In the New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann frets over Ron Paul’s “hostility to government” in an article titled “Enemy of the State.” I wonder if Lemann, who is both a long-time writer at a great magazine and the dean of a great school of journalism, would think “Enemy of the State” was red-baiting or otherwise inappropriate language if it was applied to some other candidate.

But I was especially struck by this comment in Lemann’s lament about all the government programs Paul would repeal:

As for the financial crisis, Paul would have countenanced no regulation that might have prevented it, no government stabilization of the financial system after it happened, and no special help for working people hurt by it. This is where the logic of government-shrinking leads.

The famous New Yorker editing process seems to have broken down here. Here’s how the paragraph should have read:

As for the financial crisis, Paul would have countenanced none of the regulation that helped to cause it, no government creation of cheap money that created the unsustainable boom, and no special help for Wall Street banks when the bubble collapsed. He would have seen that that was where the logic of government-expanding leads.

The New Yorker Misunderstands Ron Paul (Again) is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Politicians in Europe have spent decades creating a fiscal crisis by violating Mitchell’s Golden Rule and letting government grow faster than the private sector.

As a result, government is far too big today, and nations such as Greece are in the process of fiscal collapse.

But that’s the good news — at least relatively speaking. Over the next few decades, the problems will get much worse because of demographic change and unsustainable promises to spend other people’s money.

(By the way, America will suffer the same fate in the absence of reforms.)

Here’s one stark indicator of why Greece is in the toilet.

Look at the skyrocketing number of people riding in the wagon of government dependency (and look at these cartoons to understand why this is so debilitating).

By the way, Greece’s population only increased by a bit more than 16 percent during this period. Yet the number of bureaucrats jumped by far more than 100 percent.

And don’t forget that this chart just looks at the number of bureaucrats, not their excessive pay and bloated pensions.

With this in mind, do you agree with President Obama and want to squander American tax dollars on a bailout for Greece?

Helping to Explain Greece’s Collapse in a Single Picture is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

One almost feels sorry for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

He’s a punchline in his own country because he oversees the IRS even though he conveniently forgot to declare $80,000 of income (and managed to get away with punishment that wouldn’t even qualify as a slap on the wrist).

Now he’s becoming a a bit of a joke in Europe. Earlier this month, a wide range of European policy makers basically told the Treasury Secretary to take a long walk off a short pier when he tried to offer advice on Europe’s fiscal crisis.

And the latest development is that the German Finance Minister basically said Geithner was “stupid” for a new bailout scheme. Here’s an excerpt from the UK-based Daily Telegraph.

Germany and America were on a collision course on Tuesday night over the handling of Europe’s debt crisis after Berlin savaged plans to boost the EU rescue fund as a “stupid idea” and told the White House to sort out its own mess before giving gratuitous advice to others.German finance minister Wolfgang Schauble said it would be a folly to boost the EU’s bail-out machinery (EFSF) beyond its €440bn lending limit by deploying leverage to up to €2 trillion, perhaps by raising funds from the European Central Bank.”I don’t understand how anyone in the European Commission can have such a stupid idea. The result would be to endanger the AAA sovereign debt ratings of other member states. It makes no sense,” he said.

All that’s missing in the story is Geithner channeling his inner Forrest Gump and responding that “Stupid is as stupid does.”

...at birth?

Separated...

This little spat reminds me of the old saying that there is no honor among thieves. Geithner wants to do the wrong thing. The German government wants to do the wrong thing. And every other European government wants to do the wrong thing. They’re merely squabbling over the best way of picking German pockets to subsidize the collapsing welfare states of Southern Europe.

But that’s actually not accurate. German politicians don’t really want to give money to the Greeks and Portuguese.

The real story of the bailouts is that politicians from rich nations are trying to indirectly protect their banks, which – as shown in this chart – are in financial trouble because they foolishly thought lending money to reckless welfare states was a risk-free exercise.

Europe’s political class claims that bailouts are necessary to prevent a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis, but this is nonsense – much as American politicians were lying (or bamboozled) when they supported TARP.

It is a relatively simple matter for a government to put a bank in receivership, hold all depositors harmless, and then sell off the assets. Or to subsidize the takeover of an insolvent institution. This is what America did during the savings & loan bailouts 20 years ago. Heck, it’s also what happened with IndyMac and WaMu during the recent financial crisis. And it’s what the Swedish government basically did in the early 1990s when that nation had a financial crisis.

But politicians don’t like this “FDIC-resolution” approach because it means wiping out shareholders, bondholders, and senior management of institutions that made bad economic choices. And that would mean reducing moral hazard rather than increasing it. And it would mean stiff-arming campaign contributors and protecting the interests of taxpayers.

