Public Sees Past Facade of “Financial Reform”
A new AP-Gfk poll reveals that about two-thirds of the American public lack confidence that the financial regulation bill, currently being crafted by House and Senate conferees, will actually help avert future financial crises.
The public is right to be skeptical, as there is nothing in either the House or Senate bill that ends bailouts or ends “too-big-to-fail.” In fact parts of the bill, such as the expansion of deposit insurance, will actually increase the likelihood of future crises. (The IMF has an insightful working paper on the negative impacts of deposit insurance).
Perhaps the failure of Congressional efforts to end financial crises is the result of Washington’s unwillingness to recognize that government itself was the major driver of the recent crisis. Fortunately the public seems to get that. Some 70 percent of the poll respondents believe that government shares blame for the crisis. Here’s to hoping that Congress will at some point listen to the public, and end many of the distortionary policies that caused the crisis.
Fiscal Imbalance and Global Power
Over at National Journal‘s National Security Experts blog, this week’s question revolves around the health of the U.S. economy, and its relationship to U.S. power.
How serious a threat is the mounting debt to the nation’s standing as the world’s only superpower? Can the U.S. continue to spend more than all other countries combined on its military forces given burdensome debt levels? In what other ways does the mounting debt undermine the country’s strategic position? [...]
Our long-term fiscal imbalance, which increasingly amounts to a massive intergenerational wealth transfer, is clearly a sign of our decline. But it is a decline that has been a long time coming. (I first wrote about the insolvency of the Social Security system as a college sophomore, 23 years ago.) As such, it is tempting for people to assume that we’ll figure our way out of this mess before a complete collapse. Let’s call them, at the risk of a double negative, the declinist naysayers. And, even if they are willing to admit to the problem in the abstract, the naysayers can point to the more serious, and urgent, imbalances between pensioners and those who pay the pensions in Europe or Japan and say “At least we aren’t them.”
That is a pretty shoddy argument, but it seems to be ruling the day. We can talk about the obvious unsustainability of using taxes on current workers to pay benefits for retirees until we’re blue in the face. And my second grader can do the math on a system that was designed when workers outnumbered beneficiaries by 16.5 to 1, and in which, by 2030, that ratio will fall to 2 to 1. It simply doesn’t add up. (For more on this, much more, see my colleague Jagadeesh Gokhale’s latest.)
But this isn’t a math problem; this is a political problem. The incentive to kick the can down the road is overwhelming. The pain in attempting to deal with the problem in the here and now is, well, painful. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that members of Congress / Parliament / Bundestag / Diet, etc, have become very good at avoiding the issue altogether. And many of those who have chosen to tackle it are “spending more time with their families.”
What does all this mean for the United States’s standing as the world superpower? Less than you might think. Our difficulties in two medium-sized countries in SW/Central Asia have done more to puncture the illusion of American power than our political inability to deal with domestic problems. Our fiscal insolvency might convince other countries to play a larger role, if they genuinely feared for their safety. But other countries, especially our allies, are cutting military spending, while Uncle Sam continues to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders. In other words, our ability to maintain our global superpower status isn’t driven by our economic problems. But it is strategically stupid.
Did the IMF Deliberately Exaggerate the 2008 Financial Crisis?
This month, two vice-presidents of the Czech National Bank (CNB) have made very serious allegations against the International Monetary Fund. Below is the summary of their claims so far:
- Speaking to the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard on April 2, Mojmir Hampl, the vice-president of the CNB, said that the IMF under Dominique Strauss-Kahn “wanted to expand its role in Eastern Europe and obtain new financial resources.” Hampl claimed that the IMF exaggerated problems with the financial systems in Eastern Europe. “We have always emphasized that the instability of the financial system [in 2008] was a Western European problem. That proved correct… According to a recent EU report, only nine out of 27 EU member states did not have to introduce any financial stabilization measures [during the crisis]. All nine were new [mostly Eastern European] member states.”
- Hampl’s claim was echoed by his colleague, CNB vice-president Miroslav Singer, in today’s edition of the Czech daily Hospodarske Noviny. According to Singer, “I cannot say nice things about the IMF’s role in the 2008 crisis.” The Financial Times, Singer continued, carried a lot of nonsensical stories about the state of the Czech financial sector prior to the crisis. Instead of dispelling those stories, the IMF produced a study about the Czech Republic based on incorrect data and then leaked it to the Financial Times. “It is difficult to be certain… that the IMF wanted to harm the Czechs, Slovaks or Poles on purpose… More likely it was a combination of panic, lack of expertise and a desire to see problems everywhere.”
If true, these claims raise troubling questions about the incentives behind the largest increase of resources in the Fund’s history.
A Shortage of Sand?
