Category Archives: Financial Crisis of 2008

What I’m Reading

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I finished Gregory Clark’s new book. I put it in the must-read category. I hope to publish a review on line in the next few months.

I am now reading Fragile by Design by Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber. I posted a few months ago on an essay they wrote based on the book. I also attended yesterday an “econtalk live,” where Russ Roberts interviewed the authors in front of live audience for a forthcoming podcast. You might look forward to listening–the authors are very articulate and they speak colorfully, e.g. describing the United States as being “founded by troublemakers” who achieved independence through violence, as opposed to the more boring Canadians.

I think it is an outstanding book, although in my opinion it is marred by their focus on CRA lending as a cause of the recent financial crisis. This is a flaw because (a) they might be wrong and (b) even if they are right, they will turn off many potential readers who might otherwise find much to appreciate in the book. Everyone, regardless of ideology, should read the book. It offers a lot of food for thought.

I am only part-way through it. The story as far as I can tell is this:

1. There is a lot of overlap between government and banking. Governments, particularly as territories coalesced into nation states, needed to raise funds for speculative enterprises, such as wars and trading empires. Banks need to enforce contracts, e.g., by taking possession of collateral in the case of a defaulted loan. Government needs the banks, and the banks need government.

2. If the rulers are too powerful, they may not be able to credibly commit to leaving banks assets alone, so it may be hard for banks to form. But if the government is not powerful enough, it cannot credibly commit to enforcing debt contracts, so that it may be hard for banks to form.

3. Think of democracies as leaning either toward liberal or populist. By liberal, the authors mean Madisonian in design, to curb power in all forms. By populist, the authors mean responsive to the will of popular coalitions of what Madison called factions.

4. If you are lucky (as in Canada), your banking policies are grounded in a liberal version of democracy, meaning that the popular will is checked, and regulation serves to implement a stable banking system. If you are unlucky (as in the U.S.), your banking policies are grounded in the populist version of democracy. Banking policy reflects a combination of debtor-friendly interventionism and regulations that favor rent-seeking coalitions who shift burdens to taxpayers. The result is an unstable system.

I may not be stating point 4 in the most persuasive way. I am not yet persuaded by it. In fact, I think libertarians will be at least as troubled as progressives are by some of the theses that the authors promulgate.

Brad DeLong’s Questions

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His post is here. I will insert my answers.

Why is housing investment still so far depressed below any definition of normal?

In the U.S., politicians shifted from punishing mortgage lenders for making type II errors (turning down borrowers for loans that might have been repaid) to punishing them for making type I errors (lending to borrowers who might default). In addition, politicians interfered with the foreclosure process. This kept markets from returning to normal, and it further discouraged mortgage lending. What good is the house as collateral for a loan in a world where the government keeps the lender from getting at it?

Why has labor-force participation collapsed so severely?

I believe that this is a trend, amplified by the cycle. Many workers are facing stiff competition from foreign labor and from capital. At the same time, the non-wage component of compensation has gone up, because of health insurance costs. These factors put extreme downward pressure on take-home pay for many workers, and they have responded by dropping out of the labor force.

Why the very large spread between yields on safe nominal assets like Treasuries and yields on riskier assets like equities?

I lean toward a Minsky-Kindleberger answer. During the Great Moderation, confidence in financial intermediation grew. We thought that banks had discovered new ways to manufacture riskless, short-term assets out of risky, long-term investment projects. Then came the financial crisis, and distrust of financial intermediation soared. This made it harder to convince people that you could provide them with riskless, short-term assets backed by risky, long-term projects.

Why didn’t the housing bubble of the mid-2000s produce a high-pressure economy and rising inflation?

It took place in the context of the long-term trend to displace many American workers with capital and with foreign labor. The bubble took us off that trend and the crash put us back on it.

To what extent was the collapse of demand in 2008-2009 the result of the financial crisis and to what extent a simple consequence of the collapse of household wealth?

Great question. It appears that the collapse of household wealth is a sufficient explanation. But if so, then what was the point of TARP and the other bailouts? Of course, putting on my PSST hat, I would reject a phrase like “collapse of demand.” I would say instead that in the wake of the financial crisis, the psychology of existing businesses was that it was a good time to shore up profits by trimming the work force, and the psychology of entrepreneurs was that it was not a good time to try to obtain funding for new businesses.

Why has fiscal policy been so inept and counterproductive in the aftermath of 2008-9?

