Category: Commentary

Law School and Radio

By James Kwak

This week I posted two things on Medium. The first was a commentary on changes in the markets for law students and lawyers. In short, if you are thinking of going to law school, the case is significantly stronger than it was four years ago. Whether it’s strong enough to pull the trigger depends on too many factors for me to say anything about your particular situation.

The second was about Serial, the new podcast from the This American Life people. Longtime blog readers know that I love love love TAL. I was really looking forward to Serial, and it had its moments. But I finally gave up on it when it framed one too many unreliable recollections with pregnant pauses and ominous music. I just don’t think there’s enough there there, at least not for me.

Obamacare, Taxes, United Airlines, and My Tea Infuser

By James Kwak

Over at Medium, I just posted a new article about the Jonathan Gruber-Obamacare “scandal.” Republicans are highlighting Gruber’s remarks as proof that the individual mandate really is a tax, and that the administration hid that fact in order to put one over on the public. But this whole argument flows from a faulty premise: that whether something is a tax or not is a question that has a knowable answer.

Last week I wrote a post complaining about my dismal experiences on United Airlines, which I chalk up to two things. The first is miserable computer systems. (It’s remarkable when you can see a computer system failing, and you know exactly what’s going wrong.) The second is the oligopolistic/near-monopolistic structure of the industry, especially when combined with a do-nothing Antitrust Division over at DOJ. It’s not just me: Tim Wu thinks so, too.

Finally, before that I wrote a post about Amazon’s extraordinary dominance in online retailing of physical goods. Who cares if no one will buy your phone when people are happy using other people’s phones to buy toilet paper and diapers from you?

Enjoy.

A Conference On Finance For Everyone Else

By Simon Johnson

It is hard to move around in Washington these days without bumping into a conference on the future of finance. But most of these are either closed to the public, or run on behalf of large banks as part of their lobbying efforts.

Next week, there will be a conference open to everyone at George Washington University to discuss where we really are on financial reform, and what still needs to be done. You should register in advance through the web page (link given above), but there is no cost to attend.

Featured speakers include Jeffrey Lacker, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, and Thomas Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. We also have a wide range of other technical experts – on issues from resolution to “shadow banking” – who are willing to speak frankly and engage in honest discussion.

GW Center for Law, Economics and Finance (C-LEAF), Stanford Graduate School of Business, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, and Better Markets generously made this event possible.

If you want to understand what has really happened to finance, show up.

No, You Can’t Get a Drink at 5 AM

By James Kwak

I’m in the United Club at SFO waiting for a flight, and the bar is closed until 8. So much for business travel.

I just published a post over at Medium that is really about two things: how both airline marketers and on-campus recruiters perpetuate the idea that air travel is glamorous, even when all of us know that it isn’t. It’s sort of a sequel to one of my favorite posts of those I’ve written, “Why Do Harvard Kids Head to Wall Street?” which I think is the one Paul Tough mentioned in his book about grit. Now that it’s recruiting season in the Ivy League, I thought it might be useful.

Also, last week I wrote a post about the HP breakup and what it implies about corporate management.

Cultural Capture and the Financial Crisis

By James Kwak

A few years ago, while still in law school, I was invited to write a chapter for a Tobin Project book on regulatory capture. It was a bit intimidating, being part of a project that included luminaries like David Moss, Dan Carpenter, Luigi Zingales, Richard Posner, Tino Cuellar, and the deans of two of the best law schools in the country. I was asked to write something about an idea that I had slipped into 13 Bankers, almost in passing, about the cultural prestige of the financial industry and the political and regulatory benefits the industry derived from that prestige. My chapter turned into a discussion of the various mechanisms by which status and social networks can influence regulators, creating the equivalent of regulatory capture even without traditional materialist incentives (cash under the table, promises of future jobs, etc.).

Two weeks ago, an investigation by ProPublica and This American Life illustrated the culture of deference, risk aversion, and general sucking-upitude among New York Fed bank examiners that effectively resulted in the capture of regulators by the banks they were supposed to be regulating. As David Beim wrote in a confidential report about the New York Fed, the core problem was “what the culture expected of people and what the culture induced people to do.”

I wrote about the story for the Atlantic and referred to my book chapter, but at the time the chapter was not available for free on the Internet (at least not legally). The good people at the Tobin Project have since put it up on the book’s website, from which you can download it (legally!). Note that they are only allowed to put up one chapter at a time and they rotate them, so this is a limited-time offer.

Game of Thrones, The Wire, and the New York Fed

By James Kwak

I wrote a column that went up this morning at The Atlantic about the ProPublica/This American Life story about the New York Fed. The gist of the argument is that we all knew the New York Fed was captured; for people like Tim Geithner, that’s a feature, not a bug.

