I don’t have a lot to add to Simon’s article about the housing plan in The New Republic – as you might imagine, we did talk about it – but I do want to take issue with the title, “Insufficient Boldness.” One quirk about writing for other publications is that you usually (not always) have complete control over the body of the article, but no control of the title (and often you don’t know what the title will be until you see it printed).
Author: James Kwak
Kidnapping Chrysler
In this brief interval before the new housing plan is announced, I’ll try to sneak in a comment on the auto bailout, and the plans submitted by GM and Chrysler yesterday. This may be an obvious question that many people have thought about, and got some discussion in December, but: Why does Cerberus (the private equity firm that owns Chrysler) need money from the government?
YLS Conference on the Financial Crisis
If you are a true crisis junkie (or you are having trouble falling asleep tonight and need more to read), my own Yale Law School held a conference on the financial crisis, its causes, and potential solutions (including better regulation) on Friday. There were a number of famous names present, including Lucian Bebchuk, Christopher Mayer (of the Hubbard-Mayer proposal), Anil Kashyap, and others. You can look at the agenda or check out the readings for sessions one, two, three, and four (each includes links to PDFs of the papers).
And where was I during all of this? I was home with my daughter.
(Let me know if you find something particularly important that I should read – I’m finding it impossible to keep up.)
The “Good Bank” Proposal
There has been a small but increasing amount of attention being given to the “good bank” idea: instead of creating a government entity to buy toxic assets from existin banks – or nationalizing existing banks, removing their toxic assets, and then reprivatize them – why not create brand new, good banks with the same government money, enabling them to lend money unencumbered by previous bad decisions, and then privatize them? (Willem Buiter floated this idea on January 29, and Paul Romer has a similar proposal in the WSJ, although I’m proud to say that Nemo, who has his or her own blog, raised it in a comment on this blog two weeks earlier.)
Romer suggests using government capital to create new, healthy banks that can essentially compete with the existing banks, which can then be treated under existing rules and regulations – if they become insolvent, they get taken over; some of their liabilities (like FDIC-insured deposits) are guaranteed, and some aren’t – and that’s that. Buiter goes a step further and recommends taking away banking licenses from the legacy bad banks and making them institutions that just run off their existing assets, in part by selling their good assets to the new good banks.
Can the Public-Private Plan Work?
Back in September, Simon and I wrote two op-eds on the governance and pricing challenges of buying toxic assets. As many people have noted, those problems have not gone away. The latter, in particular, represents a formidable barrier to Tim Geithner’s latest proposal to create a public-private partnership to relieve banks of their toxic assets. (In summary, the problem is that banks do not want to sell at the price the free market will offer, because (a) they think the assets will be worth more later and (b) doing so would force them to take writedowns that might make them insolvent.)
Lucian Bebchuk also wrote an op-ed on this topic in September, and to his credit he is still trying to turn “TARP II” into something feasible in his new paper, “How to Make Tarp II Work.” The paper has some good ideas but I’m not sure it solves the basic problem, which unfortunately has to do with the laws of arithmetic.
Tracking the Household Balance Sheet
One concept that has gotten a lot of attention the last few months is the household balance sheet: the relationship between household assets and liabilities, and what that means for household behavior (consumption versus saving). Though not the precipitating factor in the current crisis, the weakening of household balance sheets (fewer assets, same liabilities, less net worth, more anxiety) has likely had a significant effect in depressing consumption, which has been the single largest factor in our recent decline in GDP. The Federal Reserve recently released a snapshot of the household balance sheet in its triennial Survey of Consumer Finances, so we can see what the situation looks like in some detail. The survey was actually taking in 2007, but with a few adjustments we can see what the current balance sheet looks like.
On the headline level, median income fell from $47,500 to $47,300 (all figures are in constant 2007 dollars), while median net worth (assets minus liabilities) grew from $102,200 to $120,300. No surprise there: we already knew wages stagnated, while real estate and stocks appreciated. However, since the survey was conducted in 2007, median net worth fell by 17.8% according to the Fed estimate, to $99,300, and that’s just to October 2008. Given that the cumulative returns of the stock market have been about -15% since October 31, and that housing prices have fallen as well (and the Fed used a housing index that has fallen less than the Case-Shiller index*), that net worth is probably between $90,000 and $95,000 – significantly less than in 2004, and back around 1998 levels ($91,300).
Welcome to New Readers
We’ve had a big surge of first-time visitors since Simon’s interview with Bill Moyers started broadcasting last night. We hope you enjoy the site and return often. You can also get free updates using an RSS reader or via email.
On the chance that some of you are new to the economics blogs, I wanted to suggest a few other sites you might also want to check out (in addition to our Financial Crisis for Beginners section). We are nowhere close to the be-all and end-all of information about the global economy, and in any case the more perspectives you get, the better.
- Planet Money is an excellent, excellent podcast for people who are relatively new to the world of economics and the financial crisis, and for people who commute and can listen to it in their cars. I listen to it for fun.
- Calculated Risk and naked capitalism are good sources for near-real-time news about the crisis and the economy in general. Calculated Risk has a particular focus on housing and mortgages; naked capitalism has incisive commentary from one side of the political spectrum.
