a good segment on loan servicers and why they do or do not modify loans for delinquent borrowers (starting around the 10-minute mark). There isn’t a lot that avid readers won’t know already; the central message is that it would be better for everyone involved – including lenders and investors – if more loans were modified. It also doesn’t address the legal issues created by collateralized debt obligations where the tranches have different priorities. But if you’re confused about the basics, it’s worth listening to.

Still, there were a couple things that were new or interesting to me:

  •  Scott Simon, a managing director at PIMCO (the world’s biggest bond fund manager), said that he thinks loan servicers should be modifying more mortgages; that seems like a pretty clear vote from the investor side.
  • The segment brings up the issue of computer systems, which is something I hadn’t thought of but should have. Apparently, most if not all of the big, bank-owned servicers don’t have computer systems (software) that can estimate the net present value of a foreclosure as opposed to a modification, taking into account zip code-specific repair costs, broker’s fees on the sale, closing costs, foreclosure-specific legal costs, and expected sale proceeds. Big-company information technology is something I know well, and I can say with a high degree of confidence that if they started designing these things in 2007, they won’t be done until sometime next year at the earliest, and there’s a good chance they won’t work, and even if they do they will have difficulty handling the load. On the other hand, one good product manager and ten good developers in Silicon Valley could probably build something better in about 12-18 months. I sure hope the fate of the economy doesn’t depend on custom homegrown software.

By James Kwak

Option Pricing for Beginners

For a complete list of Beginners articles, see Financial Crisis for Beginners.

I’ve had two posts so far on the terms under which Treasury sold back to Old National the warrants on Old National stock that Treasury got in exchange for its TARP investment, so I thought it was time for an introduction to warrant/option pricing.

The warrants received by Treasury give Treasury the right to buy common stock in the issuing bank under predefined terms. Buying the stock is called exercising the warrant. The warrant specifies how many shares Treasury can buy; the price that it must pay to buy them (the exercise price); and the term of the warrant, meaning how long Treasury has to decide whether or not it wants to exercise the warrant. If Treasury never exercises the warrant, then it expires and nothing happens. For our purposes, a warrant is the same as a call option; there are some differences I will ignore, which are outlined here.

Continue reading “Option Pricing for Beginners” →

Warrant Sales Could Cost Government $10 Billion

Mark Pittman at Bloomberg estimates the total potential cost to taxpayers of selling warrants back to banks at low prices: $10 billion.  These are the warrants that banks had to issue to Treasury in exchange for preferred stock investments under TARP. Pittman uses the Old National example as a benchmark: Old National paid $1.2 million to buy back warrants that he estimates at $5.8 million. (Linus Wilson, the first person I know of to do the calculations, estimated a range of values from $1.5 million to $6.9 million.) Extrapolating that “discount” to all the other warrants that Treasury currently holds, Pittman finds:

Under the Old National warrants formula, Bank of America Corp. would save $2.03 billion, followed by Wells Fargo & Co. at $1.48 billion and JPMorgan Chase & Co. at $1.46 billion. Morgan Stanley’s benefit would be $983 million, Citigroup Inc.’s would come in at $965 million and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. would have $693 million, according to the data compiled by Bloomberg.

If you are concerned about banks’ capital levels, that’s one way to help them out. The alternative, suggested by Wilson and others, would be for Treasury to auction off the warrants; if the bids were too low, it could create a trust, transfer them from Treasury to the trust, and release the banks of any TARP obligations triggered by those warrants.

It also contrasts sharply with the treatment of private (not publicly-traded) banks such as Centra, as documented by David Kestenbaum of Planet Money.

I’ll have more on option pricing later.

By James Kwak

Geithner Plan vs. Paulson Plan

Dennis Snower works out the arithmetic behind the Public-Private Investment Program and shows something that we’ve suspected: if the assets are really toxic (the gap between book value and long-term expected value is big), the subsidy just isn’t big enough. He also shows that if the assets are only a little toxic, the government subsidy induces private sector bidders to overbid, making the subsidy bigger than it needs to be.

Snower’s hypothetical asset has an expected value of $50. According to his calculations:

  • If the bank has it on its books at $70, the private sector will bid it up to $85 because of the government subsidy. The government would have been better off under the original Paulson Plan (just buy it off the bank at book value, in this case $70).
  • If the bank has it on its books above $85, the private sector will not buy it at all and the plan will do nothing.

Now, his asset has different characteristics than the assets out there in the real world, whose expected values are not knowable, let alone known. That may change the analysis, but I doubt it changes the ultimate result.

Thanks to the reader who recommended this.

By James Kwak

CAFE, Part Two

In the same post I discussed yesterday, Keith Hennessey cites the same NHTSA report – the Final Rule governing CAFE standards for model years 2011-15, issued in January 2008 – to make this point: “The proposal will have a trivial effect on global climate change.” (It’s point 5 in his post, and was also picked up by Alex Tabarrok in his endorsement.) Hennessey cites the NHTSA report accurately, but the report itself is misleading.

What does the report say? Look at Table VII-12 on page 624. There are three scenarios that we are concerned with: No Action (which Hennessey calls, and I will call, “Baseline”); Optimized (“Bush Plan”); and Total Costs Equal Total Benefits (“Obama Plan”). If you want to know why Optimized is Bush and TC = TB is Obama, see my previous post. In the year 2100, the projected carbon dioxide (“CO2”) concentration in the atmosphere, in parts per million, is:

  • Baseline: 717.2
  • Bush: 716.2
  • Obama: 715.6

That’s pretty convincing – or is it?

