Quote of the Day: The Glass Steagall Myth

From Washington Post’s Steve Pearlstein. (hat tip Bob Wenzel)

Repeal of Glass-Steagall has become for the Democratic left what Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are for the Republican right — a simple and facially plausible conspiracy theory about the crisis that reinforces what they already believed about financial markets and economic policy.

But why let facts get in the way of a good screenplay?

Facts such as that Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch — three institutions at the heart of the crisis — were pure investment banks that had never crossed the old line into commercial banking. The same goes for Goldman Sachs, another favorite villain of the left.

The infamous AIG? An insurance firm. New Century Financial? A real estate investment trust. No Glass-Steagall there.

Two of the biggest banks that went under, Wachovia and Washington Mutual, got into trouble the old-fashioned way – largely by making risky loans to homeowners. Bank of America nearly met the same fate, not because it had bought an investment bank but because it had bought Countrywide Financial, a vanilla-variety mortgage lender.

Meanwhile, J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo — two large banks with big investment banking arms — resisted taking government capital and arguably could have weathered the crisis without it.

Did U.S. investment banks create a shadow banking system and derivatives market outside the normal regulatory framework that encouraged sloppy lending and created what turned out to be toxic securities? You betcha.

And did regular banks make some of those bad loans and buy up some of those toxic securities? Yes, they did.

But that was as much a problem at the banks and investment banks that combined as those that remained independent. More significantly, the bulk of the money that flowed through the shadow banking system didn’t come from government-insured bank deposits. It came from money market funds, hedge funds, pension funds, insurance companies, foreign banks and foreign central banks.

Confronted with these inconvenient facts, the conspiracists like to double-down and argue that the real damage caused by repeal of Glass-Steagall is that it triggered a wave of bank consolidation — which has now left more than half of the country’s banking assets under the control of a handful of institutions that are so big that the government has no choice but to bail them out if they risk a meltdown of the financial system.

No doubt about it — too-big-to-fail is a problem. It turns out, however, that it was also a problem in 1984, when Continental Illinois, the seventh-largest U.S. bank with a whopping $40 billion in assets, had to be rescued. It was a problem a few years later when the Fed quietly rescued Citicorp because of mountains of loans to Latin American governments that turned sour. It was a problem in 1998 when the Fed had to orchestrate the rescue of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund with less than $5 billion in capital. And it was the reason behind the Fed’s 2007 rescue of Bear Stearns, with less than a quarter the size of its biggest Wall Street rivals.

Read the rest here

For the left, evidences that goes against them have simply been ignored.

The creed of the infallible moral authority of governments implies that all so-called “market failures” intuitively stem from the lack of government controls or oversight, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, notwithstanding.

Canada didn’t have a Glass-Steagall yet avoided the crisis of 2008 (Tom Woods). This only goes to show that, not only from the evidence perspective, their logic has been inconsistent or does not add up.

Reducing government, for the neo-liberals, essentially takes away the path to political nirvana. It would be senseless to argue against faith based political zealotry.

Sand Castles From US Regulatory Reforms

“Any fool can make a rule. And any fool will mind it.” - Henry David Thoreau

Among the popular misconceptions about resolving today’s social and institutional problems is the issue of regulation.

For many (particularly for the left), the recent Financial Crisis had been a product of “free markets” or “market fundamentalism”. This notion is totally absurd.(there can be no pure free market in a world of central banking)

For instance many hold that the repeal of the Glass Steagall Act via the Gramm-Leach Bliley as responsible for today’s crisis.