Heaven forbid those things happen. After all, as Bastiat told us, “Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

Tim Geithner: The Forrest Gump of World Finance is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Last week I offered my suggestion on the one book you should read, if you really want to understand the financial crisis. In this Part II, I offer a list of popular books, mostly written by journalists, along with very brief thoughts.  Part III, to come, will focus on more “scholarly” books.

As general rule, these popular books lack a theoretical framework of the crisis. They often have the feel of a “bad people did bad things” narrative. These are only books I’ve actually read (and remember), so its a selective list. Some are insider stories of only a single firm, and hence, somewhat limited in their usefulness. I will also give little evidence behind my judgments, so if you don’t value my opinion, stop reading now. 

1. All the Devils Are Here, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera. (2 stars) There’s only one reason to read this: it is the model of the establishment Left version of the crisis. This is the book that future Harvard professors will force their students to read to “understand” the evil Bush years. Otherwise, skip it. Wildly off both in terms of fact and interpretation.  Read any of their columns and you know what the book is like.

2. Reckless Endangerment, by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner. (4 stars) See Part I. Despite many flaws, probably the best of the “popular” books.

3. After the Fall, by Nicole Gelinas. (3 stars) I usually love Nicole’s stuff, and the story here on “too-big-to-fail’ is dead-on, but I think she’s off on Glass-Steagall and doesn’t make that case. Still, a relatively short and worthwhile read.

4. Fool’s Gold, by Gillan Tett. (4 stars) Exclusively about JP Morgan, but great background on credit default swaps. So despite its narrow focus on one firm, still a worthwhile read.

5. Chain of Blame, by Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla. (3 stars) A narrow, but interesting, focus on subprime mortgage lending. Muolo is a long time reporter for National Mortgage News, so this has an almost insider’s feel of the mortgage industry, for that reason a worthwhile read.

6. Senseless Panic, by William Isacc. (4 stars) Author is the former FDIC Chair during the S&L crisis, and applies insights learned there to the current crisis. He misses a lot, but it’s breezy and short, and what is there is very worth reading. I wouldn’t put this at the top of your list, but if you’re going to read several, then add this one.

7. House of Cards, by William Cohen. (3 stars) Focused exclusively on Bear Stearns.  Again, a narrow focus, but generally fast moving and an interesting story line.

8. The Sellout, by Charles Gasparino. (4 stars) Despite a few minor factual errors, this was one of the better books.  He’s tough on Washington and Wall Street, and accurately so. 

9. A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, by Larry McDonald. (3 stars) Focused only on the failure of Lehman. Maybe too much useless personal detail, but otherwise an interesting story.

10. In Fed We Trust, by David Wessel. (3 stars).  Despite reading like a love letter to Bernanke, it is probably the best inside story of the Fed’s behavior during the crisis, which is also its weakness as the book offers little insight into happens outside the Fed.

Again, Part III will focus on more scholarly books, and in my opinion, generally more insightful reading.  That said, they don’t often make fun beach reading, which the above should be safe for.

What to Read on the Financial Crisis, Part II: Popular is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

I’ve argued that the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill does not end “too-big-to-fail”, that is the belief that certain companies are implicitly backed by the government because policy-makers are unlikely to let said institutions actually fail. By naming some companies as ”systemically important” — as required by Dodd-Frank — the government is actually sending a signal as to who is likely to be bailed out.

As evidenced by regulators’ behavior during the financial crisis, the prime beneficiaries would be the creditors of these companies, as even when shareholders and management suffered, creditors generally did not. This should allow such firms to borrow at a cost lower than firms not deemed systemically important.

Given this funding advantage, it would seem natural that firms would want to be included as systemically important. Sure they might be examined by bank regulators more often, but that’s hardly a large cost compared to the funding advantage.

Congressman Frank has attempted to refute that there are any benefits from being deemed “systemically important” by the fact that ”so many financial institutions have lobbied against being designated in this way.” What his argument misses, or chooses to ignore, is that these benefits are not the same for all institutions. It is companies that rely heavily on debt market financing, such as banks, that have the most to gain. And under Dodd-Frank, the largest banks are automatically included. They have no opportunity to lobby to be in or out. The firms that are not automatically in, the most important of which are insurance companies, do not fund themselves primarily via the debt markets. Insurance companies get most of their funding from the premiums paid by their policyholders. And those premiums must be sufficient to cover expected losses, which have little to do with funding costs in the debt markets. Other non-bank financial companies, such as hedge funds and private equity, do not gain to the same extent that banks do because they have traditionally been a lot less leveraged than banks.

So the answer to Mr. Frank’s point is that those who have the most to gain from being ”systemically important” are already included, those with the least the gain are the very ones lobbying against being included. The real perversity is that once they are included, they will have a strong incentive to shift their business models toward more debt funding, making them riskier and more likely to fail (debt markets are far more fickle than insurance policy-holders). We are left relying solely on the judgment of the regulators to avoid this outcome, the same regulators who were asleep at the wheel as the housing bubble expanded.