Continue reading “CAFE, Part Two” →

The Economics of CAFE

Note: There are two somewhat significant updates at the bottom, just before the Appendix.

CAFE stands for Corporate Average Fuel Economy – the average fuel efficiency that is calculated annually for every manufacturer that sells cars or light trucks in the U.S. and compared to standards set by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the Department of Transportation. (If you want to know more about how CAFE is measured, see the Appendix to this post.) Yesterday, President Obama proposed new, higher CAFE standards for models years up through 2016, by which point aggregate efficiency should reach 35.5 miles per gallon. 

The typical conservative response to regulations like this is that they impose costs on the economy. In this case the main argument is that mandating higher fuel efficiency standards makes cars more expensive to produce; so car companies have to charge more for them; so fewer people will buy cars, and fewer people will be employed in the auto industry. I was planning to try to pre-empt this argument, but Keith Hennessey, former head of the National Economic Council under Bush II, beat me to the punch. His post summarizes some findings from a 900-page report produced by NHTSA in January 2008, when the Bush administration released the latest version of the CAFE standards. One of his main points, taken from that report, is that the Obama standards will cost 49,000 jobs. That’s relative to some baseline that I haven’t been able to identify, but it’s 38,000 jobs more than the Bush standards. The table is on page 586 of the long report; the Bush plan is “Optimized” and the Obama plan is “TC = TB.” Hennessey’s post has been picked up by Marginal Revolution (where I found it) and by The New York Times, so I decided I should stay up late and write a response.

Continue reading “The Economics of CAFE” →

Why You Should Read the Text, Not Just the Tables

Keith Hennessey, the last head of the National Economic Council before Larry Summers, has a blog post out (hat tip Alex Tabarrok) reviewing yesterday’s announcement by the Obama administration on their proposed new CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards. It links to a very informative report that I’m still digesting. (I was planning a post on the economics of CAFE for today, but now I need to read part of that report.)

Update: I found a mistake in the way Hennessey used a table and I posted about it here. Hennessey graciously acknowledged the mistake, fixed it on his post, and left a comment here. So I decided to delete my criticism. I really should have sent him an email first, and I feel bad about that. 

By James Kwak

First Buy High; Then Sell Low

On Monday last week, Old National Bancorp bought back the warrants it had granted Treasury as part of its participation in TARP, after buying back its preferred stock on March 31. Today, the New York Times ran a story saying that Old National only paid $1.2 million to buy back the warrants, while the warrants were almost certainly worth more.

The main authority cited by the Times was Linus Wilson, a finance professor at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette and a sometime commenter on this blog, so let’s go straight to the source.

Continue reading “First Buy High; Then Sell Low” →

Economics of Sick Days

Ezra Klein is one of those bloggers, like Matt Yglesias or Andrew Sullivan, that sometimes make me want to just give up. Yesterday he started a new blog at the Washington Post, and promptly put up fifteen posts on his first day – and not the one line variety, either. Today, he brings us this chart from the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

sickdayschart-thumb-350x390

This is Klein’s explanation:

You’re seeing two things here. The light blue line measures paid sick days. This is what you use if you need to take three days off because you have a fever. The dark blue line is paid sick leave. This is what you use if you need to take three months off because you have cancer. Every other country on the list offers at least one. Most offer both. The United States is alone in guaranteeing neither.

Why does this matter? Because sick people without paid sick days go to work anyway, infecting others and increasing the virulence of epidemics. Or, when it comes to things like the common cold, they simply get more people sick, which sucks for them.

Continue reading “Economics of Sick Days” →

Bankers Will Be Boys

Apparently, Anne Sibert has written an article at VoxEU describing three types of bad behavior committed by bankers that helped produce the crisis:

They committed cognitive errors involving biases towards their own prior beliefs; too many male bankers high on testosterone took too much risk, and a flawed compensation structure rewarded perceived short-term competency rather than long-run results.

I say “apparently” because I can’t get through to VoxEU despite trying three different browsers and two different computers (can’t ping it, either). But there’s a long summary over at naked capitalism. 

Everything she says sounds right, although the classification of three behaviors is a little frustrating, because they fall into three different categories. Confirmation bias is just part of the human condition; I’m not sure what we can do about that, short of inventing Cylons (and we know where that leads). Testosterone is part of the male branch of the human condition; so the potential solution is to have more female bankers. And flawed compensation structures are completely human creations, so we can definitely do something about them.

Continue reading “Bankers Will Be Boys” →

Liquidity Crisis? Check

Remember the days of talking about the TED spread and interbank lending? So over. And apparently Sheila Bair said “the liquidity crisis is over for good.”

One way to look at the decline in interbank lending rates is that interbank lending has become safe again – because governments around the world have made it so abundantly clear that they will not let major banks default on their liabilities, no matter what happens. So what we have is interbank lending rates that are artificially suppressed by implicit government support.

In any case, I guess now we’ll find out if Tim Geithner was right that this is just a liquidity crisis, not a solvency crisis.

By James Kwak

Rating Agency Self-Defense

I’m drafting a post for The Hearing on credit rating agencies (the ones who gave AAA ratings to all those CDOs). The CEO of Fitch is giving this prepared testimony tomorrow. Here’s the question: Can anyone find anything in there that constitutes a constructive suggestion for how regulation of rating agencies could be improved? Or is it all just self-serving insistence that there is no problem? 

(My favorite part is on pages 6-7 where he says, effectively, “Don’t regulate us – regulate the issuers and underwriters instead!”

By James Kwak