Not a question that I can answer, given that we disagree on what constitutes inept and counterproductive.

Why hasn’t more been done to clean up housing finance (in America) and banking finance in Europe)?

Politicians care about what happens on their watch. That is why you can count on them to bail out failing financial firms (“Yes, we should worry about moral hazard. But risk some sort of calamity because of a visible financial bankruptcy? Not on my watch.”) That is why you can count on them not to institute major financial reforms. (“Of course, we need a new design here. But do something that could cause short-term disruption to some constituents? Not on my watch.”)

Incidentally, I diagnosed the “not on my watch” bias toward bailouts way back in 2008. Also in September of 2008, I wrote,

Five years from now, we could find ourselves with no exit strategy. My guess is that we’ll be pretty much out of Iraq by then. But it would not surprise me to see Freddie and Fannie still in limbo.

You can read Robert Waldmann’s answers here. Pointer from Mark Thoma.

Ben Bernanke’s Valedictory

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He says,

The Federal Reserve responded forcefully to the liquidity pressures during the crisis in a manner consistent with the lessons that central banks had learned from financial panics over more than 150 years and summarized in the writings of the 19th century British journalist Walter Bagehot: Lend early and freely to solvent institutions

The Bagehot policy is to lend freely, at a penalty rate. If you lend freely at a penalty rate, you effect financial triage. Banks that are fine don’t borrow. Banks that are insolvent go under anyway. And banks that are temporarily illiquid use your loans to recover. Instead, if all you do is lend freely, then you are simply handing out favors, which turns banking into an exercise in favor-seeking.

He goes on to say,

Weak recoveries from financial crises reflect, in part, the process of deleveraging and balance sheet repair: Households pull back on spending to recoup lost wealth and reduce debt burdens, while financial institutions restrict credit to restore capital ratios and reduce the riskiness of their portfolios. In addition to these financial factors, the weakness of the recovery reflects the overbuilding of housing (and, to some extent, commercial real estate) prior to the crisis, together with tight mortgage credit; indeed, recent activity in these areas is especially tepid in comparison to the rapid gains in construction more typically seen in recoveries.

This is a popular story among Keynesians now. It was not in the textbooks before the crisis.

Scott Sumner will be disappointed to see that Bernanke does not believe in the theory of monetary offset.

Fun Re-reading

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For the macro book that I am working on, I wanted to refresh my memory for how the financial crisis played out. I went back to blog posts that I wrote in 2007. You can find them here. Scroll down to December, and look for posts “subprime daily briefing” (sometimes named slightly differently).

I staked out an early position against bailing our borrowers. I have no regrets there. At one point I said that the total wealth loss from the crisis would not be as large as the loss from popping the dotcom bubble–I think I was wrong about that.

I also staked out an early position in favor of capital forbearance by bank regulators, meaning that they would not force banks to sell assets at distressed prices to meet capital requirements. I still think that compared with what regulators actually did, this was a better approach.

Also interesting are the various links from the posts. For example, I found a paper by Michael Bordo, dated September 28, 2007.

Many of the financial crises of the past involved financial innovation which increased leverage. The 1763 crisis was centered on the market for bills of exchange, Penn Central on the newly revived (in the 1960s) commercial paper market, the savings and loan crisis of the early 1980s on the junk bond market, LTCM on derivatives and hedge funds.

In the most recent episode, the financial innovation derived from the securitization of subprime mortgages and other loans has shifted risk away from the originating bank into mortgage and other asset backed securities which bundle the risk of less stellar borrowers with more creditworthy ones and which were certified by the credit rating agencies as prime . These have been absorbed by hedge funds in the US and abroad, by offshore banks and in the asset backed commercial paper of the commercial and investment banks. As Rajan ( 2005) argued, shifting the risk away from banks who used to have the incentives to monitor their borrowers to hedge funds and other institutions which do not, rather than reducing overall systemic risk increased it by raising the risk of a much more widespread meltdown in theevent of a tail event as we are currently witnessing.

Bernanke and History

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the WSJ presents Five takes, three positive and two negative. Michael Bordo writes,

During the Fed’s first 100 years, it has shifted gradually from being a banker-run to an economist-run central bank, culminating in Ben Bernanke’s assumption of the chairmanship in 2006. His appointment promised to bring the academic rigor of modern monetary economics to the chairmanship. Bernanke’s research, advocating greater transparency and better communication to enhance the central bank’s credibility, augured well for continuing low and stable rates of inflation.

