naked capitalism

David Einhorn, who enjoys his considerable reputation for hard-fought battles against firms with shaky finances and dubious accounting (Allied Capital and Lehman), has taken aim at a new and equally deserving target: credit default swaps.

In an interesting bit of synchronicity, Einhorn’s comments in a letter to investors overlap to a considerable degree with a post we wrote yesterday on why a clearinghouse for derivatives wasn’t a solution to the dangers posed by credit default swaps (and note the Orwellian branding, the reforms are about “derivatives” which include benign ones, names simple interest rate and currency swaps, yet the bill has loopholes that will let many, indeed probably most, credit default swaps escape).

Credit default swaps have no redeeming social value. They are a fee machine for Wall Street and their supposed value is considerably overstated (the world pre credit default swaps functioned perfectly well) and their costs, which are considerable, are not given the attention they warrant. And I don’t mean the failure of AIG, either.

Even though Einhorn gave a stinging, wide-ranging indictment, he missed one of the issues I find troubling, which is that credit default swaps result in information loss, which in turn lowers the quality of credit decisions. In other words, the product is inherently destructive.

In the world of old-fashioned fixed income investing, creditors would evaluate a borrower to make sure it had good odds of meeting its obligations. The lender could and usually did make inquiries about the borrower’s income, and its other commitments. If it was a business, the bank might also want to assess information that would help it evaluate the stability of the borrowers income (for instance, learning who its main customers were to determine how diverse and solid they were).

Just as with securitiztion, credit default swaps lower the incentive to do borrower due diligence. Why bother, when the CDS spreads on the reference entity tells you what the market thinks and you can use CDS to reduce or lay off the credit risk? But the original lender is in a privileged position; he is able to gather data from the borrower that it non-public and thus will not be incorporated in a market price. Thus giving creditors an incentive not to do that work systematically lower the quality of credit decisions.

But that reason is a bit abstract, although the costs are real. Einhorn focused on more tangible types of damage wrought by CDS, as summarized by the Financial Times. First, CDS are a means of extortion:

“I think that trying to make safer credit default swaps is like trying to make safer asbestos,” he writes in a recent letter to investors, adding that CDSs create “large, correlated and asymmetrical risks” having “scared the authorities into spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer money to prevent speculators who made bad bets from having to pay”.

Second, CDS speculators win if companies die. Given that the volume of CDS outstanding is a significant multiple of the amount of bonds outstanding, they are not used primarily for hedging, but for creating “synthetic” exposures. And those on the short side have compelling reasons to influence outcomes. When a company gets in trouble, the best outcome is often an out-of-court restructuring of debt before it gets even further in trouble. As much as the Chapter 11 process has certain advantages, it is also costly and risky. A CDS holder (one with a significant short position) can buy some bonds (now at a cheap price) of a struggling company to assure it has a seat at the table in negotiations so it can block a renegotiation of the debt and force a bankruptcy filing so it can assure its payoff on the CDS. From the Financial Times:

CDSs are “anti-social”, he goes on, because those who buy credit insurance often have an incentive to see companies fail. Rather than merely hedging their risks, they are actively hoping to profit from the demise of a target company. This strategy became prevalent in recent years and remains so, as holders of these so-called “basis packages” buy both the debt itself and protection on that debt through CDSs, meaning they receive compensation if the company defaults or restructures. These investors “have an incentive to use their position as bondholders to force bankruptcy, triggering payments on their CDS rather than negotiate out of court restructurings or covenant amendments with their creditors”

Einhorn also agrees with our contention, that a credit default swaps clearinghouse is not a viable solution. As we said yesterday in comments:

CDS are not economic if adequately margined. Adequate allowance for jump to default risk makes it very unattractive on a ROE basis. The way around that pre-crisis was making AIG and the monolines the bagholders. That game is over, but the Street is hooked on the revenues…..

….in invoking AIG, I am saying that an undercapitalized clearinghouse is a concentrated point of failure and a very big one too, a systemic risk all of its own.

Einhorn’s views:

“The reform proposal to create a CDS clearing house does nothing more than maintain private profits and socialised risk by moving the counterparty risk from the private sector to a newly created too big to fail entity,” he notes.

That’s because it is almost impossible to adequately capitalise against such developments. “There is no way a clearing house could demand enough collateral,” he says. “The market can be so big and discontinuous that it is very hard to figure out the correct amount of collateral.”

I think you need more people recognizing that CDS serve the interests of the financial sector at the expense of the real economy, and calling for the product to be banned. Only then might you see radical enough action taken.

However, as much as I hate CDS, I have reluctantly concluded that they cannot be taken out overnight. They have become sufficiently enmeshed in our financial infrastructure that eliminating them is like disarming a web of nuclear weapons. If you make a mistake on any one, they all go boom. One (and this is far from the only) problem is that the big banks not only have large CDS exposures, but they have other hedges related to them (such as interest rate swaps). So simply putting CDS into runoff mode could lead to dislocations in other markets.

I prefer regulating them very intrusively (like insurance, to make sure the counterparties are adequately capitalized), limiting new CDS writing to hedging existing positions (that would need to be tightly defined and monitored) and limiting CDS writing to end users (which would include proprietary trading desks) to where the investor had an insurable interest, as in owned the bonds, and only up to his exposure. That plus increasing capital requirement over, say, a three year period, to reflect the true default risk of the product should shrink the market enough to allow regulators to then ascertain whether it could then be put in runoff mode. But the intent of policy should be loud and clear: to strangle CDS, with the hope of killing them.

And for those who hope netting might do the trick, reader Richard Smith disabuses us of that notion:

Another point is about the struggle to keep up with ‘financial innovation’ in the OTC market. A problem for clients and regulators alike. CDS are probably the nastiest of these. They are so polymorphous – part of a basis trade, or a directional bet, or a sort-of-legit hedge, or a synthetic, depending on context; and no cap on speculation a la Gambling Act; and then vaguely like derivatives, or insurance, or short bond positions, or a prediction market.

But you couldn’t rule out the possibility that equally nasty new products could be developed by some smart aleck. Maybe there should be a charge on the inventors to cover the cost of regulatory catch up. Or something equivalent to airworthiness regulations, which even libertarians accept without demur, as far as I understand. That would slow the innovators down a bit – proving the ‘wings’ aren’t going to come off their new financial products and kill all the passengers.

