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” →

Risk Management for Beginners

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

Joe Nocera has an article in today’s New York Times Magazine about Value at Risk (VaR), a risk management technique used by financial institutions to measure the risk of individual trading desks or aggregate portfolios. Like many Magazine articles, it is long on personalities (in this case Nassim Nicholas Taleb, one of the foremost critics of VaR) and history, and somewhat light on substance, so I thought it would be worth a lay explanation in my hopefully by-now-familiar Beginners style.

VaR is a way of measuring the likelihood that a portfolio will suffer a large loss in some period of time, or the maximum amount that you are likely to lose with some probability (say, 99%). It does this by: (1) looking at historical data about asset price changes and correlations; (2) using that data to estimate the probability distributions of those asset prices and correlations; and (3) using those estimated distributions to calculate the maximum amount you will lose 99% of the time. At a high level, Nocera’s conclusion is that VaR is a useful tool even though it doesn’t tell you what happens the other 1% of the time.

naked capitalism already has one withering critique of the article out. There, Yves Smith focuses on the assumption, mentioned but not explored by Nocera, that the events in question (changes in asset prices) are normally distributed. To summarize, for decades people have known that financial events are not normally distributed – they are characterized by both skew and kurtosis (see her post for charts). Kurtosis, or “fat tails,” means that extreme events are more likely than would be predicted by a normal distribution. Yet, Smith continues, VaR modelers continue to assume normal distributions (presumably because they have certain mathematical properties that make them easier to work with), which leads to results that are simply incorrect. It’s a good article, and you’ll probably learn something.

While Smith focuses on the problem of using the wrong mathematical tools, and Nocera mentions the problem of not using enough historical data – “All the triple-A-rated mortgage-backed securities churned out by Wall Street firms and that turned out to be little more than junk? VaR didn’t see the risk because it generally relied on a two-year data history” – I want to focus on another weakness of VaR: the fact that the real world changes.

Continue reading “Risk Management for Beginners” →

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” →

Reliving the Fun Times

With the holidays coming to an end, my little burst of reading books (as opposed to newspapers and blogs) is coming to an end with the recent collection Panic, edited by Michael Lewis, which I got for Christmas. (I also got Snowball, the new biography of Warren Buffett, but that’s 900 pages long, so it may be a while.) The book contains several as-it-happened articles on each of four recent financial panics: the 1987 stock market crash, the 1997-98 emerging markets crisis, the collapse of the Internet bubble, and the thing we’re going through now. It’s long on entertainment – both the entertainment of hearing people say things like, “The more time that goes by, the less concerned I am about a housing bubble,” and the entertainment of reading legitimately good writing, some of it by Lewis himself. But given the format, it’s necessarily short on analysis, and its main point, if any, seems to be that all panics are alike: people underestimate risk, they think they are different, they do silly things, Wall Street people make a killing, and then bad things happen.

I believe the book was released in November, but it seems like the final touches were put on sometime in late spring or early summer – Bear Stearns had fallen, but Freddie and Fannie were still independent, and Lehman was just another investment bank. So the book provides this past summer’s perspective on the crisis: a collapsing housing bubble taking down isolated hedge funds that had invested in mortgage-backed CDOs, and one investment bank (Bear Stearns) for no clearly explained reason: Lewis’s own essay on the topic focuses on the inherent complexity of Wall Street firms and how even their CEOs don’t understand them. Reading the articles from 2007 and early 2008 reminds you how few people if any foresaw the impact the collapsing bubble would have on the financial sector as a whole.

Continue reading “Reliving the Fun Times” →

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.

IMF Speaks

On Monday, the IMF released a new research “note” entitled “Fiscal Policy for the Crisis,” which sets out recommendations for fiscal policy to address the global economic downturn. The premises of the note are, first, that the financial system must be fixed before it is possible to increase demand and, second, that there is limited scope for monetary policy, leaving fiscal policy as the main weapon. The executive summary provides the main recommendation in short form:

The optimal fiscal package should be timely, large, lasting, diversified, contingent, collective, and sustainable: timely, because the need for action is immediate; large, because the current and expected decrease in private demand is exceptionally large; lasting because the downturn will last for some time; diversified because of the unusual degree of uncertainty associated with any single measure; contingent, because the need to reduce the perceived probability of another “Great Depression” requires a commitment to do more, if needed; collective, since each country that has fiscal space should contribute; and sustainable, so as not to lead to a debt explosion and adverse reactions of financial markets.

Continue reading “IMF Speaks” →

Human Nature

Or, why human beings are bad investors.

Free Exchange has Anthony Gottlieb’s recollections of interviewing Bernie Madoff about financial regulation:

at the time he came across merely as calm, strikingly rational, devoid of ego, and the last person you would expect to make your wealth vanish. I certainly would have trusted him with my money. I cannot say the same of other financial superstars I interviewed. . . . Perhaps it is the most confidence-inspiring ones that you have to look out for.

