How Times Change

By James Kwak

For those waiting, the paperback edition of 13 Bankers went on sale on Tuesday to little fanfare. That’s not surprising; all of the crisis books have been dribbling out in paperback, about 8-10 months after the hardcover editions, to little fanfare. It’s a commentary on how quickly times have changed, and also on the fickle nature of the publishing market. While there is still a lot of residual anger and bitterness over the financial crisis — specifically, over the fact that the big banks played a central role in triggering the crisis, then got massive amounts of bailout money, and now have returned to “health” more quickly than the economy as a whole or the typical household — most people seem resigned to a continuation of the pre-crisis status quo, and what energy remains has perversely gone into railing against the national debt.

The whole story also highlights the importance of timing in publishing. Looking back, we couldn’t have gotten any luckier, with the book going on sale during the Senate debate over financial reform and just two weeks before the SEC sued Goldman, which also happened the day that our Bill Moyers appearance aired, which drove our Amazon ranking up to #6. Today we’d be lucky to crack #600.

Continue reading “How Times Change” →

Goldman Sachs: “We Consider Our Size An Asset That We Try Hard To Preserve”

By Simon Johnson

To great fanfare, this week Goldman Sachs unveiled the report of its Business Standards Committee, which makes recommendations regarding changes for the internal structure of what is currently the 5th largest bank holding company in the United States. Some of the recommended changes are long overdue – particularly as they address perceived conflicts of interest between Goldman and its clients.

What is most notable about the report, however, is what it does not say. There is, in fact, no mention of any issues that are of first order importance regarding how Goldman (and other banks of its size and with its leverage) can have big negative effects on the overall economy. The entire 67 page report reads like an exercise in misdirection.

Goldman Sachs is ignoring the main point of the debate made by – among others – Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, regarding why big banks need to be much more financed by equity (and therefore have much less leverage, meaning lower debt relative to equity). On p.10 of his Bagehot Lecture in October 2010, for example, King was quite blunt: Continue reading “Goldman Sachs: “We Consider Our Size An Asset That We Try Hard To Preserve”” →

The Bill Daley Problem

By Simon Johnson, co-author of 13 Bankers (out in paperback on Monday)

Bill Daley, President Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, is an experienced business executive. By all accounts, he is decisive, well-organized, and a skilled negotiator. His appointment, combined with other elements of the White House reshuffle, provides insight into how the president understands our economy – and what is likely to happen over the next couple of years. This is a serious problem.

This is not a critique from the left or from the right. The Bill Daley Problem is completely bipartisan – it shows us the White House fails to understand that, at the heart of our economy, we have a huge time bomb.

Until this week, Bill Daley was on the top operating committee at JP Morgan Chase. His bank – along with the other largest U.S. banks – have far too little equity and far too much debt relative to that thin level of equity; this makes them highly dangerous from a social point of view. These banks have captured the hearts and minds of top regulators and most of the political class (across the spectrum), most recently with completely specious arguments about why banks cannot be compelled to operate more safely. Top bankers, like Mr. Daley’s former colleagues, are intent of becoming more global – despite the fact that (or perhaps because) we cannot handle the failure of massive global banks. Continue reading “The Bill Daley Problem” →

Why Is The US Taxpayer Subsidizing Facebook – And The Next Bubble?

By Simon Johnson

Goldman Sachs is investing $450 million of its own money in Facebook, at a valuation that implies the social networking company is now worth $50 billion. Goldman is also apparently launching a fund that will bring its own high net worth clients in as investors for Facebook.

On the face of it, this might just seem like the financial sector doing what it is supposed to – channeling funds into productive enterprise. The SEC is apparently looking at the way private investors will be involved, but there are some more deeply unsettling factors at work here.

Remember that Goldman Sachs is now a bank holding company – a status it received in September 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, in order to avoid collapse (for the details, see Andrew Ross Sorkin’s blow-by-blow account in Too Big To Fail.) This means that it has essentially unfettered access to the Federal Reserve’s discount window, i.e., it can borrow against all kinds of assets in its portfolio, effective ensuring it has government-provided liquidity at any time.

