Posts filed under 'It Is Nice To Be Part of the Elite!'
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| Flagging: a US sailor stands on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George Washington |
If a week is a long time in politics, a decade is starting to look like an age in geopolitics. Comparing the America that began the 21st century with the America of today is to witness a country that has in some ways quite radically altered its view of itself and its relationship to the world.
In short, the metallic rust of decline has crept into the American soul. “You could argue that the first decade of the 21st century was the last decade of the American century,” says David Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official and student of US foreign policy. “We are now entering the multipolar century.”
January 16th, 2010
One of the federal government’s most opaque methods for bailing out the banking system allowed a handful of giant institutions to save up to $25 billion on their borrowing costs, a Congressional panel estimated on Friday.
Seven companies received about 82 percent of those benefits, the panel estimated. General Electric Capital was able to reduce its borrowing costs by about $1.9 billion, while Goldman Sachs saved an estimated $606 million. The other big beneficiaries were Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo & Company.
The savings came in the form of federal guarantees on more than $300 billion of bonds issued by banks and other financial institutions, and they were merely one component of a $4.3 trillion safety net of guarantees orchestrated last year by the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
In one of the first systematic efforts to analyze the maze of guarantees and hidden subsidies, the Congressional panel that oversees the Treasury’s $700 billion rescue program said the guarantees had provided a cheap but risky tactic for fighting the financial crisis last year.
The good news for taxpayers, the panel said, is that the government has actually turned a profit thus far on the guarantees. The government has collected $9 billion in fees for guaranteeing bonds issued by the big financial institutions and a total of $17 billion in fees for all its emergency guarantees. Thus far, it has lost only about $2 million.
At the height of the financial crisis late last year, the government provided guarantees to financial institutions, from money-market funds to expanded deposit-insurance for banks and $300 billion in troubled assets held by Citigroup. By providing guarantees instead of direct loans, the Treasury could avoid spending money upfront.
But Elizabeth Warren, director of the oversight panel, warned that the guarantees also exposed taxpayers to potentially huge costs and had created new risks by encouraging financial institutions to count on future bailouts and take bigger risks.
“The guarantees, when they work, provide big market stability at very low cost,” Ms. Warren said. “But they come with a very high risk to the taxpayer and a powerful distortion of market pricing and moral hazard.”
The panel’s most striking finding was about the size of the effective subsidy that G.E. Capital and Wall Street giants like Goldman reaped in the form of below-market borrowing costs.
The panel estimated that the federal guarantees lowered those firms’ borrowing costs by about 39 percent. Using two different approaches to measure the value of the subsidy, the panel said the savings ranged from $12.8 billion to $25 billion.
The oversight panel said it found “no significant flaws” in how Treasury officials and banking regulators designed the guarantees. But Ms. Warren warned that they were a “dangerous tool,” adding that “next time we may not be so lucky.”
Big Breaks for Companies in Bailout’s Fine Print – New York Times
November 14th, 2009
I think Calvin Trillin–or at least his bar-room companion–is really on to something here:
“The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” …
I reflected on my own college class, of roughly the same era. The top student had been appointed a federal appeals court judge — earning, by Wall Street standards, tip money. A lot of the people with similarly impressive academic records became professors. I could picture the future titans of Wall Street dozing in the back rows of some gut course like Geology 101, popularly known as Rocks for Jocks. …
“Two things happened. One is that the amount of money that could be made on Wall Street with hedge fund and private equity operations became just mind-blowing. At the same time, college was getting so expensive that people from reasonably prosperous families were graduating with huge debts. So even the smart guys went to Wall Street, maybe telling themselves that in a few years they’d have so much money they could then become professors or legal-services lawyers or whatever they’d wanted to be in the first place. That’s when you started reading stories about the percentage of the graduating class of Harvard College who planned to go into the financial industry or go to business school so they could then go into the financial industry. That’s when you started reading about these geniuses from M.I.T. and Caltech who instead of going to graduate school in physics went to Wall Street to calculate arbitrage odds.”
I’d put it just slightly differently (and I realize Trillin is only about three-quarters serious): The key change on Wall Street was more sociological than intellectual. That is, it wasn’t so much that the smart guys went to Wall Street–though the intellectual caliber of the financial sector certainly increased with all those quants running around. The relevant change was that a lot of “outsiders” suddenly came to Wall Street, which had previously been dominated by insiders.
October 31st, 2009
Strategerizing: Military intellectuals envision a 50-year “Long War” against al Qaeda consisting of counterinsurgency operations spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines and beyond, Tom Hayden discusses in The Nation. “Comparing al Qaeda in AfPak to al Qaeda in Iraq . . . illustrates both the pros and cons of building U.S. strategy in South Asia around a counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan,” Brian Fishman suggests in Foreign Policy. If Obama submits to Veep Joe Biden’s campaign to shift the focus from the Taliban in Afghanistan to al Qaeda in Pakistan, “as I suspect he will, is there any reason to think America won’t simply preside over the rebirth of al Qaeda? Probably not,” Thomas P.M. Barnett blogs for Esquire Magazine. “Al Qaeda is implementing its game plan in the South Asian war theater as a part of its broader campaign against American global hegemony that began with [9/11],” the organization’s “guerilla chief” tells Asia Times.
