Two interesting polls from Gallup show why a few ticks in the unemployment rate here and there are really besides the point. (Thanks to Jim Geraghty of NR.) This downturn has scarred the American psyche. The first chart shows how worried workers are about finding a comparable job if they ever lose their current one. The second chart shows that they are still pretty worried about losing their existing job.
A few observations, comments and highlights:
1) Three things can happen today, as I see it: a) Chris Dodd and Richard Shelby reach a deal; b) Dems pick off a few Rs, get cloture, and the debate on the bill proceeds; or c) no deal, Rs stay unified and negotiations continue. Of those “c’ is the likely option — and that will eventually lead to a bill that may be getting tougher by moment. On Good Morning America today, Shelby seemed supportive of tougher derivatives language. And although it will not be in the bill, Kent Conrad’s comments that a bank tax is coming is reflective of the growing anti-Wall Street mood on Capitol Hill.
2) An interesting piece in The American by economist Phil Swagel, formerly of the Paulson Treasury Department, on whether the Dodd bill is a “bailout bill.” Read the whole thing, but in this bit he uses Lehman Brothers as an example:
In the fall of 2008, the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy was followed by severe negative effects as short-term credit markets shut down. This is sometimes taken as evidence that bankruptcy is not a tenable outcome for a large financial firm. This is wrong. The disruptions that followed Lehman’s collapse were greatly magnified by the idiosyncratic problem that a large money-market mutual fund broke the buck as a result of losses on Lehman debt. This sparked a panicked flight out of money-market mutual funds, which led commercial paper markets to seize up and in turn begat TARP. This situation would have been prevented only by guaranteeing Lehman debt—that is, by a bailout that the administration says would not be allowed to occur under its financial regulatory reform proposals. This means that either the administration intends to allow bailouts or that its approach would not in fact solve the problem of Lehman’s collapse—it cannot be both ways. In fact, the Dodd bill allows two forms of a bailout, since the government can put cash directly into a failing firm or guarantee its debt. The Dodd proposal is a bailout bill, plain and simple.
3) Here is Charles Plosser, head of the Philly Fed, on Dodd and TBTF:
I believe the best approach to making such a credible commitment and thus ending TBTF is amending the bankruptcy code for nonbank financial firms and bank holding companies, rather than expanding the bank resolution process under the FDIC Improvement Act (FDICIA). While the Senate bill has tightened up the proposal with a stronger bias toward liquidating a troubled firm, the bill would still give a great deal of discretion to policymakers to avoid the discipline of a bankruptcy court.
The Senate bill’s proposal to restrict the Federal Reserve’s supervisory authority to about 35 of the largest financial firms with $50 billion or more in assets further undermines the effort to end TBTF. The markets will likely interpret this provision as signaling that these firms are unique and will continue to be treated as TBTF. Many would assume that the language in the resolution section that emphasizes bankruptcy would not apply to these firms. This provision would, de facto, make the Federal Reserve supervisor of the firms deemed TBTF.
In addition, restricting the Federal Reserve’s supervisory authority to these large firms would focus the Federal Reserve’s attention more toward Wall Street and less on Main Street.
Over at the very fine TaxVox blog, Howard Gleckman writes a good explanatory piece on the current VAT debate. But this one part really struck me:
Our current revenue system has reached its breaking point. To fix our terrible budget problem, we are going to have to cut spending. But we are also going to have to raise more revenue. And for the life of me, I don’t understand why we wouldn’t want to do so in the most efficient way possible. And that may lead us to a consumption tax in one form or another, Senate resolutions notwithstanding.
Me: That was directed at conservative critics of the VAT. Now from what I can tell, plenty of conservatives would have no problem with a VAT if it a) replaced the income tax and b) was designed to boost tax revenue by boosting economic growth. And as far as a way of increasing the tax burden, the budget cuts are going to have to come first. Optimize government, try to quick the pace of GDP growth and then raise taxes if necessary.