I couldn’t agree more. We human beings have this completely misplaced confidence in our ability to judge people by “looking them in the eye.” I recall reading about one study (sorry, I don’t remember anything else about it) which showed that hiring managers were more likely to make good hires by selecting solely on the basis of resumes than by interviewing people – because using resumes is completely objective, while interviews allow you to interject your own erroneous beliefs. (I do believe that if you use interviews well – that is, to obtain factual information, like how well someone can actually write a computer program – you can do better than just using resumes; but maybe I’m just fooling myself.)

There are a couple of ways to look at this phenomenon. One is to think about motivations. There are people who are trying to rip you off and people who aren’t. The latter have no motivation to try to seem trustworthy, so they don’t bother. The former do have that motivation, so they try. Some are bad at it; some, however, are very good at it.

More broadly, what does it mean to appear trustworthy? “Trustworthiness” is just a set of signifiers that are generated by one person and that enter the brain of another person, like a firm handshake or a steady gaze. It’s like those luxury car manufacturers who expend effort and cost engineering the sound of the car door closing, because that sound is a signifier for quality. There is some evolutionary process whereby these signifiers got attached to the concept of trustworthiness in our brain over the history of the species, and maybe the connection was valid at some point. But now that people can reverse-engineer the connection and replicate the signifiers whether or not they are actually trustworthy, our instincts aren’t much use anymore.

The only way not to be fooled by your instincts is to rely solely on objective facts. Now, in the Bernie Madoff case, one can object that the only visible “facts” were themselves cooked, and that is true. But that just means we need better policing of things that are presented as facts. And I think the overall point still holds.

French Car Wreck

The latest economic data from France look bad.  The strategy of keeping official growth forecasts high (despite the evidence) is coming under increasing pressure and there may be substantial revisions to the outlook in the pipeline – once you break through to being more honest, there is some catching up to do.

Even more worrying are the plans apparently under preparation to support the French auto industry.  Officially, these plans are still under development (AP).  But from what we can see, including unofficially this week, the next phase of assistance could well be even more problematic than the support provided to the US auto industry which, so far, only got a bridge loan. Continue reading “French Car Wreck” →

Exit Strategy: Inflation

We know there is going to be a large fiscal surge in the US (the latest estimate is a stimulus of $675-775bn, which is a bit lower than numbers previously floated).  This will likely arrive as the US recession deepens and fears of deflation take hold. 

The precise outcomes for 2009 are, of course, hard to know yet – this depends primarily on the resilience of US consumer spending and whether large international shocks materialize.  But we can have a sense of what happens after the fiscal stimulus has played out (or its precise consequences become clear).   There are two main potential scenarios. Continue reading “Exit Strategy: Inflation” →

What You Can Do

On one level, recessions are about numbers, like the post I just wrote about the November statistics. On another level, recessions cause enormous hardship and misery to real families. I know most of us have less wealth than we did a year ago, since two major sources of household wealth – stocks and housing – have fallen steeply in value this year. But even if you don’t feel like you can afford to donate as much as usual to charities, there is still something you can do.

Most middle- and upper-income American households have lots of stuff. Many of us, particularly adults, have lots of clothes and other things we rarely or no longer use. You can think of this either as a behavioral phenomenon (people don’t like to get rid of things, even if they cause more disutility by taking up closet space than any utility they will ever provide) or as a market failure (it’s too much of a hassle to get rid of things, so we keep them). But if you just take a day, identify the things you will never use again, put them in bags, and drive them to a local shelter, you can help allocate those goods to the people who value them most. Or, as non-economists put it, you can help people. And, of course, you can get a tax deduction (the shelter in my town recommends using the Salvation Army valuation guidelines), which is itself probably worth more to you than those clothes you will never wear again.

Silver Linings?

We got one of our last batches of economic data for this calendar year today, and there may have been a glimmer of good news in there. In the news stories about the November data, I read that personal income went down, but real personal consumption went up, and the savings rate went up, which I found confusing, so I looked directly at the Bureau of Economic Analysis news release.

To summarize (all numbers are November’s change from October), personal income went down by 0.2%, and disposable personal income (after taxes) went down 0.1%, but in real terms (after adjusting for inflation, or deflation in this case), disposable personal income went up by 1.0%, which is huge (remember, that’s month over month). This was entirely due to falls in food and energy prices (mainly gasoline), since the core price deflator (excluding food and energy) was flat. Of that 1.0% increase in real disposable personal income, 0.6% turned into increased consumption, and 0.4% turned into increased saving, raising the savings rate from 2.4% to 2.8%.

Continue reading “Silver Linings?” →