Category: Commentary

Accountability Time

With Congress back in session, accountability is the theme of the week. Barney Frank announced the “TARP Reform and Accountability Act of 2009,” which I hope to get to in a day or two. But for now I want to talk about Elizabeth Warren and the Congressional Oversight Panel for TARP, which issued their second report on Friday. Of course, beating the accountability drum at Henry Paulson’s expense is politically easy, and a lot less controversial than, say, designing a stimulus package or a foreclosure reduction plan. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important.

Back in September, Simon and I wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post that focused on the incentive problems in the initial TARP proposal and cynically predicted:

It is most likely that “governance” over the fund will be provided by periodic hearings of the relevant Senate and House committees during which the Treasury secretary and the fund managers will be asked why they overpaid for banks’ securities and will answer that there was no choice if the financial system was to be saved.

(Recall that the proposal at that point was for Treasury to buy toxic assets from financial institutions, most likely overpaying the process.) However, the governance measures were strengthened in the eventual legislation, and it does seem that Elizabeth Warren and most of her committee (Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, did not endorse the report) are committed to keeping Treasury under tight scrutiny, which is all good.

Continue reading “Accountability Time” →

A Sliver of Optimism

One of the scary things about this fall’s descent into economic chaos was the failure of economic forecasters to keep pace. Every week economists would predict what they said were terrible things, and then the data would come in much worse, reinforcing the overall impression that no one knew what was going on.

Buried in all the negative reports about the December jobs data was one fact that was a tiny bit encouraging: the December job losses were almost exactly what forecasters expected, on average. This indicates that it’s possible that the macroeconomic community has come to grips with the magnitude of the downturn; if you’re feeling particularly giddy, you might even infer that this means that their GDP forecasts are in the right ballpark, which means (according to the WSJ) that the economy should start growing in Q3.

I wouldn’t go that far, though, and I think that Q3 forecast is too optimistic. It takes time to plan and execute a layoff (I’ve been there), so December layoffs are based on revenue projections based on data from October and maybe November. Because sales continued to fall faster than expected in November, companies will find they have to lay off more people than they initially expected, and that will drag into the new year. Furthermore, no one really knows how much the American household will shift from consumption to saving, and my sneaking suspicion is that it will be more than most people expect.

So all I can offer is a tiny sliver of optimism, that the people in the forecasting business are at least on the same planet as the rest of us. But still no one is sure what planet we’re on.

Paulson v. Buffett

Bloomberg has a new story out comparing the investment terms achieved by TARP with those achieved by Warren Buffett when he invested $5 billion in Goldman back in September. The results aren’t pretty for the U.S. taxpayer: the government received warrants worth $13.8 billion in connection with its 25 largest equity injections; under the terms Buffett got from Goldman, those warrants would be worth $130.8 billion. (The calculations were done using the Black-Scholes option pricing formula, which has its critics, but which I think is still a good way of estimating the relative difference between similar options.) That’s on top of the fact that TARP is getting a lower interest rate (5%) on its preferred stock investments than is Buffett (10%), which costs taxpayers $48 billion in aggregate over 5 years, according to Bloomberg. The difference in the value of the warrants themselves is due to two factors: (1) Treasury got warrants for a much smaller percentage of the initial investment amount; and (2) those warrants are at a higher strike price – the average price over the 20 days prior to investment, while Buffett got a discount to market price on the date of investment.

The comparison isn’t a new one – we recommended that TARP emulate Buffett back in October – but Bloomberg’s analysis has put the performance gap in striking perspective. Simon has a quote in the article, using the word “egregious,” but the really harsh words came from Nobel prize-winner economist Joseph Stiglitz, who said, “Paulson said he had to make it attractive to banks, which is code for ‘I’m going to give money away,'” and “If Paulson was still an employee of Goldman Sachs and he’d done this deal, he would have been fired.”

Continue reading “Paulson v. Buffett” →

Who’s Afraid of Deflation?

According to the Federal Open Market Committee’s (FOMC) minutes, released on Tuesday, some members think inflation targetting would be a useful way to persuade people that prices will not fall, i.e., forestall deflationary expectations.  WSJ.com seems to have the interpretation about right,

“The added clarity in that regard might help forestall the development of expectations that inflation would decline below desired levels, and hence keep real interest rates low and support aggregate demand,” according to the minutes.