Jonathan Chait over at TNR is strangely amazed that financial reform may happen:
What’s happening with financial reform right now is unlike anything that’s happened since I’ve been following American politics. Look at the fundamentals of the issue. This is a matter where a massive industry — one that accounts for close to half of all corporate profits — is adamantly opposed to new regulation. The merits of the issue are so mind-numbingly complex that even economists and policy wonks sound distinctly fuzzy on the details. Throw in a Republican Party that had pursued, with evident political success, a policy of total obstruction. I’d tell you this was a formula either for defeat or a toothless reform.
And yet a substantial reform now appears close to inevitable. It’s not a toothless reform — a set of derivative regulations more hawkish than anybody could have dreamed possible a couple weeks ago just passed through the Agriculture Committee. It’s one of those strange moments when the normal laws of politics have been suspended.
Me: I am more amazed that given the magnitude of the financial crisis and the level of public rage, the banks weren’t broken up and turned into quasi-public utilities. But Wall Street can thank the White House for that. After passing the stimulus, it decided to focus on healthcare. Time passed, passions ebbed, and the lobbying effort cranked up. But the aftermath of the crisis (+Goldman) always made it likely that reform would pass.
OK, here is what President Obama said on CNBC to reporter John Harwood about a value-added tax:
HARWOOD: If reducing consumption is a good idea, could you see the potential for a value-added tax in this country?
OBAMA: You know, I know that there has been a lot of talk around town lately about the value-added tax. That is something that has worked for some countries. It’s something that would be novel for the United States. And before I start saying that this makes sense or that makes sense, I want a better picture of what our options are. And my first priority is to figure out how can we reduce wasteful spending so that, you know, we have a baseline of the core services that we need and the government should provide, and then we decide how do we pay for that. As opposed to figuring out how much money can we raise and then not have to make some tough choices on the spending side.
Me: Well, I certainly agree with the general principle that we should optimize government and then see how much money we need. But the important thing here is that a) despite Ways & Means Chair Sander Levin badmouthing the idea and b) 85 Senate votes against the idea, c) the White House won’t rule the idea out. Not all. I also noticed that the NYTimes has yet to run a correction on Hardwood’s piece that the WH has run the numbers on how much they think a 5 percent VAT would raise (nearly $300 billion a year). That, despite the WH saying they have not done so. It should also be noted that Obama seems to be qualifying his pledge to not raise middle-class taxes as applying only to income taxes.
The Obama deficit commission has its first meeting next week. And when the panel finally releases its report after the election, I am sure it will contain an unsurprising mix of tax increases and spending cuts as a way of dealing with the deficit. But a new report from the wealth management group at UBS looking at public sector debt dismissed that policy prescription:
Although fiscal discipline is important, on its own it has rarely been enough to lower a country’s debt ratio. Fo example, since 1980 some 30 countries have undergone exercises in fiscal discipline and many of them have achieved significant reductions in their debt-to-GDP ratios.
However, the overall level of debt hardly ever diminished. At best, fiscal austerity helped to slow down the increase in debt, the actual reduction of the debt ratio was in practically all cases attributable to higher economic growth (often helped by falling interest rates and privatizations). Unfortunately, the growth outlook for the advanced economies is anything but encouraging over the medium to longer term, especially in comparison with the past two decades.
Now the UBS piece argues that the US will try to inflate its way out of its debt problems. Yet I think the report too easily dismisses the prospect for faster-than-expected economic growth. Remember that all those scary CBO deficit forecasts assume long-term growth of around 2 percent, less than two-thirds its historical average. That ability to generate high growth (or hinder it) is the lens though which every new government policy needs to be examined.
As HuffPo puts it:
A coalition of former regulators, left-leaning economists and Democratic insiders have slammed the Senate’s version of regulatory reform in a letter to the parties’ two leaders, warning that the current bill won’t prevent a future financial crisis.
One of the signers is liberal think-tank economist Dean Baker. I e-mailed him and asked about the letter’s claim that the Dodd reform bill does not “eliminate a perpetual system of government sponsored corporate bailouts financed by the government or private industry.”
