Author: James Kwak

And Now, the Counterargument

With mainstream and not-so-mainstream economists (including us) tripping over themselves talking about the need for a stimulus plan (and how the current one may actually be too small), and having just written an article saying the U.S. can probably absorb some more national debt before things go haywire (so did Simon), I thought it was only fair to point to the counterargument.

William Buiter at the FT argues that the U.S. cannot afford a major fiscal stimulus because the government (by which I think he means the entire political system, not just the Obama Administration) has no deficit-fighting credibility. If people do not believe that the government will raise taxes in the future to generate positive balances (I’m sorry to inform Congressional Republicans that cutting spending is not really an option, given the growth of entitlement commitments in the future and our increasing military needs, although cutting the growth rate of spending might be possible), they will conclude that the debt can only be paid off by inflating it away, which will drive interest rates up, the dollar down, and inflation up. Buiter spells this argument here and more recently here where he adds the U.S. is behaving like an emerging market economy in crisis (something with which we would agree).

Continue reading “And Now, the Counterargument” →

New Report Out, TARP Still a Subsidy

Elizabeth Warren’s Congressional Oversight Panel has announced that TARP has so far exchanged $254 billion in exchange for $176 billion worth of assets, which amounts to a cash subsidy of $78 billion (full report). The numbers are based on an analysis of ten specific deals – eight of the largest under the original Capital Purchase Program (not the eight largest, however, as Merrill is missing), plus the second bailouts of AIG and Citigroup. In the former, Treasury received $78 of assets for every $100 expended; in the latter, it received only $41. These results were then extrapolated to the full sample.

This is not really news, since the CBO already forecast a subsidy of $64 billion out of the first $247 billion invested, and the OMB came up with a similar estimate even earlier – and everyone writing back in October realized that the banks were getting a sweetheart deal compared to what was available from private capital, as indicated by Buffett-Goldman and Mitsubishi-Morgan Stanley.

Continue reading “New Report Out, TARP Still a Subsidy” →

Searching for a Free Lunch

I don’t envy President Obama’s economic team. When it comes to fixing our banking system, there is no easy solution.

I’ve been sick the past few days, but someone pointed out this article in The New York Times a few days ago that has a concrete illustration of the problem: a bond that an unnamed bank is holding on its books at 97 cents, but that S&P thinks is worth 87 cents (based on current loan-default assumptions), and could fall to 53 cents under a more negative scenario . . . and that is currently trading at 38 cents. Assume for the sake of argument that all of our major banks are insolvent if they have to mark these assets down to market value. The crux of the issue is that any scheme in which the banks receive more than market value is a gift from taxpayers to bank shareholders, and any scheme in which they are forced to take market value is one that the banks will not participate in. Let’s look at a few possibilities:

  1. The government forces banks to write down their assets to reflect worst-case scenarios (unless they do this, no one will have confidence that the asset values won’t fall further), and then recapitalizes them to make them solvent. This is a desirable outcome, but bank shareholders won’t go for it because they will be mostly wiped out. This is roughly what Sweden did with two banks, but Sweden nationalized them first, so the shareholders didn’t matter.
  2. The government creates an aggregator bank to buy up toxic assets. If the aggregator pays market value, no bank will sell; if it pays above market value, it’s a gift. The current idea I’ve heard is that the aggregator will only buy assets that have already been significantly marked down, but that doesn’t really help the banks any.
  3. Another idea is having the government guarantee toxic assets, as it did for Citigroup and Bank of America so far. But this doesn’t solve the problem. There is already a market to insure toxic assets – it’s called the credit default swap market. If the government provides insurance at existing market prices, no bank will buy it, because the cost of the insurance would make it insolvent. If the government provides cut-rate insurance, as it almost certainly did for Citi and B of A, then it is a gift. The only “benefits” of an insurance arrangement are: (a) it’s much less obvious that the government is giving bank shareholders a gift; and (b) the way Citi and B of A were structured, it wouldn’t require a lot of cash from Treasury (and hence from Congress), because most of the guarantee was provided by the Fed.
  4. Meredith Whitney thinks that the banks should sell their “crown jewel” assets – presumably, businesses they have that are still in good shape – to private equity firms, and use the cash to repair their balance sheets. This would be a nice solution, but I don’t foresee it happening. Given the choice between selling the good operations and being left with barely-solvent portfolios of runoff businesses, or holding onto the good operations and hoping for a government bailout, I think all the Wall Street CEOs are betting on the latter.