In other words, a commitment to an inflation target, say annual growth of 1.5% to 2%, would help keep prices from falling outright and prevent the kind of economic chaos that plagued Japan in the 1990s and the U.S. during the Great Depression.

The Congressional Budget Office thinks there is still time to prevent deflation (or perhaps it is the new measures already in the works that will keep inflation positive).  Their forecast for 2009 (see Table 1 in today’s testimony) predicts low inflation, e.g., the PCE price index is expected to be 0.6 percent for 2009 – but note that the CPI is seen as barely positive, at 0.1 percent, over the same period.

Meanwhile, the financial markets (e.g., inflation swaps) predict minus 4 percent inflation in 2009 (part of which is likely due to lower commodity prices) and then a small degree of deflation over the next few years.  According to this view, we should next see today’s price level again in about 5 or 6 years.

Of course, the financial markets could well be wrong.  It may be that the markets haven’t fully digested or understood the size of the fiscal stimulus, and it may be that further news about other parts of the Obama approach (including the directly on housing and banking) will significantly change inflation expectations.

But it is striking that financial market inflation expectations – e.g., over a five year horizon – have barely moved from their low/near deflation level since it became clear that Mr Obama would win the election or since we first realized that a massive fiscal stimulus would soon arrive (see slide 2 in my presentation from Sunday; the scale is hard to read, but the decline is from around 2% through the summer to around 0% currently).  At least for now, whether or not we are heading for deflation remains the key open question.

China and the U.S. Debt

I’m warming up for a longish Beginners-style article on government debt, which will come out next week or so. In the meantime, the New York Times has an article today about China’s diminishing demand for U.S. dollar-denominated debt. Theoretically this could make it harder for the U.S. to borrow money and thereby push up the interest rates on our debt (now at extremely low levels).

China’s voracious demand for American bonds has helped keep interest rates low for borrowers ranging from the federal government to home buyers. Reduced Chinese enthusiasm for buying American bonds will reduce this dampening effect.

However, the article doesn’t mention one compensating factor. The fall in China’s buildup of its foreign currency reserves is linked to the rise in the U.S. savings rate, which is projected to rise to as much as 6-10% (it was over 10% in the 1980s). Some of that new savings will go to pay down debt, but a lot will go into savings accounts, CDs, money market funds, and mutual funds – which means that depresses interest rates across the board. On the back of the envelope, 6% of personal income is about $600 billion a year in new domestic savings to compensate for reduced overseas investment. Whether this will be enough to compensate entirely I don’t know. But if we were all one global economy in the boom, we’re still one global economy in the bust.

Causes: Economics

We are not short of causes for our current economic crisis.  The basic machinery of capitalism, including the process of making loans, did not work as it was supposed to.  Capital flows around the world proved much more destabilizing than even before (and we’ve seen some damaging capital flows over the past 200 years.)  And there are plenty of distinguished individuals with something to answer for, including anyone who thought they understood risk and how to manage it.

But perhaps the real problem lies even deeper, for example, either with a natural human tendency towards bubbles  or with how we think about the world.  All of our thinking about the economy – a vast abstract concept – has to be in some form of model, with or without mathematics.  And we should listen when a leading expert on a large set of influential models says (1) they are broken, and (2) this helped cause the crisis and – unless fixed – will lead to further instability down the road.

This is an important part of what my colleague, Daron Acemoglu, is saying in a new essay, “The Crisis of 2008: Structural Lessons for and from Economics.”  (If you like to check intellectual credentials, start here and if you don’t understand what I mean about models, look at his new book.)  To me there are three major points in his essay. Continue reading “Causes: Economics” →

Obama Doubles Down

Barack Obama did not actually predict trillion-dollar deficits indefinitely; more precisely, he said, “unless we take decisive action, even after our economy pulls out of its slide, trillion-dollar deficits will be a reality for years to come” (emphasis added). At the same time, the highly competent Congressional Budget Office projected a $1.2 trillion deficit for fiscal 2009 (year ending 9/30/09).