- Econbrowser is more technical and data-oriented; more advanced readers will like this one.
- Economist’s View and Marginal Revolution provide in-depth articles applying economics to broad range of phenomena.
- RGE Monitor is the home of Nouriel Roubini and also aggregates articles from all over the Internet.
Of course, we would love to see you again here.
(Feel free to add other suggestions in the comments.)
The Stress Test: Time for Transparency
Like many people, I was disappointed by the Financial Stability Plan announced on Tuesday. But I think there is one glimmer of hope: the “stress test.”
A key component of the Capital Assistance Program is a forward looking comprehensive “stress test” that requires an assessment of whether major financial institutions have the capital necessary to continue lending and to absorb the potential losses that could result from a more severe decline in the economy than projected. (Emphasis added.)
The stress test is supposed to indicate which banks are healthy and which aren’t (so they can be fixed or closed). We need this for the reason most of you already know: nobody thinks the banks (meaning, mainly, the big ones) are healthy. The New York Times has a good summary of the situation. Nouriel Roubini thinks U.S. banks are facing another $1 trillion in write-downs. The IMF thinks it’s more like $500 billion. The only people who think the banks are healthy are the bankers themselves:
“Our analysis shows that the banks have varying degrees of solvency and does not reveal that any institution is insolvent,” said Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs at the Financial Services Roundtable, a trade group whose members include the largest banks.
Edward L. Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association, called claims of technical insolvency “speculation by people who have no specific knowledge of bank assets.”
Europe Is in Bigger Trouble than the U.S.
This is a theme that Simon in particularly has been sounding. Now, according to the Telegraph, a confidential European Commission memo confirms this. To review, the basic problems, relative to the U.S., are:
- Disproportionately large banking sectors (the Iceland problem) in some countries, such as the U.K.
- High exposure to U.S.-originated toxic assets (up to 50% of those assets, I have heard estimated).
- Major exposure to emerging markets, primarily Eastern Europe and secondarily Latin America, which have been harder hit by this crisis than anyone else.
- Higher pre-crisis national debt levels (for many but not all countries).
- For countries that use the euro, no control over monetary policy.
Continue reading “Europe Is in Bigger Trouble than the U.S.”
No Wishful Thinking
At management team meetings at my old company, there was a slogan I was known for: “No wishful thinking.” I would trot it out whenever I felt like our expectations for the future (say, our sales projections, or our product delivery dates) were being influenced by our desires for the future. Let’s say, for example, that you have to hit your sales target, raise more money, or lay people off. It is very easy to plan around hitting your sales target, because the other options are unpleasant. But that would clearly be folly.
I thought of this when listening to an interview Adam Posen did for Monday’s Planet Money (beginning around the 6-minute mark). The Geithner Plan had not yet been announced, but Posen already had the right diagnosis: wishful thinking. The administration, on his analysis, is hoping that it will be able to turn the economy around without having to take tough measures with the banks.
Martin Wolf puts it this way:
[H]oping for the best is what one sees in . . . the new plans for fixing the banking system. . . .
The banking programme seems to be yet another child of the failed interventions of the past one and a half years: optimistic and indecisive.
Now, About That Stimulus Bill
As I understand them, the Republicans’ main reasons for opposing the stimulus bill (0 votes in the House, 3 in the Senate) were: (a) the bill contains too much evil government spending, (b) it doesn’t spend money fast enough to affect the economy, and (c) it’s too big. There are really no grounds for bipartisan agreement on (c), especially since many Democratic economists believe the stimulus is too small given the yawning output gap. But even conceding for a moment that (a) and (b) are valid concerns, I’m still baffled by the reduction of state aid from $79 billion to $40 billion. (See the New York Times comparison here.)
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, states are facing new budget shortfalls of $51 billion this fiscal year (ends June 30) and at least $94 billion for next fiscal year. Direct federal government aid to states will do no more than partially fill those budget gaps and enable state and local governments to keep people employed instead of firing them – teachers, firefighters, etc. While one might have concerns about whether the government can spend money on new programs efficiently, in this case the money will go to basic services that the government is already providing. This is only wasteful if you take the extreme view that all government spending in general is wasteful and any excuse to reduce it is a good one (the old “starve the beast” argument). The money can be spent quickly, because all the mechanisms needed to spend it already exist. Even if it is spent over several months (because people earn their salaries over the year), it will still have an immediate stimulative effect, because people who have jobs spend a lot more than people who don’t have jobs. It will have a high multiplier, because every dollar of government payrolls counts as one dollar of GDP, so the multiplier on government salaries is roughly the multiplier on tax cuts plus one. And it will even save a little money in unemployment benefits.
There are a lot of things one can argue about in the Senate version of the stimulus, but this I just don’t understand at all.
So Now We Know . . .
Counting down to the announcement of the Geithner plan, the New York Times has this account of how it came into being (and why it should be called the “Geithner plan,” although maybe Larry Summers is hiding behind him):
In the end, Mr. Geithner largely prevailed in opposing tougher conditions on financial institutions that were sought by presidential aides, including David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, according to administration and Congressional officials.