Who Wants To Be ‘Too-Big-To-Fail’? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

One commonly heard refrain is that the deregulation of banking caused the financial crisis.  To those of us that have actually spent years working on banking policy, such a claim is met with surprise.  What banking deregulation?  The usual response, with generally an absolute lack of detail or argument, is the repeal of Glass-Steagall by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLB).  When the proponents of this claim bother to offer any explanation (in some circles simply invoking the name “Phil Gramm” substitutes for any analysis), it usually goes like this:

With Glass-Steagall dead and gone, financial institutions were now free to grow large.

That’s taken from the recent book Reckless Endangerment.  What it misses that is that Glass-Steagall placed zero constraints on the size of banks.    

The following graph shows the share of total commercial bank assets held by banks over $10 billion in assets.  Its been quite a change, and obviously one toward growing concentration.  But was this caused by GLB?  Recall GLB was not signed into law until 1999.  By 1999 the share of assets held by the largest banks was already 65%, at the height of the bubble in 2005 it had risen to 73%.  

What could have contributed to this increase? Perhaps, just maybe, the removal of branch banking restrictions in the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994. Prior to the passage of Riegle-Neal many states had substantial restrictions on the number of branches a bank could have, which severelylimited the size of banks. In Texas for instance, banks were limited to a single location.

Before the passage of Riegle-Neal, the large bank share of assets stood at 38%.  In the few years, between its passage and that of GLB, this 38% shot up to 65%.   Far more than GLB, Riegle-Neal was the legislative driver of commercial bank consolidation.  But then a banking deregulation passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president just doesn’t garner the blind emotion of blaming everything on Phil Gramm.

It should, of course, be said that  the removal of branching banks restrictions was a great thing.  There is a substantial body of academic work supporting the notion that such restrictions increased the risk of the banking system.  Because of Riegle-Neal we had a safer banking system than we would have had otherwise.  It was indeed a deregulation — one that matter and one that vastly improved our financial system.

The Banking Deregulation that Mattered (and Actually Happened) is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

It’s probably never wise to inject oneself into the middle of a food fight, but since I think both sides actually have something right and something wrong, its been a worthwhile debate to follow.  That is the ongoing debate between Peter Wallison at the American Enterprise Institute and David Min at the Center for American Progress (at least we can all agree we love America) on the role of Fannie Mae (and Freddie Mac) in the financial crisis.  If you can’t guess, Peter says Fannie/Freddie caused the crisis, David says they didn’t.

David makes an interesting point, one I’ve actually argued, in his latest retort.  That is, this wasn’t exclusively a housing crisis/bubble.  Other sectors, like commercial real estate, boomed and then went bust; other countries, with different housing policies, also had bubbles.  True from what I can tell.  I will also add that the U.S. office market actually peaked and fell before the housing market, so we can safely say there wasn’t contagion from housing to other parts of the real estate market. 

But the problem with this argument, at least for David, is that it undercuts the Dodd-Frank Act, which he has regularly defended.  The implicit premise of Dodd-Frank is that predatory mortgage lending caused the crisis, so now we need Elizabeth Warren to save us from evil lenders.  But how does predatory lending explain the office market bubble?  Do we really believe that deals between sophisticated parties, poured over by lawyers, were driven by predatory lending practices?  Do we also believe that other countries were also plagued by bad mortgage brokers?  Again, I think David is right about the problem being beyond housing, but he can’t have it both ways.

What is the common factor driving bubbles in commercial real estate, housing, and foreign real estate markets?  Maybe interest rates.  This was a credit bubble after all.  Especially since the Fed basically sets interest rate policy for the world.  It is hard for me to believe that three years (2002–2004) of a negative real federal funds rate isn’t going to end badly.  This is what I think Peter misses, the critical role of the Federal Reserve in helping blow the bubble.  But Dodd-Frank does nothing to change this. 

Now there are a ton of things I think both still miss.  We could argue all day about what a subprime mortgage is.  I think the definitions used by Wallison (and Pinto) are reasonable.  There is also a degree, a large one, to which David and Peter are just talking past each other.  For instance, there is something special about the U.S. housing market that transfers much of the risk to the taxpayer.  In contrast, the bust in the office market didn’t leave the taxpayer to pick up the tab.  That has to count for something, unless one just doesn’t care about the taxpayer. 

There are a few other issues that make Fannie/Freddie uniquely important in the crisis, but I lack the space to go into them here. Instead, I’ll wrap up by saying that their role in the overnight repurchase (re-po) market is under-appreciated and their ability to essentially neuter the Fed was critical in keeping the bubble going.  What’s for dessert?

The CAP-AEI Fannie Mae Food Fight is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If you haven’t seen it already, be sure to give a read to Friedman Prize winner Hernando de Soto‘s recent piece in Business Week, “The Destruction of Economic Facts.” It’s a fascinating perspective on the economic and financial turmoil that is wracking the United States and the world.