I was initially surprised by Obama’s forthrightness on the deficit question, but on reflection there are three good reasons for him to do it:

  1. He wants to lower expectations by making the case that we have a serious deficit problem before taking office.
  2. He wants to signal that he is aware of the deficit issue, to try to defuse the attacks he is going to get from fiscal conservatives regarding his stimulus plan.
  3. He wants to use the current crisis – and the political opportunity it gives him, as a new and generally popular president with significant majorities in both houses – to tackle the long-term retirement savings problem.

If you parse the sentence, in saying “even after our economy pulls out of our slide,” Obama is saying that the long-term deficit problem would exist with or without the current crisis – and he is right. A $1.2 trillion deficit, caused by a steep fall in tax revenues, partially by the costs of various bailouts, and a little bit by two ongoing wars, is small compared to the Social Security and Medicare funding gaps ahead. In signaling that he will announce some kind of approach to entitlement spending by next month, Obama is implying that he wants to take on not just the short-term recession, but also the long-term deficit problem.

This is good for two reasons. First, someone has to face the problem. President Bush “tried” (not very hard) to do something about Social Security in 2005, although the general direction of his proposal, in shifting from a defined-benefit to a defined-contribution model, would have shifted risk from the government onto individuals.

Second, there are economic reasons why long-term sustainability should be addressed at the same time as short-term stimulus. Virtually everyone (even Martin Feldstein) favors a large, debt-financed government stimulus package. However, the more the government borrows, the more risk there is that lenders will worry about our ability to pay off the debt. While few people expect the U.S. to default, the more widespread fear is that we will print money (in a more sophisticated form, of course) to inflate away the debt. Because of those fears, large amounts of borrowing will drive up interest rates, especially as the economy recovers, both for the government (increasing our interest payments) and for the economy as a whole (undermining growth). The solution, if there is one, is to put forward a credible plan for dealing with the long-term retirement problem.

The risk, of course, is that Social Security and Medicare can be politically lethal, which is one reason President Bush backed off so fast. But I still think this is the right bet for Obama to make. Insofar as any solution is going to involve some pain (lower benefits, increased benefit age, higher taxes, increased control over health care), it is going to be easier to pass in a time of perceived collective crisis. And being willing to tackle the problem could also help gain support from fiscal conservatives for the stimulus that we need now.

Overweight Fiscal? (The Obama Economic Plan)

Most of the current discussion regarding the Obama Economic Plan focuses on whether the fiscal stimulus should be somewhat larger or smaller ($650-800bn seems the current range) and the composition between spending and tax cuts.  President Obama stressed on Tuesday that trillion dollar deficits are here to stay for several years, and it looks like part of the arguing in the Senate will be about whether this is a good idea.

There is at least one key question currently missing from this debate.  Is this Plan too much about a fiscal stimulus and too little about the other pieces that would help – and might even be essential – for a sustained recovery?  The fiscal stimulus may be roughly the right size (and $100bn more or less is unlikely to make a critical difference), but perhaps we should also be looking for more detail on the following:

1. Recapitalizing banks.  Their losses to date have not been replaced by new capital and it is currently not possible to issue new equity in the private markets.  If you think we can get back to growth without fixing banks, check Japan’s record in the 1990s.

2. Directly addressing housing problems, including moving to limit foreclosures and reduce the forced sales that follow foreclosures.  There is apparently some form of the Hubbard-Mayer proposal waiting in the wings, but we don’t know exactly what – and this matters, among other things, for thinking about the debt sustainability implications of the overall Plan.

3.  Finding ways to push up inflation, presumably by being more aggressive with monetary policy.  Deflation is looming – according to the financial markets, despite all of the Fed’s moves and recent statements, prices will fall or be flat over the next 3 to 5 years.  This fall in inflation, from its previous expected level around 2 percent per year, constitutes a big transfer from borrowers/spenders to net lenders/savers.  The contractionary effect is likely to outweigh any fiscal stimulus that is politically feasible or economically sound.  (We have more detail on this point on WSJ.com today, linked here.)