Any financial institution with such access to such government support is likely to take on excessive risk – this is the heart of what is commonly referred to as the problem of “moral hazard.” If you are fully insured against adverse events, you will be less careful. Continue reading “Why Is The US Taxpayer Subsidizing Facebook – And The Next Bubble?” →

Who Benefits from Tax Expenditures?

By James Kwak

Ezra Klein points out a new tax expenditure database from The Pew Charitable Trusts. More attention to tax expenditures — exceptions in the tax code that reduce tax revenue or, put another way, subsidies channeled through the tax system* — is always a good thing. But Klein also says something interesting that I don’t agree with:

“they’re basically the welfare state for the middle class, cleverly arranged such that they don’t look like the welfare state for the middle class. If every year, the government sent every American — from the richest CEO to the greenest public-school teacher — a check covering 30 percent of their health-care costs, we’d think that a bit weird. We’d think it much weirder if we only sent the checks to the workers who happened to be at firms that offered benefits. . . .

“Yet that’s pretty much exactly what we do. We just hide it in the tax code rather than write it on a check.”

I agree with all of that, except the bit about the middle class. Tax expenditures primarily benefit the rich, for a few reasons.

Continue reading “Who Benefits from Tax Expenditures?” →

My Daughter Will Be Republican Majority Leader Someday

By James Kwak

Or perhaps a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

When it comes to deficits and government spending, the strategy of Republicans in Congress is to assert things that are simply not true or that defy economic logic. Ezra Klein nails House Majority Leader Eric Cantor misstating the CBO’s ten-year projection for health care reform so he can make a false claim about its longer-term effects (ignoring the fact that the CBO explicitly said health care reform would be deficit-reducing in the second decade). The same Republican leadership that rails against deficits is introducing rules that will make it easier to increase the deficit, since tax cuts will no longer have to be paired with offsetting spending cuts.

Apparently, the ability to say things that are not true is something that is learned quite early.

Continue reading “My Daughter Will Be Republican Majority Leader Someday” →

Tax-Exempt Bonds for Beginners

By James Kwak

Felix Salmon linked to an article by David Kotok on Build America Bonds (BAB), which reminded me that I’ve been meaning to write about them (now that they no longer exist). BAB were introduced in the 2009 stimulus bill. If a state or local government issues BAB, the federal government pays 35 percent of the interest on the bonds; the bondholder pays tax on all the interest, as usual for corporate bonds — but not for traditional state or local government bonds (“munis”). BAB were initially only authorized for two years, and were not extended in the recent tax cut compromise.

The Republican attack line on BAB is that they “subsidize states in more imprudent-type budget and debt scenarios” (Rick Santelli, quoted in Kotok’s article) or they are “a back-door handout for profligate state and local governments, allowing them to borrow more money while shifting some of the resulting interest costs to the federal government” (Daniel Mitchell). Well yes, BAB are a subsidy for state and local borrowing. But to criticize them for that without even mentioning the alternative is either uninformed or irresponsible.

Continue reading “Tax-Exempt Bonds for Beginners” →

Disclosure Rules for Economists

By James Kwak

In October, Gerald Epstein and Jessica Carrick-Hagenbarth released a paper documenting potential conflicts of interests among academic economists writing about the financial crisis and financial reform. Focusing on the Squam Lake Working Group on Financial Regulation and the Pew Economic Policy Group Financial Reform Project, they found that a majority of the economists involved had affiliations with private financial institutions, yet few of them disclosed those affiliations even in academic publications (where they do not face the word constraints imposed by print newspaper editors), preferring to identify themselves by their universities and as members of prestigious institutions such as NBER. To be fair, they did not find a strong relationship between economists’ affiliations and their positions on financial reform, perhaps because of the small sample and the limited amount of variation in the positions of members of these groups.

Epstein and Carrick-Hagenbarth called in their paper for economists to disclose any potential conflicts of interest, especially when writing for a general audience. This proposal has picked up some steam, first in the blogs (me; Nancy Folbre in Economix; Felix Salmon (“it’s not going to happen: there’s too much money riding on the continuation of the status quo”); Mark Thoma; Mike Konczal; Planet Money) and, more recently, thanks in part to the movie Inside Job, in the mainstream press. According to Sewell Chan in The New York Times, the AEA claims that it will consider a new ethical code or at least disclosure rules for economists — although, in a forthcoming book, “[George] DeMartino describes concerns dating to the 1920s about the influence of business on economic research, and cites multiple calls within the association for a code of conduct — all of which have been rebuffed.”