As de Soto perceives more easily from working in developing economies, an important input into functioning markets is good information—about property, ownership, debts, and so on. The “destruction of economic facts” is one of the roots of instability and uncertainty in Europe and the United States: “In a few short decades the West undercut 150 years of legal reforms that made the global economy possible.”

The law and markets are information systems, says de Soto:

The rule of law is much more than a dull body of norms: It is a huge, thriving information and management system that filters and processes local data until it is transformed into facts organized in a way that allows us to infer if they hang together and make sense.

If you’re interested in information and transparency, it’s worth a read.

Financial Crises as Information Problems is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

There’s a great piece in the spring issue of The Independent Review on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke by San Jose State Professor Jeffrey Rogers Hummel.  Although a bit long, its well worth the read for anyone wanting to understand both Bernanke’s thinking and his actions during and since the financial crisis.

First, Prof. Hummel discusses the differences between Bernanke’s and Milton Friedman’s explanations for the Great Depression.  Those that debate whether Bernanke’s actions, especially the quantitative easings, would be approved of by Friedman will get a lot out of this discussion.  From this comparison, you get the point that Friedman was concerned about overall credit conditions and liquidity, whereas Bernanke is less focused on the monetary factors than on the impairment of credit intermediation, which explains his support of selective bailouts.

Hummel’s comparison of Greenspan and Bernanke is also insightful, particularly since many (myself included) often lump the two’s policies together.  From the analysis, it is clear that Greenspan falls into the Friedman camp, his “rescues” were of the financial system in general, and not of specific firms.

One might say a bailout is a bailout, so what’s the difference between rescuing the system and rescuing individual firms within the system?  Certainly that’s a view I have some sympathy for.  The “Greenspan put” was as much a contributor to reckless risk-taking as anything else.  Hummel, however, discuses why this difference ultimately matters, and why it shows Bernanke to fit the role of economic central planner.  In short, the facts are presented that during the financial crisis, Bernanke did not actually increase overall liquidity by much, he re-directed it to those firms he deemed most important.  This process of reducing liquidity to some sectors while re-directing it to others, arguably less efficient sectors, goes a considerable distance in explaining some of the decline in both aggregate demand and consumption in 2008.

Again, the piece is one of the more accessible and insightful I’ve read on Bernanke in quite a while.

Ben Bernanke: Central Planner is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Wall Street Journal has pointed out that in his recent press conference Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke used the words “inflation expectations” (or some variation) 21 times. His argument is that we need not worry about inflation because we will see it coming, and then the Fed will do something about it. Such an argument relies heavily on the ability of inflation expectations to predict inflation. Which of course raises the question, just how predictive are inflation expectations?

The graph below compares inflation, as measured by CPI, and inflation expectations, as measured by the University of Michigan consumer survey, the longest times series we have on inflation expectations.

Clearly the two move together. For instance, the correlation between current inflation and expectations is almost 1 (its 0.93), while the correlation between inflation and actual inflation a year later is slightly less at 0.81. The relationship declines as we move further into the future. So yes, consumer expectations appear a reasonable predictor of the direction of inflation. However, they don’t appear to be a great predictor of the magnitude or the frequency of changes. For instance, the standard deviation of actual inflation is about twice that of expected inflation. As one can easily see from the chart, expectations are quite sticky and rarely pick up the extremes. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, expectations did move up, but then never reached the heights actually experienced, nor did consumers ever actually expect deflation during the recent financial crisis (if we are going to base policy on expectations, we should at least be consistent about it).

For about the last decade we also have market based measures of inflation, based upon inflation-indexed bonds. The TIPS measure tends to be less correlated with actual inflation, but does a better job of capturing the extremes. Although interesting enough, TIPS was already predicting that deflation would be short-lived before we even experienced any deflation.

The point is that while expectations are useful for qualitatively purposes, they do not have a strong record of recording the extremes. Given that most of us expect some positive level of inflation, the real debate is over how much. In this regard, either survey or market-based expectations are likely to be both a lagging indicator and an under-estimate of actual inflation.

Can We Rely on Inflation Expectations? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A previous post of mine at International Liberty addressed the debate over whether Republicans should trim the IRS’s budget. The following case study should convince everyone that the answer is a resounding yes.

First, some background from a Joe Nocera column in the New York Times. The federal government made a rather troubling decision a few years ago to investigate, prosecute, and ultimately imprison a random home-loan borrower named Charlie Engle for the crime of mortgage fraud.

Mr. Engle is far from blameless in this saga, but I noted in another post that it was rather odd that the government would target a nobody while letting all the big fish swim away. This episode certainly paints a picture of a government that has one set of rules for ordinary people, but an entirely different set of rules for the political elite and those who make big campaign contributions to that ruling class.

