How To Kill OTC Derivatives Reform in Two Sentences

The post below, which looks like it could be extremely important, is by Mike Konczal, author of the popular (for those in the know) Rortybomb blog, a previous guest blogger on this site, and now a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute — James

Have lobbyists snuck another major loophole into the OTC Derivatives bill? This week the final touches are being put on Barney Frank’s financial regulation bill – H.R. 4173 – “Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009.” One of the centerpieces of this reform is Title III: Over-the-Counter Derivatives Markets Act. And one of the goals of this reform would be to get as many derivatives as possible to trade on exchanges.

An initial hurdle for Barney Frank was what to do with an “end-user exemption.” This would exempt certain types of derivative buyers who use derivatives, say corporations hedging interest rate risk without speculating, from the extra scrutiny and regulation that comes with the exchange/clearing system. One of the narratives of financial reform so far has been that this initial end-user exemption was too large a loophole at first, and instead of just handling 10-20% of the market, it would let a large majority of the market sneak through, but ultimately Barney Frank was convinced by consumer groups and people pushing for stronger financial regulation and fixed this issue. See Noah Scheiber here in “Could Wall Street Actually Lose in Congress?” for this story, and it shows up as well in a recent profile of Barney Frank in Newsweek.

Continue reading “How To Kill OTC Derivatives Reform in Two Sentences” →

Gerry Corrigan’s Case For Large Integrated Financial Groups

Increasingly, leading bankers repeat versions of the argument made recently by E. Gerald Corrigan in his Dolan Lecture at Fairfield University.  Corrigan, former President of the New York Fed and a senior executive at Goldman Sachs for more than a decade, makes three main points.

  1. “Large Integrated Financial Groups” – at or around their current size – offer unique functions that cannot otherwise be provided.  The economy needs these Groups.
  2. Breaking up such Groups would be extremely complex and almost certainly very disruptive.
  3. An “Enhanced Resolution Authority” can mitigate the problems that are likely to occur in the future, when one or more Group fails.

These assertions are all completely wrong. Continue reading “Gerry Corrigan’s Case For Large Integrated Financial Groups” →

Revolution and Reform

Many of us bloggers are better at criticizing than at proposing anything — especially when the world makes it so easy to be a critic. The Epicurean Dealmaker, who has sent the occasional volley of criticism my way (I’m not linking to examples because my ego is too fragile), recently decided to deal with this head-on and wrote a “reformist manifesto,” complete with an epigraph from The Communist Manifesto, with a list of specific proposals.

Basically these include cleaning up the regulatory structure, expanding the scope of regulation (consumer protection, hedge funds), moving “virtually all” OTC derivatives onto exchanges or clearinghouses (I believe that “virtually all” means the currently-proposed exemption for “end-user” hedges would be drastically reduced), and increasing Fed transparency. There is also this one: “Ban political campaign contributions by the financial industry.” I think that would be great, although there is at least one constitutional problem and possibly two there.

There’s nothing on the list that I disagree with.

Continue reading “Revolution and Reform” →

Measuring The Fiscal Costs Of Not Fixing The Financial System

This post is a slightly edited version of remarks prepared for delivery at Unwinding Public Interventions in the Financial Sector: Preconditions and Practical Considerations, IMF High-Level Conference, Thursday, December 3, 2009, Washington D.C.  I participated in Session 2: Managing Fiscal Risks—Public Finance Aspects of Unwinding.

The Problem

1)      The underlying fiscal problems of the U.S. have significantly worsened as a direct result of how the financial crisis of 2008-09 was handled.

2)      The U.S. economic system has evolved relatively efficient ways of handling the insolvency of nonfinancial firms and small or medium-sized financial institutions.  A large number of these institutions have failed so far this year, without causing major disruption to the economy.

3)      The U.S. does not yet have a similarly effective way to deal with the insolvency of large financial institutions.  The dire implications of this gap in our system have become much clearer since fall 2008 and there is no immediate prospect that the underlying problems will be addressed by the regulatory reform proposals currently on the table.  In fact, our underlying banking system problems are likely to become much worse. Continue reading “Measuring The Fiscal Costs Of Not Fixing The Financial System” →

Why Did Bank of America Pay Back the Money?