His speedy response:
To my view, the biggest failing is that it does not end TBTF banks. As a practical matter, I really doubt that any regulator is going to stand up to Goldman, Citi or any of the other big banks and tell them they can’t do something that is making them lots of money, but poses serious risks to the system. It would have helped if we had fired Bernanke, so that regulators understood that there was downside risk from failing to do their job and crack down on the big banks when necessary. But if Bernanke can get reappointed, even after allowing the worst economic disaster in 70 years, there is little hope that future regulators will take large personal risks to confront major banks when there is no downside to ignoring their practices.
Tyler Cowen gives it his best shot and ends with this recommendation:
If you do wish to break or limit the power of the major banks, running a balanced budget is probably the most important step we could take. It would mean that our government no longer needs to worry so much about financing its activities. Of course such an outcome is distant these days, mostly because American voters love both high government spending and relatively low taxes.
The wonderful Nicole Gelinas explains why she does not think the Dodd bill ends TBTF (as outlined by me):
1) Title II, which starts on p. 107, explains how “orderly liquidation authority” would work. When the Treasury and a panel of judges have determined that a financial firm is unsafe for bankruptcy, the FDIC would take over that firm. In “liquidating” the company, the FDIC would figure out who — of the firms’ lenders, other creditors, and shareholders — would get what. On the repayment list is “any amounts owed to the United States, unless the United States agrees or consents otherwise” (italics mine). That speaks for itself on whether taxpayers will be “exposed to a penny of risk of loss.”
2) More important, though, what does it mean to “liquidate” a company? … The bill does not ensure that lenders will take losses. Instead, it merely directs the FDIC to operate under a “strong presumption” (p. 131) that “creditors and shareholders will bear the losses of the financial company” (p. 132).
3) A hundred-odd pages later, the bill offers a big loophole for lenders in a crisis. It says that the FDIC, “with the approval of the [Treasury] Secretary, may make additional payments or credit additional amounts to or with respect for the account of any claimant or category of claimants of the covered financial company” — that is, to lenders — “if the [FDIC] determines that such payments or credits are necessary or appropriate to minimize losses” to the FDIC (p. 241). It wouldn’t be unreasonable for a lender to expect the government and the FDIC to use all of the discretion the bill affords them to guarantee financial firms’ debt in a future systemic financial crisis, just as happened this time around.
4) Finally, Geithner’s language — he wants to “dismember” failed financial firms “safely” — is interesting. Three months ago before Congress, Geithner had this to say about the AIG bailout: “We didn’t rescue AIG. We intervened so we could dismember it safely.” True, that was the government’s intent in the fall of 2008. But AIG is still with us; the stock trades at nearly $40.
The timing of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s suit against Goldman Sachs may sway a few doubters. But U.S. financial reform is still partly a matter of faith. That’s one reason for the partisan bickering. Preventing future government bank bailouts relies heavily on Wall Street believing new rules will be enforced and failures will be allowed. For skeptics, though, the current Senate bill leaves enough wiggle room to induce doubt.
On paper, Democrats have a case to support their convictions. Their bill gives regulators new authority to wind down non-bank financial institutions. Tougher new capital and leverage requirements, as well as limits on risky activities, are supposed to make failures much less likely. A $50 billion bank-financed pool would fund resolution costs — though this whole idea may yet be dropped.
The trouble is, teetering banks and their creditors might still assume that while not too big to sue — as Goldman can attest — Uncle Sam would still think them too big and interconnected to fail. And that’s the problem for many Republicans. The bill tends to favor discretion over hard and fast rules. While the feds would have the authority to shut down institutions, for instance, they wouldn’tbe required to do it. History hints that regulators and politicians will continue to be tempted to rescue banks in a crisis, a point made by several regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents who doubt the efficacy of the Dodd bill.
And those new rules on capital, leverage and risky activities will be spelled out only later by a new systemic risk council. The government would be able to guarantee financial firms’ debt without any automatic triggering of the resolution process. And it’s still fuzzy how the challenge of winding down cross-border obligations and operations would be met.
There’s an argument for leaving less to officials’ discretion. If the threat of liquidation isn’t credible, banks will operate — and investors will treat them — as if a government backstop still existed.
If the Democrats’ reform bill passes in its current form, believers might then look for signs that it’s working. One would be that big banks can no longer fund themselves so cheaply. Especially since the recent crisis, big banks — with, say, more than $100 billion in assets — have been paying less interest on deposits and debt than smaller brethren.