October 24th, 2009
An Inside Look at How Goldman Sachs Lobbies the Senate, by Matt Taibbi: …Later on this week I have a story coming out in Rolling Stone that looks at the history of the Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapses. The story ends up being more about naked short-selling and the role it played in those incidents than I had originally planned…, but it turns out that there’s no way to talk about Bear and Lehman without going into the weeds of naked short-selling…
It’s the conspicuousness … that is the issue here, and the degree to which the SEC and the other financial regulators have proven themselves completely incapable of addressing the issue seriously, constantly giving in to the demands of the major banks to pare back (or shelf altogether) planned regulatory actions. There probably isn’t a better example of “regulatory capture” … than this issue.
In that vein, starting tomorrow, the SEC is holding a public “round table” on the naked short-selling issue. What’s interesting about this round table is that virtually none of the invited speakers represent shareholders or companies that might be targets of naked short-selling, or indeed any activists of any kind in favor of tougher rules against the practice. Instead, all of the invitees are either banks, financial firms, or companies that sell stuff to the first two groups.
In particular, there are very few panelists — in fact only one, from what I understand — who are in favor of a simple reform called “pre-borrowing.” Pre-borrowing is what it sounds like; it forces short-sellers to actually possess shares before they sell them.
It’s been proven to work, as last summer the SEC, concerned about predatory naked short-selling of big companies in the wake of the Bear Stearns wipeout, instituted a temporary pre-borrow requirement…
The lack of pre-borrow voices invited to this panel is analogous to the Max Baucus health care round table last spring, when no single-payer advocates were invited. So who will get to speak? Two guys from Goldman Sachs, plus reps from Citigroup, Citadel (a hedge fund that has done the occasional short sale, to put it gently), Credit Suisse, NYSE Euronext, and so on.
In advance of this panel and in advance of proposed changes to the financial regulatory system, these players have been stepping up their lobbying efforts… Goldman Sachs in particular has been making its presence felt.
Last Friday I got a call from a Senate staffer who said that Goldman had just been in his boss’s office, lobbying against restrictions on naked short-selling. The aide said Goldman had passed out a fact sheet about the issue that was so ridiculous that one of the other staffers immediately thought to send it to me. When I went to actually get the document, though, the aide had had a change of heart.
Which was weird, and I thought the matter had ended there. But the exact same situation then repeated itself with another congressional staffer, who then actually passed me Goldman’s fact sheet.
Now, the mere fact that two different congressional aides were so disgusted by Goldman’s performance that they both called me on the same day — and I don’t have a relationship with either of these people — tells you how nauseated they were.
I would later hear that Senate aides between themselves had discussed Goldman’s lobbying efforts and concluded that it was one of the most shameless performances they’d ever seen from any group of lobbyists, and that the “fact sheet” … was, to quote one person familiar with the situation, “disgraceful” and “hilarious.” …
October 3rd, 2009
The consumer retreats
The world economy entered the current crisis in a badly lopsided condition, with the American consumer borrowing massively to buy products from Chinese and European manufacturers who happily socked away all their extra cash while producing more than their home markets could absorb. Now, pressed by rising unemployment and the need to rebuild shrunken household wealth, the American shopper is tapped out.
The consumer’s retreat is making itself felt around the world. The first six months of this year, Americans bought $18 billion fewer German-made goods than during the same period in 2008. For German factories, that meant the loss of more than 35% of their U.S. orders. It was the same story for Japan, which saw $31 billion worth of sales vanish — 42% of its total.
Major auto-producing countries weren’t the only ones to feel the chill. Chinese factories shipped almost $21 billion fewer goods to the U.S. during the first half of this year than during the same period last year. And with consumers still confronting several years of paying down debt and repairing their balance sheets, many economists say the world confronts a permanent shift in economic drivers.
“The world is going to be adjusting for years to slow growth from the U.S. consumer,” says economist Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard University. “The U.S. consumer has been the engine of world growth for the last quarter century; that engine has stalled.”
Not everyone agrees. Christian Broda, head of international economic research for Barclays Capital, says the world may be headed for slower growth, but that doesn’t mean no growth. Substantial monetary and fiscal easing that has been put in place has yet to make itself felt. As it does, growth will improve. Stories of a complete change in Americans’ behavior, he says, have been overdone.
“Savings will go up, but these processes will take years. …You won’t rebuild your wealth in a year,” he says.
Something has to give
Rather than seeking to restart the same engine in the same way, U.S. policymakers say, they want to construct a more durable economic foundation. Lawrence Summers, head of the president’s National Economic Council, said last month that the U.S. economy “must be more export-oriented and less consumption-oriented” as it emerges from the crisis.
That’s a sensible goal, but unfortunately, the U.S. isn’t alone in embracing it. German Chancellor Angela Merkel says there is “no alternative” to continuing her country’s longstanding reliance upon exports rather than boosting demand at home. Japan, too, shows no signs of making a fundamental shift. And Chinese officials, while acknowledging a desire to promote greater domestic consumption in the long run, are wary of moving too quickly for fear of killing jobs in their export factories.
“The world can’t cope with the U.S. and China both acting like China,” Magnus says. “What’s going to give?”
That’s not clear. Chinese consumption could accelerate faster than expected, though there’s no sign that is imminent. Through July, Chinese savings deposits rose at an annual rate of 29%, vs. 11.3% in the same period in 2008, according to DBS Group Research in Singapore. Alternatively, China might continue binging on investment. But that’s only a short-run fix, which would ultimately swell both production capacity and inventories, depressing global prices. Or the world recovery could limp along at an especially anemic pace for years.
The difficulties in achieving the sort of global rebalancing required are evident in the U.S.-China relationship. U.S. exports in June ticked up for the second-consecutive month, but by a modest 2.2% from the month before. And the value of total shipments remains deeply depressed compared with the year-ago period.