Everybody knows by now that Bank of America is buying back the $45 billion of preferred stock that the government currently owns. While the reason why they are doing this is obvious, I’m going to pretend it isn’t for a few paragraphs.

Buying back stock costs money — real cash money. Why would a company ever do such a thing? The textbook answer is that a company should do it if it doesn’t have investment opportunities that yield more than its cost of capital. The cash in its bank account, in some sense, belongs to its shareholders, who expect a certain return. If the bank can’t earn that return with the cash, it should return it to the shareholders. In this case, though, the interest rate on the preferred shares is only 5%, which is far lower than usual cost of equity. In fact, Bank of America just issued $19 billion of new stock in order to help buy back the government’s preferred stock. The cost of that new equity (in corporate finance terms) is certainly higher than 5%. In other words, Bank of America just threw money away.

Continue reading “Why Did Bank of America Pay Back the Money?” →

Buffett and Geithner

Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail sure is a page-turner; even for events that I already knew about in general, it’s full of new details and juicy quotations.

For example, on page 508 it lays out the details of Warren Buffett’s October 2008 proposal for a “Public-Private Partnership Fund,” which would eventually become the PPIP announced by Tim Geithner in March 2009.  I knew that Buffett, Bill Gross, and Lloyd Blankfein had supported the idea, but I didn’t know the details. Buffett’s idea was slightly different from the eventual PPIP.

Continue reading “Buffett and Geithner” →

Some Questions For Mr. Bernanke

On Thursday, Ben Bernanke will appear before the Senate Banking Committee, to begin his reconfirmation process as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

Based on committee members’ public statements, Bernanke already appears to have enough votes on his side.  But Thursday’s hearing and the subsequent floor debate are an important opportunity for senators to raise important issues about how the Fed will operate moving forward.

This is more than a ritual.  Questioning (the monetary) authority and politely insisting on a coherent answer is an important part of our political governance structure – and something that was sorely lacking during the Greenspan era.

There are three possible lines of enquiry that could draw Mr. Bernanke out.  These questions could be separate or part of a sequence: Continue reading “Some Questions For Mr. Bernanke” →

Iron Cage for Nothing

When I gave away many of my old books a year ago, I kept my college copy of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Now Tyler Cowen cites a paper by Davide Cantoni demonstrating that Protestantism had nothing to do with economic development. (Cantoni also co-authored a paper with Simon and others on the impact of the French Revolution — via the Napoleonic conquests — on economic development.) He uses the “natural experiment” created by the division of the Holy Roman Empire (very roughly, modern-day Germany and Austria) into Protestant and Catholic states.

Continue reading “Iron Cage for Nothing” →

Never a Good Sign

The board of GM asked Fritz Henderson to resign as CEO. I don’t have an opinion on Fritz Henderson. But here’s the worrying bit, from the New York Times article:

“’Fritz was just not enough of a change agent,’ [a person with direct knowledge of the board’s deliberations] said. ‘The board wants a world-class C.E.O. and now they have enough breathing room to find one.'”

Having tried and rejected the inside option (Henderson was a longtime GM executive chosen to replace Rick Wagoner, who was forced out earlier this year), the board is certain to go looking for a superstar CEO from outside the company and probably outside the industry. The phrase “world-class CEO” is always a dead giveaway for delusion.

Continue reading “Never a Good Sign” →

Feudal Lords Of Finance

In some influential circles, these questions are now asked: What’s wrong with high levels of inequality in general, and with having very rich bankers in particular.  After all, human societies have survived the presence of extremely wealthy individuals in the past – in fact, some now argue, the presence of such a “new aristocracy” can finance growth and spur innovation.

This argument is deeply flawed along three dimensions.

  1. Such super-elites care very little for anyone other than themselves.  Certainly, there will be some charity – but remember that John D. Rockefeller’s greatest donations came after he had been dragged through the mud by some very persuasive rakers (Ida Tarbell). Continue reading “Feudal Lords Of Finance” →

Details

Now that the financial regulatory reform bills are progressing in both houses of Congress, it means that to really be on top of things, you not only have to read the bills, you have to read the amendments. One example is the Miller-Moore amendment (full text here), which passed the committee 34-32, only to run into criticism from Andrew Ross Sorkin and Yves Smith, among others, as well as defenses by Felix Salmon.