If that too-big-to-fail subsidy doesn’t narrow significantly, Republicans would be justified in calling for a reform revival.
The timing of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s suit against Goldman Sachs may sway a few doubters. But U.S. financial reform is still a matter of faith. That’s one reason for the partisan bickering. Preventing future government bank bailouts relies heavily on Wall Street believing new rules will be enforced and failures will be allowed.
For skeptics, though, the current Senate bill leaves enough wiggle room to induce doubt.
On paper, Democrats have a case to support their convictions. Their bill gives regulators new authority to wind down non-bank financial institutions. Tougher new capital and leverage requirements, as well as limits on risky activities, are supposed to make failures much less likely. A $50 billion bank-financed pool would fund resolution costs — though this whole idea may yet be dropped.
The trouble is, teetering banks and their creditors might still assume that while not too big to sue — as Goldman can attest — Uncle Sam would still think them too big and interconnected to fail. And that’s the problem for many Republicans. The bill tends to favor discretion over hard and fast rules. While the feds would have the authority to shut down institutions, for instance, they wouldn’t be required to do it. History hints that regulators and politicians will continue to be tempted to rescue banks in a crisis.
And those new rules on capital, leverage and risky activities will be spelled out only later by a new systemic risk council. The government would be able to guarantee financial firms’ debt without any automatic triggering of the resolution process. And it’s still fuzzy how the challenge of winding down cross-border obligations and operations would be met.
There’s an argument for leaving less to officials’ discretion. If the threat of liquidation isn’t credible, banks will operate — and investors will treat them — as if a government backstop still existed.
If the Democrats’ reform bill passes in its current form, believers might then look for signs that it’s working. One would be that big banks can no longer fund themselves so cheaply. Especially since the recent crisis, big banks — with, say, more than $100 billion in assets — have been paying less interest on deposits and debt than smaller brethren.
If that too-big-to-fail subsidy doesn’t narrow significantly, Republicans would be justified in calling for a reform revival.
Talk about burying the lede. This from the NYTimes and my pal John Harwood:
One way to reach that 3 percent [deficit-to-GDP] goal, by the calculations of Mr. Obama’s economic team: a 5 percent value-added tax, which would generate enough revenue to simultaneously permit the reduction in corporate tax rates Republicans favor.
Me. Not only does it look like they are considering a VAT, the only offset would be lower corporate taxes. The whole thing would be a net tax increase, obviously. I mean, that is the whole point, despite all the talk about its efficient, pro-growth effects. A VAT of that size would raise $250-$300 billion a year in new tax revenue.
Can the Securities and Exchange Commission ride Goldman Sachs back to credibility? Perhaps, but it will take more than one high-profile lawsuit to restore the reputation of America’s top financial cop. L’Affaire Madoff was pretty close to a brand killer. But the move is powerful evidence — and warning — that the agency is out of the doughnut shop and back on the beat.
The all-points bulletin went out not long ago. Under the leadership of a new chairman and enforcement director, the SEC’s Obama years have marked a hard switch from the laissez-faire enforcement posture of the Bush administration. In 2009, the regulator opened twice as many investigations as in 2008, with fines up 35 percent. The new assertiveness helped tamp down talk on Capitol Hill that the SEC should be merged with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission or subsumed into a giant super-regulator.
But aggression can also lead to unforced errors. The regulator was impatient with the New York attorney general’s office during its tag-team litigation effort against Bank of America. So it dumped its legal partner and went it alone. The result: A judge threw out a $33 million SEC fine against BofA regarding bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch employees. And the judge called a later $150 million settlement between the two sides “half-baked justice at best”.
The SEC also failed to execute in its case against Cohmad Securities and the firm’s involvement with Bernard Madoff. In February, a federal court dismissed the SEC’s “flimsy” charges that Cohmad helped enable the notorious Ponzi schemer. And little has transpired in the more than nine months since the agency filed an insider trading complaint against former Countrywide boss Angelo Mozilo.