Epstein and Carrick-Hagenbarth have drafted a letter to the president of the AEA asking for the adoption of a code that requires economists to avoid conflicts of interest and to disclose ties that could create the appearance of a conflict of interest. If you are an economist and would like to sign on, you can email Debbie Zeidenberg (peri at econs dot umass dot edu) by Sunday evening. The full text follows.

Continue reading “Disclosure Rules for Economists” →

The More Things Change …

By James Kwak

As a holiday gift to myself, I’ve actually been reading a real book, on paper — The Worldly Philosophers, by Robert Heilbroner. The book itself was not a gift to myself; I have my sister’s old copy, which is the 1980 edition. The book is a traditional intellectual history of some of the main figures in economics. As the original was written in 1953, it focuses less on the mathematical line of economics, from Walras and Marshall through Arrow-Debreu to the present, and more on what used to be called political economy: Smith, Ricardo, Mill, Marx, Keynes, etc. It’s not a way to learn economics, but a way to learn something about the historical conditions that helped give rise to some important economic ideas.

But some passages seem oddly relevant today. Discussing the conventional economic wisdom of the early nineteenth century (pp. 121-22):

“They lived in a world that was not only harsh and cruel but that rationalized its cruelty under the guise of economic law. . . . It was the world that was cruel, not the people in it. For the world was run by economic laws, and economic laws were nothing with which one could or should trifle; they were simply there, and to rail about whatever injustices might be tossed up as an unfortunate consequence of their working was as foolish as to lament the ebb and flow of the tides.”

Continue reading “The More Things Change …” →

Why Can’t Europe Avoid Another Crisis? Why Can’t the U.S.?

By Simon Johnson

Most experienced watchers of the eurozone are expecting another serious crisis to break out in early 2011. This projected crisis is tied to the rollover funding needs of weaker eurozone governments, i.e., debts falling due in March through May, and therefore seems much more predictable than what happened to Greece or Ireland in 2010. The investment bankers who fell over themselves to lend to these countries on the way up, now lead the way in talking up the prospects for a serious crisis.

This crisis is not more preventable for being predictable because its resolution will involve politically costly steps – which, given how Europe works, can only be taken under duress. And don’t smile as you read this, because this same logic points directly to a deep and morally disturbing crisis heading directly at the United States.

The eurozone needs to – and will eventually – take three steps: Continue reading “Why Can’t Europe Avoid Another Crisis? Why Can’t the U.S.?” →

Tax Cutters Set Up Tomorrow’s Fiscal Crisis

By Simon Johnson. This post slightly updates the first few paragraphs of my most recent column on Bloomberg, which ran last week. For the rest of that column, use this link.

President Barack Obama is receiving congratulations for moving to the center on the tax agreement with Republicans.

Both sides think they got something: Democrats feel this will nudge unemployment below 8.5 percent in 2012, helping the president get reelected; Republicans achieved longstanding goals on measures such as the estate tax and think they will get most of the credit for an economic recovery that’s already under way.

The truth is, the deal moved us closer to a fiscal crisis, just as the euro zone now is experiencing.

Who will emerge on top in the U.S. version is harder to predict; at the moment, Republicans have the edge. But it’s not clear even they will be happy with what they wished for — an opportunity to enact massive federal government spending cuts.

To read the rest of this column, please click here. Alternatively, you can use the full address: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-23/tax-cutters-set-up-tomorrow-s-fiscal-crisis-commentary-by-simon-johnson.html

Bankers’ Pay On The Line Again

By Simon Johnson

The people who run big banks in the US have had a good year. They pushed back hard on financial reform legislation during the spring and were able to defeat the most serious efforts to constrain their power. They and their non-US colleagues scored an even bigger win at Basel this fall, where the international committee that sets financial safety standards decided to keep the required levels of equity in banks at dangerously low levels. And the counter narrative for the 2008 financial crisis, “Fannie Mae made me do it,” gained some high profile Republican adherents closely aligned with the men who will control the House Financial Services Committee in 2011-12.