But I also noted that I’m not a lawyer or legal expert and was unsure about the degree to which the big players actually broke laws, or whether they simply made stupid business decisions (often encouraged by bad government policy).

The most upsetting part of the story, though, is how the government wound up targeting Mr. Engle. It turns out that an IRS agent, Robert Norlander, must have been competing for the IRS’s Bully-of-the-Year Award because here are some of the things he did:

• Norlander decided to snoop into Engle’s affairs because he saw a film about him training for a marathon. In other words, there was no probable cause, no reasonable suspicion, nothing. Just the perverse decision of an IRS bully to go after someone.
• Norlander admitted a pattern of thuggish behavior, stating that he will snoop into someone’s private life simply because that person drives an expensive car.
• Norlander continued to investigate and persecute Engle, subjecting him to undercover surveillance, even though his tax returns showed no wrongdoing.
• Norlander even engaged in “dumpster dives” to look for evidence of wrongdoing in Mr. Engle’s garbage. Keep in mind that there is no probable cause, no reasonable suspicion, and Engle’s tax returns were legit.
• Norlander used a sleazy KGB tactic by sending an attractive woman to flirt with Mr. Engle in hopes of getting him to somehow admit to a crime.
• Norlander failed to find any evidence of a tax crime. He couldn’t even hit Engle with a money-laundering offense. But the undercover agent who was part of the “honey trap” was wearing a wire and supposedly got Engle to admit to mortgage fraud and Norlander used that extremely flimsy evidence to justify a Justice Department case against Engle.

In other words, this whole thing has a terrible stench. Assuming the details in the story are accurate, we have an IRS agent engaging in a random vendetta against someone, and then apparently justifying his jihad by figuring out how to nail the guy on a very weak charge of mortgage fraud. I would describe Norlander as a “rogue agent,” but apparently this behavior is business-as-usual at the IRS.

Here are the relevant passages from Nocera’s column:

Mr. Engle received $30,000 for his participation. The film, “Running the Sahara,” was released in the fall of 2008. Eventually, it caught the attention of Robert W. Nordlander, a special agent for the Internal Revenue Service. As Mr. Nordlander later told the grand jury, “Being the special agent that I am, I was wondering, how does a guy train for this because most people have to work from nine to five and it’s very difficult to train for this part-time.” (He also told the grand jurors that sometimes, when he sees somebody driving a Ferrari, he’ll check to see if they make enough money to afford it. When I called Mr. Nordlander and others at the I.R.S. to ask whether this was an appropriate way to choose subjects for criminal tax investigations, my questions were met with a stone wall of silence.) Mr. Engle’s tax records showed that while his actual income was substantial, his taxable income was quite small, in part because he had a large tax-loss carry forward, due to a business deal he’d been involved in several years earlier. (Mr. Nordlander would later inform the grand jury only of his much lower taxable income, which made it seem more suspicious.) Still convinced that Mr. Engle must be hiding income, Mr. Nordlander did undercover surveillance and took “Dumpster dives” into Mr. Engle’s garbage. He mainly discovered that Mr. Engle lived modestly. In March 2009, still unsatisfied, Mr. Nordlander persuaded his superiors to send an attractive female undercover agent, Ellen Burrows, to meet Mr. Engle and see if she could get him to say something incriminating. In the course of several flirtatious encounters, she asked him about his investments. …Unbeknownst to Mr. Engle, Ms. Burrows was wearing a wire. …No tax charges were ever brought, even though that was Mr. Nordlander’s original rationale. Money laundering, the suspicion of which was needed to justify the undercover sting, was a nonissue as well. As for that “confession” to Ms. Burrows, take a closer look. It really isn’t a confession at all. Mr. Engle is confessing to his mortgage broker’s sins, not his own.

Stories like this explain why I’m a libertarian.

As George Washington supposedly said, ”Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” Unfortunately, thanks to bad laws and thuggish bureaucrats, government is definitely now our master and no longer just a servant. The IRS is a grim example of this phenomenon. President Obama, not surprisingly, wants to increase their budget.

Another Day in the Life of the IRS is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Debates over the causes of the financial crisis sometimes center on whether Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “late to the party” in terms of subprime lending.  As it relates to the recent crisis, I address this question elsewhere. 

The GSEs and their apologists do claim to have been big contributors to one party: the expansion of homeownership in the United States.  Yet the facts suggest otherwise.

The chart below compares the GSE’s market-share, in terms of home mortgage lending (as reported in the Fed’s Flow of Funds data), with the national homeownership rate (as reported in the Decennial Census). 

The chart makes readily apparent that the largest increases in homeownership occurred before the GSEs played much of a role, if any, in the mortgage market.  For instance, by 1970, the homeownership rate had reached 62.3, yet the GSE market-share was just above 6%.  Even a decade after Fannie was “privatized,” the GSE market-share was still under 20%.