So a failed case against Goldman for alleged securities fraud might leave the SEC in worse shape. It would also open the watchdog to charges that the timing of its charges, right in the middle of a debate over financial reform, was merely an attempt by the Obama administration to intimidate Wall Street into supporting its get-tough legislation. But in the meantime, the financial industry will be looking hard over its shoulder for the first time in years.
A few thoughts on the SEC charges against Goldman Sachs:
1) Goldman Sachs gave the Obama campaign $994k during the 2008 election, his biggest donor. Doesn’t this undercut the theory just a bit that Washington is under the thumb of Wall Street?Even a tiny bit? (No, say Simon Johnson and James Kwak.)
2) I can’t help but think this boosts the odds of financial reform passing and a shift it to the left, as well. You might even see more GOPers advocate for breaking up the banks, as do some Fed regional presidents.
3) Certainly under the leadership of a new chairman and enforcement director, the SEC’s Obama years have marked a hard switch from the posture of the Bush SEC. In 2009, the regulator opened twice as many investigations as in 2008, with fines up 35 percent. The new assertiveness helped cool talk the Hill that the SEC should be merged with the CFTC pushed into a giant super-regulator
4) But its aggression can also lead to unforced errors. A judge threw out a $33 million SEC fine against BofA regarding bonuses paid to Merrill Lynch employees. The SEC also failed to execute in its case against Cohmad Securities and the firm’s involvement with Bernard Madoff. In February, a federal court dismissed the SEC’s “flimsy” charges that Cohmad helped enable the notorious Ponzi schemer.
5) A failed case against Goldman for alleged securities fraud might leave the SEC in worse shape. It would also open the watchdog to charges that the timing of its charges, right in the middle of a debate over financial reform, was merely an attempt by the Obama administration to intimidate Wall Street into supporting its get-tough legislation.
6) This is exactly the sort of scenario a bank exec outlined to me a few months back. The exec worried that the longer FinReg reform dragged on, the odds increased that some bolt-from-the-blue news would change the political calculus and push the bill to the left.
Here is the new Washington Consensus: American taxes must be raised dramatically to deal with exploding federal debt since spending can’t/shouldn’t be cut. Only the rubes and radicals of the Tea Party and their Contract from America movement think otherwise. And don’t worry, the economy will be just fine.
Don’t believe it. While you will never hear this in the MSM, there is plenty of academic research supporting the idea that cutting taxes and spending is the ideal economic recipe for growth, jobs incomes and fiscal soundness. (This all assumes that America’s amazing turnaround since 1980 isn’t proof enough.) Just take a look:
1) Tax cuts boost economic growth more than increased government spending. Cutting spending is a better way to reduce budget deficits than raising taxes. “Large Changes in Fiscal Policy: Taxes Versus Spending” — Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna, October 2009:
We examine the evidence on episodes of large stances in fiscal policy, both in cases of fiscal stimuli and in that of fiscal adjustments in OECD countries from 1970 to 2007. Fiscal stimuli based upon tax cuts are more likely to increase growth than those based upon spending increases. As for fiscal adjustments, those based upon spending cuts and no tax increases are more likely to reduce deficits and debt over GDP ratios than those based upon tax increases. In addition, adjustments on the spending side rather than on the tax side are less likely to create recessions.
2) Tax cuts boost growth. Tax increases hurt growth, especially if used to finance increased government spending. “The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks” — Christina Romer and David H. Romer, July 2007:
In short, tax increases appear to have a very large, sustained, and highly significant negative impact on output. Since most of our exogenous tax changes are in fact reductions, the more intuitive way to express this result is that tax cuts have very large and persistent positive output effects. … The resulting estimates indicate that tax increases are highly contractionary. The effects are strongly significant, highly robust, and much larger than those obtained using broader measures of tax changes. The large effect stems in considerable part from a powerful negative effect of tax increases on investment. We also find that legislated tax increases designed to reduce a persistent budget deficit appear to have much smaller output costs than other tax increases.