There was a paragraph in my original draft that I really liked, but I can completely understand why the editors didn’t want it:

“When Tyrion Lannister wants his son killed, he sentences him to death in public. When Avon Barksdale wants potential incriminating witnesses killed, he obliquely lets his lieutenant know that he’s worried about loose ends—because he doesn’t want his fingerprints (voiceprints, actually) visible. When senior New York Fed officials want their staff to go easy on Goldman Sachs—well, they don’t need to lift a finger. The institutional culture takes care of it for them.”

This is similar to the idea at the core of “The Quiet Coup,” the Atlantic article that had a million page views back in 2009. In a less well developed political system, rich businessmen buy favorable policy by passing money under the table (or hiring politicians’ relatives, or giving them loans and then letting them default, and so on). In the United States, for the most part, you don’t have to do anything illegal: the system takes care of it for you, whether it’s bailout money from the Treasury Department or regulatory forbearance from the New York Fed. That system is a combination of personal incentives, cultural capture, and institutional sclerosis.

In short, buying politicians (or regulators) is good. Not having to buy them in the first place is even better.

New Collection on Medium

By James Kwak

I’ve joined a new collection on Medium devoted to business and finance writing. It’s called “Bull Market,” after an intense lobbying campaign (including alleged vote-buying, although I haven’t tried to collect) by Felix Salmon, and includes Felix, Mark Buchanan, Dan Davies, Alexis Goldstein, Francine McKenna, Evan Soltas, and Mark Stein. The goal is to write thoughtful articles that don’t just respond to the latest story on the wire (although there will be some of that, too).

My contribution for today is a post about the no-poaching lawsuit in Silicon Valley and what it says about class consciousness in America today.

I hope you enjoy the collection.

An Elizabeth Warren for New York

By Simon Johnson

These days, almost everyone likes to complain about institutional corruption – and various forms of intellectual capture of government orchestrated by big corporate interests. But very few people are willing to do anything meaningful about it.

Zephyr Teachout is an exception. Not only has she written about the history of political corruption in the United States, both in long form (her recent book) and in many shorter versions (e.g., see this paper), she is competing for the Democratic nomination to become governor of New York.

In many countries, Ms. Teachout would sweep to victory. She has smart ideas about many dimensions of public policy (here are her economic policies), she has assembled a strong team, and – most of all – she represents exactly the kind of responsible reform that we need at this stage of our republic.

Elizabeth Warren offered exactly the same sort of promise to the people of Massachusetts in 2012 – real reform through pragmatic and effective politics. She has delivered on this promise and there is every indication that her influence will only grow in the years to come. Continue reading “An Elizabeth Warren for New York” →

How to Get Thrown Out of a Luxury Hotel

By James Kwak

That’s one of the subplots of Big Money, by Politico reporter Kenneth Vogel, a book that I reviewed for yesterday’s issue of the New York Times Book Review. You can read that review, so I won’t re-review it here, except to say that if you were wondering how political operatives get rich people to part with their money, you’ll find out here.

Larry Summers and Finance

By James Kwak

I think some people didn’t understand the point I was making about the question of whether the government made money on TARP in my earlier post. Summers said, “The government got back substantially more money than it invested.” This is true, at least if you give him some slack on the word “substantially.” The money repaid, including interest on preferred stock and sales of common stock, exceeded the money invested.

My point begins with the observation that, as of late last year, the government had earned an annual return of less than 0.5%. My point itself is that it is silly to evaluate an investment by whether or not it has a positive return in nominal terms. You can only meaningfully evaluate an investment by comparing it to some benchmark. Saying that a nominal return of 0.5% is greater than 0% is meaningless, since the 0% benchmark is meaningless. Most obviously, it doesn’t account for inflation; since inflation has been about 1–2%, the government lost money in real terms.

Continue reading “Larry Summers and Finance” →

Larry Summers Should Keep His Mouth Shut

By James Kwak

Larry Summers is well on his way to rehabilitating his public image as a brilliant intellectual, moving on from his checkered record as president of Harvard University and as President Obama’s chief economic adviser during the first years of the administration. Unfortunately, he can’t resist taking on his critics—and he can’t do it without letting his debating instincts take over.

I was reading his review of House of Debt by Mian and Sufi. Everything seemed reasonable until I got to this passage justifying the steps taken to bail out the financial system:

“The government got back substantially more money than it invested. All of the senior executives who created these big messes were out of their jobs within a year. And stockholders lost 90 per cent or more of their investments in all the institutions that required special treatment by the government.”

I have no doubt that every word in this passage is true in some meaninglessly narrow sense or other. But on the whole it is simply false.

Continue reading “Larry Summers Should Keep His Mouth Shut” →

Worse Than We Even Imagined

By James Kwak

I’m giving a talk at the UConn Law School reunions tomorrow, and one of my closing points is about the plethora of banking crimes/scandals/whoopsies that we’ve seen in the past few years—even those having nothing to do with the financial crisis. This is the slide I created to illustrate the point:

I know I’m forgetting a few, but I figured that was enough. It does really take your breath away.