In Soviet times people used to say that if the Communists took over the Sahara desert, there’d soon be a shortage of sand.
Which I guess explains why there’s an energy crisis in energy-rich Venezuela.
“Freedom in Crisis” on YouTube
My “Freedom in Crisis” speech, which has gotten some compliments as I’ve delivered it in various venues, is now available on the web, complete with accompanying Powerpoint illustrations.
Find it also on the Cato site here. And a partial transcript (pdf) was printed in Cato’s Letter. (Get a free subscription to Cato’s Letter here.) And to hear speeches like this live, watch for details on the next Cato University, July 25-30, 2010, in San Diego.
Monday Links
- Obama spoke on Wall Street today about increasing regulation of the American financial system. But did deregulation really cause the financial crisis?
- Burnt rubber: Obama’s decision to slap a 35 percent tariff on Chinese tires whiffs of senseless protectionism.
- According to the Economic Freedom in the World report, the U.S. was ranked the second-freest economy in 2000. It has fallen to 6th place this year.
- A bold exit strategy for Afghanistan.
- Why it’s time for the U.S. to start doing less abroad.
- Podcast: China’s economy is on track to be larger than the U.S. economy in a few years. Trade expert Dan Griswold says, “So what?”
Reform Needed, but Obama Plan Would Result in More Financial Crises, not Less
Today President Obama took his financial reform plan to the airwaves. While there is no doubt our financial system is in need of financial reform, the President’s plan would make bailouts a permanent feature of the regulatory landscape. Rather than ending “too big to fail” — the President wants us to believe that with additional discretion and power, the same Federal Reserve that missed the boat last time will save us next time.
The truth is that the President’s plan will result in a small number of companies being viewed by debtholders as “too big to fail”. These companies would see their funding costs decline, allowing them to gain market-share at the expense of their rivals, making these firms even larger. Greater concentration in our financial services industry is the last thing we need, yet the Obama plan all but guarantees it.
Obama also chooses myth’s over facts. The President claims that de-regulation and competition among regulators caused the crisis. The facts could not be more different. Those institutions at the center of the crisis — Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Bear Stearns, Lehman –could not choose their regulator.
The President’s plan chooses convenient targets and protects entrenched interests, rather than address the true underlying causes of the crisis. At no time have we heard the President discuss the expansionary monetary policies that helped fuel the bubble. Nor has the President talked about the global imbalances — the global savings glut that poured surplus savings from the rest of the world into the US. But then the President appears to hope that loose monetary policy and continued American consumption funded by China will get him out of his own political problems with the economy. It is especially striking that the President makes little mention of the housing bubble, as if it was only the bust that was the problem.
The President continues to say he inherited this crisis. While true, he did not inherit the same individuals — Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke — who were at the center of creating the crisis. All Obama needs to do is find a position for Hank Paulson and he will have completely re-assembled the Bush financial team.
Without real reform — fixing Fannie and Freddie, scaling back the massive subsidies for leverage in our tax code, loose monetary policy – it will only be a matter of time before the next crisis hits. If we implement the President’s plan, we will, however, guarantee that the next crisis will be even larger and severe than the current one.
If I Only Had a Crisis
Bloomberg News points out that President Obama needs a health-care crisis in order to impose a health-care “solution”:
President Barack Obama returns to Washington next week in search of one thing that can revive his health-care overhaul: a sense of crisis….
“At the moment, except for the people without insurance, we’re not in a health-care crisis,” said Stephen Wayne, a professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington. “You do need a crisis to generate movement in Congress and to help build a consensus.”
This administration has used Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine as a manual. Klein said in an interview that
The Shock Doctrine is a political strategy that the Republican right has been perfecting over the past 35 years to use for various different kinds of shocks. They could be wars, natural disasters, economic crises, anything that sends a society into a state of shock to push through what economists call ‘economic shock therapy’ – rapid-fire, pro-corporate policies that they couldn’t get through if people weren’t in a state of fear and panic.
Whether or not that’s true about the “right-wing” policies that she purported to analyze, the Obama admininstration has taken it to heart. Rahm Emanuel said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And this crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before” such as taking control of the financial, energy, information and healthcare industries. Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the president himself all echoed Emanuel’s exultation about the opportunities presented by crisis.
The financial crisis turned out to be shocking enough to let the federal government extend the power of the Federal Reserve, nationalize two automobile companies, spend $700 billion on corporate bailouts and another $787 billion on pork and “stimulus,” and inject a trillion dollars of inflationary credit into the economy. But now people are balking at further expansions of government, and the administration is longing for just a little more crisis to serve as a further opportunity.
Bailouts Could Hit $24 Trillion?
ABC News reports:
“The total potential federal government support could reach up to $23.7 trillion,” says Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, in a new report obtained Monday by ABC News on the government’s efforts to fix the financial system.