I think there are two possible outcomes to all of this: (1) the government makes a gift to bank shareholders and justifies it on the grounds that there was no other choice; or (2) the government forces the banks to sell assets at market value and accept a government recapitalization program – either by exercising its regulatory authority (similar to an FDIC takeover) or by just buying out all the common shareholders at their current low prices. In option (2), the government would then re-privatize the banks at some point. But there’s no easy solution.

Random Observations on the GDP Announcement

By now I imagine you know that GDP contracted at an annual rate of 3.8% in Q4, beating economists’ “consensus” prediction of a 5.4% decrease. (Why do people insist on calling an average of forecasts a “consensus?”) A few thoughts:

  • You can waste a lot of time looking over GDP statistics. Go to the news release page and download the Excel tables in the right-hand sidebar.
  • The “consensus” is that the reason for the positive surprise was an unexpected increase in inventories. (Goods added to inventory count as production, even if they aren’t bought off the shelves.) But . . .
  • With any set of numbers that add up to their totals, you can’t really find true causality. All you can do is point out numbers you think are particularly interesting. Another way to look at it is that the numbers were helped out a lot by short-term deflation, particularly due to falling gasoline prices. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) , the biggest component of GDP by far, fell at an 8.9% annual rate in nominal terms. But the price deflator for PCE fell by so much – an annual rate of 5.5% – that in real terms PCE only fell at a 3.5% annual rate. That fall in prices was almost entirely due to the fall energy prices, which is highly unlikely to be repeated. But do people consciously reduce their spending in nominal or real terms? Nominal, I would think. So, as I “predicted” in December (I always have so many caveats that it’s not really fair to say that I ever predict anything), Q4 was better than expected, but Q1 is likely to be worse than predicted (before today, that is, since everyone is revising their Q1 forecasts down right now), since people will keep ratcheting down spending in nominal terms, but we won’t be bailed out by such a steep fall in prices.
  • The savings rate climbed from 1.2% to 2.9% – but it still has a long way to go (it was over 10% in the 1980s).
  • Real expenditures on food were down 4% (that’s not an annual rate, that means people spent 4% less on food in Q4 than in Q3). Ouch. I hope that was mainly a shift from restaurants to eating at home.

Back to more useful things.

What Does “Private” Mean?

Yesterday, Tim Geithner told reporters, “We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system.” On its face, I think most Americans would agree that a private banking sector is better than just having one big government bank. But “private” can still mean a lot of different things. For starters, here are three: (a) day-to-day operations are managed by ordinary corporate managers who are paid to maximize profits, rather than by government bureaucrats; (b) those profits flow to private shareholders, rather than the government; (c) the overall flow of credit in the economy is determined by private market forces, rather than the government.

When people debate “nationalization,” it’s not always clear whether they are talking about ending (a) and (b) or just (b).  The recapitalizations to date under the TARP Capital Purchase Program have bent over backwards to avoid either one. Because the government purchased nonconvertible preferred shares, it has no ability (that I know of, although Robert Reich thinks otherwise in an article I’ll come back to) to turn them into common stock with voting rights that lead to management control; and because the shares pay a fixed 5% dividend, they are a lot like a loan, where any profits after paying off the loan flow to existing shareholders.

