Category: External perspectives

Boring and Exciting Finance

Taunter has a comprehensive proposal about how to regulate financial services, dividing them into Boring and Exciting. Boring services are the following:

retail deposits
loans to retail customers, including mortgages
retail insurance, including annuity products
any custodial service beyond traditional settlement (i.e., if you hold something after T+3, you’re a custodian)

If you do any of those, then you are a Boring institution, you can do all Boring services, you face some significant regulations, and you get bailed out when necessary. If you do none of those, then you are an Exciting institution, you can do almost anything you want, and there is an ironclad rule preventing the government from bailing you out. Boring institutions cannot offer Exciting services (I think) and Exciting institutions cannot offer Boring services (that’s certain).

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Krugman on Economics

This weekend’s New York Times Magazine has the 7,000-word article about the state of macroeconomics that Paul Krugman has been hinting at for some time now. It’s a well-written, non-technical overview of the landscape and the position Krugman has been presenting on his blog, which for now I’ll just summarize for those who may not have the time to set aside just now.

Like many, Krugman faults the discipline for its infatuation with mathematical elegance:

“[T]he central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

“Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.”

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Soros and Volcker on Financial Innovation

I had a business trip late last week, so I used the plane flight home to read The Sages, by Charles Morris. It includes three short sketches of Warren Buffett, George Soros, and Paul Volcker, wrapped around the thesis that the recent financial crisis showed the importance of pragmatism and experience rather than sophisticated financial models. Obviously I’m just grabbing a couple of passages here that I found interesting.

Here’s Soros (pp. 42-43):

“I am a man of the markets, and I abhor bureaucratic restrictions. I try to find my way around them. … But I do believe that financial markets are inherently unstable; I also recognize that regulations are inherently flawed: Therefore stability ultimately depends on a cat-and-mouse game between markets and regulators. Given the ineptitude of regulators, there is some merit in narrowing the scope and slowing down the rate of financial innovations.”

And here’s Volcker (p. 160), as paraphrased by Morris:

“He scoffed at the notion that clamping down on banks, hedge funds, and other players would stifle ‘innovation.’ The only innovation that real people cared about for the previous twenty or thirty years, he said, was ‘the automatic teller machine.'”

By James Kwak

The Problems with Regulatory Cost-Benefit Analysis

Mark Kleiman (hat tip Brad DeLong) says more clearly what I tried to say a while back: cost-benefit analysis of regulations has a curious way of nailng the costs and underestimating the benefits. He focuses on three points:

Traditional CBA counts all dollar benefits equally, despite the fact that the marginal utility of a dollar depends a lot on who is getting it; a dollar more for a poor person provides a lot more utility than a dollar more for a rich person.
Long-term or uncertain benefits, no matter how large (like preventing the inundation of every coastal city) are typically discounted down to zero.
Benefits that are difficult to quantify because there is no market for them (like feeling better because you are healthy) never get counted. (This is the one I know best because it’s one of the things my wife specializes in.)

Matt Yglesias also comments.

By James Kwak

How Much Does the Financial Sector Cost?

Benjamin Friedman, in the Financial Times (hat tip Yves Smith), questions the high cost (read: compensation) of our financial sector. But he does not simply say that huge bonuses for bankers are unfair. Instead, he says that the costs of financial services need to be balanced against their benefits.

The discussion of the costs associated with our financial system has mostly focused on the paper value of its recent mistakes and what taxpayers have had to put up to supply first aid. The estimated $4,000bn of losses in US mortgage-related securities are just the surface of the story. Beneath those losses are real economic costs due to wasted resources: mortgage mis-pricing led the US to build far too many houses. Similar pricing errors in the telecoms bubble a decade ago led to millions of miles of unused fibre-optic cable being laid.

The misused resources and the output foregone due to the recession are still part of the calculation of how (in)efficient our financial system is. What has somehow escaped attention is the cost of running the system.

In particular, Friedman wonders at the relationship between the value provided by financial services and the opportunity cost involved: “Perversely, the largest individual returns seem to flow to those whose job is to ensure that microscopically small deviations from observable regularities in asset price relationships persist for only one millisecond instead of three. These talented and energetic young citizens could surely be doing something more useful.”

This reminds me of something Felix Salmon wrote about a while back: If profits and compensation in the financial sector go up and keep going up, that’s a priori evidence of inefficiency, not efficiency. Those higher profits mean that customers are paying more for their financial services over time, not less, which means that financial services are imposing a larger and larger tax on the economy. Now, it is possible that they are also increasing in value fast enough to cover the tax, but that is something to be proven.