So perhaps the issue is not the absolute size or composition of the fiscal stimulus, but rather the role of the fiscal stimulus relative to other parts of the Plan.  Hopefully, it’s a more evenly weighted package, and just we haven’t yet seen the details.  Still, it’s odd that the presence and general contours of these other important elements have not yet been clearly flagged.

The Economic Crisis and the Crisis in Economics

The Economic Crisis

The global financial crisis of fall 2008 was unexpected.  A few people had been predicting that serious problems were looming, and even fewer had placed bets accordingly, but even they were astounded by what happened in mid-September.

What did happen?  There are many layers to unpeel, but let me begin with the three main events that triggered the severe global phase of the crisis. (See http://BaselineScenario.com for more on what came before, how events unfolded during fall 2008, and where matters now stand).

  • 1. On the weekend of September 13-14, 2008, the U.S. government declined to bailout Lehman. The firm subsequently failed, i.e., did not open for business on Monday, September 15. Creditors suffered major losses, and these had a particularly negative effect on the markets given that through the end of the previous week the Federal Reserve had been encouraging people to continue to do business with Lehman.
  • 2. On Tuesday, September 16, the government agreed to provide an emergency loan to the major insurance company, AIG. This loan was structured so as to become the company’s most senior debt and, in this fashion, implied losses for AIG’s previously senior creditors; the value of their investments in this AAA bastion of capitalism dropped 40% overnight.
  • 3. By Wednesday, September 17, it was clear that the world’s financial markets – not just the US markets, but particularly US money market funds – were in cardiac arrest. The Secretary of the Treasury immediately approached Congress for an emergency budgetary appropriation of $700bn (about 5% of GDP), to be used to buy up distressed assets and thus relieve pressure on the financial system. A rancorous political debate ensued, culminating in the passing of the so-called Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), but the financial and economic situation continued to deteriorate both in the US and around the world.

Thus began a financial and economic crisis of the first order, on a magnitude not seen at least since the 1930s and – arguably – with the potential to become bigger than anything seen in the 200 years of modern capitalism.  We do not yet know if the economic consequences are “merely” a severe recession or if there will be a prolonged global slump or worse.

The Crisis in Economics

Does this economic crisis constitute or imply a crisis for economics?  There are obviously two answers to this question: no, and yes. Continue reading “The Economic Crisis and the Crisis in Economics” →

Causes: Hank Paulson

Other posts in this occasional series.

I generally prefer systemic explanations for events, but it is obviously worthwhile to complement this with a careful study of key individuals. And in the current crisis, no individual is as interesting or as puzzling as Hank Paulson.

The big question must be: How could a person with so much market experience be repeatedly at the center of such major misunderstandings regarding the markets, and how could his team – stuffed full of people like him – struggle so much to communicate what they were doing and why?

Hank Paulson’s exit interview with the Financial Times contains some potential answers but also generates some new puzzles.

Continue reading “Causes: Hank Paulson” →

Eurozone Hard Pressed: 2% Fiscal Solution Deferred

One leading anti-recession idea for the moment is a global fiscal stimulus amounting to 2% of the planet’s GDP.  The precise math behind this calculation is still forthcoming, but it obviously assumes a big stimulus in the US and also needs to include a pretty big fiscal expansion in Europe.  (Emerging markets will barely be able to make a contribution that registers on the global scale.)

What are the likely prospects for a major eurozone fiscal stimulus?  My presentation yesterday on this question is here.  The main points are: Continue reading “Eurozone Hard Pressed: 2% Fiscal Solution Deferred” →

The Importance of Accounting

Or, as I thought of titling this post, SEC does something useful!

Accounting can seem a dreadfully boring subject to some, but it gets its moment in the sun whenever there is a financial crisis . . . remember Enron? This time around is no exception. During the panic of September, some people were calling for a suspension of mark-to-market accounting, and while they did not get what they wanted, they succeeded in inserting a provision in the first big bailout bill to study the relationship between mark-to-market accounting and the financial crisis.

