Finance and the Public Interest

Last week I had the opportunity to opine on this question at a lively conference on the financial crisis sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and the World Bank.  Since I spoke about things I’ve been meaning to blog about for some time, I decided to post the transcript here.

Sheila Bair would take bamboo shoots under her nails before going to Tim Geithner and the Treasury for help, said Camden R. Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers

Here’s a wonderful idea for a financial product: raise trillions of dollars from investors, invest in a variety of risky assets, and then lie to investors about what the shares of the fund are worth. Just to make this easy, claim that each share is worth $1, even if it’s really worth less.

As nightmarish memories of September 2008 fade, the financial industry is gearing up to fight new regulations. The battle lines are being drawn and became more visible this week.

In the last few months, the federal government has intervened in financial markets to an extent unparalleled in U.S. history. A partial tally includes the $29 billion, no-recourse loan from the Fed to rescue Bear Stearns; the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their exposure to the credit risk on $5 trillion of residential mortgages; loans in excess of $100 billion to insurance giant AIG, and of course, open-ended Congressional authority for Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to purchase up to $700 billion in troubled assets from financial institutions, part of which has already financed the purchase of over $250 billion of preferred bank stock.

Whatever you think about the wisdom of these interventions, one fact is indisputable: The government is not saying how much it expects all of this to cost us. The dearth of official estimates has, on one hand, led to Pollyannaish claims like “taxpayers could actually make money on this.”. On the other hand, it has stoked fears that taxpayers may be on the hook for trillions of dollars in losses.

It now seems clear that the financial crisis will last a long time. I want to suggest here that we are at the “end of the beginning”of the financial crisis, about to enter a new phase. Unfortunately, this is not an optimistic statement, merely an assessment. The government is fast running out of policy options that bear any resemblance to “free market” policies. What remains is for the federal government to run everything. And this is what is gradually occurring. The challenge will then be for the government to undo all of its intervention as quickly as possible.

While sophisticated bankers and their wealthiest clients continue to take a pass on investments with even the slightest hint of risk, it seems strange that many investment advisers continue to sing the same soothing lullaby to individual investors:  “No need to panic, remember, you’re investing for the long run.  And that is what stocks are for!  If you get out now, you will miss the ups as well as the downs.”

Now I am certainly not advising you to panic (in fact, I am not advising you at all, because I am a mere finance professor, not a certified investment advisor).  But it does seem like a good time to revisit what we know (and don’t know) about personal investments and asset allocation, and to try to reassure you that there is no dishonor in prudence.

The problem with commenting on the financial rescue plan is that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. have not told us all that they know about the financial crisis. Specifically, we don’t know about the financial health of banks individually or in the aggregate. In this entry I will offer a guess: There is widespread bank insolvency and the point of the rescue plan is to use asset purchases to save banks that are good and, just as important, to facilitate closing banks that are bad. If this is right, the rescue plan is a sensible response to the crisis. In effect the plan has a secret component: widespread and controlled bank closings.

Uncharacteristically, I find myself agreeing with Paul Krugman that there is no reason to think that the government’s buying mortgage-related assets could be an effective way to address the liquidity problem in the markets.  I would love to be able to critique the administration’s explanation of how its plan is actually going to work, but eerily, none has been offered.  Maybe a war chest of $700 billion is expected to create enough shock and awe to get institutions to start lending again.

We seem to have entered a new phase of the credit crisis. We spent a number of months learning how much house prices would fall and which institutions had exposure to mortgage loans. Now, as credit problems cascade and liquidity remains scarce, events seem to have moved beyond mortgages. Now we are concerned, for example, about which firms are exposed to other firms via credit default swaps.

In this entry I will make some observations about a few of the extraordinary events of the last week, specifically about money market funds, short sales, and the need for centralized clearing of financial products.

In a blog entry almost six months ago, I suggested that prices for credit default swaps (CDS) would tell us when the financial crisis was winding down. Unfortunately, the data this week tell us that the end is not in sight. This is probably obvious to you given the news headlines of the last few days, but looking at credit default swaps can help us understand how bad things are.

“In an abusive naked short transaction, the seller doesn’t actually borrow the stock, and fails to deliver it to the buyer. For this reason, naked shorting can allow manipulators to force prices down far lower than would be possible in legitimate short-selling conditions.” “What the SEC Really Did on Short Selling”, by Christopher Cox (SEC Chairman), Wall Street Journal, July 24 2008, P. A15.

As the debate continues over the wisdom or lack thereof of Congress having given Treasury Secretary Paulson a blank check to keep Fannie and Freddie afloat over the next 18 months, a point that seems largely overlooked is that there was only one realistic alternative.  Either Congress could explicitly provide a financial backstop such as the one just enacted, or the Federal Reserve could later ride to the rescue a la Bear Stearns should the need arise.  After all, there is widespread agreement that Fannie and Freddie are too big, and at the moment too important, to fail, and that taxpayers are ultimately on the hook.

It’s official.  After the administration’s protestations to the contrary last week – read my lips, no new bailouts – this morning Treasury announced a plan to inject “billions of dollars in loans and investments” to shore up Fannie and Freddie.

“We’re structure experts, we’re not underlying-asset experts.”

—Moody’s employee

How exactly did the credit rating agencies assign ratings on collateralized debt obligations backed by mortgages? In “Triple-A Failure” in the April 27 issue of the New York Times Magazine, Roger Lowenstein explains in detail how Moodys rated one such issue, which Lowenstein calls “Subprime XYZ”. Lowenstein’s article is notable for the insight it provides into Moody’s ratings process. The ratings agencies were not the only culprit in this crisis, but they played an important role, and the Lowenstein article helps to elucidate that role.

Reporter: But now I’m asking you: When will we know?
Henry Hurt: Blackout lasts for 3 minutes. If they’re not back in 4, we’ll know.
—Apollo 13

When will we know that the credit crisis is over? One way to tell will be by looking at the market for credit derivatives. Credit default swaps (CDSs) permit investors to buy or sell insurance against the event that a specific company defaults (or more generally, experiences a “credit event”). The buyer of insurance pays a quarterly or semiannual premiums to the seller. In return, the seller promises in the event of default to pay the buyer the loss in bond value due to default. When CDS premiums are high, it is a sign that investors are worried about a default.

“Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”. — John Maynard Keynes

Is the Black-Scholes option pricing model responsible for the current credit crisis? The writer Michael Lewis (whose writing I generally admire) answers “yes” in “Inside Wall Street’s Black Hole” in the March 2008 issue of Portfolio magazine. He pins the blame on papers written 35 years ago by “academic scribblers.” He doesn’t blame Alan Greenspan, borrowers, lenders, ratings agencies; or investment banks. He blames professors. I don’t think this is one of Lewis’s finer efforts, but since he is highly regarded and widely read, it seems worthwhile to consider what he has to say.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) has just announced its intention to double its investment in equities to 45 percent of its $67 billion portfolio.  This decision flies in the face of responsible financial management, which in this case calls for avoiding equities entirely, or even better, taking a short position in the stock market.

PBGC’s decision to gamble for solvency is such a bad idea, and is motivated by such perverse institutional incentives, that I’d like to commemorate it by making it the topic of this first blog entry.