Rising exports, aided by the slumping dollar, have whittled away at the U.S. trade deficit. China’s corresponding trade surplus also is shrinking, but bigger reductions depend on getting Chinese consumers to buy more.
Chinese household consumption is among the lowest in the world, amounting to roughly 35% of economic output, vs. nearly 70% in the U.S. Chinese consumers save rather than spend, in part, to guard against unexpected medical expenses in a country that lacks a health insurance system.
Until China can put in place a national health care system, household consumption is unlikely to rise. “We need to be aware of the difficulties and should not be over-idealistic,” central banker Zhou Xiaochuan, head of the People’s Bank of China, said in a July 3 speech.
But reorienting China’s producers to serve local consumers rather than distant markets also would require far-reaching changes in several other national policies. An undervalued currency, rock-bottom interest rates set by government fiat and a lack of labor rights all effectively subsidize producers at the expense of consumers.
“There’s a whole bunch of policies that constrain consumption and boost production,” says Pettis, a former investment banker.
Quarterbacks Abound: Exports Can’t Fuel Global Recovery – USA Today
September 4th, 2009
A great deal has been made in recent weeks about Ronald Reagan’s critique of nationalized or socialized health care from 1961: We can go back a bit further, though, and take a look at an intriguing piece from 1848, a dialogue on socialism and the French Revolution and the relationship of socialism to democracy, which includes Alexis de Tocqueville’s critique of socialism in general…
August 22nd, 2009
Homeowners are turning to the “strategic default” — walking away from a mortgage even when there are funds available to keep paying. “Increasingly, the determination of when to default is not guided by the moral question: Is this the right thing to do? It is guided by the pragmatic concern: Am I too far underwater on my mortgage?” writes Kelsey VanOverloop. Read more »
July 25th, 2009
Jamie Dimon has won big. JP Morgan Chase now stands alone, both in financial position and political clout – including special access to the White House and, as explained in today’s NYT, Rahm Emanuel’s likely attendance at his next board meeting tomorrow.
Dimon’s semiotics have been brilliant throughout the crisis – it wasn’t his fault, he was forced to take TARP money, and – in phrasing that will make the history books – bankers should not be “vilified”. But now he has a problem.
Larry Summers forcefully stated Friday that high recent profit levels for big banks (i.e., JPMorgan and Goldman) are based on the support they received and still receive from the government (listen to his answer to the second question, from about the 6:10 to 10:30 mark). At that level of generality, in a period of financial stabilization and consequent reduction in executive branch discretion, this statement does not threaten Dimon or anyone else.
And Summers’ statement on the dangers of “too big to fail” was “too vague to succeed”. Dimon saw this one coming and is very much aligned with Tim Geithner on the technocratic fixes that will supposedly take care of this – the mythical “resolution authority”, which will not actually achieve anything because it has no cross-border component, so the next time a major multinational bank (e.g., JP Morgan) fails, the choice again will be “collapse or bailout” (as Summers put it in the same Q&A Friday). Yes, I know the G20 is supposedly working on this; no, I don’t think they are making progress.
But Summers also drew a line in the sand on consumer protection.
Reformists within the administration really need a new consumer protection agency for financial products – there is little else they will be able to point to as an achievement on banking issues. Summers did not, for example, on Friday even mention the need for stronger regulation over derivatives; Dimon has likely already prevailed on this.
Consumer protection is easy for people to understand. If the banking lobby really defeats or defangs it this year – as it almost certainly can – won’t that make meaningful re-regulation of banking a big issue for the midterm elections in 2010 and beyond?
And does Dimon really want to publicly confront and defeat Larry Summers?
It must be tempting for Dimon to now press home his advantage, including at the White House. But as JP Morgan Chase stands alone at the top of our banking hierarchy, how far should he push his luck?
Summers has an unparalleled ability to move the consensus. And if he is now running from the left to become chair of the Fed – which was my impression on Friday – this will shift all candidates, including Ben Bernanke, towards being tougher on banks.
Why doesn’t Dimon instead seize on greater consumer protection as a way to rebuld legitimacy for finance – and to shape the new rules so as to create barriers to entry and growth for future rivals?
What would John Pierpont Morgan have done?
Jamie Dimon vs. Larry Summers – Simon Johnson, Baseline Scenario
July 22nd, 2009
The death of Robert McNamara has confronted the architects of another massive national catastrophe with a challenge: Will they, like McNamara in his post-Vietnam agony, acknowledge their failings and confess the error of their ways? Will they come up with a list, as McNamara did, of what to do differently next time?
There has already been speculation aplenty about whether Donald Rumsfeld will ever reassess his performance in the Iraq war. But I’m not thinking about Rumsfeld or the other men who brought us the war in Iraq. I have in mind the architects — every bit as cerebral and self-certain as McNamara — of the financial world that imploded last year. The real latter-day McNamara may not be Rumsfeld but Robert Rubin, Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton.
In fact, the similarities between the men who crafted the Iraq war and the men who crafted Vietnam aren’t that strong. McNamara’s hubris was that of a hyper-rationalist. He and his whiz kids, his systems analysts and efficiency experts, stormed into an intellectually sleepy capital determined to subject what had been the haphazard realm of policy to scientific measurement. The Air Force flyboys may have wanted to bomb the bejesus out of the commies, but McNamara’s boys could tell you precisely what tonnage would destroy precisely what industrial capacity. Victory was just an equation or two away.
