Posts filed under ‘Bailout / Financial Crisis’
Regime Uncertainty
| Peter Klein |
Much wisdom in John Taylor’s piece in today’s WSJ. The housing boom and crash were caused primarily by monetary policy and a government-induced relaxation of borrowing standards. Policymakers mistakenly diagnosed the problem as a lack of liquidity and tried to increase loan volume as early as 2007. Further “stimulus” and even lower federal-funds rates came in 2008, followed by a set of arbitrary interventions (selective bank bailouts, the inexplicable TARP). Taylor places special blame on Bernanke and Paulson for creating regime uncertainty:
On Friday, Sept. 19, the Treasury announced a rescue package, though not its size or the details. Over the weekend the package was put together, and on Tuesday, Sept. 23, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson testified before the Senate Banking Committee. They introduced the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), saying that it would be $700 billion in size. A short draft of legislation was provided, with no mention of oversight and few restrictions on the use of the funds. . . .
The realization by the public that the government’s intervention plan had not been fully thought through, and the official story that the economy was tanking, likely led to the panic seen in the next few weeks. And this was likely amplified by the ad hoc decisions to support some financial institutions and not others and unclear, seemingly fear-based explanations of programs to address the crisis. What was the rationale for intervening with Bear Stearns, then not with Lehman, and then again with AIG? What would guide the operations of the TARP?
I argued before that the whole “credit crunch” may be a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Taylor suggests that more generally, the government, having created the crisis, is now deepening and prolonging it by trying to “fix” the problem is made, a classic example of Mises’s theory of interventionism.
Viral Marketing
| Peter Klein |
My friend Tom Woods has written a new book, Meltdown, that explains the economic crisis from an “Austrian” perspective. Tom is a historian by training but has an excellent grasp of economic theory and policy (disclaimer: I consulted on the book). The book is aimed at the intelligent lay reader and was produced very quickly (Tom writes faster than I read) to take advantage of today’s unique educational moment. The book went on sale today.
Tom is promoting the book via the usual means (scholarly and popular websites and blogs, email lists, some TV and radio appearances) and some of his admirers have launched a viral marketing campaign, based at GetTomonTV.com. Can viral marketing work to promote a quasi-academic book? Will policy wonks, economic journalists, and concerned citizens blog, text, and twitter like Blair Witch groupies or Christian Bale fans? How does one promote books (and, for that matter, journal articles) in the Web 2.0 world? Most important, how do I use this knowledge to promote myself?
Google: Too Big to Fail?
| Peter Klein |
It’s horrible to contemplate, but is Google a future candidate for subsidization and regulation under the essential facilities doctrine? Matt Asay wonders. It’s right to ask these questions, but I think people who worry about the catastrophic effects of a Google failure on the economy underestimate how quickly market participants adapt to changes in product offerings, even in the presence of network effects.
Business 101
| Peter Klein |
In announcing his caps on executive compensation this morning the President noted his outrage that Wall Street executives have “paid themselves customary lavish bonuses.” Apparently he is unaware that executive pay in large companies is set by a compensation committee, and typically by a formula determined well before performance results are realized. I guess he thinks executives just decide how much to pay themselves, based on whatever they feel like. He’s also upset about “executives being rewarded for failure,” suggesting he doesn’t know the difference between absolute and relative performance evaluation. Don’t they teach Business Organizations at Harvard Law?
The Recipe for Recovery Is Revealed
| Mike Sykuta |
The Obama administration has apparently revealed its recipe for economic recovery. Based on the rhetoric and policy proposals fronted thus far, the recipe appears as follows:
- Do everything possible to discourage potential high-value executives from working in troubled industries by capping executive pay in struggling industries.
- Eliminate high-powered market-based incentives for mid-level employees to perform their jobs well.
- Encourage distressed companies to renege on long-term contracts that populist politicians find offensive (or consider easy to target so as to appear they are being responsible with taxpayers’ money).
- Dole out a trillion dollars of taxpayer funds to pet projects and interest groups in the name of “economic stimulus” (enabled by the perception of “responsibility” created by their railing against the targets of #1-3).
- Ignore the economic consequences of the incentives created (or destroyed) in #1-3 as well as the fact that someone at some point will have to pay that trillion dollar bill.
- Half-bake under the heat of political pressure and serve to the masses who are starved for quick-fix solutions that only impose costs on “that other guy” or “the rich fat-cats of corporate America.”
I don’t know about you, but I think it will be interesting to see how quickly the soufflé crashes . . . though I’m not looking forward to it being force-fed.