The real growth in GSE activity occurred during the 1980s, particularly the later half.  The reason?  The implosion of the savings and loan industry.  It seems we simply substituted several thousand mismanaged and under-capitalized thrifts for two large mismanaged and under-capitalized thrifts.  Interestingly enough, as the GSEs were doubling their market-share in the 1980s the homeownership rate actually fell.  By the time the GSEs had reached a market-share of 50%, the U.S. homeownership rate had already come close to the rate we see today, of 66%.

The data clearly show that we became a nation of homeowners with little assistance from Fannie and Freddie.  Not only did they join that party late, they simply took the place of the last group to ruin the party:  the S&Ls.

Fannie, Freddie: Late to the Party? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Thanks to Denver lawyer Kevin Evans, who filed the Freedom of Information Act Request, we now know that several employees of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) might have missed the financial crisis because their eyes were glued to their computer screens watching porn.

The chart below shows the number of incidents, as reported by the SEC’s Inspector General.  What caught my eye was that the number of porn-viewing incidents shows a massive spike in 2008, when the financial crisis was at its worst.

It should, of course, be noted that the overall level of incidents was small in number, so we shouldn’t draw too many conclusions about the SEC overall.  We should, however, be concerned at at least one of these employees was being paid $222,418 a year.  I might be able to accept someone getting paid $20,000 a year spending their work time watching porn, but not $222,418.  But then at least this employee has an excuse for missing the financial crisis; we are still waiting to hear the excuse for the SEC’s non-porn viewing employees (perhaps they were too busy on Facebook to keep an eye on Wall Street).

SEC Employees Hard at Work during Financial Crisis is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Since the financial crisis, “deregulation” has become a catch-all phrase for everything that went wrong in our financial markets.  Unfortunately said deregulation is rarely ever explained, but is rather asserted.  To truly inform policy debates, discussions must center on specific instances of deregulation.  One such example of banking deregulation that did actually occur was the The Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 (imagine that, a Democrat Congress and a Democrat President deregulating the banking industry).  The heart of Riegle-Neal was to remove barriers to interstate branching. 

A recent article in the Journal of Finance looks at the impact of bank branching deregulation on the distribution of income across U.S. States.  A working paper version can be found here.  The researchers find that as bank deregulation increased competition and improved efficiency, “deregulation materially tightened the distribution of income by boosting incomes in the lower part of the income distribution while having little impact on incomes above the median. Bank deregulation tightened the distribution of income by increasing the relative wage rates and working hours of unskilled workers.”  The bottom line is that the increased competition that resulted from deregulation disproportionately benefited those on the bottom of the income distribution.  As Washington continues to pile additional new regulations upon the banking industry, we should bear in mind that much of the impact of increased regulation might be felt by those least able to bear it.

The extent to which regulatory barriers in banking benefits the rich at the expense of the poor is also illustrated in a forthcoming article, again in the Journal of Finance.  In this article, the authors find in the early 20th century, counties where the elite had disproportionately large land holdings had fewer banks per capita, with costlier credit, and more limited access. The authors see this as suggestive that elites restrict financial development in order to limit access to finance, and hence maintain existing income inequalities.

One of the lessons I take away from these papers is that we need to examine banking regulation/deregulation as it actually occurs and is implemented, and not how we believe some all knowing, benevolent government would impose it.  The odds seem to me that the more extensive is banking regulation, the more likely it is to be captured by economic elites and narrow interests.

Bank Deregulation and Income Inequality is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Cato senior fellow Johan Norberg, author of In Defense of Global Capitalism and Financial Fiasco, has the cover story in this week’s issue of The Spectator, the eminent 182-year-old British weekly. Titled “The great debt bubble of 2011,” it warns that governments are repeating their mistakes of the past decade:

There is a broad consensus that the financial crisis of 2007 was at least in part a result of record-low interest rates, huge deficits and large-scale credit-financed consumption. Today, governments across the world are trying to solve the crisis — by means of record-low interest rates, huge deficits and large-scale credit-financed consumption. This time, they are also using more novel means of creating easy money: bank bailouts, stimulus packages and quantitative easing.

After discussing the soaring debt burdens of European countries, Norberg writes:

At this point, it is traditional to say: thank God for those roaring economics in East Asia, India and Brazil. But how real is their remarkable growth? Look closely, and even this may be in part a result of artificial stimulus. India’s and Brazil’s growth is financed by short-term capital from abroad: money that could disappear overnight. Easy money always ends up somewhere. The last time it was in property, this time it is in emerging markets (and often in the property markets of emerging markets)….

Aside from the foreign capital inflows, China had its own stimulus package, as big as America’s. Beijing has printed yuan and pushed banks and local governments to spend like drunken Keynesians. Absurdly, China’s money supply is now larger than America’s, even though its economy is a third of the size. We can see the results of this stimulus in stock market prices and in new roads, bridges and housing complexes all over the country.