A brief, high-level explanation of the dispute: Under mark-to-market accounting, assets on your balance sheet have to be valued at their current market values. So if you have $10 million worth of stock in Microsoft, but that stock falls to $5 million, you have to write it down on your balance sheet and take a $5 million loss on your income statement. The criticism was that mark-to-market was forcing financial institutions to take severe writedowns on assets whose market values had fallen precipitously, not because of their inherent value, but because nobody was buying these assets – think CDOs – and that banks were becoming insolvent because of an accounting technicality. Under this view, banks should be able to keep these assets at their “true” long-term values, instead of having to take writedowns due to short-term market fluctuations.

I am instinctively skeptical of this view, and in favor of mark-to-market accounting, because I believe that while market valuations may not be perfect, they are generally better than the alternative, which is allowing companies to estimate the values themselves, subject only to their auditors and regulators. But the issue is considerably  more complicated than either the simple criticism or my simple defense would imply.

Earlier this week, the SEC released its study of mark-to-market accounting as required by the bailout bill. Their conclusions are simple:

fair value [mark-to-market, as will be explained] accounting did not appear to play a meaningful role in bank failures occurring during 2008. Rather, bank failures in the U.S. appeared to be the result of growing probable credit losses, concerns about asset quality, and, in certain cases, eroding lender and investor confidence.

Continue reading “The Importance of Accounting” →

The G20: Gordon Brown’s Opportunity

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been trying to drum up support for some form of Bretton Woods Two, i.e., a big rethink regarding how the global economy is governed.  So far, little support has materialized for any kind of sweeping approach to these issues.

Still, the chairmanship of the G20 affords him a great opportunity to make progress in other ways.  (The G20 website still needs updating, as does the group’s Wikipedia entry; the key point is that this is now a forum for heads of government, rather than for ministers of finance/central bank governors.  The chair was due to rotate to the UK in any case; the fact that it falls to Mr Brown in person is an amazing stroke of luck for him.)

The G20 focus in November, as you may recall, was largely on re-regulation and it remains to be seen how much of that agenda will be implemented by the next meeting on April 2nd.  But that meeting was substantially under French auspices, despite taking place in Washington.  Mr Sarkozy’s staff were jubiliant by the meeting’s end: “we have put the bell on the American cat” was the most memorable quote.  The next meeting will take place in Britain, with a new US President at the table, and looks likely to be a much more serious affair. Continue reading “The G20: Gordon Brown’s Opportunity” →

Causes: Econbrowser Speaks

Other posts in this occasional series.

As you might imagine, I read (or skim) a lot of economics blogs. One of my favorites is Econbrowser, written by James Hamilton and Menzie Chinn. Whereas many blogs tell me good ideas that I didn’t think of but that theoretically I might have come up with (given infinite time and mental alertness), Econbrowser almost invariably teaches me something I absolutely couldn’t have known beforehand.

In the last week, both Hamilton and Chinn have written about the causes of the current economic crisis.

Menzie Chinn

For Chinn, the current situation was created by a “toxic mixture” of:

  • Monetary policy
  • Deregulation
  • Criminal activity and regulatory disarmament
  • Tax cuts and fiscal profligacy
  • Tax policy

He thinks that lax monetary policy was not particularly significant (or, more specifically, the policy was not lax given the information available at the time). He says that some examples of deregulation were more significant than others (repealing Glass-Steagall OK, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act not so much, which is the distinction I also made in an earlier post). Deregulation bleeds into the third point – the abandonment of regulatory agencies of their policing functions, along with examples where regulators committed actual fraud to aid the companies they were supposedly regulating (IndyMac being the prime example).

But the last two points are the ones you don’t hear a lot about. The Bush tax cuts fueled the asset price bubble, especially the second one (in 2003), which came long after the recession had ended and when housing prices were on the steep part of their climb. Under tax policy, Chinn takes aim at the tax deductibility of second homes; combined with tax cuts that largely favored the rich, this increased demand for second homes, and therefore the prices of homes. Right now many people are calling for tax cuts as a way to stimulate the economy, and while you can debate whether tax cuts are more effective than increased spending, that is a reasonable debate to have. In retrospect, the error Chinn is pointing to is cutting taxes – providing a fiscal stimulus, in other words – when it wasn’t needed, at the same time that interest rates were low. Since the Reagan administration, the argument for tax cuts has been to shrink the size of government, increase the incentive to work, and return money to people who know how to spend it better than the government. Only this time, we’ve reached a point where (almost) everyone agrees we need a fiscal stimulus, and the need is so pressing we’re going to ignore the fiscal handcuffs created by the Bush tax cuts, which makes no one happy.