The hubris of the late and unlamented Bush presidency was of a different order. If it was McNamara’s math that made it hard for him to grasp how a peasant army could resist half a million American troops, it was a simple refusal to take seriously the utterly predictable consequences that Saddam Hussein’s removal would have on a fractured Iraq that led Bush and his crew to plunge us, and Iraq, into a needless war. As once the hyper-rationalists had failed to factor for human complexity, so too, four decades later, did the ideologues who disdained the reality-based community do the same. Brought low by the hubris of the brilliant, we were brought low again by the hubris of fools.
Our time is no stranger to the hubris of the brilliant, though. To find it, we need to look not to Washington but to Wall Street. The real successors to McNamara’s whiz kids are the economic geniuses, the “quants,” who figured out how to build a tower of investment on a dot of assets, arbitrage everything, and hedge any risk, except, of course, the ones that plunged us into a depression.
The devastation they wrought may not have reached the level of the Vietnam War, which embittered this nation for decades and cost the lives of tens of thousands of Americans and many times more Vietnamese. But considering that they were merely economists, bankers and their ideologues, the damage is impressive enough. It’s not just the millions of jobs lost, the retirement savings wiped out, the homes foreclosed on. It’s also the offshoring of American manufacturing and the concomitant creation of mountains of consumer debt (which the American people owed to Wall Street) so that their compatriots could continue to consume even though their incomes had stagnated. It’s the transformation of a nation that once invested in productive enterprise into a nation sustained by asset bubbles.
Will the creators of this crisis wander through an intellectual and moral desert as McNamara did for decades? As yet, the mea culpas have been few and, like McNamara’s, incomplete. Alan Greenspan did admit to a congressional committee that his belief in the rational behavior of financial institutions had been shattered. But the confessions of failure and assumptions of responsibility from Chicago School economists, leading Wall Street bankers and lax governmental regulators, all of whom assured us that the very profitable financial vehicles they had devised also reduced the risk to the rest of us, are almost nowhere to be found.
If there’s an analogous figure to McNamara in this mess, then, it’s probably Rubin — socially liberal, like McNamara; concerned with the world’s poor, like McNamara; architect, like McNamara, of a system perfected by the best minds of his time, a system that should have worked but that failed catastrophically. Rubin’s repentance is a private matter, but the lessons that his protégés Larry Summers and Tim Geithner derive from the failure of deregulated hypercapitalism are of the utmost public concern. Whiz kids themselves, do they still believe in the capacity of their fellow whizzes to concoct financial devices so mathematically sound that strong regulation would be superfluous? Their reluctance to tightly regulate credit-default swaps suggests that they haven’t really been disenthralled of their faith in self-regulating markets. If we’re lucky, the image of Bob McNamara calculating the war on his slide rule, and spending the subsequent decades trying to understand where he went wrong, may bring them to their senses. It certainly should do that for us.
meyersonh@washpost.com
Is Robert Rubin Today’s McNamara? – Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
July 17th, 2009
Returning from China last month, U.S. Congressman Mark Kirk had a bearish take on a high-level visit by American officials.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner claimed the U.S.’s biggest creditor voiced great confidence in its debt. Kirk, an Illinois Republican, came back with the opposite impression.
“China is beginning to cancel Congress’s credit card,” he told Fox News on June 10. It “doesn’t want to lend much more money to the United States and especially is worried about the Fed’s policy of printing money to buy new debt.”
A month later, there’s no doubt about whose assessment was more accurate. Chinese leaders are clearly very concerned about the dollar. How they will react is a key question hanging over markets, and it’s time to take the discussion to the next level.
Everyone knows China wants to reduce its dollar holdings. Little is known about how that process may unfold and how much work and preparation needs to go into it. Lots, in fact.
Think of China and the U.S. in history’s most expensive divorce. The two economies total $17 trillion of output, and polls in China show little support for adding to almost $800 billion of U.S. Treasuries.
This argument can be broadened to the rest of Asia. The idea that China or Japan — with $686 billion of Treasuries — can just start selling massive blocks of dollars is ridiculous. It would devastate markets the world over and the fallout would boomerang back on Asia. If you think markets are shaky now, just wait until word of a central-bank fire sale gets around.
Copycat Selling
Sure, Singapore (with $40 billion of Treasuries), India ($39 billion) or South Korea ($35 billion) could try to dump dollars on the stealth. Good luck in this highly connected, around-the-clock world. News that a key economy seeks a first- mover advantage over peers would inspire copycat selling. Expect investors and traders to respond with massive sell orders.
Warren Buffett can discreetly trim Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s interest in a company or a currency. How a central bank divests itself of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars on the sly is another matter.
Governments that may be concerned about getting stuck with their dollars for good have a point. And by curtailing investments in dollars today, Asia is ensuring that the U.S. currency will be worth less a year from now. Bernard Madoff can tell you a thing or two about how this process works.
Dollar Accord
What may be necessary is a global framework or pact to end the dollar’s dominance. A “Plaza Accord” of sorts may be needed to dismantle the so-called Bretton Woods II system of tying currencies to the dollar that emerged after the global crises of 1997 and 1998. A Dollar Accord, anyone?
Just as stocks take a hit when additional shares are issued, Asia faces a debt-dilution dynamic for which it never bargained. The Federal Reserve’s zero-interest-rate policies don’t help. And Asia can’t do a lot on its own here.
This process will require considerable cooperation, be it through the International Monetary Fund, the Group of 20, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations or a yet-to-be-created entity. Goals must be set, mechanics discussed and timing negotiated. If ever there were a time for a currency summit, it’s now.
Politics will be a stumbling block. It’s hard to envision the U.S. signing on to scrap the dollar as the reserve currency. Neither the euro nor the yen is ready to replace it. And China’s designs on currency domination are a decade away — or longer.