3) Cutting corporate taxes boosts growth. “The Effect of Corporate Taxes on Investment and Entrepreneurship” — Simeon Djankov, Tim Ganser, Caralee McLiesh, Rita Ramalho, Andrei Shleifer, January 2008:
We present new data on effective corporate income tax rates in 85 countries in 2004. The data come from a survey, conducted jointly with PricewaterhouseCoopers, of all taxes imposed on “the same” standardized mid-size domestic firm. In a cross-section of countries, our estimates of the effective corporate tax rate have a large adverse impact on aggregate investment, FDI, and entrepreneurial activity. For example, a 10 percent increase in the effective corporate tax rate reduces aggregate investment to GDP ratio by 2 percentage points. Corporate tax rates are also negatively correlated with growth, and positively correlated with the size of the informal economy.
4) Tax rates are reaching dangerous levels where higher rates bring in less money. “The Elasticity of Taxable Income with Respect to Marginal Tax Rates” — Emmanuel Saez, Joel Slemrod and Seth Giertz, May 2009:
Following the supply-side debates of the early 1980s, much attention has been focused on the revenue-maximizing tax rate. A top tax rate above [X] is inefficient because decreasing the tax rate would both increase the utility of the affected taxpayers with income above [Y] and increase government revenue, which can in principle be used to benefit other taxpayers. Using our previous example … the revenue maximizing tax rate would be 55.6%, not much higher than the combined maximum federal, state, Medicare, and typical sales tax rate in the United States of 2008.
5) Cutting corporate taxes boosts wages. “Taxes and Wages” — Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur, June 2006:
Corporate taxes are significantly related to wage rates across countries. Our coefficient estimates are large, ranging from 0.83 to almost 1-thus a 1 percent increase in corporate tax rates leads to an almost equivalent decrease in wage rates (in percentage terms). … Higher corporate taxes lead to lower wages. A 1 percent increase in corporate tax rates is associated with nearly a 1 percent drop in wage rates.
There are plenty more, of course. The Tax Foundation lists a dozen recent studies how harmful business taxes are to growth, jobs and wages. Economist Greg Mankiw has determined America is far from a low tax nation. More like in the middle. And let me add this from economist Scott Sumner:
When I started studying economics the US was much richer than Western Europe and Japan, but was also growing more slowly than other developed countries. They were still in the catch-up growth phase from the ravages of WWII. But since Reagan took office the US has been growing faster than most other big developed economies, and at least as fast in per capita terms. They’ve plateaued at about 25% below US levels, when you adjust for PPP. This is the steady state. … Why is per capita GDP in Western Europe so much lower than in the US? Mankiw seems to imply that high tax rates may be one of the reasons. … So I think Mankiw is saying that if we adopt the European model, there really isn’t a lot of evidence that we’d end up with any more revenue than we have right now. … Of course the progressives’ great hope is that we’ll end up like France. But Brazil also has high tax rates, how do they know we won’t end up like Brazil?
1) Dems have ripped the Bush tax cuts yet want to keep 95 percent of them.
2) Even the middle class ones may only be extended through the 2012 election by Congress. That will make for a nice presidential campaign issue!
3) New research shows that raising taxes on rich may now cost more revenue than it produces. We are on the wrong side of the Laffer Curve, people.
4) If WH thinks Americans consume too much and save too little, why do they want to raise taxes on savings and investment?
5) Why raise taxes on capital when the first quarter of 2010 saw the lowest commitments to venture capital since 1993.
6) These tax hikes (letting the Bush tax hikes expire on the so-called wealthy) would hit the bulk of small biz profits.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell charges that the Dodd financial reform bill supported by the WH fails to end Too Big To Fail. Is he correct. Well, this bit from Reuters highlights one problem area:
Seeking a middle ground between bailout and bankruptcy, the Senate bill sets up a new process for “orderly liquidation” of large firms that get into trouble. Authorities could seize distressed firms and dismantle them. The Senate bill creates a $50 billion fund to finance such actions. Large firms with assets above $50 billion would pay into the fund. Republicans object to a part of the bill that would let the fund borrow additional money from the Treasury — that means taxpayers — if the liquidation fund runs short. This provision smells like “backdoor bailouts,” say Republicans. … The House bill, like the Senate’s, sets up a new liquidation process, but it would be simpler to invoke and and it would come with a higher price-tag. The House proposes a $200-billion fund. Firms with assets over $50 billion would pay up to $150 billion into the fund, which could borrow another $50 billion from the Treasury.