Economist and Professor Luigi Zingales argues otherwise[1], ``In 1984, the top five U.S. banks controlled only 9% of the total deposits in the banking sector. By 2001, this percentage had increased to 21%, and by the end of 2008, close to 40%. The apex of this process was the 1999 passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed the restrictions imposed by Glass-Steagall. Gramm-Leach-Bliley has been wrongly accused of playing a major role in the current financial crisis; in fact, it had little to nothing to do with it. The major institutions that failed or were bailed out in the last two years were pure investment banks — such as Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch — that did not take advantage of the repeal of Glass-Steagall; or they were pure commercial banks, like Wachovia and Washington Mutual. The only exception is Citigroup, which had merged its commercial and investment operations even before the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, thanks to a special exemption.” (bold emphasis)

On the other hand, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), whose regulations forced financial institutions to accept risky borrowers have also been held responsible.

According to Peter J. Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute[2], ``In 1995, the regulators created new rules that sought to establish objective criteria for determining whether a bank was meeting CRA standards. Examiners no longer had the discretion they once had. For banks, simply proving that they were looking for qualified buyers wasn’t enough. Banks now had to show that they had actually made a requisite number of loans to low- and moderate-income (LMI) borrowers. The new regulations also required the use of “innovative or flexible” lending practices to address credit needs of LMI borrowers and neighborhoods. Thus, a law that was originally intended to encourage banks to use safe and sound practices in lending now required them to be “innovative” and “flexible.” In other words, it called for the relaxation of lending standards, and it was the bank regulators who were expected to enforce these relaxed standards.”

Meanwhile, the Cleveland Fed downplays the role of the CRA in this crisis[3].

There has been “no consensus” as to which of the two laws had truly an adverse impact on the markets. Since there has been no perfect correlation, the ensuing tit-for-tat in the media had been reduced into a debate based on ideological slant.

In addition, we also said that the impact of laws tend to be divergent and ‘time sensitive’, where some laws could have positive interim term effects but with negative long term impact, and vice versa.

As caveat, while correlations may not appear to be outright linear, as the debate above holds; it would be misguided to attribute the lack of correlation to a single variable or to one law considering that there are many other laws or variables that also combine and or compete to expand or diminish the effects of a particular law.

Here the underlying general principles or theory will be more dependable than simply relying on statistics or math. Murray Rothard notes of the observation of John Say in distinguishing these[4],

``Interestingly enough, Say at that early date saw the rise of the statistical and mathematical methods, and rebutted them from what can be described as a praxeological point of view. The difference between political economy and statistics is precisely the difference between political economy (or economic theory) and history. The former is based with certainty on universally observed and acknowledged general principles; therefore, “a perfect knowledge of the principles of political economy may be obtained, inasmuch as all the general facts which compose this science may be discovered.” Upon these “undeniable general facts,” “rigorous deductions” are built, and to that extent political economy “rests upon an immovable foundation.” Statistics, on the other hand, only records the ever changing pattern of particular facts, statistics “like history, being a recital of facts, more or less uncertain and necessarily incomplete.” (underscore mine)

In short, trying to pinpoint the effects of one law based on oversimplified statistics to the political economy can be tricky. And this is where the left has used statistics or math to obfuscate evidences.

More of John Say from Murray Rothbard, ``The study of statistics may gratify curiosity, but it can never be productive of advantage when it does not indicate the origin and consequences of the facts it has collected; and by indicating their origin and consequences, it at once becomes the science of political economy.” (underscore mine)

Regulatory Arbitrage And Fighting The Last War

And as we earlier pointed out to the contrary, where laws are lengthy, ambiguous, partisan and subject to political discretion, they tend to be distortive and create imbalances in the system. And the impact of some of these laws indubitably accentuated the crisis.

Nevertheless there had been some policies or regulations that had relatively more material impact among the others (see figure 3).

Figure 3: Bank of International Settlements: Ingredients of the Crisis

The apodictic evidence from last crisis had been the surfacing of the “shadow banking system” (see right window).

As pointed out earlier above, one of the unintended consequences of bad laws or overregulation is to have regulatory arbitrages, where markets look for regulatory loopholes from which it exploits. These are parallel to the emergence or existence of black markets over economies that operate heavily under price controls[5].

So even the multilateral government agency as the UN via its subsidiary the UNCTAD had to admit this[6], ``Recent United States banking regulations, for example, were designed to control risk through the measured capital ratio used by commercial banks, the report says. This attempt backfired because bank managers circumvented the rules either by hiding risk or by moving some leverage outside the banks. This shift in leverage created a "shadow banking system" which replicated the maturity transformation role of banks while escaping normal bank regulation. At its peak, the US shadow banking system held assets of approximately $16 trillion, about $4 trillion more than regulated deposit-taking banks. While the regulation focused on banks, it was the collapse of the shadow banking system which kick-started the crisis.”

The lesson of which clearly is that politics, no matter how heavy handed, can hardly control the fundamental laws of economics.

Another problem with regulation is that it fights the last war.

For instance during the last bubble, the issue of prominence had been the accounting fraud from Enron, Tyco International, Worldcom, Adelphia and others that gave rise to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act[7].

Obviously, from a hindsight bias the regulation failed to make any headway to stop the recent crisis. Again that’s because markets are dynamic and seizes the next loopholes as opportunity to expand.

Nonetheless some has argued that the Sarbox law itself has been a drag to the recovery of the US. An example is this commentary from Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman[8],

``Is Sarbox to blame? Many financial pundits say no, but the SEC survey results point in the other direction. When public companies are asked whether Section 404 has motivated them to consider going private, a full 70% of smaller firms say yes, and 44% of all public companies also say yes.

``Has Sarbox driven businesses out of the country? Among foreign companies, a majority in the survey say that Section 404 has motivated them to consider de-listing from U.S. exchanges, and a staggering 77% of smaller foreign firms say that the law has motivated them to consider abandoning their American listings.”

In short, another unintended consequence of having more regulation is to raise the cost of compliance.

In a globalized market, investors can arbitrage away regulatory burden or the cost of compliance by simply transferring to where there is less onus or costs.

Figure 4 IMF: Sovereign Debt to GDP in the G-7

Yet fighting the last war means attacking past problems which may not be the source of the next crisis.

Another factor that is seemingly ignored is that the leverage, which is now a “prominent” factor, acknowledged by the mainstream seems to be building not in the previous sectors, which suffered from a bust, but instead in government debt.

As in the earlier chart (figure 3 left window) from the speech of Hervé Hannoun[9] Deputy General Manager of the BIS, low interest rates which has allowed for the chasing of yields, low volatility and high risk appetite, were outstanding features of the last crisis. However, practically the same ingredients in the past we are seeing today.

And governments are in a tight fix because, as we have been saying[10], “ governments will opt to sustain low interest rates (even if it means manipulating them-e.g. quantitative easing) as a policy because ``governments through central banks always find low interest rates as an attractive way to finance their spending through borrowing instead of taxation, thereby favor (or would be biased for) extended period of low interest rates”

So governments are operating in a policy paradox.

They pretend to know the main sources of the crisis yet are addicted to it for political reasons. An addict can hardly refuse what’s keeping them going. It’s simply path dependency from what we call as policy “triumphalism”. According to the G-20, ``The global recovery has progressed better than previously anticipated largely due to the G20’s unprecedented and concerted policy effort.”[11]

Again we are being validated.

Agency Problem And Socializing Losses While Privatizing Profits

There is another problematic aspect in regulation; it’s called the agency problem or the principal agent problem.

It’s a problem which emanates from different incentives or goals by those operating within the industry.

For instance during the last crisis, risk monitoring was fundamentally outsourced by risk buyers to the ratings agencies (yes in spite of the army of professionals). On the other hand, originators of risk securities or risk sellers tied fees due the credit ratings agencies on the credit ratings they issued which were then sold to “sophisticated” financial institutions.

Said differently, the job of credit appraisals were delegated to the ratings agencies which incidentally derived its income from the issuers of securities, and not from the buyers. Whereas buyers of securities fully delegated the role of due diligence to the ratings agencies.

So credit risks had been ignored in the assumption that someone else would do it for them. As Charles Calomiris Columbia University recently said in an interview[12], “Agency problem...Ratings agencies were a coordination device for plausible deniability."

Figure 5: The Economist: Reforming Banking

Perhaps the ultimate source of ‘plausible deniability’ comes with attendant with the current structure of the banking system-it’s basically called the fractional reserve based banking platform (see figure 5).

Bank equity as % of assets is now nearly at the lowest level since the introduction of central banking and deposit insurance.

In a BIS paper from Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England[13] writes, ``Over the course of the past 800 years, the terms of trade between the state and the banks have first swung decisively one way and then the other. For the majority of this period, the state was reliant on the deep pockets of the banks to finance periodic fiscal crises. But for at least the past century the pendulum has swung back, with the state often needing to dig deep to keep crisis-prone banks afloat. Events of the past two years have tested even the deep pockets of many states. In so doing, they have added momentum to the century-long pendulum swing.”

This means that the banking system’s ability to take more risks comes under the broadening premise of “privatizing profits and socializing losses” as the guiding policy.

This means that aside from central banking, deposit insurance is another means to “privatizing profits and socializing losses” which allows the banking system to absorb more risks, while on the hand tolerates the expansion of regulatory powers by the central bank.

As Murray N. Rothbard wrote[14], `Under a fiat money standard, governments (or their central banks) may obligate themselves to bail out, with increased issues of standard money, any bank or any major bank in distress. In the late nineteenth century, the principle became accepted that the central bank must act as the “lender of last resort,” which will lend money freely to banks threatened with failure.

``Another recent American device to abolish the confidence limitation on bank credit is “deposit insurance,” whereby the government guarantees to furnish paper money to redeem the banks’ demand liabilities. These and similar devices remove the market brakes on rampant credit expansion.”

So moral hazard and the agency problem seem to be significant factors that had been transforming the developed world banking system.

Of course there are other potential sources of regulatory problems, such as economics and behavioural aspects of enforcement, conflicting laws, a multitude of arcane laws which the public can’t comprehend, Arnold Kling’s legamoron (laws that could not stand up under widespread enforcement) and others, but due to time constraints we will be limited to the above.

At the end of the day, those building up the expectations for more regulations as elixir to the current problem would likely fail them. Why? Because there will be a new crisis down the road and hardly any of the current reforms will stop it.

Until they deal with roots of the problem, bubbles like the game called whack-a-mole will keep reappearing. Yet history says that all paper money is bound to go back to its intrinsic value-zero.

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[1] Zingales, Luigi Capitalism After the Crisis, National Affairs

[2] Wallison, Peter J. The True Origins of This Financial Crisis, American Spectator

[3] Nelson, Lisa Little Evidence that CRA Caused the Financial Crisis, Cleveland Fed

[4] Rothbard, Murray N. Praxeology as the Method of the Social Sciences

[5] An example of this is North Korea, which recently massively devalued her currency to fight the black markets. But unlike before where policies where met with passive resistance, riots broke out from which tempered Kim’s political approach. See Will North Korea's Version Of The 'Berlin Wall' Fall In 2010?

[6] UNCTAD, Shadow banking system that escaped regulation, faith in ´wisdom´ of markets led to meltdown, study says

[7] Wikipedia.org, Sarbanes-Oxley

[8] Freeman, James The Supreme Case Against Sarbanes-Oxley, Wall Street Journal

[9] Hannoun, Hervé Financial deepening without financial excesses, Bank of International Settlements, 43rd SEACEN Governors’ Conference, Jakarta

[10] See How Myths As Market Guide Can Lead To Catastrophe

[11] Wall Street Journal Blog, Text Of G-20 Finance Ministers, Central Bankers’ Statement

[12] Calomiris Charles, Econolog David Henderson: Calomiris on the Financial Crisis

[13] Haldane, Andrew Banking on the state Bank Of International Settlements

[14] Rothbard, Murray N., The Economics of Violent Intervention, Man, Economy and State