IMF Solution
The amount of scrutiny the dollar’s successor would face makes you wonder who would want to print the reserve currency. That explains why the most credible argument making the rounds involves the IMF’s so-called Special Drawing Rights, or SDRs.
They are really an account of exchange, rather than legal tender, and are calculated according to a basket of currencies consisting of the dollar, euro, yen and pound. Chinese central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan wants the IMF to move toward creating a “super-sovereign reserve currency.”
Or, here’s another suggestion: Brady bonds for less- troubled economies. The idea behind bonds created in the 1980s as part of Latin America’s debt restructuring was to let investors swap their claims on nations in turmoil for tradable instruments. A similar process may work with the dollar.
Rumors of the dollar’s demise are no longer exaggerated. What is being exaggerated, though, is how easy it will be for Asia to get out of the quandary it’s in. Cutting off the U.S. government’s credit card, for example, means American consumers can’t buy your goods. And any sudden divorce between the world’s two main economic powers won’t be pretty. Far from it.
It’s time to figure out what the next step is, and policy makers need to get serious. Complaining about our dollar-based system won’t get us there. Some brainstorming about where to go from here would be far more constructive.
(William Pesek is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
Our $17 Trillion Chinese Split Won’t Be Pretty – William Pesek, Bloomberg
July 14th, 2009
William White predicted the approaching financial crisis years before 2007’s subprime meltdown. But central bankers preferred to listen to his great rival Alan Greenspan instead, with devastating consequences for the global economy.
William White had a pretty clear idea of what he wanted to do with his life after shedding his pinstriped suit and entering retirement.
White, a Canadian, worked for various central banks for 39 years, most recently serving as chief economist for the central bank for all central bankers, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), headquartered in Basel, Switzerland.
Then, after 15 years in the world’s most secretive gentlemen’s club, White decided it was time to step down. The 66-year-old approached retirement in his adopted country the way a true Swiss national would. He took his money to the local bank, bought a piece of property in the Bernese Highlands and began building a chalet. There, in the mountains between cow pastures and ski resorts, he and his wife planned to relax and enjoy their retirement, and to live a peaceful existence punctuated only by the occasional vacation trip. That was the plan in June 2008.
And now this.
White is wearing his pinstriped suits again. He has just returned from California, where he gave a talk at a large mutual fund company. Then he packed his bags again and jetted to London, where he consulted with the Treasury. After that, he returned to Switzerland to speak at the University of Basel, and then went on to Frankfurt to present a paper at the Center for Financial Studies. From there, White traveled to Paris to attend a meeting at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Finally, he flew back across the Atlantic to Canada. White is clearly in demand, including in North America.
Since the economy went up in flames, the wiry retiree has been jetting around the globe like a paramedic for the world of high finance. He shows no signs of exhaustion, despite his rigorous schedule. In fact, White, with his gray head of hair, is literally beaming with energy, so much so that he seems to glow.
Perhaps it is because someone, finally, is listening to him.
Listening to him, that is, and not to his rival of many years, the once-powerful former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank, Alan Greenspan. Greenspan, who was reverentially known as “The Maestro,” was celebrated as the greatest central banker of all time — until the US real estate bubble burst and the crash began.
Before then, no one in the world of central banks would have dared to openly criticize Greenspan’s successful policy of cheap money. No one except White, that is.
The Economist Who Predicted the Crisis – Balzli & Schiessl, Der Spiegel
July 11th, 2009
President Obama’s visit to Moscow this week may turn out to be a very good thing. Forget all this jibber-jabber about nuclear disarmament.
There is no better reminder than the former Soviet Union for how the fantasies of a few collectivist zealots can turn into unending nightmares for its people — and for how a state-run economy ends up with no economy at all.
If we’re lucky, a little Russian history on this trip will turn into a welcome wake-up call for Mr. Obama.
It’s not that Mr. Obama is some radical who carries a warm nostalgia for the Soviet Union from his university days. He’s way too young and too smart for that.
But the president believes in the state, certainly more than any other recent American president. He believes the state must actively intervene in the economy and that the state can bring about a better future. And it seems he believes it is his destiny to lead the state to that future.
In that way — and others — Obama reminds me of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state.
CNBC’s Jim Cramer made the Obama-Lenin comparison back in February. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more it holds.
Associated Press
A painting made during the Russian Revolution, showing Vladimir Lenin surrounded by revolutionaries, date unknown.
Of course, Obama is a reformer, not a revolutionary. And he’s certainly no communist.
But just like Lenin, Obama is a supremely self-confident leader — an intellectual heavyweight and a clever political tactician — an elitist moralizer and a populist champion. And just like Lenin, Obama carries the true-believers’ righteous fervor for “change.”
I was thinking of Lenin as I watched the president’s Rose Garden remarks on energy and innovation last Thursday.
After his eight minutes in front of the teleprompter, the president turned to walk away, and a reporter blurted out a question, “Mr. President, do you have a message for the small businesses on health and economy?”
The president should have just walked away. But it was as if he couldn’t stop himself as he launched into a rambling, haughty answer that I found…well, a bit scary.
It was scary because it demonstrated that Mr. Obama — almost half a year in office — still has no grasp of the everyday realities faced by America’s small businessmen. They can’t make payroll, but the president is directing them to buy LED lightbulbs and urging them to contact “clean energy” CEOs.
And it was scary because it showed that the president is still possessed by an unshakable conviction in the power of the state over the individual and of the future over the past.
