Category Archives: Financial Crises

Larry Summers on Mian and Sufi

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He writes,

They argue that, rather than failing banks, the key culprits in the financial crisis were overly indebted households. Resurrecting arguments that go back at least to Irving Fisher and that were emphasised by Richard Koo in considering Japan’s stagnation, Mian and Sufi highlight how harsh leverage and debt can be – for example, when the price of a house purchased with a 10 per cent downpayment goes down by 10 per cent, all of the owner’s equity is lost. They demonstrate powerfully that spending fell much more in parts of the country where house prices fell fastest and where the most mortgage debt was attached to homes. So their story of the crisis blames excessive mortgage lending, which first inflated bubbles in the housing market and then left households with unmanageable debt burdens. These burdens in turn led to spending reductions and created an adverse economic and financial spiral that ultimately led financial institutions to the brink.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Summers points out that Mian and Sufi’s suggestion that we should have bailed out homeowners is probably not correct. I feel even more strongly than Summers does about this.

Suppose that we accept the balance-sheet recession story. Some comments and questions.

1. Vernon Smith is also a proponent.

2. What was the difference between the damage to consumer wealth caused by the dotcom crash of 2000 and by the housing crash of 2007-2008? Was it solely the fact that the latter had been financed more by borrowing?

3. Suppose that there had been no debt-fueled consumer boom in 2005-2006. What would there have been instead? A sluggish economy? A more sustainable boom?

4. Suppose that we take a PSST perspective. Then the period from the late 1990s to the present is one long, painful, still-unfinished adjustment to the Internet and factor-price equalization. We happened to have a sharp boom-bust cycle in home construction in the middle of it, but even during the boom we did not have four consecutive months of gains in employment over 200,000. Then, in 2008 we had a panic about large financial institutions, leading to a big increase in government intervention, which mostly consisted of transfers of resources to less-productive businesses, such as GM, Citigroup, and Solyndra.

Re-telling the AIG story

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Hester Peirce writes,

AIG’s securities lending program is just as critical to the story of its downfall. Through the securities lending program, AIG and its life insurance subsidiaries had massive exposure to residential mortgage-backed securities. At the height of the 2008 crisis, the program experienced a run, and AIG could not meet the massive repayment demands. The losses in the securities lending program were severe enough to imperil a number of AIG’s regulated life insurance subsidiaries. Before the bailout, AIG itself may have been insolvent.

The standard story is that all of the problems at AIG were caused by its credit default swaps. As those out-of-the-money options came closer to being in the money, their counterparties exercised rights to collateral calls, creating a liquidity crisis for AIG.

I have always accepted the standard story, and my view is that the way to handle it would have been to block the collateral calls. Make Goldman Sachs and DeutscheBank and everyone else wait to see how things play out.

Peirce says that in addition to the collateral calls on credit default swaps, AIG had exposure to mortgage securities through its regular insurance subsidiaries’ portfolios. Those securities lost market value during the crisis. For AIG, the problem became acute because of its securities-lending business. I don’t think I understand completely how this securities lending worked, but I think that the effect was to create a very significant maturity mismatch for AIG, so that it had a lot of short-term liabilities backed by long-term assets. When counterparties for a variety of reasons stopped providing short-term funding to AIG, it was faced with a need to sell long-term assets, and a lot of those assets were mortgage securities whose prices were depressed.

I came away from this analysis believing that the securities-lending program was important. However, I am less convinced that AIG was insolvent or that some of its subsidiaries were insolvent.

Financial Stability, Regulation, and Country Size

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Lorenzo writes,

Something that is very clear, is that “de-regulation” is a term empty of explanatory power. All successful six have liberalised financial markets–Australia and New Zealand, for example, were leaders in financial “de-regulation”. If someone starts trying to blame the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) on “de-regulation”, you can stop reading, they have nothing useful to say.

Pointer from Scott Sumner.