Bordo’s take is negative. I have to say that I cannot agree that Bernanke made the Fed an economist-run central bank. During the crisis, it seemed to me to be a banker-run central bank.

Normal AD vs. the Credit Channel

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‘Uneasy Money’ writes,

try as they might, the finance guys have not provided a better explanation for that clustering of disappointed expectations than a sharp decline in aggregate demand. That’s what happened in the Great Depression, as Ralph Hawtrey and Gustav Cassel and Irving Fisher and Maynard Keynes understood, and that’s what happened in the Little Depression, as Market Monetarists, especially Scott Sumner, understand. Everything else is just commentary.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen. This argument broke out five years ago, and it is no closer to being settled. I might phrase it as the following multiple choice question:

a) the economic slump caused the financial crisis (the Sumnerian view, endorsed above)

b) the financial crisis caused the slump (the Reinhart-Rogoff view; also the mainstream consensus view).

c) both are symptoms of longer-term structural adjustment issues (I am willing to stand up for this view. Tyler Cowen also is sympathetic to it. Note that I do not wish in any way to be associated with Larry Summers’ view, which is that the structural issue is that we have too much saving relative to productive investments.)

d) both are symptoms of a dramatic loss of confidence. As people lose confidence in some forms of financial intermediation, intermediaries that are heavily weighted in those areas come to grief. Se see disruptions to patterns of trade that depend on those forms of intermediation. Moreover, as businesses lose confidence, particularly in their ability to access credit, they trim employment and hoard cash.

I want to emphasize that I see a reasonable case to be made for any of these views. There may be yet other points of view that I would find reasonable (although Summers’ “secular stagnation” is not one of them). In macroeconomics, if you think you have all the answers, then I cannot help you. I think that this is a field in which doubts are more defensible than certainties.

Richard Robb on the Origins of the Financial Crisis

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He writes An Epistemology of the Financial Crisis, appearing in the current issue of Critical Review.

Subprime mortgages retained by U.S. banks for their own portfolios performed at least as badly as those they securitized for sale to others….A study by Wei Jiang, Ashlyn Nelson, and Edward Vytlacil [various versions available] examined one large lender and concluded that mortgage “loans remaining on the bank’s balance sheet are, ex post, of owrse quality than sold loans.” They concluded that RMBS [residential mortgage backed securities] investors had information advantages over banks. This is the very opposite of the view that banks sold the worst loans to unsuspecting third parties.

Robb’s theme is that the crisis was caused by imperfect knowledge rather than greed/adverse incentives. I have many comments

1. This same theme may be found in Jerry Muller’s similarly titled Our Epistemological Depression and my The Financial Crisis: Moral Failure or Cognitive Failure?, neither of which hare cited by Robb.

2. It is no surprise that Robb did not see the articles by Muller or me, nor is it likely that many people will see Robb’s. The mainstream narrative is available to everyone, while our narrative has been relegated to the most obscure publication outlets.

3. Robb writes,

One clue to what went wrong comes from a study that Fitch conducted [may be found here] on borrowers who defaulted within six months of taking out a mortgage. The study looked closely at 45 “early payment defaulters” from 2006. [It] found that 66 percent of them committed “occupancy fraud,” falsely claiming that they intended to occupy the home.

There are some forms of fraud that are often the fault of the lender, and the borrower is relatively blameless. Overstating borrower’s income is an example. But when it comes to occupancy fraud, you have to blame the borrower, and for lenders it is one of the most difficult forms of fraud to detect prior to making the loan. However, blaming the borrowers runs counter to the conventional narrative.

4. Contrary to what I have written, Robb argues that lenient risk-based capital rules for highly-rated mortgage securities were not implemented soon enough to be implicated in the financial crisis. On the Recourse Rule, a 2001 regulation that some of us believe encouraged subprime securitization, Robb writes,

While on the margin the Recourse Rule encouraged investment in highly rated ABS [asset backed securities], the incentives were not so great as to justify holding these securities unless banks thought they were safe.

5. Robb writes,

An unambiguous regulatory failure was the decision to allow Lehman Brothers to fail. The market expected the U.S. Treasury to cobble together a last-minute rescue over the weekend….largely because…Bear Stearns, had been rescued six months earlier by being absorbed into JPMorgan Chase. Lehman was 25 times large4r than Bear Stearns and far more interconnected…the Securities and Exchange Commission had no plan for an orderly transfer of clients’ assets…institutional clients with claims over $5000,000 had to wait until the summer of 2013.