Yet More “Shameful” Interventionist Rhetoric
| Mike Sykuta |
It’s obviously not enough for regulators from the Obama administration to march down Wall Street and mandate changes in the incentive systems of rank-and-file workers or even mandating that these “bonus” payments be rescinded (see here and here). Now banks that received bailout money are being chastised and brow-beaten from the bully pulpit of the White House for honoring long-term contracts signed years before the current “crisis.”
Today’s Wall Street Journal reports Citigroup is considering reneging on its 20-year stadium naming rights deal with the New York Mets to appease the White House and the populist press. Citi has already caved on its commitment to purchase a new corporate jet to replace two aging planes (a move that would likely have enhanced both fuel and environmental efficiency, ironically enough). Although Citi and the Mets claim the deal is still on, the attitude from Washington is remarkable in its complete disregard for the complexity of business deals, if not for the very essence of the institutional structures that support exchange (and contracting).
First, despite all the clamoring about Citi spending $400 million on naming rights while receiving $350 million in TARP funds, the reality is Citi is obligated to pay $20 million a year for 20 years. So while taxpayers are being told they are paying to name the new Mets stadium Citi Field, only a relatively small amount — certainly by bailout standards — is being spent this year. If the purpose of the bailout is to get firms through these troubled times and into a more stable future, we’re not talking about taxpayers taking on a 20-year commitment. (more…)
Stimulus Haiku
| Peter Klein |
From the great Bob Higgs:
Billions come bursting
From huge hydrants of money
I am stimulatedCredit freeze thaws now
Fed heats pipes until they steam
Winter is lovelyConsumers feel fine
Ready to mortgage their souls
John Maynard Keynes smilesSaving’s so passe
Capital stock may be assumed
Let K be capitalGiant debt you bet
Chinese will serve fine dinner
Children cannot voteLike rose in springtime
Welfare state blossoms anew
Laughter heard in hell
Feel free to try your hand in the comments section below. See also Bob’s reflections on the Inauguration.
Update: See also Morgan Reynolds’s bailout version of “I Fought the Law.”
Burying the Carbon Issue
| David Gerard |
As noted here, a “small” chunk of the House stimulus package is earmarked for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) demonstration projects. For a coal-fired electric power plant, CCS entails the separation of the carbon dioxide during the combustion stage, compression into a fluid, and injection into a deep (> 1 km) geological formation where it will remain indefinitely.
Regardless of one’s views on global climate change or the government’s role in addressing it, it seems pretty clear that policy makers are moving us toward a carbon-constrained world. The rationale for CCS in such a world is straightforward. Unlike conventional pollutants, today’s carbon emissions will remain in the atmosphere for close to 100 years. Stabilizing atmospheric CO2 concentrations at current levels will require extraordinary (perhaps 80%+) reductions from current emissions levels. However, carbon or no carbon, it is highly improbable that we can meet our projected energy needs (at least in the near term) without continued reliance on fossil energy sources.
I am involved with the CCSReg project that is developing recommendations for the development of a regulatory framework for CCS if the US legislates reductions in carbon emissions. Earlier this month, we issued an interim report with several preliminary recommendations, including putting money toward demonstration projects (summary).
The potential regulatory issues range from identifying and mitigating environmental and safety risks to addressing public acceptance issues associated with the NUMBY (not under my back yard) syndrome. The property rights issue might interest many in this audience, as it is not clear who owns the underground pore space (if anyone), or how much these owners should be compensated for having CO2 filling it up (if anything). This could be resolved on a state-by-state basis, though many potential sequestration sites are located in multiple states. (more…)
Fortunes Even A Hack Can Tell
| Mike Sykuta |
A couple weeks ago, Brad DeLong included me in a list of ethics-free Republican hacks because I was among a number of economists who posted comments on Rep. John Boehner’s website critical of the proposed Democratic “stimulus plan.” To wit, I posted:
History has shown that the Obama team’s proposed ‘stimulus’ is not only going to have little to no effect in the short run, but will create a larger bureaucratic structure, lead to tremendous investments in unproductive political lobbying among ‘stimulus project’ wannabes, and dissuade/delay private investment, recovery and growth.
So imagine my surprise (or lack thereof) to see the headline article of today’s Wall Street Journal. The ink is not even dry on the legislative draft that Congress is expected to vote on sometime today, and lobbyists from stimulus project wannabes such as the concrete and asphalt industries are battling over how we should rebuild and repair roads and bridges; dairy and beef cattle producers are battling over talk of a government program to slaughter dairy cattle and increase milk prices. States are clamoring for bailouts. And the labor unions are singing on their way to the bank with plans for massive infrastructure spending.