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.

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More by Arindrajit Dube

Last month Arindrajit Dube wrote a guest post for us analyzing private insurer stock market returns following the news that the Senate Finance Committee “Group of Six” would be dropping the public plan; he estimated that avoiding a public plan would be worth $28-35 billion to three major insurers. Last week he did a similar analysis based on last Sunday’s comments by Kathleen Sebelius and Robert Gibbs indicating potential willingness to drop the public plan (something the administration has tentatively backpedaled from). I was on vacation, but his analysis is available on Economist’s View, and his bottom-line number is $32 billion, or 40% of their market value.

Dube also co-authored an op-ed in The New York Times on San Francisco’s experience with comprehensive, government-mandated health insurance. One of their points is that in an environment where all competitors are forced to pay something for health insurance, this creates a level playing field where all companies can pass on the higher costs to consumers – as opposed to a situation where companies race to the bottom by cutting benefits in order to minimize costs.

By James Kwak

More on Rescissions

For those interested in the issue of health insurance policy rescissions, Slate also had a story yesterday, only with a lot more detail and links than mine (but without the clever comparison to financial services “innovation”).

Also, Taunter wrote an insightful post about rescission, expanding on a comment he left on this blog. He drives home a point I thought I made in my original post, but maybe wasn’t very clear: if 0.5% of policies get rescinded, that means that far more than 0.5% of insureds who really need insurance get their policies rescinded, because the insurers are targeting those policyholders who develop expensive illnesses. I said, “insurers only try to rescind policies if you turn out to need them; so the percentage of people who lose their policies when they need them is even higher.” Taunter puts numbers behind that, and they turn out to be potentially scary.

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Obfuscating Inequality

Will Wilkinson has gotten a lot of Internet love for his article “Thinking Clearly About Economic Inequality” (Free Exchange, Real Time Economics, Yglesias, Klein, Cowen, Rortybomb), which argues that increasing inequality is not as bad as people like Paul Krugman make it out to be. I thought it was a rhetorically clever but deeply misleading attempt to blur the obvious issue – economic inequality is increasing – by looking at it through a dizzying array of qualifying lenses.

Wilkinson marshals an impressive number of arguments to try to make the point that increasing income inequality is not the metric that we should focus on. I’ll try to take them one at a time. (Wilkinson’s arguments are summarized in the numbered paragraphs; the others are my responses.)

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What Will Change?

Timothy Garton Ash is a prominent modern European historian, who became famous writing about the collapse of Communism and the transformation of Eastern Europe in the 1990s. It was something many people thought they would never live to see.

A friend asked me what I thought of Ash’s article a couple of months ago in The Guardian, where he asked what will come of modern capitalism in the wake of the financial and economic crisis.

An extreme “neoliberal” version of the free-market economy, characterised not just by far-reaching deregulation and privatisation but also by a Gordon Gekko greed-is-good ethos – and fully realised in practice only in some areas of Anglo-Saxon and post-communist economies – seems likely to find itself [left in ruins or at least very substantially transformed]. But how about a modernised, reformed version of what postwar German thinkers called the “social market economy”?

Ash goes even farther than what you might call the Continental European social-democratic model, and envisions a world with a better balance between production and consumption, between national and international governance, and between exploitation and protection of the environment.

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The Problem with Federalism

Paul Krugman and many others have been talking about the “fifty little Hoovers” – state governments forced by balanced-budget rules to cut spending and raise taxes in the face of a recession, eliminating services when they are most needed and deepening the economic downturn. James Surowiecki (hat tip Matthew Yglesias) expands the attack by arguing that federalism (the idea that power is balanced between the national and state governments) in general is a problem, at least in these economic circumstances. In addition to counter-cyclical state fiscal policy, he cites political issues such as the disproportionate allocation of road spending to areas with few people and coordination problems such as the difficulty building national transportation or energy networks.

It may seem as if the balance is tilted heavily in favor of the national government – it has an army, it prints money, and so on – but the Constitution leans more toward protecting state autonomy (see the principle that the federal government is one of enumerated powers, and the Tenth Amendment), and the trend of the Reagan Revolution and the Rehnquist Court was to favor states’ rights. (Of course, “states’ rights” are not necessarily a Republican or a Democratic issue, but tend to be favored by whichever side finds the argument convenient at the moment.)