Another observation I’d been meaning to make on ‘CDS trade compression’: the 20-40% that some commentators are so pleased about. I worked on an app like this for a large IB (recently unpopular in the guise of an mollusc) at the turn of the millennium. They had half a million daily NASDAQ trades at that time and their settlement IT guy in NY was freaking out as his mighty mainframe began to wilt under the volumes. Even with quite a conservative approach to compression (there are choices about how aggressively you net the trades – we thought we could get it down to 25,000 trades per day if we really went for it) we got 80% compression straight away, so, 100,000 netted trades per day. Of course those are highly standardized trades. The aggregation was something like stock, side, settlement date, counterparty, trade flags. NASDAQ is often characterized as an OTC market so it is really the product standardization that matters, rather than the nature of the venue perhaps. I think it went to 90% within a month or two as we got bolder but I may be confabulating; it’s a while ago.

If they can only get 40% trade compression out of CDS, after a year, there must be an awful lot of detritus left over (especially when IIRC most of the counterparties are TBTFs). So things like contract clauses, reference entity, duration of cover must be all over the place in what remains. Difficult to hedge or lay off I should think. And some unconfirmed trades too no doubt. A total mess.

Ignoring all the other shortcomings of CDS the natural thing would be to standardize the product:: that’s happened so many times before, but IBs hate standardization of course for the margin erosion it brings, and anyway now we get this cartel-like protection of the margins, under the guise of support for ‘finanical innovation’.

The implication is that what is on the banks’ books now is a bit hairier to manage than they are ‘fessing up. As other experts who similarly hate the product, like Satyajit Das have observed, simply banning new protection writing would probably lead to hugely disfunctional behavior prior to the date and also lead to problems (as in big time losses, which in a worst case scenario could result in another bailout) as positions that were in runoff mode would be essentially frozen and could not be managed.

But if we can get agreement on aims, which is the product should be killed, then it becomes possible to debate the best (least painful and costly) means.

By George Washington of Washington’s Blog.

Investors are basically rational, right?

In fact, as many studies have demonstrated, the answer is no.

But instead of wading through all of the investment psychology research, let’s look at research into people’s basic reasoning abilities. Bear with me for a minute. A study in an area unrelated to investing sheds light on people’s basic thinking processes.

Sociologists from four major research institutions investigated why so many Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, years after it became obvious that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

The researchers found, as described in an article in the journal Sociological Inquiry (and re-printed by Newsweek):

• Many Americans felt an urgent need to seek justification for a war already in progress

• Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.

• “For the most part people completely ignore contrary information.”

• “The study demonstrates voters’ ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information”

• People get deeply attached to their beliefs, and form emotional attachments that get wrapped up in their personal identity and sense of morality, irrespective of the facts of the matter.

• “We refer to this as ‘inferred justification, because for these voters, the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search for a justification for that war.

• “People were basically making up justifications for the fact that we were at war”

• “They wanted to believe in the link [between 9/11 and Iraq] because it helped them make sense of a current reality. So voters’ ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information, whether we think that is good or bad for democratic practice, does at least demonstrate an impressive form of creativity.

An article yesterday in Alternet discussing the Sociological Inquiry article helps us to understand that the key to people’s active participation in searching for excuses for actions by the big boys is fear:

Subjects were presented during one-on-one interviews with a newspaper clip of this Bush quote: “This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda.”The Sept. 11 Commission, too, found no such link, the subjects were told.

“Well, I bet they say that the commission didn’t have any proof of it,” one subject responded, “but I guess we still can have our opinions and feel that way even though they say that.”

Reasoned another: “Saddam, I can’t judge if he did what he’s being accused of, but if Bush thinks he did it, then he did it.”

Others declined to engage the information at all. Most curious to the researchers were the respondents who reasoned that Saddam must have been connected to Sept. 11, because why else would the Bush Administration have gone to war in Iraq?

The desire to believe this was more powerful, according to the researchers, than any active campaign to plant the idea.

Such a campaign did exist in the run-up to the war…

He won’t credit [politicians spouting misinformation] alone for the phenomenon, though.

“That kind of puts the idea out there, but what people then do with the idea … ” he said. “Our argument is that people aren’t just empty vessels. You don’t just sort of open up their brains and dump false information in and they regurgitate it. They’re actually active processing cognitive agents”…

The alternate explanation raises queasy questions for the rest of society.

“I think we’d all like to believe that when people come across disconfirming evidence, what they tend to do is to update their opinions,” said Andrew Perrin, an associate professor at UNC and another author of the study…

“The implications for how democracy works are quite profound, there’s no question in my mind about that,” Perrin said. “What it means is that we have to think about the emotional states in which citizens find themselves that then lead them to reason and deliberate in particular ways.”

Evidence suggests people are more likely to pay attention to facts within certain emotional states and social situations. Some may never change their minds. For others, policy-makers could better identify those states, for example minimizing the fear that often clouds a person’s ability to assess facts …

The Alternet article links to a must-read interview with psychology professor Sheldon Solomon, who explains:

A large body of evidence shows that momentarily [raising fear of death], typically by asking people to think about themselves dying, intensifies people’s strivings to protect and bolster aspects of their worldviews, and to bolster their self-esteem. The most common finding is that [fear of death] increases positive reactions to those who share cherished aspects of one’s cultural worldview, and negative reactions toward those who violate cherished cultural values or are merely different.

Fear in the Economic and Financial Arenas

Has something similar happened in the economic/financial arenas?

Congressmen Brad Sherman and Paul Kanjorski and Senator James Inhofe all say that the government warned of martial law if Tarp wasn’t passed. And Rahm Emanuel famously said:

Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.

Last year:

• Senator Leahy said “If we learned anything from 9/11, the biggest mistake is to pass anything they ask for just because it’s an emergency”

• The New York Times wrote:
  

  “The rescue is being sold as a must-have emergency measure by an administration with a controversial record when it comes to asking Congress for special authority in time of duress.”
  ***

  Mr. Paulson has argued that the powers he seeks are necessary to chase away the wolf howling at the door: a potentially swift shredding of the American financial system. That would be catastrophic for everyone, he argues, not only banks, but also ordinary Americans who depend on their finances to buy homes and cars, and to pay for college.

  Some are suspicious of Mr. Paulson’s characterizations, finding in his warnings and demands for extraordinary powers a parallel with the way the Bush administration gained authority for the war in Iraq. Then, the White House suggested that mushroom clouds could accompany Congress’s failure to act. This time, it is financial Armageddon supposedly on the doorstep.