As he put it in the Rose Garden, we have to change the health-care system. We have to change how we use energy. We have to change how we “train our young people.” “We are not folks who are scared of the future or look backwards. We always meet the challenges by moving forward.”
Political clichés? Of course.
But the president seems to actually believe his clichés. And some of his Rose Garden remarks could have been lifted from Lenin’s speeches circa 1918 – the same hectoring tone and the same mockery of opponents who long for the “status quo”.
Even Mr. Obama’s call to move “forward.” “Forward!” in fact was one of the Soviets’ favorite slogans.
The good news for those of us who are a little freaked out by Mr. Obama is that even Lenin did an about-face after the utter failure of his initial hard-left economic policies.
By early 1921, faced with the ruin and famine wrought by nationalization of the economy, the Bolsheviks re-instituted a quasi-capitalist economy with its New Economic Policy. Ironically, the NEP was aimed to help small businessmen — the very same people that the Obama economy so desperately needs nowadays.
Lenin called the NEP taking “one step backward to take two steps forward.” While he’s in Moscow, President Obama may want to ask someone at the Kremlin, just what Lenin meant by that.
Editor’s Note: Mr. Newmark was a student in Moscow in 1984, worked with George Soros on Russian economic reform in 1988-89 and ran the Goldman Sachs Moscow office from 1992-1994.
Why Barack Obama Is Like Vladimir Lenin – Evan Newmark, Deal Journal
July 7th, 2009
John Mack of Morgan Stanley (MS) made sure that he had a large base salary for this year, even though his firm nearly fell apart last year. The management of Citigroup (C) also wants to do something for its “best” employees. According to a number of media reports, the bank plans to give its senior investment bankers raises of up to 50%.
It won’t matter. The very best people will flee the Citi pay caps to make millions of dollars at private equity firms and hedge funds.
The federal government has proved adroit at forcing the cream of the crop, the people who create the revenue and earnings, out of America’s largest banks and brokerage firms. These people are used to making $10 million a year or better. They make their employers tens of million if not hundreds of millions of dollars in return. Talent at that level can write its own ticket. Boutique firms like Greenhill (GHL), large hedge funds, private equity operations, and foreign banks will pay the going rate to get the stars.
The Administration has made certain that the key managers at banks, their intellectual capital, will be displaced, further damaging their chances of rebounding from their worst year in decades. An operation that the government should have performed with a scalpel instead of a meat cleaver has chopped the wages of mediocre and extremely skilled bankers with the same cut.
The government can say that it saved the banks but it also took away from them their best weapons to withstand what is still likely to be a rough and dangerous future.
Douglas A. McIntyre
Citi’s Raises Won’t Retain Talent – Douglas McIntyre, 24/7 Wall Street
June 29th, 2009
The weekend G8 communiqué, coming after four months of stabilisation in most financial markets, seemed to mark the official end of the financial crisis. If so, what lessons should be learnt for economic and financial policies in the months ahead? The history of the crisis in the next few paragraphs may not be the standard version presented by most commentators and economists, yet recent events suggest it to be a plausible account of what went wrong.
The blunders that produced last autumn’s financial crisis had nothing to do with the supposedly inflationary monetary policies of Alan Greenspan, or the fiscal profligacy of Gordon Brown, or with Mervyn King’s lack of practical market experience, or Hu Jintao’s mercantilist approach to currencies and exports. All these and many other factors contributed to the vulnerability of the world economy, but none of them would have been enough to cause its near-collapse last autumn. For that we can blame the unforced errors of a man almost forgotten since he slipped quietly out of office at the beginning of this year: Henry Paulson, the former US Treasury Secretary and ex-chairman of Goldman Sachs.
To understand how a localised financial problem in one segment of the US mortgage market turned into a near-collapse of the global financial system we need to recall Mr Paulson’s astonishing misuse of mark-to-market accounting standards to expropriate the shareholders of Fannie Mae and then to bankrupt Lehman Brothers. What made matters even worse was his inability to understand the systemic consequences of what he was doing. Anyone who doubts the importance of individuals in economic history should recall that the single worst day of last autumn’s entire financial crisis, as measured by the widening of risk spreads on interbank credit, was September 23. That was the day Mr Paulson appeared before the Senate Finance Committee to explain what he wanted to do with the $700 billion he had requested from Congress. This was the moment when everyone realised the world’s most powerful economic official did not know what he was doing.
Once the key role of personalities and financial policies is recognised, it is hardly surprising that things began to improve almost as soon as Mr Paulson was replaced by a competent Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner. A collapse of share prices on Wall Street triggered by the Lehman bankruptcy in September ended the very day after President Obama responded to attacks on Mr Geithner’s personal probity by offering his unqualified support. A week later, the suicidal mark-to-market accounting regulations were dismantled. And it is no coincidence that the financial crisis, at least in America and Britain, effectively ended that week. From that point onwards, the US Government found itself collecting tens of billions of dollars in repayments from supposedly insolvent banks. Far from being forced to nationalise almost every bank and running out of money with which to refinance toxic assets, as predicted by panic-mongering Nobel Laureate economists, the US Treasury now finds itself almost embarrassed by the hundreds of billions of dollars it has budgeted for supporting a banking system that no longer needs state support.
Paulson Caused the Financial Crisis – Anatole Kaletsky, Times of London
June 17th, 2009
It’s starting to look like the spring awakening in bank stocks may not be enough to save the CEOs of America’s biggest troubled banks, Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit and Bank of America’s Ken Lewis.