The deregulation story amounts to saying that we know that regulation can prevent a crisis, but a crisis occurred, therefore there must have been deregulation. In fact, the risk-based capital rules that I have suggested helped cause the crisis were at the time they were enacted viewed as regulatory tightening, to correct flaws in the regime that existed at the time of the S&L crisis. The deregulation that did take place was intended to reduce bank profits by making the industry more competitive, not to increase profits or risk-taking.

Lorenzo’s post mostly beats a drum that I have been beating, which is that government tends to get worse as scale increases. He writes,

It is generally just harder to stick it to folks (either by what you do or what you don’t do) in a way that doesn’t get noticed in smaller jurisdictions. (Unless jurisdictions are so small they fly under the media radar but are big enough to be semi-anonymous–urban local government in Oz has a bit of a problem there.)

In Debt to Social Engineering

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Ryan Avent writes,

What is needed, they argue, is to make debt contracts more flexible, and where possible, replace them with equity. Courts should be able to write down the principal of mortgages as an alternative to foreclosure. They recommend “shared-responsibility mortgages” whose principal would decline along with local house prices. To compensate for the risk of loss, lenders, they reckon, would have to charge a fee equal to 1.4% of the mortgage, or receive 5% of any increase in the value of the property.

Pointer from Mark Thoma. “They” are Mian and Sufi, in House of Debt. Avent argues similarly that student loans should have an equity component.

What these forms of bad debt have in common, in my view, is that they reflect clumsy social engineering. Public policy was based on the idea that getting as many people into home “ownership” with as little money down as possible was a great idea. It was based on the idea of getting as many people into college with student loans as possible.

The problem, therefore, is not that debt contracts are too rigid. The problem is that the social engineers are trying to make too many people into home “owners” and to send too many people to college. Home ownership is meaningful only when people put equity into the homes that they purchase. College is meaningful only if students graduate and do so having learned something (or a least enjoyed the party, but not with taxpayers footing the bill).

As long as we still have these sorts of public policies, monkeying around with the nature of the loan contract is simply doubling down on clumsy social engineering.

Rubio Touches the Third Rail

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Andrew Biggs writes,

Included in Sen. Rubio’s ideas are:

–Social Security solvency: Rubio would gradually increase the retirement age in line with life expectancies and reduce the growth of benefits for higher-earning individuals. In addition, Rubio favors strengthening the safety net for lower-income retirees.
–Delayed retirement: Rubio would eliminate the 12.4% payroll tax for retirement-age individuals to encourage them to stay in the work force. I really like this idea and wrote on it for the Wall Street Journal.
–Open the TSP: Rubio would allow workers who are not offered retirement plans by their employers to participate in the federal government’s Thrift Savings Plan, the DC pension for government employees. In a way, this builds upon the President’s myRA proposal, but allows for greater choice in investments.

I am a big fan of indexing the age of eligibility for retirement benefits to average life expectancy at age 60. I would like to see that done for Medicare as well. People can still retire when they are younger and healthier, but not on someone else’s nickel.

John Cochrane vs. Financial Intermediation

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He writes,

demand deposits, fixed-value money-market funds, or overnight debt must be backed entirely by short-term Treasuries. Investors who want higher returns must bear price risk. Intermediaries must raise the vast bulk of their funds for risky investments from run-proof securities. For banks, that means mostly common equity, though some long-term or other non-runnable debt can exist as well. For [money-market?] funds, or in the absence of substantial equity, that means shares whose values float and, ideally, are tradable.

I suppose Murray Rothbard would have liked this.

My own aphorism about financial intermediation is that the nonfinancial sector wants to issue risky, long-term liabilities and to hold riskless, short-term assets, which the financial sector accommodates by doing the opposite. If that aphorism is correct, then Cochrane’s vision involves getting rid of financial intermediation.

I suspect that the optimal amount of financial intermediation is not zero. However, I suspect that it is not as much as we get in a world in which there is deposit insurance, too-big-to-fail guarantees, and tax advantages of leverage. Here, Cochrane’s tactical approach is interesting.