  “This is scare tactics to try to do something that’s in the private but not the public interest,” said Allan Meltzer, a former economic adviser to President Reagan, and an expert on monetary policy at the Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business. “It’s terrible.”

Not Just Government

But it’s not just government . . .

If the too big to fails say that the world economy will crash and there will be martial law unless they are bailed out, politicians – most of whom don’t understand finance or economics – will believe them, and sound the alarm themselves.

As Karl Denninger wrote yesterday:

[AIG's CEO] left Geithner with two documents. One was a fact sheet that listed all the attributes of AIG FP [the division run by Joe Cassano that blew the company up] and argued why it should be given status as a primary dealer. The other–a bombshell that Willumstad was confident would draw Geithner’s attention–was a report on AIG’s counterparty exposure around the world, which included “2.7 trillion of notional derivative exposures, with 12,000 individual contracts.” About halfway down the page, in bold, was the detail that Willumstad hoped would strike Geithner as startling: “$1 trillion of exposures concentrated with 12 major financial institutions.”

Was that a threat?

And isn’t threatening the United States (whether directly or otherwise) something you’re not supposed to do?

Sounds like “Bail me out or I will crash everything.”

Isn’t that analagous to walking into a bank, opening one’s coat to reveal an explosives-laced belt, and saying “gimme all the money or everyone dies!”

Yves Smith has previously used a similar analogy.

Fear Among Individual Investors

Investors – as with politicians or Americans in general – believe that “when [they] come across disconfirming evidence . . . . they tend to … update their opinions”, but in reality, they cling to the beliefs they formed during certain heightened emotional states, such as fear.

Fear turns people into sheep. Once they are sheep, they will strive mightily to justify the actions of their “leaders” – whether those leaders gave trillions of dollars in bailouts or got us into war, and even if the leaders’ justifications were false.

I believe this dynamic is also playing out in the fact that many Americans assume that the government has a real plan for fixing the economy, is working as hard as it can to do so, and that – eventually – things will improve.

Just as most Americans believe “since we’re at war in Iraq, and since the government previously claimed that Saddam was behind 9/11, he must have been”, they are probably thinking “since the government gave trillions to the giant banks and said that economists have figure out how to fix things, they must have done what was needed, and things will turn around in a v-shape recovery”.

The lengths people go to rationalize a false link between Saddam and 9/11 is a great example, because it may reveal by analogy how far people will go to justify their trust in our economic leaders and in their own investment decisions.

Of course, the yearning for high returns is the other half of what drives investor psychology. But this essay focuses on fear.

By George Washington of Washington’s Blog.

What is the current American economy: capitalism, socialism or fascism?

Socialism

Initially, it is important to note that it is not just people on the streets who are calling the Bush and Obama administration’s approach to the economic crisis “socialism”. Economists and financial experts say the same thing.

For example, Nouriel Roubini writes in a recent essay:

This is a crisis of solvency, not just liquidity, but true deleveraging has not begun yet because the losses of financial institutions have been socialised and put on government balance sheets. This limits the ability of banks to lend, households to spend and companies to invest…

The releveraging of the public sector through its build-up of large fiscal deficits risks crowding out a recovery in private sector spending.

Roubini has previously written:

We’re essentially continuing a system where profits are privatized and…losses socialized.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb says the same thing:

After finishing The Black Swan, I realized there was a cancer. The cancer was a huge buildup of risk-taking based on the lack of understanding of reality. The second problem is the hidden risk with new financial products. And the third is the interdependence among financial institutions.

[Interviewer]: But aren’t those the very problems we’re supposed to be fixing?

NT: They’re all still here. Today we still have the same amount of debt, but it belongs to governments. Normally debt would get destroyed and turn to air. Debt is a mistake between lender and borrower, and both should suffer. But the government is socializing all these losses by transforming them into liabilities for your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. What is the effect? The doctor has shown up and relieved the patient’s symptoms – and transformed the tumour into a metastatic tumour. We still have the same disease. We still have too much debt, too many big banks, too much state sponsorship of risk-taking. And now we have six million more Americans who are unemployed – a lot more than that if you count hidden unemployment.

[Interviewer]: Are you saying the U.S. shouldn’t have done all those bailouts? What was the alternative?

NT: Blood, sweat and tears. A lot of the growth of the past few years was fake growth from debt. So swallow the losses, be dignified and move on. Suck it up. I gather you’re not too impressed with the folks in Washington who are handling this crisis.

Ben Bernanke saved nothing! He shouldn’t be allowed in Washington. He’s like a doctor who misses the metastatic tumour and says the patient is doing very well.

Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls it “socialism for the rich”.  So do many others.

Fascism?

Some, however, argue that the economy is more like fascism than socialism. For example, leading journalist Robert Scheer writes:

What is proposed is not the nationalization of private corporations but rather a corporate takeover of government. The marriage of highly concentrated corporate power with an authoritarian state that services the politico-economic elite at the expense of the people is more accurately referred to as “financial fascism” [than socialism]. After all, even Hitler never nationalized the Mercedes-Benz company but rather entered into a very profitable partnership with the current car company’s corporate ancestor, which made out quite well until Hitler’s bubble burst.

And Italian historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because “the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise… Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social” (page 416).

This perfectly mirrors Roubini’s statement about the American government’s bailout plan.

Remember that one of the best definitions of fascism – the one used by Mussolini – is the “merger of state and corporate power“.

That could never happen in America, right?

Consider:

• The government has given trillions in bailout or other emergency funds to private companies, but is largely refusing to disclose to either the media, the American people or even Congress where the money went

• Congress has largely been bought and paid for, and two powerful congressmen have said that banks run Congress

• The head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, the former Vice President of the Dallas Federal Reserve, and two top IMF officials have all said that we have – or are in danger of having – oligarchy in the U.S.

• Economist Dean Baker says that the real purpose of bank rescue plans was “A massive redistribution of wealth to the bank shareholders and their top executives”

• The big banks killed any real chance for financial reform months ago

Looting

As Examiner.com pointed out in May (it is worth quoting the essay at some length, as this is an important concept), looting has replaced free market capitalism:

Nobel prize-winning economist George Akerlof co-wrote a paper in 1993 describing the causes of the S&L crisis and other financial meltdowns. As summarized
by the New York Times:

In the paper, they argued that several financial crises in the 1980s, like the Texas real estate bust, had been the result of private investors taking advantage of the government. The investors had borrowed huge amounts of money, made big profits when times were good and then left the government holding the bag for their eventual (and predictable) losses.In a word, the investors looted. Someone trying to make an honest profit, Professors Akerlof and Romer [co-author of the paper, and himself a leading expert on economic growth] said, would have operated in a completely different manner. The investors displayed a “total disregard for even the most basic principles of lending,” failing to verify standard information about their borrowers or, in some cases, even to ask for that information.