Me: Then there is the issue of confidence in regulators and politicians to resist the temptation to bail/rescue in a crisis.
Alex Pollock does, and the results are not pretty:
Consider a new, independent regulatory bureaucracy filled with ambitious officers and staffers who are interventionist by ideology, believers that people need to be guided for their own good according to the tenets of “behavioral economics,” social democratic by faith, and closely aligned to numerous “consumer advocates.” They will hardly be content with the project of “improving disclosure,” important as that is.
They will ineluctably embark instead on allocating credit in terms of “improved access” and “fairness.” In other words, they will promote expanding riskier loans, in spite of the fact that making people loans they can’t afford is the opposite of protecting them.
This is why, if such an organization is to be created, it is absolutely essential that it be truly part of, and subordinate to, a regulatory body also charged with financial prudence, safety and soundness, and balancing risks. Better would be not to create it at all, but rather to centralize the responsibility for clear, straightforward key information in a relevant existing regulator—the Federal Trade Commission, for example.
The Great Arnold Kling thinks there is a high probability of a two-decade economic fiasco, outlined below.
In the Looting Scenario, what is going to be rewarded is what we call rent-seeking. Basically, over the next twenty years, wealth transfer by government will be much more important than wealth creation–and the amount available for transfer could actually decline. For example, I expect that benefits for the elderly will become increasingly means-tested and savings will be increasingly taxed, to the point where the marginal return to saving will approach zero. If the marginal return to saving is low, and government deficits are high, then capital formation is going to be low. It’s hard to see how you get rapid innovation in that kind of world.
The Looting Scenario is one in which public employees and pensioners have the incentive to just take as much as they can while they can get it. It is a scenario in which people talk about the deficit, and wise heads say we must do something about it, but the only politically feasible approach is to raise taxes. Even so, it turns out that higher tax rates bring in less revenue than projected, because of the incentives to consume leisure and engage in black-market activity.
Seven years ago, it would not have occurred to me that our ruling class would be so bad that the Looting Scenario would be likely. My guess is that, even among libertarians, just about everyone else still has faith that our ruling class will not let the Looting Scenario take place. However, I think it is one of the higher-probability scenarios out there.
Over at the must-read e21 site, Chris Papagianis provides an excellent counter to the Dodd-Obama financial reform plan. He prefers an approach devised by Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales. Here are the key details via Papagianis:
1) Hart and Zingales would use credit default swap (CDS) spreads as a market-based default probability metric. The “spread” or premium on a CDS contract represents the market price of providing a financial guarantee against losses from a firm’s default.
2) In the Hart and Zingales framework, once the CDS spread rises above a pre-specified “critical threshold,” the regulator would force the institution in question to issue equity (offer new stock for sale) until the CDS spread moves back below the threshold.
3) While Hart and Zingales choose the right instrument for their trigger, their proposed remedial step should be strengthened. Instead of having the regulator demand that the institution issue new equity, the debt of the institution could automatically convert into equity. Say a large bank financed $150 billion of assets with $80 billion of deposits, $40 billion of senior debt, $20 billion of so-called junior debt, and $10 billion of equity. When the CDS on this bank surpassed the critical threshold, half of the bank’s junior debt would automatically convert to equity. Instead of having 6.7% equity (15-to-1 leverage), the bank’s assets would be financed with 13.3% equity (7.5-to-1 leverage). If that failed to bring the CDS below the critical threshold, the other half of the junior debt would also convert to equity.
4) The mandatory conversion would enhance systemic stability for two reasons. First, the risk that the debt would convert to equity would be priced into the debt, raising the systemic institution’s cost of capital and leveling the playing field with smaller banks. Secondly, the automatic conversion would eliminate the potential for regulatory forbearance caused by market conditions.
Me: I like this. It doesn’t depend on the omniscience of politically captured regulators, and it doesn’t involve bank bailouts by taxpayers. This would seem to be an antidote to Crony Capitalism.