James Hamilton

In a November 2008 lecture, current IMF chief economist Olivier Blanchard discusses the boom in oil prices in a footnote:

How could the very large increase in oil prices from the early 2000s to mid-2008 have such a small apparent impact on economic activity? After all, similar increases are typically blamed for the very deep recessions of
the 1970s and early 1980s.

Hamilton takes almost the opposite approach: maybe it was high oil prices that tipped the global economy into recession. While this may sound preposterous (everyone knows it was housing, right?), remember that the U.S. housing bubble has been front-page news since at least early 2007, yet the peak of financial panic didn’t occur until September-October 2008. Was there really a lot of new information about the subprime mortgage market that appeared during that time? Christopher Dodd was already holding hearings on the subprime meltdown in March 2007 (thanks to Michael Lewis’s book Panic! for reminding me of that.) Or was it something else?

Hamilton takes a 2007 model created by Lutz Kilian and Paul Edelstein of how changes in energy prices affect personal consumption. (Summary: an increase in energy prices that would require a 1% reduction in other purchases to buy the same amount of energy actually leads to a 2.2% decrease in consumption over 15 months.) He then applies the model to actual energy prices since the middle of 2007 and (according to my eyeballing the chart) shows that about half of the falloff in consumption over the period is due to increased energy prices.

The (possible) implication is that if oil had remained at its early 2007 prices, the decline in housing prices that was already clearly visible would not have been enough to cripple the financial system and bring the global economy to its knees. In the process, of course, we ended up with oil in the $30s, but the damage has clearly been done. Hamilton promises to continue this topic in a future post, and I’ll be watching out for it.

Some Questions about GMAC

I’m a little late to the GMAC bailout story, but after reading all the newspapers and blogs I usually read, there are still some things I don’t understand. I’m particularly confused about the announcement that GMAC will start lending to anyone with a credit score above 620, down from their previous minimum of 700. (The median credit score in the U.S. is 723.)

1. What is the relationship between GM and GMAC? I know that Cerberus owns 51% of GMAC and GM owns the other 49%. I also know that, in order to become a bank holding company, both were forced to reduce their ownership stakes. In any case, GMAC is an independent company that should not be run for the benefit of GM. Its obvious that GM benefits if GMAC reduces its lending standards. But how does GMAC benefit?

2. If a loan to someone with a credit score of 621 was a bad idea on Monday, why was it a good idea on Tuesday? The only theory I can think of under which this makes sense is that GMAC thinks that loans to people with credit scores of 621 are profitable, but they couldn’t get the capital cheaply enough until they got their government bailout money.

3. Who is going to pay the bill when these loans go bad? It looks to me like GMAC is making a big gamble by trying to pump up its lending volume with higher-risk borrowers, right in the middle of the worst recession since . . . 1981? the 1930s? (In any case, it won’t be able to get anything like the lending volume it used to have, simply because fewer people are buying cars.) Isn’t this a situation where a company is choosing a high-risk strategy because its only option is to watch its revenues shrink away to nothing because the demand for credit has plummeted? But if that’s the case, how smart is it to go chasing after high-risk borrowers because the low-risk ones are suddenly saving their money? And now that GMAC has gotten the Henry Paulson seal of approval (remember, TARP money was not supposed to go to unhealthy “banks”), I think there’s a fair chance they are counting on Treasury to bail them out of their next round of bad loans.

Of course, it could be said in GMAC’s defense that they are just doing what Congress wants them to do: take TARP money and use it to make loans more available to consumers. But this goes back to the fundamental schizophrenia of TARP: it was conceived to keep banks from failing, but most people think its purpose should be to increase credit. And in this case I suspect GMAC’s taxpayer money is being used to sell GM cars that people wouldn’t buy otherwise, and when it runs out GMAC will be back for more.