The investors “acted as if future losses were somebody else’s problem,” the economists wrote. “They were right.”

The Times does a good job of explaining the looting
dynamic:

The paper’s message is that the promise of government bailouts isn’t merely one aspect of the problem. It is the core problem.Promised bailouts mean that anyone lending money to Wall Street — ranging from small-time savers like you and me to the Chinese government — doesn’t have to worry about losing that money. The United States Treasury (which, in the end, is also you and me) will cover the losses. In fact, it has to cover the losses, to prevent a cascade of worldwide losses and panic that would make today’s crisis look tame.

But the knowledge among lenders that their money will ultimately be returned, no matter what, clearly brings a terrible downside. It keeps the lenders from asking tough questions about how their money is being used. Looters — savings and loans and Texas developers in the 1980s; the American International Group, Citigroup, Fannie Mae and the rest in this decade — can then act as if their future losses are indeed somebody else’s problem.

Do you remember the mea culpa that Alan Greesnspan, Mr. Bernanke’s predecessor, delivered on Capitol Hill last fall? He said that he was “in a state of shocked disbelief” that “the self-interest” of Wall Street bankers hadn’t prevented this mess.

He shouldn’t have been. The looting theory explains why his laissez-faire theory didn’t hold up. The bankers were acting in their self-interest, after all…Think about the so-called liars’ loans from recent years: like those Texas real estate loans from the 1980s, they never had a chance of paying off. Sure, they would deliver big profits for a while, so long as the bubble kept inflating. But when they inevitably imploded, the losses would overwhelm the gains…

What happened? Banks borrowed money from lenders around the world. The bankers then kept a big chunk of that money for themselves, calling it “management fees” or “performance bonuses.” Once the investments were exposed as hopeless, the lenders — ordinary savers, foreign countries, other banks, you name it — were repaid with government bailouts.

In effect, the bankers had siphoned off this bailout money in advance, years before the government had spent it…Either way, the bottom line is the same: given an incentive to loot, Wall Street did so. “If you think of the financial system as a whole,” Mr. Romer said, “it actually has an incentive to trigger the rare occasions in which tens or hundreds of billions of dollars come flowing out of the Treasury.”

In fact, the big banks and sellers of exotic instruments pretended that the boom would last forever, siphoning off huge profits during the boom with the knowledge that – when the bust ultimately happened – the governments of the world would bail them out.

As Akerlof wrote in his paper:

[Looting is the] common thread [when] countries took on excessive
foreign debt, governments had to bail out insolvent financial institutions, real estate prices increased dramatically and then fell, or new financial markets experienced a boom and bust…Our theoretical analysis shows that an economic underground can come to life if firms have an incentive to go broke for profit at society’s expense (to loot) instead of to go for broke (to gamble on success). Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations.  Indeed, Akerlof predicted in 1993 that the next form the looting dynamic would take was through credit default swaps – then a very-obscure financial instrument (indeed, one interpretation of why CDS have been so deadly is that they were the simply the favored instrument for the current round of looting).

Is Looting A Thing of the Past?

Now that Wall Street has been humbled by this financial crash, and the dangers of CDS are widely known, are we past the bad old days of looting?

Unfortunately, as the Times points out, the answer is no:

At a time like this, when trust in financial markets is so scant, it may be hard to imagine that looting will ever be a problem again. But it will be. If we don’t get rid of the incentive to loot, the only question is what form the next round of looting will take.

Bottom Line

So what do we really have: socialism-for-the-giants, fascism or an economy which calls itself “capitalism” but which allows looting?

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. They are just different brand names for the same basic type of economy. All three systems allow giant businesses which are friendly to the government to keep enormous private profits but to pass the losses on to the government and ultimately the citizens.

Whether we use the terminology regarding socialism-for-the-giants (”socialized losses”), of fascism (”public and social losses”), or of looting (”left the government holding the bag for their eventual and predictable losses”), it amounts to the exact same thing.

Whatever we have, it isn’t free market capitalism.

Note: Yves Smith has called the financial services pay arrangement of “heads I win, tails you lose” looting, and has also argued that our form of capitalism is evolving into Mussolini style corpocracy, meaning fascism. But the label most often pinned on the Obama administration is socialism.

The bottom line is that I don’t put much stock in what socialists might label a system, any more than what fascists or corporate looters would label a system. Whatever you call it, if the giants get all the benefits and pawn all of the losses off on the public, it is a very dangerous system.

Robert Johnson, former chief economist to the Senate Banking Committee, submitted testimony to a House Financial Services Committee hearing on OTC derivatives. His written testimony is to be posted today.

While his remarks are worth reading in their entirety, one bit that caught my attention was his discussion of TDTR, or “Too Difficult to Resolve.” Many readers and economists such as Willem Buiter have argued, forcefully, that it is essential to develop what Buiter calls a “special resolution regime,” which is a fancy way of saying a specific set of rules and practices for putting big financial players into bankruptcy.

I expressed concerns about dealing with the difficulties of Too Big Too Fail institutions yesterday, saying (in effect) that many of the appealing-sounding ideas (including some I had favored, like putting credit default swaps on an exchange) were not workable or would not solve the problem (for instance, as Satyajit Das explained at some length, the amount of initial margin it would take to deal with “jump to default” risk would make credit default swaps uneconomic. No one is willing to kill CDS, which would be the effect of such measures. An undercapitalized exchange creates a concentrated point of failure, an AIG waiting to happen. And even though we would love to shut that casino down overnight, having looked into it is some depth, the cure would probably be at least as bad, if not worse than the disease. The best of the bad choices on offer is to regulate them like insurance, ideally more intrusively, and take affirmative measures to contain the market, particularly restricting the writing of “naked” short exposures).

Many readers were unhappy, but shooting the messenger does not change the fact that this is an even bigger problem to tackle than most realize.

From Johnson (note the link is not live yet, for some reason; Johnson was updating his testimony):

It would not be too strong to say that the architecture of derivatives regulation and market structure is the heart of Too Big to Fail policy.