Czars, Kings, and Presidents

By James Kwak

Over the years, Tim Geithner has come in for a lot of well-deserved criticism: for putting banks before homeowners, for lobbying for Citigroup when it wanted to buy Wachovia, for denying even the possibility of taking over failed banks, and so on. The release of his book, whatever it’s called, has revived these various debates. Geithner is certainly not the man I would want making crucial decisions for our country. But it’s also important to remember that he was only an upper manager. The man who called the shots was his boss: Barack Obama.

That’s the theme of Jesse Eisinger’s column this week. I’m on Eisinger’s email list, and he described the tendency to focus on Tim Geithner—while ignoring the role of the president—as “If only the Tsar knew what the Cossacks are doing!” I wasn’t familiar with the Russian version, but I’ve always been fond of the seventeenth-century French version. In September 2009, for example, Simon and I wrote this about the financial reform debate:

“During the reign of Louis XIV, when the common people complained of some oppressive government policy, they would say, ‘If only the king knew . . . .’ Occasionally people will make similar statements about Barack Obama, blaming the policies they don’t like on his lieutenants.

“But Barack Obama, like Louis XIV before him, knows exactly what is going on.”

Continue reading “Czars, Kings, and Presidents” →

Why Regulation Goes Astray

By James Kwak

The Harvard Law Review recently published a multi-book review by Adam Levitin, the go-to guy for congressional testimony on toxic mortgages, illegal foreclosures, and homeowner relief (or, rather, the failure of the administration to provide any). It’s a tough genre: Levitin had to write something coherent about six very different books by Bernanke, Bair, Barofsky, Blinder, Connaughton, and Admati and Hellwig, whose sole point of commonality is that they all had something to do with the financial crisis. I don’t agree with all the aspects of his discussions of each individual book, but I think Levitin did a good job using the books as a starting point for a discussion of the incentives problem in financial regulation: the problem that regulators have stronger incentives to favor the industry than to defend the public interest.

HLR asked me to write an online “response,” which in some ways is an even less appetizing prospect—writing something interesting about something someone else (whom I generally agree with) wrote about six other things by different people. On the other hand, they only wanted 2,000 words, so I said yes.

My response focuses on a separate reason that regulation can be captured by industry: ideology. This is something that Levitin does discuss in the body of his article, but I think is not directly addressed by his proposed solutions. If you want to read more, you can download it from my website or read it at the HLR site.

Connecticut Public Retirement Plan Passes, More or Less

By James Kwak

A couple of weeks go I wrote an op-ed about a proposal in Connecticut to create a new tax-preferred retirement plan that would, by default, include almost all workers who don’t currently have access to an employment-based plan (like a 401(k)). That proposal took some major steps forward when it was included in an end-of-session bill that was passed by the Connecticut legislature. As it stands, the bill authorizes a feasibility study and implementation plan for the new retirement option, which must contain a number of features (default enrollment, portability, default annuitization at retirement, a guaranteed return to be specified at the beginning of each year, etc.).

As I said in the op-ed, this is a decent step forward that will increase the amount of retirement saving by low- and middle-income workers, put those savings in a relatively low-cost, low-risk investment option, and spread some of the benefits of the retirement tax break to those workers (although you do have to pay income tax to benefit from the deduction). One of the claims made by the plan’s opponents is that it cannot be managed for less than the 1 percent of assets mandated by the bill, but that seems laughable to me: the State of Connecticut’s current retirement plans for its employees have administrative costs of 10 basis points, plus investment expense ratios as low as 2 basis points (for index funds from Vanguard). This is a slightly different animal, since the idea is to invest in low-risk securities and buy downside insurance, but still it doesn’t follow that you have to pay more than 1 percent for asset management is.

Connecticut is one of several states, most famously California, that are in the process of implementing these public retirement plans to cover people who are left out by the current “system,” which favors people who work for large companies. They can solve several of the common problems with 401(k) plans: nonexistence (at many employers), low participation rates, investment risk, pre-retirement withdrawals, lump-sum distributions at retirement, to name a few.

But they can’t solve the underlying problem, which is that many people just don’t make enough for saving 3 percent of their salary each year to make much of a difference. A big constraint is that the Connecticut plan was designed to not cost taxpayers any money: administrative fees will come out of plan balances, and the insurance is there to limit the chance that the state will have to bail out the plan in the future. If we really want to protect people against retirement risk, we need to actually spread risk by making either the funding mechanism or the benefit formula progressive, which means we can’t regard the idea of the untouchable individual account as sacrosanct. (See my recent paper for more on this topic.) That’s what Social Security does, and it’s vastly popular. But in today’s political environment of me me me me me, and so we’re stuck with treating symptoms.