Happy New Year! And watch for more on incipient bubbles in the January-February issue of Cato Policy Report.

Johan Norberg on Bubbles Yet to Come is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A constant narrative of the financial crisis is that banks out-smarted the government by taking excessive risks, and that if only we had empowered regulators, the whole crisis would have been avoided.  The truth, however, is that government was often the driver of excessive risk-taking, and nowhere is that more true than in the mortgage market.

One of the worst offenders has been the Federal Housing Administration (FHA).  Even today, one can get an FHA backed loan with only a 3.5% downpayment.  After the financing of seller concessions, the borrower can leave the closing table with zero, or even negative, equity.  FHA will even offer these low equity loans to subprime borrowers, those with the worst credit history.  If there’s anything to be learned from the financial crisis, combining high risk borrowers with low downpayment loans is asking for default.

Despite FHA’s loose standards, several lenders have responsibly chosen to impose higher underwriting standards than FHA.  Sadly instead of being praised for being slightly more responsible than FHA, these lenders are being attacked by so-called consumer advocates for not taking enough risk.

The Washington Post reports that a coalition of advocates is planning to file complaints against lenders who have higher standards than FHA, claiming that higher standards discriminate against minorities, since minorities on average have lower credit scores.  It seems some have learned nothing, continuing to push the very same policies that contributed to the crisis.  If anything, FHA should start moving in the direction of the more responsible lenders and improve its woefully weak underwriting standards.  Congress should also move in the direction of requiring meaningful downpayments on FHA loans, as well as shifting some of the credit risk back to the lender.

Advocates Complain Banks Not Putting FHA at Enough Risk is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The financial crisis and global warming have reinforced an age-old criticism of our traditional ways of measuring wealth, and a number of alternative indexes have been proposed that would instead measure people’s well-being and environmental sustainability.

There are problems with using GDP. It involves an incredible amount of guesswork; and even if it were perfect, it would be bizarre to use production of goods and services as the only yardstick to evaluate our societies. But finding problems is one thing; it is something completely different to find an alternative that is better. Any sort of well-being index would require agreement on what well-being is, and there is a risk that governments would be tempted to find a one-size-fits-all standard and try to make us all wear it.

In a new paper I examine some of the proposed alternatives and they all beg the question about well-being by defining it as the result of the particular kinds of policies that they happen to prefer. Bhutan’s famous National Happiness Index, for example, defines it partly as a strong, traditional culture, and has used it to oppress minorities. And the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, created by French president Nicolas Sarkozy and led by economist Joseph Stiglitz, selectively chooses measures to show that France is richer in relation to the United States than it would otherwise be.

The advantage of GDP is precisely what it has often been criticized for — that it is a narrow and value-free measure. It does not even try to define well-being, and so fits liberal, pluralistic societies in which people have different interests, preferences and attitudes toward well-being. It tells us what we can do, but not what we should do; and since it measures what we can do, it also correlates with most of the things most people want from life: better health, longer lives, less poverty and even happiness. The latest research shows not only that people in rich countries are happier but also that countries grow happier as they become richer.

Read the paper here. Read Will Wilkinson’s Policy Analysis on happiness research here.

On Happiness is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Ireland is in deep fiscal trouble and the Germans and the French apparently want the politicians in Dublin to increase the nation’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate as the price for being bailed out. This is almost certainly the cause of considerable smugness and joy in Europe’s high-tax nations, many of which have been very resentful of Ireland for enjoying so much prosperity in recent decades in part because of a low corporate tax burden.

But is there any reason to think Ireland’s competitive corporate tax regime is responsible for the nation’s economic crisis? The answer, not surprisingly, is no. Here’s a chart from one of Ireland’s top economists, looking at taxes and spending for past 27 years. You can see that revenues grew rapidly, especially beginning in the 1990s as the lower tax rates were implemented. The problem is that politicians spent every penny of this revenue windfall.

When the financial crisis hit a couple of years ago, tax revenues suddenly plummeted. Unfortunately, politicians continued to spend like drunken sailors. It’s only in the last year that they finally stepped on the brakes and began to rein in the burden of government spending. But that may be a case of too little, too late.

The second chart provides additional detail. Interestingly, the burden of government spending actually fell as a share of GDP between 1983 and 2000. This is not because government spending was falling, but rather because the private sector was growing even faster than the public sector.

This bit of good news (at least relatively speaking) stopped about 10 years ago. Politicians began to increase government spending at roughly the same rate as the private sector was expanding. While this was misguided, tax revenues were booming (in part because of genuine growth and in part because of the bubble) and it seemed like bigger government was a free lunch.

But big government is never a free lunch. Government spending diverts resources from the productive sector of the economy. This is now painfully apparent since there no longer is a revenue windfall to mask the damage.

There are lots of lessons to learn from Ireland’s fiscal/economic/financial crisis. There was too much government spending. Ireland also had a major housing bubble. And some people say that adopting the euro (the common currency of many European nations) helped create the current mess.