The amendment applies to cases where (a) a systemically important (TBTF) financial institution is taken over by the government and (b) the government has to take a loss on the transaction (that is, the assets cannot be liquidated for enough to cover the secured creditors and the insured depositors). In those cases, it says that the receiver can choose to treat up to 20% of a secured debt as unsecured. (A mortgage is an example of secured debt; if you can’t pay off your mortgage, the bank gets the house instead. For financial institutions, we are largely talking about repos — transactions where Bank A sells securities to Bank B and promises to buy them back later, which is effectively a secured loan from Bank B to Bank A — and collateral held provided by Bank A to Bank B when derivatives trades move against Bank A.)

Continue reading “Details” →

What’s Wrong with Our Health Care Debate

Uwe Reinhardt has a post on Economix that zeroes in on Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s criticism of the new mammogram guidelines. Here’s the quote from Hutchinson:

“So this task force says all of a sudden we’re going to change the guidelines that we have had for all these years. And now the public option may not pay for those, and that means the insurance companies are going to follow. The key is that these are covered by insurance so women will not have to decide if they’re going to spend $250 to get a mammogram because they and their doctors believe it is right to do so.”

Basically, the critics of the mammogram guidelines* are bemoaning the fact that certain women may not be able to get mammograms paid for by insurance — without mentioning the fact that many women don’t have insurance to begin with.

Or, to paraphrase Reinhardt: If certain medical procedures are so important to people’s health — shouldn’t everyone get them regardless of income or insurability?

* On which, let me make clear, I have no opinion, nor any qualified basis on which to have an opinion.

By James Kwak

Coordinated Capital Controls: A Further Elaboration

This guest post is by Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.  His recent proposal that countries consider coordinated capital controls has stimulated a great deal of discussion, and here he explains how discouraging capital flows relates to arguments about the attractiveness of a Tobin-type tax. 

Paul Krugman, in his Friday column for the New York Times, endorsed a tax on financial transactions, proposed recently by Adair Turner, Britain’s top financial regulator.  It is important to distinguish this Turner proposal from the original Tobin tax on international flows and these two taxes in turn from the kind of coordinated capital controls I proposed in this blog post two weeks ago.

Tobin’s original idea was to discourage speculation by taxing flows of international capital.  The Turner variant is to tax all financial transactions, domestic and international.  What they have in common is that both are seen as structural measures to be applied regardless of the state of the macroeconomic cycle.

In contrast, the capital controls that are now being proposed are more in the spirit of “macroprudential” measures, to be taken in response to surges in international capital flows (and not to steady and permanent flows) to emerging markets that have the potential of creating bubbles in asset prices, including exchange rates.  Such measures are therefore intended to be taken during the upswing of the cycle and not at all times. Continue reading “Coordinated Capital Controls: A Further Elaboration” →

Does Dubai Matter? Ask Ireland

Presumably the rulers of Dubai and Abu Dhabi are currently locked in negotiations regarding the exact terms that will be attached to a “bailout” for Dubai World.  We’ll never know the details but if, as seems likely, the final deal involves creditors taking some sort of hit (perhaps getting 75 cents in the dollar, at the end of the day), does that matter?

Dubai probably has around $100bn in total liabilities, if we include off-balance sheet transactions, so total credit losses of $30-50bn need to be assigned.  The direct effects so far seem small.  HSBC leads the pack, in terms of exposure,  but our baseline estimate is a 3 percent loss relative to its equity – not good, but manageable (and the stock already fell 5 percent on the news).  The impact among other financial institutions that lent to Dubai seems fairly spread out and mostly within continental Europe.

Korean construction companies and Ukrainian/Russian steelmakers are also affected by the likely fall off in construction activity, but the broader boom in emerging markets is unlikely to be disrupted.  The repricing of risk so far does not apply significantly to East Asia or Latin America.

However, there is a worrying impact on Ireland. Continue reading “Does Dubai Matter? Ask Ireland” →