In the spirit of Art Carden’s recent post, “Everything is proceeding precisely as I have foreseen.” Ethics-free hack or no.
Department of Irony, Cass Sunstein Edition
| Peter Klein |
Harvard’s Cass Sunstein has been tapped by Obama to head the Federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (to be “regulation czar,” in the vernacular). One of his main tasks, presumably, will be to sell the new financial-market and related regulations accompanying the “stimulus” bill. I hope Sunstein will re-read his recent working paper with Richard Zeckhauser, “Overreaction to Fearsome Risks”:
Fearsome risks are those that stimulate strong emotional responses. Such risks, which usually involve high consequences, tend to have low probabilities, since life today is no longer nasty, brutish and short. In the face of a low-probability fearsome risk, people often exaggerate the benefits of preventive, risk-reducing, or ameliorative measures. In both personal life and politics, the result is damaging overreactions to risks. We offer evidence for the phenomenon of probability neglect, failing to distinguish between high and low-probability risks. Action bias is a likely result.
Cass, will you please explain “action bias” to the President and Congresssional leaders before they completely restructure the US economy in response to the current economic downturn?
The DeLong Hall of Honor
| Peter Klein |
Brad DeLong continues to be one of the stupidest smart people around. When the House failed to pass the $700 billion bailout the first time back in September, and the stock market fell by $1.3 trillion, Brad estimated the true cost of the bailout at $100 billion (ha!), added $2 trillion in lost wages from its failure to pass, and accused House Republicans of having a required benefit-cost ratio of 30-to-1. Of course, the bailout bill passed a week later, and the stock market fell by another $1.2 trillion. Oops! In general, there’s no economic policy issue that Brad can’t spin into a childlike morality play pitting noble, enlightened Democrats against vile, stupid Republicans.
His latest post in this vein, characterizes all economists who publicly oppose Obama’s proposed stimulus plan “ethics-free Republican hacks.” Most of the individuals quoted aren’t actually Republicans, but never mind. You Go, Girl! When I saw that my colleague Mike Sykuta made the list, I was jealous, and upset that I hadn’t written anything specifically opposing the stimulus. So, Brad, I want you to know that I reject the stimulus plan, and the sophomoric Keynesian reasoning behind it, lock, stock, and barrel. Will you please include me in your next Hall of Shame? (BTW I am not now, and have never been, a Republican.)
Update: See also Boudreaux and Horwitz and their commentators.
The Failure of the Journalists, Part II
| Peter Klein |
Another aspect of journalists’ remarkably credulous and fatuous attitude towards policymakers is their view that rhetoric, not substance, is what matters. Hence the constant references to the Bush Administration’s “dedication to free-market principles,” its “aversion to regulation,” its “belief in letting markets work by themselves.” This is of course sheer balderdash and piffle, virtually the reverse of the truth. Bush and Paulson and Greenspan and their clique are “free marketeers” in the same way (to borrow from A. J. Jacobs) that Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant. They adopt the language, and some of the form, of market advocacy without any of the content. The Bush Administration was already, before the “financial crisis,” the most economically interventionist since LBJ; it now ranks with Hoover and FDR as the most aggressively anti-market in US history. Greenspan and Bernanke expanded the money supply like none before; Bush and Cheney borrowed and spent trillions to finance overseas adventures; the Federal Register added pages at a record-setting pace; now the banking and automobile industries have become GSEs. Lassiez-faire, indeed! (BTW can anyone name a specific act of “deregulation” that contributed to the financial crisis? Gramm-Leach-Bliley? No way. And GLB was under Clinton, as was the infamous WGFM. What specific regulations, e.g. on hedge funds or mortgage-backed securities or executive compensation, did the Bush Administration oppose?)
And yet, there was Juan Williams on yesterday’s Diane Rehm show explaining, matter-of-factly, how Bush and Paulson had allowed their “free-market ideology” and “resistance to regulation” to “commitment to the idea that the market works itself” to lead the nation into ruin. Williams may be a good news reporter, but he has the political-economy understanding of a fifth-grader. Does it ever occur to these “watchdogs” to investigate what government officials actually do, rather than simply repeat what they say?
