Category: Commentary

Secrecy and Moral Hazard

According to Reuters, the Federal Reserve recently got a stay of a federal district court’s order that the Fed must reveal details about which banks accessed its emergency loan programs during the financial crisis. The arguments on each side are pretty straightforward. Bloomberg, the plaintiff, is arguing that the public has a right to know where their taxpayer money,* via the Federal Reserve, is going. The Fed is arguing that if it reveals the names, that could trigger a run on those banks, because customers will worry about their solvency; it is also arguing that revealing names now will make banks less willing to access emergency lending programs in the future, taking away an important tool in a financial crisis.

I find both of the Fed’s arguments weak.

Continue reading “Secrecy and Moral Hazard” →

Paulson Was Right (?)

The New York Times has a story about how the government is making a profit on its TARP investments: “The profits, collected from eight of the biggest banks that have fully repaid their obligations to the government, come to about $4 billion, or the equivalent of about 15 percent annually.” The article has plenty of appropriate caveats – the total bailout went well beyond TARP, the Citigroup and Bank of America investments and asset guarantees are still out there, we still have a ton of money sunk into AIG – but the fact remains that some of the investments are getting paid back, with interest and with a modest bonus from the warrants issued to Treasury.

There is also an ongoing debate about whether Treasury is getting full value for its warrants, which we’ve covered previously, but let’s leave that aside for now. The bigger question, I think, is this: Did Treasury get a fair deal for its investments at the peak of the crisis?

Continue reading “Paulson Was Right (?)” →

More On The Two-Track Economy — From The WSJ And Others

The notion of a two-track economy seems to be taking hold.  We kicked the concept around pretty well last week — your 130 comments (as of this morning) helped clarify a great deal of what we know, don’t know, and need to worry about.  The two-track concept overlaps with, and builds on, long-standing issues of inequality in the U.S., but it’s also different.  Within existing income classes, some people find themselves in relatively good shape and others are completely hammered.

New dimensions of differentiation are also taking hold within occupations and within industries – the WSJ this morning has nice illustrations.  The contours of this differentiation begin to shape our recovery or, if you prefer, who recovers and who does not – it’s hard to say how this will play out in conventional aggregate statistics, but these are likely to become increasingly misleading.

For now, I would highlight three points about the two-track future for banks – partly because this matters politically, and partly of the way it impacts the rest of the process. Continue reading “More On The Two-Track Economy — From The WSJ And Others” →

Causes: Too Much Debt

Menzie Chinn, one of my favorite bloggers, and Jeffry Frieden have a short and highly readable article up on the causes of the financial crisis. Chinn is not given to ideological ranting and is a great believer in actually looking at data, so I place significant weight in what he says.

Chinn and Frieden place the emphasis on excessive American borrowing, by both the public and private sectors.

This disaster is, in our view, merely the most recent example of a “capital flow cycle,” in which foreign capital floods a country, stimulates an economic boom, encourages financial leveraging and risk taking, and eventually culminates in a crash.

Continue reading “Causes: Too Much Debt” →

Firefighter Arson And Our Macroeconomic Policymakers

Firefighter arson is a serious problem.  The U.S. Fire Administration, part of Homeland Security, concluded in 2003, “A very small percentage of otherwise trustworthy firefighters cause the very flames they are dispatched to put out” (p.1). Illustrative and shocking anecdotes are on pp. 9-15 of that report, as well as here and here.

Macroeconomic policy making now has a similar issue to confront. Continue reading “Firefighter Arson And Our Macroeconomic Policymakers” →

Comments on the Health Care Debate

Last week, Mike Konczal got a little grief for saying that we have “the smartest comments section on the nets,” and while I’m not sure that’s literally true, I am frequently astounded at the quality of many of our comments. Instead of writing more on health care for today, I want to point you to a few comment threads on my previous post, “Medicare and the Public Option.”

1. StatsGuy on why the current reform proposals will subsidize and therefore increase overtreatment and drive up costs (which alone is worth the price of admission).

2. Russ and others on why nothing at all is better than reform without a public option (I don’t agree with him, though).

3. Carson Gross, anne, and Frank Tobin on high-deductible plans and making consumers aware of costs (I don’t agree with Carson, either).

And many, many more …

Also, StatsGuy recommends this article on the incentives faced by physicians, as do I.

By James Kwak

Larry Summers on Preventing and Fighting Financial Crises

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

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

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

Continue reading “Larry Summers on Preventing and Fighting Financial Crises” →

A Sad Day

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

By James Kwak

Chat Today About Bernanke Nomination For Reappointment (1pm Eastern)

The Washington Post is hosting an on-line chat about Ben Bernanke and his likely reappointment as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (today, 1pm eastern: use this link to chat).  News story on President Obama’s announcement of Bernanke’s renomination this morning, with video of press conference, is here.

You can submit questions in advance or live during the chat, which will probably run until about 2pm.

By Simon Johnson

Update: here’s the transcript of the chat; a lot of very good questions.

Which Bernanke? Whose Bubble?