Absent a drastic simplification of derivative exposures and a transparent and comprehensive improvement in the monitoring of those positions when imbedded in large firms, complex derivatives render these behemoth institutions Too Difficult to Resolve (TDTR). I say that because, the policies of resolving troubled financial institutions, so- called enhanced resolution powers, cannot be invoked unless government authorities have the capacity to assess and understand the entanglements of derivatives exposures throughout the financial sector and the economy at large. Resolution powers themselves can be quite useful and should be passed into law as a part of the financial reform you are considering. The ability to undertake “prompt corrective action” vis a vis bank holding companies and financial services holding companies, as the FDIC can now do vis a vis failing banks, would diminish the probabilities of a cascading bankruptcy or other disruptive panic.

Yet opaque, complex entangled derivatives exposures would serve to deter the authorities from invoking those powers and taking over a failing institution for fear of setting off a system wide calamity of magnitudes that policy officials can dread but not understand or estimate. Complex entanglements through derivatives exposures discourage government officials who are the risk managers on behalf of the citizens of our nation from invoking and using those powers. The spider web of complex opaque derivatives renders enhanced resolution powers impotent.

It is in this respect that complex and opaque derivatives exposures at large financial institutions contributed mightily to a policy of induced forbearance, as we witnessed in the first quarter of 2009. That experience, as we have seen, was very demoralizing to our citizens who have put their faith in philosophies that emphasize the use of markets as a mechanism for achieving social goals. The inhibitions that authorities experience in applying market discipline to large financial institutions and their managements tend to undermine belief in the use of markets.

What makes induced forbearance of TDTR institutions even more troubling is that their potential creditors would understand that they will not have their debts restructured when government officials are deterred by complex derivative exposures from taking a TDTR institution into receivership and restructuring the entity. This would create the perverse impact of reducing the risk premium on the unsecured debt of these institutions, lowering their funding costs, and giving them incentive to take more risk. It would also create a competitive advantage for TDTR firms that encourages an increase in their market share relative to those firms who had to pay more for funding because their creditors would fear that their bonds could be restructured in the event of solvency problems. TDTR financial institutions are enabled to get larger and larger by wrapping themselves in a spider web of complex derivatives and thereby inducing authorities to make ever-larger scale gambles on forbearance. Forbearance is a two-sided coin. Firms can continue to lose money rather than return to health. This is not a tolerable state of affairs for taxpayers who are held hostage by the fear of resolving complex intertwined institutions.

You are a teacher at a local primary school. Each school day you and some of your colleagues watch over the children at the school playground to make sure all of the children follow the rules and keep their hands to themselves. Your role is to keep the children safe. Mind you, this is a Montessori School where the philosophy is to let children explore within set boundaries.  But, if a child hurts another or a child’s behavior poses an immediate risk to others, you always step in.

In fact, one child, Charlie has been a bit of a problem recently. Charlie is one of the biggest kids at the school, a boisterous sixth grader who likes to push and play with matches. Last July 4th, it seems he got a hold of a video on the Internet blog Credit Writedowns on how not to use fireworks.  Contrary to the video’s intention, he rather liked seeing things blow up and courting danger. You see Charlie is a bit of a pyromaniac. You have repeatedly had to stop Charlie from bringing matches to the playground and lighting things on fire. But, recently you have had to confiscate firecrackers and suspend him from school.

But, one day a new headmaster comes to the school. He doesn’t believe much in the need for teachers to monitor the children. The children can monitor themselves. Unfortunately, Charlie has a bit of a following at school and before you know a lot of the kids are lighting firecrackers on the schoolyard. No one gets seriously hurt – just a few minor burns here and there. So Charlie ups the ante to M-80s like he saw in the video. There was a serious close call when he put the frog in a jar with the M-80, but self-monitoring has worked pretty well and there have still been no major casualties.

That’s when little John comes up to you and asks, “Ms. Watkins, why does Charlie have lit dynamite?”

In case it’s not obvious:

• Charlie is a too big to fail bank.
• The matches are debt, the firecrackers are derivatives, the M-80s are asset-backed securities and the dynamite is OTC derivatives.
• You (Ms. Watkins) are Brooksley Born
• The headmaster is Alan Greenspan
• Little John is another smaller community bank
• The other children are banks and citizens of the broader economy
• The frog-glass incident was LTCM’s collapse
• The lit dynamite incident was Lehman Brothers

In the past, I have likened regulators to referees or playground monitors to illustrate why the concept that markets are self-regulating is absurd. In the last post, “Frontline – The Warning: Who Knew About the Looming Financial Crisis?” Alan Greenspan was at war with regulator Brooksley Born over this concept of self-regulation. Born believed that regulation was a necessity in any financial market. Greenspan believed that markets are inherently self-regulating. Even fraud was self-regulating through market discipline in his view. I believe he has now repudiated this. However, Born lost that battle with ugly consequences when the market she wanted regulated, OTC derivatives, blew up via AIG.

Self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance.

Note: Even though, I am pointing to Buiter’s piece here, I am not a believer in regulation-heavy in the least. Nevertheless, his ideas do merit consideration.

One of the horrorshows that has been moving along in the background is the disaster of the funding of a sewer project in Birmingham, Alabama, which looks pretty likely to produce the biggest municipal bankruptcy since Orange County back in the mid 1990s.

Orange County did have one Robert Citron to blame for its woes. By all accounts (Frank Partnoy in Infectious Greed is particularly good here) Citron was WAAAY over his head, and not the brightest bulb to begin with.

The South has an even more combustible mix: a proud history of political corruption, plus even less-than-normally finance savvy bunch of officials (if such a thing is possible). There is a very good piece up at Bloomberg, so you can do some one-stop shopping and catch up on this sorry saga. A quick overview:

Jefferson County, Alabama,…anchored by Birmingham, is staring at what one local politician calls financial “Armageddon.”

The spectacle — a tax struck down, about 1,000 county employees furloughed, a politician indicted over $3 billion in sewer debt that may lead to the largest municipal bankruptcy in history — has elbowed its way up the ladder of county lore….

One target of their anger is Larry P. Langford, who was the county commission’s president in 2003 and 2004 and is now mayor of Birmingham. The 61-year-old Democrat goes on trial today, charged in a November 2008 federal indictment with taking cash, Rolex watches and designer clothes in exchange for helping to steer $7.1 million in fees to an Alabama investment banker as the county refinanced its sewer debt….

Under Langford’s stewardship, the county bet on interest- rate swaps, agreements that a representative of New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co. told commissioners could reduce their interest costs. Instead, the swaps — covering more than $5 billion in all — blew up during the credit crisis after ratings for the county’s bond insurers fell…

Thousands of public borrowers across the U.S. chose a similar strategy, and many are now paying billions of dollars to escape the contracts….Even Harvard University, the world’s richest academic institution with an endowment of $26 billion, fell for Wall Street’s financing in the dark: It paid $497.6 million to investment banks during the fiscal year ended June 30 because it chose to cancel $1.1 billion of interest-rate swaps.

Yves here. I am clearly an old fart. Jefferson County had floating rate and switched to supposedly cheaper fixed rate debt. Remarkably (and insanely) they had a massive maturity mismatch, funding a lot of the program…in auction rate securities! The rest was in floating rate debt dependent on credit enhancement (apparently for the swap) that got whacked in monoline downgrades:

In 2003 and 2004, with Langford as president, the commission plunged into interest-rate swaps with JPMorgan, Bear Stearns Cos., Bank of America Corp. and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Over time, the county, whose fiscal 2010 operating budget is $808.6 million, entered swaps on more than $5 billion in bonds.

Langford said in 2005 that the swaps would save $214 million — an assumption based on the county and its bond insurers maintaining their credit ratings…

The county later hired financial adviser James White of Birmingham-based Porter, White & Co., who estimated that the commission’s cost for the swaps, $120.2 million, was as much as $100 million too high, based on prevailing rates.

Then, in 2007-08, credit ratings for bond insurers that backed the variable-rate bonds plummeted to junk status because of unrelated losses in mortgage-backed securities. The reduction in credit quality killed demand for the bonds they insured.

Banks were forced to buy the securities, kicking in contract provisions that accelerated to four years from 40 the county’s payment schedule on more than $800 million of the debt. The insurers’ fall also affected more than $2 billion in auction-rate securities in late 2007 as bidders’ interest evaporated.

Some of the county’s variable rates more than tripled, to as high as 10 percent. Meanwhile, the bank payments it received were decreasing. In March 2009, when JPMorgan canceled its swap agreements, a county filing said they were worth more than $650 million to the bank, which has agreed to waive termination fees under negotiations on how to restructure the county’s debt.

Worse, the local authorities don’t bother with bids, which sets them up to be fleeced:

Less than 15 percent of $391 billion in new debt offerings were sold last year on the basis of public bidding — down from 83 percent of new sales in 1970. Most issues are now negotiated, meaning borrowing costs are set in private bargaining sessions.

In Jefferson County, the resulting opacity was a gateway to corruption, according to documents filed in Langford’s case. The Securities & Exchange Commission began probing the county’s swaps in 2004; the Federal Bureau of Investigation started inquiring later. In June 2007, SEC investigators deposed Langford in Miami about whether he used the sewer-debt refinancings to pay off political friends.

And that’s just the bond issues, so the transparency of swaps has to be even worse.

Readers may recall that this sorry drama has been going on for well over a year. So why hasn’t the county filed for bankruptcy, or prepared a filing and gotten into a stare-down with the swaps counterparties to negotiate a settlement? Get a load of this:

Carns and Commissioner Bobby Humphryes, both Republicans, say they reluctantly favor bankruptcy, in part to prevent the appointment of a receiver who might seek increases. “We need a cram-down on the debt,” says Carns, adding that the county can afford to service less than half the obligations, about $1.4 billion worth. A bankruptcy court would have authority to reduce the amount owed.

Democrat Shelia Smoot, along with Democrat William Bell and commission President Collins, opposes filing voluntarily.

“It would be detrimental to our community for the next 50 years,” she says.

Yves here. The last statement is utter hogwash. The idea that not filing for BK is a good idea is as big a bill of goods as the original swaps deals.

The county is nuclear waste NOW due to the unsupportable debt burden. By contrast, lenders are happy to fund post bankruptcy companies, and municipalities even more. They have decent cash flows and have delevered! They might well look like a much better credit than the average municipal borrower post bankruptcy.

The reluctance to file for bankruptcy suggests there is even more dirty laundry the local officials do not want aired.

The story is very well done, and you will find it here.

Ed Harrison has an excellent post over on his Credit Writedowns blog, following up and elaborating on his “Greed is Not Good” post here yesterday.

To whet your appetite, here it the beginning of “More on greed, regulation, Lehman and the financial industry“:

In one of my latest posts I said “greed is not good.” Quite frankly, I looked at this statement as self-evident in the wake of an economic catastrophe where greed was a defining element. Yet, a remarkable number of people commented in defense of greed; they seem to believe greed is a good thing. So, I would like to clarify a few things about greed in the context of the recent financial crisis and prudent regulation of the financial industry.

Greed is not good

Greed is defined as:

A selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed (Merriam Webster)

An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth (Free Online Dictionary)

The selfish desire for or pursuit of money, wealth, food, or other possessions, especially when this denies the same goods to others. It is generally considered a vice, and is one of the seven deadly sins in Catholicism. (People who do not view unconstrained acquisitiveness as a vice will generally use a word other than greed, which has strong negative connotations.) (The Free Dictionary)

The obsession with accumulating material goods (Access-Jesus)

Do you notice the commonalities in all these definitions? Excessive, selfish, more than what one needs or deserves, unconstrained, obsessive. You can make the non-judgmental argument as I did that greed is neither good nor bad. But, in what twisted world view is any of this good? Greed is not ambition or hunger or drive. Greed is by definition excessive and unconstrained, and, thus, leads to unstable and suboptimal outcomes. Greed is not good.

Ed discusses how the free market ideology is a religion and serves to maintain the power of kleptocrats and why regulation is the least bad of the options available to deal with the concentrations of power that are inherent features of a stratified society. His post continues here.

By George Washington of Washington’s Blog.

William K. Black – professor of economics and law, and the senior regulator during the S & L crisis – says that that the government’s entire strategy now – as during the S&L crisis – is to cover up how bad things are (”the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts”).

Indeed, as I have previously documented, 7 out of the 8 giant, money center banks went bankrupt in the 1980’s during the “Latin American Crisis”, and the government’s response was to cover up their insolvency.

Black also says:

There has been no honest examination of the crisis because it would embarrass C.E.O.s and politicians . . .

Instead, the Treasury and the Fed are urging us not to examine the crisis and to believe that all will soon be well.

PhD economist Dean Baker made a similar point, lambasting the Federal Reserve for blowing the bubble, and pointing out that those who caused the disaster are trying to shift the focus as fast as they can:

The current craze in DC policy circles is to create a “systematic risk regulator” to make sure that the country never experiences another economic crisis like the current one. This push is part of a cover-up of what really went wrong and does absolutely nothing to address the underlying problem that led to this financial and economic collapse.