6. According to Robb, the financial community never expected house prices to decline. But I would like to point out that you cannot just look at what investors were expecting on average. Instead, think of investors as assigning probabilities to various paths for house prices. I think it is fair to say that investors under-estimated the probability of a large decline in house prices. However, a sophisticated investor would not have assigned a zero probability to a path in which house prices declined.

7. Robb views post-crisis risk aversion as a major source of problems. He provides examples of assets that in hindsight were ridiculously undervalued by investors.

during a crisis, they learn to be skeptical of the probabilities, no matter how those probabilities are presented.

All in all, it is one of the most provocative essays I have read on the financial crisis.

A Finance Practitioner’s Perspective

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John Hussman writes,

the past 13 years have chronicled the journey of valuations – from hypervaluation to levels that still exceed every pre-bubble precedent other than a few weeks in 1929. If by 2023, stock valuations complete this journey not by moving to undervaluation, but simply by touching pre-bubble norms, we estimate that the S&P 500 will have achieved a nominal total return of only about 2.6% annually between now and then.

He uses the Shiller P/E ratio as his measure of over- or under-valuation. Thanks to Timothy Taylor for the pointer.

What I found even more interesting was a paragraph later in Hussman’s essay.

On careful analysis, however, the clearest and most immediate event that ended the banking crisis was not monetary policy, but the abandonment of mark-to-market accounting by the Financial Accounting Standards Board on March 16, 2009, in response to Congressional pressure by the House Committee on Financial Services on March 12, 2009. The change to the accounting rule FAS 157 removed the risk of widespread bank insolvency by eliminating the need for banks to make their losses transparent. No mark-to-market losses, no need for added capital, no need for regulatory intervention, recievership, or even bailouts. Misattributing the recovery to monetary policy has contributed to a faith in its effectiveness that cannot even withstand scrutiny of the 2000-2002 and 2007-2009 recessions, and the accompanying market plunges. This faith is already wavering, but the loss of this faith will be one of the most painful aspects of the completion of the present market cycle.

And I cannot resist the subsequent paragraph:

The simple fact is that the belief in direct, reliable links between monetary policy and the economy – and even with the stock market – is contrary to the lessons from a century of history. Among the many things that are demonstrably not true – and can be demonstrated to be untrue even with simple scatterplots – are the notions that inflation and unemployment are negatively related over time (the actual correlation is close to zero and slightly positive), that higher inflation results in lower subsequent unemployment (the actual correlation is positive), that higher monetary growth results in subsequent employment gains (the correlation is almost exactly zero), and a wide range of similarly popular variants. Even “expectations augmented” variants turn out to be useless. Examining historical evidence would be a useful exercise for Econ 101 students, who gain an unrealistic sense of cause and effect as the result of studying diagrams instead of data.

Comparative Banking Systems

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Charles W. Calomiris and stephen H. Haber write,

The fact that the property rights system underpinning banking systems is an outcome of political deal-making means that there are no fully private banking systems; rather, all modern banking is best thought of as a partnership between the government and a group of bankers, and that partnership is shaped by the institutions that govern the distribution of power in the political system.

Read the whole thing. Another excerpt:

In 1977, Congress passed the Community Reinvestment Act to ensure that banks were responsive to the needs of the communities they served. The CRA required banks that wanted to merge with or acquire other banks to demonstrate that responsiveness to federal regulators; the requirements were later strengthened by the Clinton administration, increasing the burden on banks to prove that they were good corporate citizens. This provided a source of leverage for urban activist organizations such as the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, the Greenlining Institute, and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, known as ACORN, which defined themselves as advocates for low-income, urban, and minority communities. Such groups could block or delay a merger by claiming that the banks were not in compliance with their responsibilities; they could also smooth the merger-approval process by publicly supporting the banks. Thus, banks seeking to become nationwide enterprises formed unlikely alliances with such organizations. In exchange for the activists’ support, banks committed to transfer funds to these organizations and to make loans to borrowers identified by them. From 1992 to 2007, the loans that resulted from these arrangements totaled $850 billion.

In contrast,

In Canada, the government did not use the banking system to channel subsidized credit to favored political constituencies, so it had no need to tolerate instability.