Mr. Geithner, who will announce the broad outlines of the plan on Tuesday morning, successfully fought against more severe limits on executive pay for companies receiving government aid.
He resisted those who wanted to dictate how banks would spend their rescue money. And he prevailed over top administration aides who wanted to replace bank executives and wipe out shareholders at institutions receiving aid.
I’m not a huge fan of executive compensation caps, as I think they are something of a sideshow. But I think the general approach of playing nice with banks and their shareholders is a mistake, because it leads to intransparent subsidies like the privately-financed bad bank is sure to be. (If the government is guaranteeing assets bought by private investors, as is widely rumored, it’s still a subsidy; it’s just not as obvious as writing a check.)
Is Saving Good?
For a complete list of Beginners articles, see Financial Crisis for Beginners.
Way back in October, one of our readers sent in a question which can be paraphrased roughly as: “During the boom everyone said we should be saving more. Now people are saying we should be spending more. What gives?” This question has been sitting in my inbox unanswered. Until now.
Two of the leading economics blogs in the world (OK, the English-speaking world) published posts entitled “The Paradox of Thrift” yesterday, solving my problem for me. Tyler Cowen started off with a link to Matthew Yglesias, who wrote a non-technical explanation of the sort I usually do in my Beginners posts. Read that first. (Cowen adds some semi-technical notes that you may or may not understand.) James Hamilton then gives a technical explanation, but by “technical” here I’m only referring to first-year undergraduate macroeconomics, so most people should be able to follow. Read that second, at least through the second paragraph after the second graph.
Yglesias basically says that if you save instead of spending, your bank can lend the money out to someone else to spend instead of you. It might go to your neighbor’s home equity line to buy a new flat-screen TV, in which case the economic impact is the same as if you had bought a flat-screen TV. Or it might go to some entrepreneur who is building a new factory, in which case the short-term GDP impact is the same (the money gets spent), but the long-term economic benefits are arguably higher (because in the long term we need new capital investment for the economy to continue growing). Hamilton shows the same thing with a simple equation. In the immediate term, S (personal savings) and I (private investment) both contribute to GDP, so one is just as good as the other; but in the long term, we need I, so savings are good.
However, it does not necessarily follow that every dollar saved necessarily and magically becomes another dollar invested. There are many reasons why increased savings may result not in increased investment, but simply in the same level of investment, which means total output (GDP) will be lower. Yglesias, Hamilton, and Cowen all point out various examples of why this can happen. In a dismal economic climate like the current one, entrepreneurs may not want to build new factories (put another way, demand for credit may not exist, so the banks have no place to lend the money). Or the savings may be going into zombie banks that are hoarding cash instead of lending it out. Or the economy may simply not be able to adjust fast enough: in order to shift out of cars and into anti-gravity hovercraft, it may just not be possible to retrain the workers fast enough to put all the available capital to use.
So in the long term, there are good things about a higher savings rate, not least that it will reduce the number of people facing poverty in their retirement years. But if we get there too quickly, it could exacerbate the recession we are going through.
Here’s an Idea . . .
. . . since the Geithner-Summers team seems to be looking for them.
Why not say that all bank compensation above a baseline amount – say, $150,000 in annual salary – has to be paid in toxic assets off the bank’s balance sheet? Instead of getting a check for $10,000, the employee would get $10,000 in toxic assets, at their current book value. A federal regulator can decide which assets to pay compensation in; if they were all fairly valued, then it wouldn’t matter which ones the regulator chose. That would get the assets off the bank’s balance sheet, and into the hands of the people responsible for putting them there – at the value that they insist they are worth. Of course, the average employee does not get to set the balance sheet value of the assets, and may not have been involved in creating or buying those particular assets. But think about the incentives: talented people will flow to the companies that are valuing their assets the most realistically (since inflated valuations translate directly into lower compensation), which will give companies the incentive to be realistic in their valuations. (Banks could inflate their nominal compensation amounts to compensate for their overvalued assets, but then they would have to take larger losses on their income statements.)
We can dream, can’t we?
How Do You Like Them Free Markets?
By now everyone knows about this past year’s Wall Street bonuses: $18.4 billion total, the fifth-highest total ever; the $4 billion in bonuses rushed through by Merrill Lynch before its acquisition by Bank of America; and John Thain’s demand for a personal $10 million bonus (which was initially a demand for $30-40 million, according to Felix Salmon). This has, not surprisingly, unleashed a torrent of rage against Wall Street, up to and including Barack Obama, who called the bonuses “shameful.”
The usual defense of this sort of behavior is that you have to pay the market price for talent, the bonuses for top people are only a small fraction of the value they contribute (not a particularly good argument this year), and so on. And this is, not surprisingly, what John Thain was able to muster up in his defense on CNBC:
If you don’t pay your best people, you will destroy your franchise. Those best people can get jobs other places, they will leave. . . . you have to– pay market prices at the time.
Yes, there is a market for labor, and compensation is the price set by that market. And maybe it’s even a free market. But it’s certainly not a well-functioning market (one where price = marginal cost, for example, or where the surplus is divided between the parties, or where the right incentives are created).
The Baseline Scenario 