The one thing we can definitely say, though, is that lower tax rates did not cause Ireland’s problems. It’s also safe to say that higher tax rates will delay Ireland’s recovery. French and German politicians may think that’s a good idea, but hopefully Irish lawmakers have a better perspective.

Don’t Blame Ireland’s Mess on Low Corporate Tax Rates is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

As an economist, I should probably be most agitated about the economic consequences of TARP, such as moral hazard and capital malinvestment. But when I read stories about how political insiders (both in government and on Wall Street) manipulate the system for personal advantage, I get even more upset.

Yes, TARP was economically misguided. But the bailout also was fundamentally corrupt, featuring special favors for the well-heeled. I don’t like it when lower-income people use the political system to take money from upper-income people, but it is downright nauseating and disgusting when upper-income people use the coercive power of government to steal money from lower-income people.

Now, to add insult to injury, we’re being fed an unsavory gruel of deception as the political class tries to cover its tracks. Here’s a story from Bloomberg about the Treasury Department’s refusal to obey the law and comply with a FOIA request. A Bloomberg reporter wanted to know about an insider deal to put taxpayers on the line to guarantee a bunch of Citigroup-held securities, but the government thinks that people don’t have a right to know how their money is being funneled to politically-powerful and well-connected insiders.

The late Bloomberg News reporter Mark Pittman asked the U.S. Treasury in January 2009 to identify $301 billion of securities owned by Citigroup Inc. that the government had agreed to guarantee. He made the request on the grounds that taxpayers ought to know how their money was being used. More than 20 months later, after saying at least five times that a response was imminent, Treasury officials responded with 560 pages of printed-out e-mails — none of which Pittman requested. They were so heavily redacted that most of what’s left are everyday messages such as “Did you just try to call me?” and “Monday will be a busy day!” None of the documents answers Pittman’s request for “records sufficient to show the names of the relevant securities” or the dates and terms of the guarantees.

Here’s another reprehensible example. The Treasury Department, for all intents and purposes, prevaricated when it recently claimed that the AIG bailout would cost “only” $5 billion. This has triggered some pushback from Capitol Hill GOPers, as reported by the New York Times, but it is highly unlikely that anyone will suffer any consequences for this deception. To paraphrase Glenn Reynolds, “laws, honesty, and integrity, like taxes, are for the little people.”

The United States Treasury concealed $40 billion in likely taxpayer losses on the bailout of the American International Group earlier this month, when it abandoned its usual method for valuing investments, according to a report by the special inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. …“The American people have a right for full and complete disclosure about their investment in A.I.G.,” Mr. Barofsky said, “and the U.S. government has an obligation, when they’re describing potential losses, to give complete information.” …“If a private company filed information with the government that was just as misleading and disingenuous as what Treasury has done here, you’d better believe there would be calls for an investigation from the S.E.C. and others,” said Representative Darrell Issa, the senior Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. He called the Treasury’s October report on A.I.G. “blatant manipulation.” Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee, said he thought “administration officials are trying so hard to put a positive spin on program losses that they played fast and loose with the numbers.” He said it reminded him of “misleading” claims that General Motors had paid back its rescue loans with interest ahead of schedule.

P.S. Allow me to preempt some emails from people who will argue that TARP was a necessary evil. Even for those who think the financial system had to be recapitalized, there was no need to bail out specific companies. The government could have taken the approach used during the S&L bailout about 20 years ago, which was to shut down the insolvent institutions. Depositors were bailed out, often by using taxpayer money to bribe a solvent institution to take over the failed savings & loan, but management and shareholders were wiped out, thus  preventing at least one form of moral hazard.

What Gets You Most Upset about the TARP Bailout, the Lying, the Corruption, or the Economic Damage? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

President Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic has just given an important speech in Prague on Central and Eastern Europe and on the IMF. Among other lessons of the global financial crisis he points to the growing menace of the IMF:

I consider the IMF a barbaric relic from the Keynesian and fixed-exchange rate era. I know it is a harsh verdict but Keynes himself repeatedly used similar strong statements about his colleagues which justifies my using such a terminology.  

I am convinced the IMF should be dismantled or radically restructured as soon as possible. To do the opposite, to increase its role as it happened as a result of the last year’s G20 decision in the middle of the panic connected with the then looming crisis or to speculate about creating similar institutions on individual continents (especially in Europe) is a wrong way to go. It is yet another manifestation of a mistaken and dangerous global governance mindset which – to my great regret – has been getting more and more support in the intellectual and political circles these days. To whom and how at all can the IMF be held responsible for its activities? And if its proposals or measures turn out to be mistaken (and this can happen very easily), who will face the consequences? Certainly not the IMF. (emphasis in original)

President Klaus: The IMF Is a ‘Barbaric Relic’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog