Spreading the wealth-1: Introducing Comrade Bush

By now, practically everyone must be sick of hearing about Joe the Plumber. But bear with me for a minute as he provides me with a peg on which to hang a point I wish to make. I thought his interaction with Obama was quite interesting and was planning to comment on it even before Joe became John McCain’s BFF.

What I found most amusing is how the right wing has seized upon Obama’s comment to Joe about the need to ‘spread the wealth around’ and has thrown one of their by now patented manufactured outrage hissy fits, screaming “There, I told you! Obama is a socialist!” and warning that if he is elected president he is immediately going to take all our money and give it to winos and panhandlers and make us wear grey tunics and work on collective farms.
[Read more…]

Solving the mortgage mess

Now that we have the subprime mortgage mess, solving it is inevitably going to create a sense of injustice in some quarters. During the second Obama-McCain debate, I was startled by McCain’s sudden revelation of a new plan to address the mortgage crisis:

“As president of the United States…I would order the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes — at the diminished value of those homes and let people be able to make those — be able to make those payments and stay in their homes.

“Is it expensive? Yes. But we all know, my friends, until we stabilize home values in America, we’re never going to start turning around and creating jobs and fixing our economy.”

He emphasized that this was his very own plan, not Obama’s or Bush’s. But it turns out that Obama had said something seemingly similar in a speech given on September 23, saying:

“For example, we should consider giving the government the authority to purchase mortgages directly instead of simply purchasing mortgage-backed securities. In the past, such an approach has allowed taxpayers to profit as the housing market recovered.”

But while the broad details of the McCain and Obama plans appear similar, apparently the details McCain’s plan, released later, are different enough from his own that the of Obama camp is now criticizing the McCain plan as mainly benefiting the financial institutions that caused this mess.

What McCain seems to be suggesting is this. Suppose someone has a $200,000 mortgage on a home that is now worth only $100,000. McCain’s plan would purchase the mortgage from the banks at the full value ($200,000), and then renegotiate the mortgage with homeowner for $100,000. This enables the banks to be fully bailed out of the consequences of their reckless lending, and also bails out the homeowners. It is the taxpayers who foot the bill for the remaining $100,000.

Critics have argued that there is no reason that the banks should be bailed out this way by buying the mortgages at face value. Instead they should pay them the ‘real’ value of the mortgages. But determining the ownership and real value of individual mortgages is not going to be easy since they have been bundled and sliced and diced on their way to being transformed into easily marketable securities.

Clearly the banks want to get as high a price as they can. But they have no real leverage in this situation except for what they have by virtue of their influence with the government partly purchased through their lobbyists’ contributions to politicians.

The government should use its leverage to say that they will not bail out the banks but will instead take them over (partially or wholly) by purchasing their stock and thus gaining control. Then they will be able to benefit when home values eventually rise and the banks become more stable and their stock values go up. The government can then sell its stock and get out of the retail banking business. But in the interim, they will have effectively nationalized these institutions, the way they have already nationalized Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG.

This is the model being practiced by the European countries led by England and is based on the Swedish solution to their 1992 crisis.

Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.

That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well.

It now seems that the US government is adopting this very solution. Of course, this move smacks of socialism and adopting it will be a tacit concession that capitalism has at least partly failed. It will thus be anathema to those ideologues who do not see problems as requiring pragmatic solutions based on whatever realistic options are available but as requiring actions based on an ideological template. The true free-market believers will say that the government should do absolutely nothing and let the chips fall where they may, irrespective of however many banks go under.

But the people who run the US are neither socialists nor free-market capitalists. What the current crisis reveals only too plainly is that they are ‘state capitalists’, who think that the government should serve the interests of the big corporations and financial institutions.

But facing a real chance of public revolt over a blatant giveaway to the very financial institutions and people who created this mess, the government seems to be reconciling itself to the fact that it must adopt some variant of the Swedish/English model, and Paulson’s revised plan seems to reflect that.

However, the way the US government has been itself lurching from one plan to another does not inspire much confidence. As Josh Marshall points out: “[T]he fact that [Paulson] rammed through his bailout bill as absolutely essential to saving the economy, only to decide a few days later that we need something dramatically different, does not inspire me with great confidence in his grasp of the nature of the crisis.”

POST SCRIPT: Tone deafness by the McCain camp

McCain has been getting hammered by Obama for advocating policies that seem to ignore the middle class and cater to the rich. Presumably feeling the need to respond to this charge, the McCain campaign has produced a new tax proposal they say is aimed at the middle class.

What is it? They are proposing a capital gains tax cut!

What are they thinking? It is mostly the rich who worry about capital gains taxes or even know what it is. They are the ones who are constantly asking for cuts in the capital gains tax and even its elimination.

Second, with the current stock market and housing market downturns, people are facing huge capital losses, not gains, so they are unlikely to be paying any such taxes soon.

While this may be just another effort to use the crisis to ram through a policy that will eventually favor the rich when the economy recovers, it is another sign that the McCain has no sensitivity to what concerns ordinary people.

Retirement savings losses

Like most people who have retirement accounts, the beginning of October saw the arrival of my quarterly statements and they did not make for pleasant reading. Mine showed a drop of 12% since the beginning of the year.

I have heard many people express dismay over similar losses. It is, of course, not pleasant to see ones savings drop so sharply. But at the same time, we have to realize that what we may be seeing is a drop from an artificially high and inflated value. Over the past few years, those same retirement accounts have grown at a rapid clip due to the galloping stock market prices.

While reading the quarterly statements back in the good old days (i.e., last year) were fun, I never thought of that as ‘real’ money or wealth, the way I view the money in my bank account. It is like the value of my home. It may go up or down but as long as I am not selling it or trying to borrow against it, it has no effect on my life except psychologically.

Talking of the good old days, wasn’t it was just this summer that $150 billion was given away as $600 to each taxpayer and that this ‘stimulus package’ was supposed to solve all our financial problems by the simple expedient of having people go shopping? Ah, those were the good times.

As I have mentioned before, if we think of the virtual economy of the stock market as being a measure of the real economy, then the Dow Jones Index should only be about 5,500, still below its current value. So, except for people who are forced to convert their stock assets into actual cash, there has been no tangible loss.

What is extraordinary is the effort by some to blame the whole subprime mess on what they claim is the effort by the government to provide loans to poor and minority communities to encourage them to buy homes. They say that this is what encouraged risky lending practices. This is flat-out false.

There were of course many people who did buy homes and made other major purchases based on a false sense of wealth and it is they who are now really feeling the pain. There are those people who bought homes they could not really afford before the real estate market went sour, for which they now owe more money than the house is worth and hence have now defaulted. It is uncertainty both about the scope and extent of this default problem and the worth of the securitized investments made out of bundled mortgages that seems to fueling the loss of confidence in banks and the stock market.

To be sure, many individuals were greedy and took advantage of the chance to buy expensive homes at inflated values based on artificially low introductory rates. Many of them also spent way more than they should have on credit, maxing out their cards. Have we forgotten that people have long been strongly urged to shop, and that it was almost their patriotic duty to do so in order to keep the economy going? Credit card offers were plentiful and so easy to obtain that we were regaled with stories of even cats and dogs obtaining them. Now it seems that credit card debt was also ‘securitized’ like home mortgages were and those debts are also in danger of default, and suddenly people are being lectured to sternly for their thriftless ways.

People seemed to have had an unrealistic sense of what they could and could not afford. Such people are by no means blameless. But what they are guilty of is greed. They cannot be blamed for the mess because they are not the ones who were in control of the situation.
It should also not be forgotten that not all home mortgage or credit card defaults are due to greed. Some people default because of factors outside their control, like loss of their job or a major illness. In fact, the largest factor in personal bankruptcies is due to the cost of medical care.

It is the banks that we expect to be the grown ups in this situation, who should understand what risks are reasonable. They are the professionals. They are not obliged to give loans to whoever asks for them. It is they who are supposed to check on the value of the homes that are being bought and the ability of the purchaser to pay back the loans before they lend money.

But the banks did not practice the kind of due diligence that was called for. So while they, like the homeowners, are also guilty of greed, they definitely bear the major responsibility for the mess.

POST SCRIPT: Crazy prayers

The idiocy of some religious believers never ceases to amaze me. Take this invocation given by Rev. Arnold Conrad, past pastor of the Grace Evangelical Free Church at a McCain rally in Davenport, Iowa.

“I would also pray, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their god — whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah — that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons,” Conrad said.

“And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they’re going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and Election Day,” he said.

Apart from the pastor’s ignorance (he mixes up the names of gods with the names of the religions) he is warning his Christian god that this election is being seen as a grudge match between him and his competitor gods and that if he doesn’t act to make McCain win, he wont be able to show his face in the neighborhood again. Unbelievable.

Government of the Dow, by the Dow, for the Dow

The recent financial crisis and the frantic (and finally successful) attempt by the government and Wall Street to strong-arm the public to provide immediate relief to the very institutions that caused the crisis is striking evidence, if anyone needed it, of exactly for whose benefit the government is run: Wall Street. You can ignore all the blather about how this bailout was needed to prevent ordinary people from financial ruin. That may or may not be true. What is indubitable is that if Wall Street interests were not at stake, nothing would have been done.

As was clearly evident in the past week, while the government can drag its feet for decades, say it is too expensive, and take no action to solve urgent problems like health care, when it comes to giving away nearly a trillion dollars to the financial industry, it can act with lightning speed. And you can be sure that when this money runs out (as it surely will as Wall Street institutions get their greedy hands on it) and next financial ‘crisis’ appears, we will be asked to cough up even more, and told that otherwise the sacrifices we have already made will be ‘wasted’. This is the same argument given for continuing the war in Iraq.
[Read more…]

Crisis? What crisis? Which crisis? Whose crisis?

In the midst of all this panic about a financial meltdown, it is hard to get a sense of how to actually measure if there is a crisis or not. Clearly there are various measures that can be used: the number of houses foreclosed, the number of personal bankruptcies, the number of banks going under, the amount of credit available, the state of the stock market, and so on. While they are all connected in some way, which ones should we be paying most attention to?

Deciding which measures are being used to say there is a crisis is important because that will drive the efforts to resolve it. Clearly what is concerning the political leadership is the state of the financial market, and the current bailout efforts seemed to be aimed at reassuring the banking, insurance, and other financial sectors and propping up the stock market. People are being scared and told that if the stock market declines their retirement savings will go down the tubes.
[Read more…]

Why the Wall Street bail out plan is bad-6: The credit ratings agencies scandal

In voting down the bailout proposal 228-205 yesterday, the House of Representatives struck a small blow for democracy. They refused to be steamrolled by Wall Street and its agents in Congress and the administration.

As usual, in the run up to the vote, the administration met in secret with the Congressional leadership, worked out some vague plan, gave the House members just a few hours to see the bill, and then ordered the House members to vote for it or else, saying “Trust us, we know what is best. If you immediately don’t do what we say, the world will come to an end.”
[Read more…]

Why the Wall Street bail out plan is bad-5: Rewarding greed

In this next-to-last post in this series (but probably not on this topic), I want to look at how senior Wall Street executives saw their profession as some sort of game in which the goal was to extract more personal benefit than the next executive, leading to a leap-frogging of various forms of compensation packages that would leave ordinary people gasping.

These executives were taking risks with other people’s money that left many ordinary people ruined while they themselves were benefiting:

The chairman of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, still has his mansion in Greenwich, CT, his oceanfront estate on Jupiter Island in FL, and his Park Avenue co-op in Manhattan.

Many at Lehman blame Fuld for dallying while his investment bank went bust, taking risks with other people’s money while he cleared over $40 million in salary and stock in the last year alone.
. . .
Fuld isn’t the only top executive who remains well-off despite his firm’s collapse. Former Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz collected more than $38 million in salary and bonuses in the last three years for which figures are available.

[Read more…]

Why the Wall Street bail out plan is bad-4

A large number of economists were quick to express their dislike of the Paulson plan and have been vociferous in urging Congress to not be stampeded by the administration but to use this opportunity to put back into place some of the regulations that were dismantled over the last three decades.

Meanwhile on NPR this morning, Allan Meltzer, a former Fed economist and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University says that he does not see that this ‘crisis’ hurts anyone other than a few major players on Wall Street and that all the scaremongering about a global financial catastrophe if nothing is done are nor warranted.

Meanwhile a group of 150 economists have also weighed in, saying that there is no need for this mad rush and we should think things through carefully before committing ourselves to the Paulson plan or some minor variation of it.

As economists, we want to express to Congress our great concern for the plan proposed by Treasury Secretary Paulson to deal with the financial crisis. We are well aware of the difficulty of the current financial situation and we agree with the need for bold action to ensure that the financial system continues to function. We see three fatal pitfalls in the currently proposed plan:
1) Its fairness. . . .
2) Its ambiguity. . . .

3) Its long-term effects. . . .
For these reasons we ask Congress not to rush, to hold appropriate hearings, and to carefully consider the right course of action, and to wisely determine the future of the financial industry and the U.S. economy for years to come.

I am not optimistic that these cautions will be heeded. The administration and Congressional leadership is deep in the pockets of Wall Street and will find some face-saving way to give them everything they want.

Alexander Cockburn walks us through some of the highlights of the bipartisan deregulation that resulted in Wall Street firms playing fast and loose with other people’s money for their own benefit. One key person who appears repeatedly in this sordid story is Phil Gramm, the former Senator from Texas who is now economics advisor to John McCain and reportedly his preferred choice to be Treasury Secretary. As US senator from Texas, he pushed through some of the key legislation that resulted in this mess.

In 1999 John McCain’s friend and now his closest economic counselor, then a senator from Texas, was the prime Republican force pushing through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. It repealed the old Glass-Steagall Act, passed in the Great Depression, which prohibited a commercial bank from being in the investment and insurance business. President Bill Clinton cheerfully signed it into law.

A year later Gramm, chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, attached a 262-page amendment to an omnibus appropriations bill, voted on by Congress right before a recess. The amendment received no scrutiny and duly became the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which okayed deregulation of investment banks, exempting most over the counter derivatives, credit derivatives, credit defaults, and swaps from regulatory scrutiny. Thus were born the scams that produced the debacle of Enron, a company on whose board sat Gramm’s wife Wendy. She had served on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 1983 to 1993 and devised many of the rules coded into law by her husband in 2000.

Somewhat stained by the Enron debacle Gramm quit the senate in 2002 and began to enjoy the fruits of his own deregulatory efforts. He became a vice chairman of the giant Swiss bank UBS’ new investment arm in the US, lobbying Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006, urging Congress to roll back strong state rules trying to crimp the predatory tactics of the subprime mortgage industry.

Cockburn points out that the enabling of Wall Street shenanigans has always been a bipartisan affair.

But is [Gramm} Exhibit A? No. That honor should surely go to Robert Rubin and to the economic course he set for his boss, the eagerly complicit Bill Clinton. Gramm has been the hireling of the banking industry. Rubin is at the beating heart of Wall Street finance, and he and Lawrence Summers at Clinton’s Treasury, were the guiding forces for financial deregulation.

Obviously the Republicans hoped that the roof wouldn’t fall in on their watch, and the crisis could be deferred to 2008 and then blamed on the Democrats. But their insurance policy was that if the roof did cave, as it has now, the rescue policy would be identical in both cases. That’s why Obama has collected more money than McCain from the big Wall Street houses.

The gang that successfully got out of Dodge in time was the Clinton-Rubin-Summers gang, just before the last bubble -–the stock market bubble — burst in March of 2001. They knew what was coming.

Rubin is one of Obama’s advisors, Gramm is McCain’s so whoever becomes president, as usual Wall Street has its friends in high places. They make money from public investments when the going is good and make money directly from the taxpayers when the going is bad. The only way their hands can be taken out of the till is if the public angrily tell their representatives that there should be no bailout until massive reforms and regulations are put into place so that people’s money is safeguarded from these rapacious predators.

This episode illustrates better than any civics class exactly who runs the country and for whose benefit.

POST SCRIPT: Jon Stewart on the Paulson plan

Why the Wall Street bail out plan is bad-3: More doubts

I have described before how the subprime mortgage debacle lies at the root of this mess. But how did it come about that mortgage lending, once the most conservative and transparent and regulated of banking practices, became the basis of a massive shadow economy in which trillions of dollars flowed around, free from any oversight? And what is the government bailout meant to do?

The foundations of the mess lies with the neoliberal deregulation policies that began under the Carter administration and was enthusiastically followed by every subsequent administration of both parties. The driving idea behind all this loosening was that the banking and investment sector was being shackled by too many regulations and too much oversight. The protective firewalls that had been put up between banks and investment houses following the excesses that led to the Great Depression were targeted. It was argued that if the banks were freed from these onerous restrictions, capitalism would bloom.
[Read more…]

Why the Wall Street bail out plan is bad-2: Manufactured crisis?

I have been getting increasingly suspicious that this so-called financial crisis may be a bogus one to enrich this administration’s base of Wall Street cronies before Bush leaves office. While I am not an economist and do not have the inside knowledge that Henry Paulson (Treasury Secretary) and Ben Bernanke (head of the Federal Reserve) have, there is something about this mad rush to pass major legislation that strikes me as very suspicious. It reminds me too much of the way the administration flat-out lied about the danger that Iraq posed in order to get Congressional authorization for the invasion.

People like Paulson and Bernanke lied when they said they had the situation under control earlier when they bailed out Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG. How do we know that they are not lying again now in order to push a covert agenda? While I accept that the financial sector is in trouble, what I want to know is what evidence has been produced that we need to act immediately. The stock market might go down if no immediate action is taken but that is not sufficient reason because they are betting on a bailout and their potential disappointment is not a reason for throwing more money into their trough.
[Read more…]