Baker also says:

“Instead of striving to uncover the truth, [Congress] may seek to conceal it” and tell banksters they’re free to steal again.

Economist Thomas Palley says that Wall Street also has a vested interest in covering up how bad things are:

That rosy scenario thinking has returned to Wall Street should be no surprise. Wall Street profits from rising asset prices on which it charges a management fee, from deal-making on which it earns advisory fees, and from encouraging retail investors to buy stock, which boosts transaction fees. Such earnings are far larger when stock markets are rising, which explains Wall Street’s genetic propensity to pump the economy.

The media has largely parroted what the White House and Wall Street were saying. As a Pew Research Center study on the coverage of the crisis found:

The gravest economic crisis since the Great Depression has been covered in the media largely from the top down, told primarily from the perspective of the Obama Administration and big business, and reflected the voices and ideas of people in institutions more than those of everyday Americans…

Citizens may be the primary victims of the downturn, but they have not been not the primary actors in the media depiction of it.

A PEJ content analysis of media coverage of the economy during the first half of 2009 also found that the mainstream press focused on a relatively small number of major story lines, mostly generating from two cities, the country’s political and financial capitals.

A companion analysis of a broader array of media using new “meme tracker” technology developed at Cornell University finds that phrases and ideas that reverberated most in the coverage came early on, mostly from government, particularly from the president and the chairman of the Federal Reserve…

• Three storylines have dominated: efforts to help revive the banking sector, the battle over the stimulus package and the struggles of the U.S. auto industry. Together they accounted for nearly 40% of the economic coverage from February 1 through August 31. Other topics related to the crisis have been covered much less. As an example, all the reporting of retail sales, food prices, the impact of the crisis on Social Security and Medicare, its effect on education and the implications for health care combined accounted for just over 2% of all the economic coverage.

• Actions by government officials and business leaders drove much of the coverage. The White House and federal agencies alone initiated nearly a third (32%) of economic stories studied through July 3. Business triggered another 21%. About a quarter of the stories (23%) was initiated by the press itself and did not rely on an external news trigger. Ordinary citizens and union workers combined to act as the catalyst for only 2% of the stories about the economy.

• Fully 76% of the datelines on economic stories studied during the first five months of the Obama presidency were New York (44%) or metro Washington D.C. (32%). Only about one-fifth (21%) of the stories originated in any other city in the U.S., and about a quarter of those emanated from two other major media centers: Atlanta and Los Angeles.

As I have previously reported, concentration in the mainstream media (along with a number of other dynamics) has severely undermined the credibility of the media.

Why Should We Care?

Why should we care if there has been a cover up?

Well, initially, if there has been activity which is harmful to the economy and may lead to another financial crisis, wouldn’t we want to know about it, so that we prevent it from happening again?

The answer is obviously yes.

But if the government, Wall Street, and the media are all in cover-up mode, then independent auditors, financial analysts and economists cannot shine a light into financial practices to find out what really went wrong.

In addition, if we don’t know what’s really going on, we can’t gauge whether the government’s economic policies are working. For example, Time Magazine called Tim Geithner a “con man” and the stress tests a “confidence game” because those tests were so inaccurate.

William Black said:

How do you think we did the stress tests? Like doing a stress test on an airplane wing, but you don’t actually have airplane wing. And don’t know what airplane wing is made out of. It’s a farce.

I agree.

Without accurate information, we will not know if we’re heading in the right or the wrong direction.

Fraud

One of the foremost experts on structured finance and derivatives – Janet Tavakoli – says that rampant fraud and Ponzi schemes caused the financial crisis.

University of Texas economics professor James K. Galbraith agrees:

You had fraud in the origination of the mortgages, fraud in the underwriting, fraud in the ratings agencies.

Congress woman Marcy Kaptur says that there was rampant fraud leading up to the crash (see this and this).

According to economist Max Wolff:

The securitization process worked by “packag(ing), sell(ing), repack(aging) and resell(ing) mortages making what was a small housing bubble, a gigantic (one) and making what became an American financial problem very much a global” one by selling mortgage bundles worldwide “without full disclosure of the lack of underlying assets or risks.”

Buyers accepted them on good faith, failed in their due diligence, and rating agencies were negligent, even criminal, in overvaluing and endorsing junk assets that they knew were high-risk or toxic. “The whole process was corrupt at its core.”

William Black says that massive fraud by is what caused the economic crisis. Specifically, he says that companies, auditors, rating agencies and regulators all committed fraud which helped blow the bubble and sowed the seeds of the inevitable crash. And see this.

Indeed, as I have previously noted, the giant ratings agencies have a culture of covering up improper ratings (and they essentially took bribes for giving higher ratings).

Black also notes:

• Everyone involved knew that the CDOs which packaged subprime loans were not AAA credit-worthy (which means that they are completely risk-free). He also said that the exotic instruments (CDOs, CDS, etc.) which spun the mortgages into more and more abstract investments were intentionally created to defraud investors

• The government knew about mortgage fraud a long time ago. For example, the FBI warned of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud in 2004. However, the FBI, DOJ and other government agencies then stood down and did nothing. See this and this

• “Accounting is the weapon of choice in the financial sphere”, with the top executives involved in these fraudulent schemes vacuuming out huge profits for themselves and select insiders, and having auditors rubber stamp what’s being done

• In November 2007, one rating agency – Fitch’s – dared to take a look at some loan files. Fitch concluded that there was the appearance of fraud in nearly every file reviewed

Black and economist Simon Johnson also state that the banks committed fraud by making loans to people that they knew would default, to make huge profits during the boom, knowing that the taxpayers would bail them out when things went bust.

See also this, this and this.

The Economy Won’t Recover Until We Prosecute

So there was a little fraud, no big deal, right?

Wouldn’t looking backwards at fraudulent conduct be distracting for the people, the government, and the economy? Shouldn’t we look forward so we can recover?

No.

Specifically, the Wharton School of Business has written an essay stating that restoring trust is the key to recovery, and that trust cannot be restored until wrongdoers are held accountable.

The Wharton paper states:

The public will need to “hold the perpetrators of the economic disaster responsible and take what actions they can to prevent them from harming the economy again.” In addition, the public will have to see proof that government and business leaders can behave responsibly before they will trust them again…

For more on the importance of trust in the economy, see this.