Yes, $23.7 trillion.
“The potential financial commitment the American taxpayers could be responsible for is of a size and scope that isn’t even imaginable,” said Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., ranking member on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. “If you spent a million dollars a day going back to the birth of Christ, that wouldn’t even come close to just $1 trillion — $23.7 trillion is a staggering figure.”
Granted, Barofsky is not saying that the government will definitely spend that much money. He is saying that potentially, it could.
At present, the government has about 50 different programs to fight the current recession, including programs to bail out ailing banks and automakers, boost lending and beat back the housing crisis.
We used to complain that George W. Bush had increased spending by ONE TRILLION DOLLARS in seven years. Who could have even imagined new government commitments of $24 trillion in mere months? These promises could make the implosion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac look like a lemonade stand closing.
Review of the Big REAL ID Hearing
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing yesterday on the REAL ID Act and the REAL ID revival bill, known as PASS ID. I attended and want to share with you some highlights.
Good News!
Little good came from the hearing, as it was primarily focused on how to get the states and people to accept a national ID. But there is some good news.
First, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared REAL ID dead (much as I did in my testimony two-plus years ago). “DOA” is how she referred to it.
She also said that no state will be in compliance with REAL ID by the current December 31, 2009 deadline. This is important because a lot of people think that states doing anything about the security of drivers’ licenses and ID cards are complying with REAL ID.
Another highlight was the commentary of Senator Roland Burris (D-IL). He is a beleaguered outsider to the Senate and evidently wasn’t coached on the talking points around REAL ID and PASS ID. So he flat out asked why we shouldn’t just have “a national ID.”
Senator Susan Collins’ (R-ME) nervous smile was particularly noticeable when Burris asked why the emperor had no clothes. No one was supposed to talk about national IDs at this hearing! But that’s what PASS ID is.
REAL ID and PASS ID are two versions of the same national ID system, and nobody is denying it. That’s good news because the effort to rebrand REAL ID through PASS ID has failed.
Why Promiscuous Bail-Outs Never Was a Good Idea
Jeffrey A. Miron explains in Reason why a government bail-out of most everyone was neither the only option nor the best option:
When people try to pin the blame for the financial crisis on the introduction of derivatives, or the increase in securitization, or the failure of ratings agencies, it’s important to remember that the magnitude of both boom and bust was increased exponentially because of the notion in the back of everyone’s mind that if things went badly, the government would bail us out. And in fact, that is what the federal government has done. But before critiquing this series of interventions, perhaps we should ask what the alternative was. Lots of people talk as if there was no option other than bailing out financial institutions. But you always have a choice. You may not like the other choices, but you always have a choice. We could have, for example, done nothing.
By doing nothing, I mean we could have done nothing new. Existing policies were available, which means bankruptcy or, in the case of banks, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation receivership. Some sort of orderly, temporary control of a failing institution for the purpose of either selling off the assets and liquidating them, or, preferably, zeroing out the equity holders, giving the creditors a haircut and making them the new equity holders. Similarly, a bankruptcy or receivership proceeding might sell the institution to some player in the private sector willing to own it for some price.
With that method, taxpayer funds are generally unneeded, or at least needed to a much smaller extent than with the bailout approach. In weighing bankruptcy vs. bailouts, it’s useful to look at the problem from three perspectives: in terms of income distribution, long-run efficiency, and short-term efficiency.
From the distributional perspective, the choice is a no-brainer. Bailouts took money from the taxpayers and gave it to banks that willingly, knowingly, and repeatedly took huge amounts of risk, hoping they’d get bailed out by everyone else. It clearly was an unfair transfer of funds. Under bankruptcy, on the other hand, the people who take most or even all of the loss are the equity holders and creditors of these institutions. This is appropriate, because these are the stakeholders who win on the upside when there’s money to be made. Distributionally, we clearly did the wrong thing.
It’s too late to reverse history. But it would help if Washington politicians stopped plotting new bail-outs. At this stage, most every American could argue that they are entitled to a bail-out because most every other American has already received one.
Too Big to Fail
One of the most pernicious public policies aggravating the financial crisis is that of “too big to fail.” The doctrine states that some banks (now financial institutions generally) are so large that their failure would incur “systemic risk” for the financial system. That sounds terrible and it is intended to. Financial services regulators and Treasury secretaries use it to frighten small children and congressmen. How can an elected official vote to incur systemic risk? He must vote to approve the bank bailout of the day. In fact, people who use the term cannot even agree among themselves as to what it means, much less what causes it and, therefore, what the appropriate response would be. I suggest the reader substitute the phrase “too politically connected to fail” whenever he sees “too big to fail.” What follows will then be rendered intelligible.
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