Pigouvian taxes provide a better structure for controlling debt than capital ratios or intensive discretionary supervision, as in stress tests. For each dollar of run-prone short-term debt issued, the bank or other intermediary must pay, say, five cents tax. Pigouvian taxes are more efficient than quantitative limits in addressing air pollution externalities, and that lesson applies to financial pollution. By taxing run-prone liabilities, those liabilities can continue to exist where and if they are truly economically important. Issuers will economize on them endogenously rather than play endless cat-and-mouse games with regulators.

The way I put it is that you cannot make financial institutions too regulated to fail. So instead of trying to make financial institutions harder to break, try to make them easier to fix. This means taking away the incentives to adopt unstable financial structures. Cochrane would go further and penalize unstable financial structures using taxes.

Meanwhile, Peter Wallison warns that the command-and-control approach to regulation has a logic of ever-widening jurisdiction.

But Inequality is the Defining Problem of Our Time

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Lawrence Kotlikoff writes,

The US fiscal gap now stands at an estimated $205 trillion, or 10.3 percent of all future US GDP. Closing this gap is imperative, and requires a fiscal adjustment of an immediate and permanent 37 percent reduction in spending (apart from servicing official debt), an immediate and permanent 57 percent increase in all federal taxes, or some combination of the two. The necessary size of this adjustment increases the longer it is put off.

The Financial Crisis and Wealth Transfer

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Amir Sufi writes (with Atif Mian).

The strong house price rebound in high foreclosure-rate cities likely reflects these markets bouncing back after excessive price declines. But these foreclosed properties are not being bought by traditional owner-occupiers that plan on living in the home. Instead, they have been bought by investors in large numbers.

This is from a new blog spotted by Tyler Cowen, and both of the first two posts are worth reading in their entirety.

The picture that I get is of a pre-crisis economy in which middle- and lower-middle-income households thought they were doing well in the housing market. Then their house prices collapsed. Vulture investors swooped in to buy. Meanwhile, the government bailed out big banks and the stock market boomed. Some folks will credit the Fed for the latter. I don’t, but that is a bit beside the point here.

Net this all out–the sucker bets on housing by the non-rich, followed by big gains by wealthier folks in stocks and in foreclosed houses, and you get a picture of a huge regressive wealth transfer engineered in Washington. Carried out primarily by those who profess to be outraged by inequality.

Labor Force Participation Chartfight

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1. John Cochrane presents a chart showing that over the last 25 years, the employment-population ratio tracks the ratio of people aged 25-54 to the total population.

Pointer from Mark Thoma. The chart is from Torsten Slok of Deutsche Bank.

2. John Taylor has a chart showing that the labor force participation rate is several percentage points that which was projected several years ago based on demographics. The chart comes from a paper by Chris Erceg and Andy Levin.

The first chart suggests that most of the decline in the employment/population ratio in recent years is due to demographic changes. The second chart suggests the opposite. How to reconcile the two?

3. And then there is Binyamin Appelbaum:

In February 2008, 87.4 percent of men in that demographic had jobs.

Six years later, only 83.2 percent of men in that bracket are working.

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

My verdict is that Slok’s chart, referred to by Cochrane, is misleading. Here is the chart:

The way that the two lines are superimposed makes it appear that 2007 was a glorious year of over-employment, and the plunge in the employment-population ratio looks like a reversion to trend. Suppose you were to slide the blue line up vertically so that it just touches the red line at the peak in 2007. That would make the chart look much more like Appelbaum’s, shown below:


Some other issues:

–I suspect that some of the drop-off in employment has occurred among youth, who are outside of the 25-54 bracket that Slok uses.

–Another issue is what you think should have happened outside Slok’s bracket at the other end, namely 55-64 year olds. These are baby boomers, so that their share of the labor market has been soaring. The most likely reconciliation of the two charts is that the baby boomers have been retiring early at rates higher than historical norms.

As far as labor force participation goes, is 55 the new 65? If so, then somebody should trace out what that means for Social Security. Fewer people paying in and more people collecting disability cannot be a good thing for solvency.

Update: Cochrane offers another take, more nuanced.