Ben Bernanke will be nominated for a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve.  But which Bernanke are we getting?  There are at least three.

  1. The Bernanke who led the charge to rescue the US (and world’s) financial system after the Lehman-AIG collapse.  If you accept that the choice from late September was “Collapse or Rescue,” this Bernanke did a great job.
  2. The Bernanke who argued for keeping interest rates low as the housing bubble developed.  This Bernanke was part of the Greenspan Illusion – the Fed should ignore bubbles and “just clean up afterwards.”  Is that still Bernanke’s view?  Surely, he has learned from that experience.
  3. Then there is Bernanke-the-reformer.  Given #1 and #2 above, shouldn’t he be pushing hard for tough re-regulation of the financial system – particularly those dodgy parts where markets meet banking?  But is there any sign of such an agenda, even with regard to recently trampled consumers – let alone “too big to fail” financial institutions?

Most likely, we’re in for another bubble. Continue reading “Which Bernanke? Whose Bubble?” →

Change or More of the Same?

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

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

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

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

Continue reading “Change or More of the Same?” →

Fun with Derivatives

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

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

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

Continue reading “Fun with Derivatives” →

One Last Thought on FDIC and Political Will

So this is Mike Konczal signing off for the week – I’d like to thank James and Simon for giving me the opportunity to guest-blog here. And I’d like to thank all the readers and commenters for sparking discussions and refining my thoughts about many of the issues here.

You can follow my blogging at the rortybomb blog, and I’m also on twitter.

I want to close on one last note about where we, as a country, need to go from here. As a longtime fan of The Baseline Scenario, I read that there’s a project here to show the way in which capture by the financial industry has taken place in this country; through regulatory capture, through social networks and connections, etc.

There’s another element to it as well, and that’s what we as a country expect our government to be able to do about it. I want to point out this netroots nation video of Chris Hayes, an editor at The Nation, talking about The New Deal versus today (5m20s start):

Think about FDIC, how would we design FDIC today?…What we would do is, we wouldn’t set up an independent government agency which works very well, has worked smoothly, has prevented bank runs, since the bad old days of bank runs…we wouldn’t do that today. The banks would be like ‘what? you are just going to step into this market?’ What we’d do today if we were designing FDIC is we’d choose a bunch of the banks and we’d subsidize them insuring other banks…

The Home Ownership Loan Corporation…we have a lot of foreclosures, a lot of people underwater on mortgages. What are we doing? We are subsidizing the lenders with public dollars and telling them ‘if we give you guys some money, will you go help those people?’ And surprise, surprise, they have not really gotten their asses to do it. Now the Home Ownership Loan Corporation was faced with the same exact problem…and it went out and bought the mortgages and directly re-negotiated the terms of the mortgages, and it was very, very successful.

This is a massive conceptual problem.

I find this fascinating because I completely agree that, if we were to encounter bank runs for the first time today, this is how we’d try to set up FDIC. FDIC is an example of a government program that works, and the banks-insuring-one-another-with-public-money is exactly the kind of operation we’d expect to fail. I also find it fascinating because I believe part of what happened in this crisis is that we started a banking system in the capital markets, a ‘shadow bank system’ if you will, that collapsed in a new 21st century style bank run, and going forward we need to find a way to regulate it properly to make sure it doesn’t happen again (here’s interview I did with Perry Mehrling about it).

It’s one thing to identify the problem – finding the will to conceptualize the problems, and begin to fix them, is the other half of the solving the problem. And that is what this country needs more of, less hoping that the problems will fix themselves if we shove enough public money to private parties, and more of working to find the solutions ourselves.

Thanks for the great week all!

The Limits of Arbitrage

Wow, it’s already Friday. I’ll feel that I’ve short-changed you if we don’t do some Finance Theory before I go.

Did you see this roundtable about the state of macroeconomics in The Economist’s Free Exchange? Fascinating stuff; in particular it became a bit of an odd defense of the Efficient Markets Hypthosis (EMH). A representative comment was made by William Easterly, in defense of EMH:

The most important part of the much-maligned Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH) is that nobody can systematically beat the stock market. Which implies nobody can predict a market crash, because if you could, then you would obviously beat the market. This applies also to other asset markets like housing prices.

This is not true, and I want us to walk through why it isn’t. In March of 1997, Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny published a paper titled The Limits of Arbitrage (pdf) in the Journal of Finance. I think it’s the most important finance paper of the past 15 years, something everyone even remotely connected to financial markets should become familiar with. It builds on and summarizes a decade long research project, research they conducted with people such as Joseph Lakonishok and Brad Delong. In it they say that arbitrageurs, the very smart and talented traders at hedge funds who will take prices that are out of line and bring them back into line, making a good fee and making prices reflect all available information, the very building block necessary for EMH to work, can’t do their job if they are time or credit constrained. Specifically, if they are highly leveraged, and prices move against their position before they return to their fundamental value – if the market stays irrational longer than they can remain solvent – they’ll collapse before they can do their job.
Continue reading “The Limits of Arbitrage” →