When I was young (like in high school) I thought states were silly and we should just have a national government, like in France, where the departments are mainly just administrative units. When I got a little older and became a qualified fan of Edmund Burke, I decided that the current system worked well enough most of the time that it would have to be seriously broken to justify a major structural change.

I’m not sure it qualifies as seriously broken at the moment, but I think the current recession counts as evidence that it sure isn’t the system you would design if you were starting from scratch.

By James Kwak

The Man Who Crashed the World?

Back in November, Michael Lewis wrote a great story in Portfolio on the financial crisis, focusing on the traders who saw that the housing bubble was going to crash, bringing mortgage-backed securities down with it – and made lots of money betting on it. Now Lewis is back with his article in Vanity Fair on AIG Financial Products (FP) and its last head, Joseph Cassano. This time, though, it feels like it’s missing the usual Lewis magic.

Lewis sets out to tell the untold story of FP, based on extensive interviews with people who actually worked there. He starts by laying out the conventional wisdom about FP, which presumably he is going to debunk. The conventional wisdom, according to Lewis, is that the problem lay in credit default swaps: “The public explanation of A.I.G.’s failure focused on the credit-default swaps sold by traders at A.I.G. F.P., when A.I.G.’s problems were clearly much broader.” Indeed, Lewis implies that the government essentially framed FP: “Why were officials, both public and private, so intent on leading others to believe all the losses at A.I.G. had been caused by a few dozen traders in this fringe unit in London and Connecticut?

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The Finest of the Flavors

Richard Thaler has a simple argument for plain-vanilla financial products. Mike at Rortybomb deals with some of the predictable objections. This is also similar to Adam Levitin’s position on credit cards, which I wrote about a while back.

I’m in favor, although I don’t think it will be enough to simply make the vanilla offering available; in that case nothing would stop lenders from paying higher commissions to brokers in order to steer customers toward exploding mortgages.

By James Kwak

Still Skeptical About Banks

It’s getting somewhat lonelier being a large financial institution skeptic, although there still a lot of us left. I would say that among the skeptics, the general view is that we may have seen an end to bank panics for this cycle – I’m not sure anyone is saying there will definitely be another crisis in the near future – but we may not have, and we may come to regret not taking stronger measures now. (How’s that for prognostication?)

Lucian Bebchuk, in Project Syndicate (a well-intentioned collaboration that manages to sound ominous and conspiratorial), makes the argument in clear terms. First, the recent stress tests only projected losses through 2010, ignoring the large number of loans and mortgage- and asset-backed securities that mature in later years. More fundamentally, though: “Rather than estimate the economic value of banks’ assets – what the assets would fetch in a well-functioning market – and the extent to which they exceed liabilities, the stress tests merely sought to verify that the banks’ accounting losses over the next two years will not exhaust their capital as recorded in their books.” Put another way, the focus has been on the accounting value of assets, not their economic value; so for a given asset, as long as it doesn’t have to be written down before the end of 2010, there is no problem.

Bebchuk also points out that the ability of banks to raise equity capital should not be taken as an “all clear” sign. As he and others have previously argued, equity in large banks by its very nature represents a leveraged bet whose downside risk is limited by the implicit government guarantee. That is, as a shareholder, if the economy does OK and bank assets appreciate in value, you get all of the upside (leveraged by the bank’s liabilities); if the economy does terribly and bank assets fall in value, your losses are not only limited to the amount of your investment, they are further limited by the implicit guarantee that the government will not wipe you out. That guarantee is weaker than the implicit guarantee on bank liabilities, but it is still there; given the way the government has treated Citigroup, Bank of America, and GMAC, betting on the “no more Lehmans” policy seems like a sensible bet.

Most attention is now focused on the battle over financial regulation (if it isn’t on health care and energy), which is appropriate. But it may be premature to declare victory over the financial crisis.

By James Kwak

The Importance of Mark Thoma

David Warsh has an article about economics blogging that is focused on Mark Thoma. Mark isn’t the most controversial blogger on the Internet, but he is one of the most invaluable, because he provides long excerpts of lots of economics material, from all different perspectives. (He also has his own points of view, but he is willing to entertain people who don’t agree with him. He is also gracious and welcoming to new bloggers (like we were not so long ago). If you have a general interest in economics and don’t subscribe to him, check him out.

By James Kwak