Mainstream Journalism, RIP
| Peter Klein |
Last week’s WSJ carried an op-ed from SEC Chair Christopher Cox, “We Need a Bailout Exit Strategy.” The op-ed was nothing special (mostly defending the SEC, of course, though there was a nice Hayekian line about “decentralized decision-making, in which millions of independent economic actors make judgments using their own money, [resulting] in the wisest allocation of scarce resources across our complex society”). What caught my eye was the headline, which suggests a connection between the bailout and the Iraq war, a connection I’ve been meaning to write about.
Remember how journalists felt deceived by the Bush Administration about the war? President Bush said that Saddam Hussein was a “grave and growing threat,” and the media repeated this line. Colin Powell showed pictures of the mobile weapons trailers and the New York Times reprinted them with enthusiasm. When the Administration’s claims proved false, the mea culpas began. Judith Miller resigned in disgrace. Never again, the media cried, will we be used as house propaganda organs. And yet, once the financial crisis began, the exact pattern was repeated. Bernanke and Paulson say there’s a “credit freeze,” that the financial sector is on the verge of collapse, that they alone know what to do — so that’s what the newspapers print. No time to investigate, to interview anyone outside the government, to hold these claims up to any critical scrutiny. If high officials say credit markets are frozen, that only “bold action” from the Treasury, the Fed, and Congress can prevent total meltdown, then that’s the way it is. Virtually every news report on the crisis followed the official script. It’s as if the financial reporters from the Times, the WSJ, the Washington Post, CNN, etc. were embedded with the Treasury. News reports have been little more than government press conferences. Shame, journalists, shame!
Why Oh Why, as Brad DeLong would say, can’t we have a press corps that investigates, rather than simply repeating what the government asserts?
More on the Mythical Credit Crunch
| Peter Klein |
The mainstream media finally picks up the meme. From a Reuters story (via Jeff):
* Overall U.S. bank lending is at its highest level ever and has grown during the current financial crisies.
* U.S. commercial bank lending is at record highs and growing particularly fast since May 2007.
* Corporate bond issuance has declined but increased commercial lending has compensated for this.
As for the interbank market, [a new report] says:
* lending hit its highest level ever in September 2008 and remained high in October and that overall interbank lending is up 22 percent since the start of the financial crisis, taken to be mid-2007.
* The cost of interbank lending, as measured by the interest rates banks charge each other for lending overnight Fed funds, dropped to its lowest level ever in early November and remains at very low levels. . . .
[C]onsumer credit . . . was at a record high in September, the latest date for publicly available data. Local government bond issuance had continued at similar levels to those before the credit crisis, while bank lending for real estate reached a record level in October 2008. . . .
All of [this] drove the Celent report to conclude that the U.S. and other governments may be throwing good money after bad for want of a better idea of what is really happening. “Just like a doctor contemplating an obviously sick and suffering patient, a massive surgical intervention based on a misdiagnosis can only worsen the patient’s condition.”
As usual, you read it here first.
Supply and Demand
| Peter Klein |
You may have seen this ad that is currently making the rounds. It’s good for a chuckle, and also raises a serious point. Current discussion of the US automakers’ problems focuses almost entirely on the supply side: high labor costs, poor management, lack of innovation. The demand side is largely ignored — there’s talk about the distribution of demand for US products between large and small vehicles, but the overall demand for US cars and trucks, regardless of type, seems to be taken as fixed. But what if consumers change their preferences, not toward “small cars,” but toward non-US products? What, then, is the appropriate policy response?
Bailout proponents seem to believe that US cars “really are” as good as, say Japanese cars, but somehow consumers have been tricked into preferring cars from Japan. As usual, bailout proponents have no argument or evidence whatsoever for this belief, but no matter. A normal person might think consumers are fully entitled to buy, and refuse to buy, whatever brands they like. In today’s corporate-statist economy, however, consumer demand cannot be allowed to influence the allocation of resources.
Have Economists Sold Out?
| Peter Klein |
I’ve complained that, in the current crisis, economists are being ignored. Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales, two economists I very much admire, argued in Wednesday’s WSJ that the problem is, rather, that economists have sold out:
This year will be remembered not just for one of the worst financial crises in American history, but also as the moment when economists abandoned their principles. There used to be a consensus that selective intervention in the economy was bad. In the last 12 months this belief has been shattered.
Practically every day the government launches a massively expensive new initiative to solve the problems that the last day’s initiative did not. It is hard to discern any principles behind these actions. The lack of a coherent strategy has increased uncertainty and undermined the public’s perception of the government’s competence and trustworthiness.