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Long-Term Returns to Stimulus: Education

The fiscal stimulus debate is currently hampered by confusion over its objectives. On the one hand, one purpose of the stimulus is to generate economic activity quickly in order to boost aggregate demand and break the recessionary spiral we seem to be in. On the other hand, people rightly worry about the capacity of the government to spend large amounts of money quickly without wasting it, and argue that the money should be put to productive use, rather than paying people to dig holes and then fill them in again. (This is why you see (at least) two versions of criticism of the stimulus plan: on the one hand, the criticism is that the government is incapable of putting money to productive use; on the other hand, the criticism is that money for things like electronic health records will not be spent in time to have a short-term effect.)

My opinion is that both are valid purposes. There probably is a limit to the number of tens of billions of dollars the government can spend next month without wasting some of it. But given the projected duration of the output gap (the difference between potential and actual GDP, meaning that the economy is performing below its full-employment capacity), I think there is also value in programs that take several quarters to disburse their money – as long as those programs are also good investments.

One major area of spending is education, where the plan includes more than $150 billion in new spending over two years. While politicians (and economists) reflexively cite education as an area where investments can have positive long-term returns (through increases in productivity which increase GDP and our average standard of living), I wanted to see what empirical research there has been on this topic. There has been a lot of research on the impact on individuals’ earnings of additional education (this is a common example used in first-year statistics classes), but somewhat less on the impact on national economic growth.

Continue reading “Long-Term Returns to Stimulus: Education” →

The Scariest Blog Post Ever

Seeking Alpha is perhaps the largest financial blog/blog aggregator around. And for at least a week now, one of their “most popular” posts has been The Scariest Chart Ever. Take a look. Then come back here.

The chart itself isn’t very scary. It shows that the amount borrowed by banks from the Federal Reserve – “Borrowings of Depository Institutions from the Federal Reserve” – has spiked from a trivial level (a few billion dollars) to several hundred billion. It sat at a trivial level because, in ordinary times, there is no reason for a bank to borrow at the discount window when it can borrow instead from another bank at a lower rate (since the Fed funds rate is usually lower than the discount rate). It has spiked up recently as a symptom of the credit crisis; basically, what the chart shows is that the Fed is doing its job of providing liquidity in a crisis.

What’s scary is that the author of the post claims that the chart shows “federal borrowing,” called it “the scariest chart ever,” and concluded, “Anyone still think there are not some rough patches down the road?” . . . and then this became the most popular post on the most popular financial blog in the world. And even though a few people (including me) tried to point out the basic error, the vast majority of the comments pile on to the idea that this chart shows a huge spike in government borrowing.

This is scary (actually, depressing might be a better word) for those of us who think that blogs (and the Internet in general) can serve a valuable purpose in disseminating useful information and allowing constructive discussion. It also points to the importance of financial education, although maybe this example is more about basic verbal education (read the title of the chart) and numerical education (read the numbers on the Y axis: if the chart says that government borrowing was a few billion dollars as recently as 2007, then there’s something wrong).

Update: I should point out that in general I think Seeking Alpha provides a useful service by aggregating information from a wide variety of blogs and using community techniques to filter through them. Among other things, they republish some articles that Simon and I write here. This example just shows that sometimes the community filtering technique produces weird results.

Meanwhile, Elsewhere . . .

All the hubbub about the new Obama Administration and the probably-impending bank rescue plan has diverted my attention a bit from goings-on in the rest of the world. I decided to spend a little time checking in, thanks to the magic of the Internet. And things do not look so good.

  • Japan, in what looks like sign of desperation, announced a plan to buy shares directly in companies (not just banks) that are having trouble raising capital. The idea seems to be that, since companies are having trouble borrowing money from banks, they should get it from the government instead. This looks like a much broader and more direct intervention – deciding who gets capital and who doesn’t – than anything that has been contemplated in the U.S.
  • Germany, the largest economy in the EU and one once thought to be relatively safe in the current crisis (as compared to the U.S. or the U.K., with our overgrown financial sectors), is now projected to see a contraction in GDP of over 3% (composite Bloomberg forecast) – but still struggled to pass a stimulus package of $65 billion – or 2.5% of GDP – over 2 years.  And despite an annual government deficit under 3% of GDP (ours is over 8% by comparison), the political pressure is to reduce the deficit and return to a balanced budget out of fear of inflation. This only highlights the tensions within the Eurozone between countries with different economic situations and priorities.
  • The Institute for International Finance projects that net private sector capital flows (investments, whether direct investment, equity, or debt) to emerging markets will be $165 billion in 2009, a staggering 65% drop from 2008. Commercial banks are expected on balance to withdraw $61 billion from the region. As a result, regions such as Eastern Europe whose recent growth was dependent on foreign lending are likely to contract for some time to come, as companies are unable to refinance their debt.
  • Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, estimates that the economic crisis has pushed 100 million people around the world into poverty.