The stakes are high. As Pam Martens, who worked on Wall Street for 21 years, writes:

The massive losses by big Wall Street firms, now topping those of the Great Depression in relative terms, have yet to be adequately explained. Wall Street power players are obfuscating and Congress is too embarrassed or frightened to ask, preferring to just throw money at the problem and hope it goes away. But as job losses and foreclosures mount and pensions and 401(k)s shrink, public policy measures to address the economic stresses require a full set of unembellished facts…

It was four years after the crash of 1929 before the major titans of Wall Street were forced to give testimony under oath to Congress and the full magnitude of the fraud emerged. That delay may well have contributed to the depth and duration of the Great Depression. The modern-day Wall Street corruption hearings in Congress … must now resume in earnest and with sworn testimony if we are to escape a similar fate.

From Marshall Auerback, a fund manager and investment analyst who writes for New Deal 2.0:

As reported by Bloomberg:

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., one of the first banks to receive cash injections from the U.S. Treasury during last year’s crisis, doesn’t have an implicit guarantee from the government, Chief Financial Officer David Viniar said today.

“We operate as an independent financial institution that stands on our own two feet,” Viniar, 54, said in a conference call with reporters today after the New York-based firm posted higher third-quarter profit. “We don’t think we have a guarantee.”

That’s the quote from today.

Then see an excerpt from their last 10Q issued less than three months ago.

Note the footnote (3) that $20 billion was guaranteed via the FDIC (click to view full image).

Now tell me something, what if you have received FDIC guarantees in the middle of the crisis and had been able to borrow three year money at 100bp over 3 year notes or a whopping 1.5% interest cost.

Might you have taken up the opportunity?

Would that be an implicit guarantee or perhaps more than just implicit?

It is an outright lie to say that they “operate as an independent financial…..”

They should be held accountable for lying to their shareholders.

Where is the outrage in Congress and in the Obama administration?

FDR and Jesse Jones never ever would have tolerated this behavior just 8 months after the bank closings.

You need to look beyond the forest of debits and credits.

This goes to the very heart and soul of the democracy and what we have written about the corruption in the American polity.

Yves here. Ahem, and how pray tell does Goldman rationalize that it was allowed to become a bank in the crisis, which gives it direct access to the Fed? And the government has a clear “no more Lehmans” policy, with Goldman as a larger and therefore treated as an even more important to preserve player.

Another doozy from the conference call was that Goldman CFO David Viniar justified Goldman’s high profits by claiming it was justified by the valuable social role the firm was performing.

Organizations that perform valuable social functions are generally controlled by the state (police) or utilities and subject to heavy government oversight to keep them from abusing their crucial role. But Goldman, along with the rest of the financial services industry, has managed to get itself in the “heads I win, tails you lose” position of privatized gains and socialized losses. And then they have the temerity to act as if we don’t see the result, which is looting.

Submitted by Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns.

In the 1987 movie classic Wall Street, the sinister protagonist Gordon Gekko played by Michael Douglas gives this famous quote:

In the last seven deals that I’ve been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pretax profit of 12 billion dollars. Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them! The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.

Since that time, this quote has become famous as the “Greed is Good” philosophy of capitalism.  Gekko symbolizes an era in which it is believed that the free hand of market capitalism will steer the economy efficiently and effectively with little need for government intervention or regulatory oversight. Instead, so the theory goes, we are each allowed encouraged to pursue our manifest destiny of getting filthy rich. Screw everybody else.

Well, let me tell you something greed is not good.  Greed is corrosive and it is tearing at the very fabric of our democracy. A generation ago most people in America worked for a few institutions in their lifetimes.  Many had employer-paid healthcare and employer-financed defined benefit pension plans.

But, since the 1980s the moorings have come off and set us adrift in a world of economic insecurity.

• Job insecurity has increased dramatically, especially as reflected in part work statistics(see here and here). This has resulted in deteriorating health and declining work safety.
• The healthcare debate is front and center in the US today. Yet, incongruously, the focus has mainly been on how ‘socialist’ proposed remedies appear.
• And defined benefit has been almost completely replaced with 401(k) plans, leaving retirees to face potential economic hardship in old age.

This is “the Great Risk shift” in which corporations in pursuit of shareholder value (remember ‘greed is good’) have sloughed off as many economic risks onto ordinary Americans as they could reasonably get away with. This is crony capitalism, not free market capitalism. And a anesthetized American public has put up with this. I continue to ask myself why.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was very much on display earlier in the year as we entered the worst of this financial crisis. Everyone felt vulnerable. But now that recession is over, it does seem that America is returning to business as usual, both on Wall Street and on Main Street.

What I find most galling is that just one year ago Barack Obama was saying, “Elect me! Elect me! I am change you can believe in. But, no sooner does he enter office and he continues the massive bailout of the financial services industry that was begun by the predecessor administration. And today there are really no substantive regulatory changes on offer by this Administration. It was this same support for the financial elite at the expense of the middle class which has led to a widening gulf in income and wealth.

And by the way, if you haven’t noticed, real incomes are lower now than 36 years ago.  So, this is certainly not change I believe in…yet. And given many of the players today are the same as they were before the crisis, don’t expect any real change. Apparently the only thing that is going to induce change in Washington (or London) is a horrific depression.

So, what about greed then? Roger Bootle takes this on in his latest book, “The Trouble with Markets,” which I highlighted earlier in the week. Here is how the Telegraph quotes him:

The free-market vigilantes are already rushing to defend the unfettered market system. Their defence is based on one or other of three arguments. First, the market solution is to let failing financial firms fail. If the state intervenes to stop this, the blame for the resulting mess cannot be laid at the door of the market system. Second, banking has been a heavily regulated activity. The regulators have failed in their job. Third, the monetary policy authorities should have paid more attention to the growth of money and credit and the resulting inflation of the property market bubble.

In this way, they try to argue that what seems on the face of it to be a failure of markets is in fact a failure of government. So the solution, they say, is not less freedom for markets but more.

These people are dangerous. The idea of letting the financial system implode and then waiting for the market to bring spontaneous, healthy revival out of the wreckage might read well on the pages of a book, but in the real world it would bring human misery on a gigantic scale. In today’s society, people simply will not tolerate it. If that is what the market system is about then they will have none of it; and rightly so.

Have a go at the full article linked below. Bootle makes some very good points. I liked his last book, “Money for Nothing”. So I suspect his new book is a good read too.

Greed isn’t good– it’s dangerous – Telegraph