Now, Hart and Zingales imply, but don’t demonstrate, that these selective interventions are supported by the majority of economists. I think most economists oppose them, but I don’t have systematic evidence either. Still, their point is well taken. To the extent that the lay public associates the moves by Bernanke, Paulson, etc. as representing some kind of professional consensus, the reputation of economics as a scientific discipline will be forever destroyed.
Incidentally, I don’t mind Hart and Zingales’s key counter-proposal that government “should intervene only when there is a clearly identified market failure,” because I think that condition is basically impossible to meet.
Macroeconomics Quote of the Day
| Peter Klein |
From Gary North (thanks to Dennis Lubahn):
Ben Bernanke . . . spent his career studying Milton Friedman’s now-dominant 1963 interpretation of the failure of Federal Reserve Policy, 1930-33, in not reversing the Great Depression. The FED did not inflate, Friedman said. This was in contrast to Murray Rothbard’s 1963 interpretation of the same era. He argued that the FED did inflate, 1924-29, which created the boom that busted in 1929. Had Bernanke studied Murray Rothbard’s 1963 book on Federal Reserve policy as the cause of the Great Depression, he might have had a very different career, perhaps teaching in a community college in North Dakota.
Of course, Rothbard’s approach to addressing the current crisis would be exactly the opposite of what has been done so far: stop inflating, allow interest rates to rise, encourage saving and capital accumulation, allow bankrupt financial and industrial firms to fail, etc. But we are all Keynesians now, right?
Some Basic Finance Theory
| Peter Klein |
Sorry to sound like a broken record,* but journalists keep babbling about the “reduction in credit” as if it’s necessarily a bad thing. They don’t know any basic finance theory, which says that in well-functioning capital markets, positive NPV projects are funded and negative NPV projects aren’t. The talking heads think that the total number of projects funded, or the total amount of funding, independent of quality, measures the health of the financial system (and more is always better). They point out that consumers are finding it more difficult to get mortgages, that credit-card issuers are lowering borrowing limits, that firms are facing a higher cost of capital. (Of course, as we’ve pointed out before [1, 2], wild claims about credit markets being “frozen” are preposterous.) But changes in the allocation of credit are inefficient only if previous credit arrangements were somehow optimal. What if mortgages were too easy to get, credit-card limits too high, capital costs too low? A reduction in aggregate borrowing may be an improvement. Aggregate data aren’t helpful here.
For example, on the Diane Rehm show yeseterday two “experts” were talking about the proposed auto-industry bailout, when a wise caller raised this question: if the Big Three can return to profitability after receiving these government loans, then why wouldn’t private lenders be eager to make the loans? The pundits agreed that this was a good question but responded, matter-of-factly, that of course that can’t happen because credit markets have “completely shut down.” Rubbish!
* Readers under 30: ask your parents or grandparents what this expression means. It’s sort of like a corrupted mp3 file.
The New World Order
| Peter Klein |
Jim Surowiecki at the New Yorker:
When news broke that Timothy Geithner was Barack Obama’s pick for Secretary of the Treasury, the stock market jumped more than six per cent in the space of an hour. Obviously, this was a good thing, but there was also something weird about the spectacle of the Street’s once fearless free marketeers exulting over a government appointment, as if they were nomenklatura members cheering a new Politburo chief. It showed just how central a few government officials have become to the well-being not just of the markets but of the economy as a whole. For better or worse, we now live in a world in which the Treasury Secretary controls hundreds of billions of dollars in spending and shapes the fate of some of the nation’s biggest companies. That’s quite a job to ask someone to do.
I think Surowiecki overstates the newness of all this — government has been heavily involved in running Wall Street since at least the 1930s, and I don’t know how many of the Street’s big players were ever “fearless free marketeers” — but the point is well taken.
Pay For Performance, Robert Rubin Edition
| Peter Klein |
Remember, it’s not how much you pay, but how. Today’s WSJ profile of Robert Rubin provides some interesting numbers. Citigroup losses over the last year: $20 billion. US government bailout money going to Citigroup in the last month: $45 billion. Rubin’s compensation since becoming senior counselor and a director at Citigroup in 1999: $115 million. Naturally, Rubin says Citi’s near bankruptcy has nothing to do with his leadership. Critics say he encouraged the firm to increase its risk taking in 2004 and 2005. Ah well, another former Golden Boy brought down to earth. Thank goodness something positive is coming out of this mess.
Consider this today’s friendly reminder that corporate welfare is a bipartisan scam.
Update: See also Larry Ribstein.
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