One of the themes of this crisis has been that whatever problems we have here in the U.S., countries with weaker borrowing power, currencies, social safety nets, and financial sectors face much bigger problems. That isn’t changing.

Sweden for Beginners

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

With the regularity of a pendulum, the focus of discussion has swung back to the banking system (September: Lehman and AIG; November: Citigroup; January: Bank of America, and everyone else). And as everyone waits in anticipation for the Obama team’s first big swing, there has been increased discussion of . . . Sweden, including a recent New York Times article and a fair amount of blog activity, with a broad overview by Steve Waldman. (For other accounts, see this Cleveland Fed paper and a review of the crisis published by the Swedish central bank (which, according to Wikipedia, is also the world’s oldest central bank).)

Why Sweden? Because Sweden had its own financial crisis in the early 1990s, and by many accounts did a reasonably good job of pulling out of it. A housing bubble, fueled by cheap credit, collapsed in 1990, with residential real estate prices falling by 25% in real terms by 1995 and nonperforming loans reaching 11% by 1993, while the Swedish krona fell in value by 30%, hurting a banking sector largely financed by foreign funds. As Urban Backstrom said in a 1997 paper, “[the] aggregate loan losses [of the seven largest banks] amounted to the equivalent of 12 percent of Sweden’s annual GDP. The stock of nonperforming loans was much larger than the banking sector’s total equity capital.” In other words, the banking sector as a whole was broke.

Continue reading “Sweden for Beginners” →

Protectionism by Another Name?

One thing you can probably get 99% of economists to agree on is that a global trade war in the middle of a global recession is a bad idea. If every country increases import tariffs, hoping to protect its domestic industry from foreign competition, global trade will fall in all directions, hurting everybody. Put another way, increased tariffs are a negative-sum game.

To date, we haven’t seen much in the way of higher trade barriers during this crisis, although you could argue that some bailouts constitute subsidies favoring local over foreign companies. Instead, however, we are seeing friction over currency valuations. If you want to boost your net exports but don’t want to do the obviously unfriendly thing and increase tariffs, the other option is to devalue your currency: a weaker currency increases the price of imported goods and reduces the price of exported goods, hence reducing imports and increasing exports.

Yesterday, Tim Geithner accused China of “manipulating its currency,” something we’ve heard periodically over the last several years but not in much in the last few months. (Of course, Geithner then said that “a strong dollar is in America’s national interest,” whatever that means.)  Switzerland threatened to intervene on foreign exchange markets to suppress the value of the Swiss franc. And the French finance minister criticized the U.K. for letting the pound depreciate. (Hat tip Macro Man for the last two.)

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More on Financial Education

My earlier post on basic financial education got a fair amount of attention, so I wanted to point out one source for more information on the topic. Zvi Bodie, Dennis McLeavey, and Laurence B. Siegel hosted a conference in 2006 on “The Future of Life-Cycle Saving and Investing,” and the most of the presentations and comments can be downloaded as a PDF from this site. Some of the general themes of the conference were: people don’t save enough for retirement; people have to make important financial decisions on their own; but people tend to make suboptimal financial decisions (like not rolling over retirement accounts), so giving them more “choice” leads to bad results; and the financial advice they are getting is not necessarily helpful.