A top banking regulator is agitating for Pandit’s removal, according to a report Friday in the Wall Street Journal. The clash between Pandit and Sheila Bair, the head of the Federal Insurance Deposit Corp., comes just a month after restive shareholders at Charlotte-based BofA (BAC, Fortune 500) stripped CEO Lewis of his chairmanship.
The FDIC told CNN it had no comment on the story. Citi (C, Fortune 500) says it stands behind Pandit, who took over as CEO at the end of 2007 and has spent much of his tenure trying to clean up the messes left by his predecessors Chuck Prince and Sandy Weill.
In a statement to CNN Friday, Citi chairman Dick Parsons said the company was “confident in our management.”
BofA has similarly endorsed Lewis, and the three-month-long rally in bank stocks has quieted talk of wholesale government takeovers of these firms.
But given the massive investor losses at these banks and the failure of their top managers to anticipate the industry’s meltdown last year, few would shed a tear at either executive’s departure.
“These companies are sort of the poster children for the excesses that created this crisis,” said Eric Jackson, an activist investor and managing member of Ironfire Capital in Naples, Fla. “I think it’s appropriate for the regulators to push for substantial changes in management and on the boards.” Jackson’s firm does not own shares of either bank.
Citi and BofA have been the two biggest bank recipients of federal aid since the financial crisis erupted last fall. Together they have taken some $500 billion in federal aid, the lion’s share of which has come in the form of federal guarantees of their troubled assets.
Recently, both firms have shown some signs that they have broken out of what earlier this year looked like terminal decline.
Shares of Citi have tripled since Pandit surprised Wall Street by saying Citi was on track for its first quarterly profit since mid-2007. BofA’s stock price has quadrupled during the same time frame.
Both banks went on to report better-than-expected first-quarter results in April. Those surprises further boosted the shares even as many observers warned the numbers were padded by one-time gains and legal but incredible accounting maneuvers, such as profits tied to the declining value of the banks’ own debt.
The hopes of a banking sector recovery only intensified after regulatory stress tests showed banks didn’t need that much more money. The findings helped spur a surge of capital raising from the private sector that has bolstered the balance sheets of many big institutions.
Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit Is On the Hot Seat – Colin Barr, Fortune
June 10th, 2009
With the economy floundering, Wall Street in disgrace, and American capitalism facing its most serious ideological challenge in one, two, or three generations (you can take your pick), it’s a good moment to remember Lenin. While the bearded Bolshevik’s grasp of economics was never the best and his stock picks remain a mystery, he would have grasped the politics of our present situation all too well. The old butcher would not have found anything especially surprising about the rise of Barack Obama, the nature of his supporters, or the evolution of his policies. He would have simply asked his usual question: Kto/kogo (“Who/whom”). The answer would tell him almost everything he needed to know. Lenin regarded politics as binary–a zero sum game with winners, losers, and nothing in between. For him it was a bare-knuckled brawl that ultimately could be reduced to that single brutal question: who was on top and who was not. Who was giving orders to whom. Hope and Change, nyet so much.
Of course, it would be foolish to deny the role that things like idealism, sanctimony, fashion, hysteria, exhaustion, restlessness, changing demographics, Hurricane Katrina, an unpopular war, George W. Bush, and mounting economic alarm played in shaping last November’s Democratic triumph. Nevertheless if we peer through the smug, self-congratulatory smog that enveloped the Obama campaign, the outlines of a harder-edged narrative can be discerned, a narrative that bolsters the idea that Lenin’s cynical maxim has held up better than the state he created.
So, who in 2008 was Who, and who Whom?
Millionaires’ Brawl:A Power Struggle – Andrew Stuttaford, Weekly Standard
June 2nd, 2009
Their standing dinner reservation at the country club is for 6:30 p.m., because at least that much never changes. Every Wednesday night, Charles and Mimi Cluss dress in pleated slacks and suit jackets and drive to the manicured playground where Uniontown’s elite have gathered for 101 years. It is like a “second home,” Charles says of the place where he finalized deals for his lumber company and hosted weddings for two daughters. Except on this night in mid-May, he no longer knows what to expect.
Tough times for the country club set. (WashingtonPost)
May 30th, 2009
Via the Seattle PI:
The stress tests are done
Surprise — many banks are fine
Now, go buy that bridge
H/T Corrente
May 6th, 2009
I’ve been unimpressed with this oft-quoted bit from Phillip Swagel’s insider account of the Paulson Treasury.
Legal constraints were omnipresent throughout the crisis, since Treasury and other government agencies such as the Federal Reserve must operate within existing legal authorities. Some steps that are attractive in principle turn out to be impractical in reality—with two key examples being the notion of forcing debt-for-equity swaps to address debt overhangs and forcing banks to accept government capital. These both run hard afoul of the constraint that there is no legal mechanism to make them happen. A lesson for academics is that any time the word “force” is used as a verb (“the policy should be to force banks to do X or Y”), the next sentence should set forth the section of the U.S. legal code that allows such a course of action—otherwise, the policy suggestion is of theoretical but not practical interest. Legal constraints bound in other ways as well, including with respect to modifications of loans.
Today’s news (Clusterstock + source docs, WSJ Deal Journal, McArdle, Naked Capitalism, Calculated Risk, Marketwatch), that Henry Paulson, um, forced Bank of America’s near suicidal merger with Merill Lynch kind of clinches the case. Pre-Merrill, BOA was viewed as relatively healthy among large banks. What’s the statute under which a Treasury secretary unilaterally fires and replaces the board of a healthy bank? The Paulson Treasury talked up legal constraints whenever they were faced with something Paulson didn’t want to do. When Paulson, or Bernanke, really did want to do something, they were very creative about bending the law to their will. The Fed’s “special purpose vehicles” are clearly not lending in the sense that the architects of the Federal Reserve Acts “unusual and exigent circumstances” clause foresaw. The FDIC has no statutory authority to issue ad hoc guarantees of bank debt, but flexibility was read into the laws.