But there is also a potential lump of coal in Santa’s sack for the biggest banks, in the form of restrictions of pay – both its structure and perhaps even the amounts (although officially the latter is not currently on the table). Continue reading “Bankers’ Pay On The Line Again” →

Symbols and Substance

By James Kwak

Arnold Kling wins the prize for the most erudite post of the past week, a review of The Symbolic Uses of Politics, by Murray Edelman. Kling cites not only Sigmund Freud and J.D. Salinger, but Theodor Adorno and Seymour Lipset (with specific books, not just names), among others.

In Kling’s summary, Edelman divided the political sphere into insiders and outsiders (Kling’s terms). Insiders are basically special interests: small in number but well organized and with specific goals. Outsiders, or the “unorganized masses,” are the rest of us: we have some interests, but we are poorly organized to pursue them and therefore are generally unsuccessful. In particular, Outsiders suffer from poor and limited information, and therefore are especially susceptible to political symbols. In Kling’s words:

“Given these differences, the Insiders use overt political dramas as symbols that placate the masses while using covert political activity to plunder them. What we would now call rent-seeking succeeds because Outsiders are dazzled by the symbols while Insiders grab the substance.”

Continue reading “Symbols and Substance” →

Why Citigroup?

By James Kwak

I think Ezra Klein is probably right about Peter Orszag:

“Citigroup is a really big, really powerful institution. Orszag’s position in it is the sort of position that could one day lead to being president of Citigroup. If you’re him, and you’re trying to figure out an interesting and high-impact way to spend the next 40 years, I can see why it’s appealing. But it’s the power and the job and the opportunity, more than the money, that make it appealing.”

Klein says the problem is that this kind of job transition makes people lose faith in government, and I agree with that. But I think there’s a deeper problem as well.

This is the mindset of the ambitious educational elite: You go to Harvard (or Stanford), maybe to Oxford (or Cambridge) for a Rhodes (or Marshall), then to Goldman (or McKinsey, or TFA), then to Harvard Business School (or Yale Law School), then back to Goldman (or Google), and on and on. You keep doing the thing that is more prestigious, opens more doors, has more (supposed) impact on the world, and eventually will make you more and more famous and powerful. Money is something that happens along the way, but it’s not your primary motivation. Then you get to Peter Orszag’s position, where you can do anything, and you want to go work for Citigroup? Why do our society and culture shape high-achieving people so they want to be executives at big, big companies that are decades past their prime? Why is that the thing people aspire to? Orszag wanting to work at a megabank — instead of starting a new company, or joining a foundation, or joining an NGO, or becoming an executive at a struggling manufacturing company that makes things, or even being a consultant to countries with sovereign debt problems — is the same as an engineer from a top school going to Goldman instead of a real company. It’s not his fault, but it’s a symptom of something that’s bad for our country.

The Obama Renaissance

By James Kwak

President Obama is enjoying something of a political resurgence, at least among the commentariat. Ezra Klein points out that his approval ratings remain higher than those of his Congressional opposition, as opposed to Clinton in 1994 and Bush in 2006. In The New York Times, Michael Shear says the lame-duck session of Congress could be a “big win” for Obama, and Matt Bai hails the tax cut compromise as “responsible governance” and says it could lead to a successful presidency.

Obama is certainly in a decent position politically, and I would bet on him to be reelected comfortably in 2012. First off, his opponents in Congress are deeply irresponsible (admittedly: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”) and face a huge political problem within their own party: a significant portion of the conservative base really does want lower deficits, yet the only thing the Republican caucus knows how to do is cut taxes. Klein points out that the Republicans will eliminate House rules that spending increases or tax cuts have to be offset elsewhere, and will instead say that “tax cuts don’t have to be paid for, and spending increases can’t be offset by tax increases.” Second, the Tea Party and Sarah Palin mean that Obama is likely to face an opponent who has been pulled dangerously close to the lunatic fringe during the primary (or, even better yet, Palin herself). And third, there’s triangulation.

Continue reading “The Obama Renaissance” →