Bodie, in his concluding remarks on investor education (pp. 169-71), provides this diagnosis:

We need institutional innovation to address the problem of investor education. Most people have honorable intentions, but we all want to make a living. In that respect, we are all salesmen to some extent. The trick, therefore, is getting people to serve the public interest while they are serving their own interests. . . .

[T]he U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is part of the problem. The educational materials distributed by financial services firms and by the SEC are often misleading and biased in favor of products that may not be suitable for large numbers of consumers. . . .

Therefore, universities and professional associations should cooperate in designing, producing, and disseminating objective financial education that is genuinely trustworthy. In doing so, we have to distinguish between marketing materials and bona fide education.

But there is lots more interesting stuff throughout the book. Laurence Kotlikoff (pp. 55-71) analyzes the problems with the conventional method of estimating target retirement savings, and shows that small mistakes can lead to unhappy outcomes. And the sessions are full of frightening information, especially Alicia Munnell’s session; for example, in 2004 the average 401(k)/IRA balance for a head of household age 55-64 was only $60,000. The outlook for retirement security looks pretty grim. And all of this was written at the peak of the boom.

“Bad Banks” for Beginners

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

What is a bad bank? . . . No, I don’t mean that kind of bad bank, with which we are all much too familiar. I mean the kind of “bad bank” that is being discussed as a possible solution to the problems in our banking sector.

In this sense, a bad bank is a bank that holds bad, or “toxic” assets, allowing some other bank to get rid of these assets and thereby become a “good bank.” Continue reading ““Bad Banks” for Beginners” →

Pick Ourselves Up, Dust Ourselves Off . . .

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America. For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of our economy calls for action: bold and swift. And we will act not only to create new jobs but to lay a new foundation for growth.

When my daughter falls down, I usually say, “pick yourself up and brush yourself off.”

Not surprisingly, Barack Obama’s speech today was long on ambitions and short on specifics, as is customary for the occasion. We’ve been writing at length about the economic challenges that the Obama administration faces and some of its policy options, so there’s no need to rehash that in detail today. Suffice it to say that deep crisis creates a rare opportunity, and Obama has the opportunity to leave a greater mark on the economy than any president since Reagan or perhaps FDR.

On another note: Although this blog is generally about economics, I am particularly curious to hear what the new president will say about torture. I drafted a speech that I would like to hear him give over on Talking Points Memo Cafe.

The Importance of Education

Robert Shiller, he of the Case-Shiller Index (and therefore a reasonable symbolic candidate for 2008 Man of the Year, were it not for a certain presidential election), has an op-ed in The New York Times advocating a government program to subsidize financial advice for anyone, particularly low-income people. There is a lot to like about this idea. In Shiller’s proposal, the subsidy would only apply to advisors who charge by the hour and do not take commissions or fund management fees, so they would have no incentive to steer clients into particular investments or into unnecessary transactions. It seems reasonable that, if they had access to impartial advice, some people might not have taken on mortgages they had no hope of paying back or, more prosaically, some people might do a better job of budgeting and take on less credit card debt.

But I have one major reservation, which is that I’m not sure how good the financial advice would be. In my opinion, most financial advice floating around is worth less than nothing. To take the most obvious example: by sheer volume, the largest proportion of financial advice that exists (counting all advice that anyone gives to anyone else via any means of communication) is almost certainly advice on buying individual stocks, and the second largest is probably advice on choosing mutual funds. I am firmly in the camp that believes that whether or not stocks obey the efficent market hypothesis, it is not within the capabilities of any individual investor to identify stock trades that will have an expected risk-adjusted return higher than the market as a whole, net of transaction costs. I also believe it is not in within the capabilities of any stock mutual fund manager, and that all of the variation in risk-adjusted mutual fund performance can be explained by pure statistical variation. And even if I’m wrong about that, and there are a few exceptional fund managers out there, I don’t believe that any individual could distinguish the exceptional managers from the simply lucky ones; and even if he could, by the time he did he would be buying into a fund that had grown so big it was no longer capable of above-market returns.

If this is so, why doesn’t the market for financial advice take care of this problem?

Continue reading “The Importance of Education” →