With respect to the banks, the Paulson Treasury could have forced any big bank into a bail-out or receivership scenario just by looking at it funny, or by having the Fed take a conservative view of bank asset collateral values under the special liquidity programs. It’s worth noting that Treasury very ostentatiously forced banks to accept TARP capital, and Geithner’s Treasury was able to persuade holders of Citi preferred to convert to common equity.
It’s not exactly right to say that our don’t-ask-don’t-tell quasinationalization policy has given us “ownership but not control”. An assertive Treasury secretary has tremendous leverage over zombie bank managers. Instead, what we have is is control without accountability. An informal, unauditable, hydra-headed set of private managers and public officials controls how quasinationalized banks behave. Neither taxpayers nor shareholders have reason to believe that decisions are being taken in their interest. The informality and disunity of control impedes the kind of hands-on, detail-oriented supervision and risk management that ought to be the core preoccupation of bank managers. Exactly as opponents of nationalization feared, America’s large banks are poorly run behemoths that routinely make idiotic commercial decisions to satisfy tacit political mandates. No one really knows who is responsible for what.
Ironically, there might be less scope for political control if banks were in formal, least-cost-resolution receivership. A bank that has already failed cannot fail. If independent boards are appointed to oversee the receiverships, politicians might have very little leverage. Incumbent private managers face collapse, sacking, disgrace, and potential civil and criminal liability for improprieties that come to light during the post-mortem. New moderately paid, high reputation board members would bear no responsibility for what came before, and could very publicly resign in protest if pushed to act in a manner inconsistent with their charter. (Resignation in protest by long-affiliated board members of a zombie bank would have different reputational consequences, and it would be difficult to recruit high-reputation outsiders to serve on zombie bank boards.) Promoting insiders or recalling retired executives to run zombie firms leaves the leadership weak and compromised. A much higher caliber of outside talent could be recruited to oversee banks in receivership than would accept responsibility for banks that are insolvent but on government life support.
This is not to say that formal public control would be a panacea. The list of public and quasipublic organizations currently being gutted by politically motivated credit expansion includes Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, FHLB, FDIC, and the Federal Reserve system. A bank in receivership managed by a weak board or not institutionally segregated from political bodies could easily join the list. But if received banks were put under strong boards, and given clear mandates to divide and sell their assets (maximizing taxpayer value subject to a scale constraint) while running off their lending books, there would be little hazard of politically directed credit or other shenanigans. That would imply that large insolvent banks would reduce their lending, contradicting the Administration’s endless exhortations that banks should lend, lend, lend. My view is that public encouragement of expanding indebtedness is very bad policy (read Finem Respice). But if you misguidedly believe that “credit is the lifeblood of a modern economy”, the thousands of well-run smaller banks in America are fully capable of taking advantage of today’s deeply subsidized lending spreads to serve creditworthy borrowers. Whether in private or in public hands, the big, broken banks are simply too compromised to lend.
Steve Randy Waldman — Friday April 24, 2009 at 1:53am
April 24th, 2009
How do you replace 70% of GDP?
President Obama spoke on the economy yesterday morning, and Helicopter Ben delivered a speech on “Four Questions about the Financial Crisis” yesterday afternoon.
CNNMoney.com reports that in the prepared remarks for his speech, Bernanke said, “Recently we have seen tentative signs that the sharp decline in economic activity may be slowing.”
The ’signs’ he is referring to include recent upticks in home sales and new home constructions, as well as improvements in consumer spending, especially new vehicles.
“A leveling out of economic activity is the first step toward recovery,” said Big Ben. “To be sure, we will not have a sustainable recovery without a stabilization of our financial system and credit markets.”
Bernanke may have wanted to wait until the retail numbers were released before preparing those remarks. Nearly every expert that has been surveyed on this topic believed that U.S. retail sales, which count for half of consumer spending, rose in March, mainly due to the auto industry incentives that began last month.
However, it turns out that retail numbers pulled a fast one – and showed a drop in sales for last month.
Two months of gains has boosted hopes that March’s numbers would follow suit, building a rebound in consumer spending.
But, not so much. The Commerce Department showed that March’s retail sales were down for almost every type of store except necessities, such as food and drugs.
MarketWatch reports: “Retail sales in the first quarter were down 1.2%, compared with the fourth quarter of last year, raising the possibility that real consumer spending may have fallen again for the first three months of 2009 after plunging at a 4% annual rate in the final six months of 2008.
“Economist David Rosenberg of Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch said he expected consumer spending to decline at a 3.7% annual pace in the April through June quarter.”
“The retail sales figures indicated incentives and promotions by car dealers and clothing stores such as Gap Inc. failed to draw customers hurt by a lack of credit and the highest jobless rate in 25 years.”
In other words…outlook not so good for the economy. Americans have clearly been spooked by the high jobless rate. It seems that everyone knows someone who has been laid off, or had hours cut back…and the possibility of it happening to you becomes very real. So you cut back. You make dinner instead of going out…make do with last year’s summer clothes instead of going on a shopping spree.
April 15th, 2009
They will come after I form the Brian J. Schuettler Bank Holding Company LLC and get my first 10 Million from TARP.
Thanks, Tim!
April 11th, 2009
