Monthly Archives: March 2011

Can Japan Afford Recovery? Yes. Japan Does Not Need Tax Hikes or Charity

By L. Randall Wray

(cross-posted with Benzinga.com)

The press is filled with speculation about the impact of Japan’s earthquake and its nuclear disaster on government finances. Prime Minister Naoto Kan said that his government is exploring sources of funding, and two-thirds of surveyed citizens are willing to accept higher taxes to pay for relief. Corporate tax cuts might be rescinded, and Japan has always favored consumption tax surcharges to reduce budget deficits. Recovery spending might add $250 to $300 billion to the government’s likely budget of $1 trillion. As everyone knows, Japan’s government debt is already 200% of GDP, and with the extra spending as well as loss of tax revenue due to the economic slowdown that is likely to befall the economy (at least temporarily), the budget shortfall will get bigger.
In a touching display of charity, the global community has responded by promising to provide funds for relief. Everyone’s favorite auto-tune singer, Britney Spears, is donating some VIP tickets to her concert; My Chemical Romance is donating a song; Adam Ant is headlining a relief show; and sports stars around the world are leading efforts to raise funds. Now, I do not want to be a killjoy, but even after two decades of economic depression, the “secret savings” of Japanese wives still average over $37,000 per household. Folks, this is not Haiti or the New Orleans that was abandoned by President Bush. This is one of the richest societies that has ever graced planet earth. What the Japanese do not need is money from abroad. They do need expertise and supplies. I was horrified to find that some of my friends in California were downing iodine pills. OMG—send THOSE to Japan, not greenbacks, songs, or concert tickets.
I do not intend to minimize Japan’s real problems, after suffering from a triple whammy of Biblical proportions: earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. It will take a very long time to recover.

But, it would only add insult to injury to raise taxes now. It would make economic recovery much harder to attain and sustain. As a sovereign nation with its own sovereign currency, Japan can “afford” recovery—government can afford to buy anything for sale in yen that might help in the relief efforts. Japan has unemployed labor and other idle resources—both for sale in yen. To be sure, the massive destruction will create bottlenecks—it will take time to reopen some factories, to get workers back into a stable home environment so that they can work, and to mobilize productive capacity. Japan will need to increase imports of some strategic materials and supplies. But it has all the yen it needs to undertake the massive recovery effort. As in all sovereign nations, the Japanese government spends by keystrokes and so long as it can find electrons, it can credit balance sheets. And if it needs to buy some stuff in dollars, it’s got those, too.

If the recovery really gets underway, aggregate demand (to replace housing, autos, factories, and infrastructure lost in the catastrophe) could superheat the economy. Inflation pressures might build. Now, THAT would be the time to raise taxes. Not to “pay for” government spending, but to take some of the fire out of an overheated economy. Better yet, relief and reconstruction will need to be planned. Yes, I know that scares the pants off the neolibs, but neither war nor reconstruction can be left to “market forces”. The aforementioned bottlenecks will generate price pressures—and, worse, price gouging—long before full employment is reached. Coordination together with wage and price controls (or “guidelines”) will let the economy generate sufficient steam to rebuild the nation without excessive inflation.

Unfortunately, Japanese policymakers have shown over the past two decades that they usually lose nerve long before they produce a sustainable recovery. They frequently adopt consumption taxes and/or spending constraints, and rely on monetary policy to overcome fiscal drag. It never does. Japan has been test-running Chairman Bernanke’s quantitative easing for 20 years, with exactly the same results that we observe now in the US: nada, zip, niente. Zero interest rates, if anything, depress the economy—especially if you have a whole lot of household saving (and no debt) in the form of government bonds that earn you little income. Sound familiar? If Helicopter Ben has his way, we will see another 17 years of this in the US.

But what about the mountains of Japanese government debt? There is no solvency risk—it is sovereign debt, denominated in yen and serviced by keystrokes. Isn’t that inflationary? Need you ask, after 20 years of deflation? Doesn’t it cause currency depreciation? If only it would! Burden the grandkids? They are inheriting the treasuries—all they want is for the BOJ to raise interest rates so they can clip some coupons.

Clearly, it is not all hunky dory in Japan. Aside from the current calamity, Japan is aging and losing its workforce. Its firms have been offshoring production for four decades so that even the non-elderly are not working. Jimmy Carter’s “national malaise” jumped the American ship and took up home in Japan—with households responding by ramping up savings. If it weren’t for American consumers, Japan Inc. would have practically no markets.

But these problems cannot be resolved by efforts to downsize government and its deficit. Indeed, the rational response to both the immediate problems as well as the longer-term trends is more government spending and less taxes.

Fraud and Financial Crisis

The Department of Economics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges (HWS) will welcome to campus William K. Black, a renowned bank regulator, lawyer and author, who will discuss financial fraud as well as the world’s current financial crisis. The talk will be held at 4 p.m. on Friday, April 1 in Albright Auditorium.

A professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Black teaches white-collar crime, public finance, antitrust, law and economics. He is the author of “The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry,” called “a classic” by the Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, George Akerlof.

“Black developed the concept of control fraud – frauds in which the chief executive officer or head of state uses the entity as a ‘weapon,'” says Black’s website, also noting that control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime combined.

Black also recently helped the World Bank develop anti-corruption initiatives and served as an expert for the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight in its enforcement action against Fannie Mae’s former senior management.

In examining the causes of the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 that led to the recession, The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded the “financial crisis was avoidable. The crisis was the result of human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire.” To this point, Black argues that, “standard economic policies create a criminogenic environment that fosters perverse incentive structures and large-scale criminality, or control fraud, whereby a person in control of a seemingly legitimate corporation or government agency uses it as a weapon to defraud.”
He points to errors he sees in previous administrations’ efforts at banking regulation. “The recent epidemics of accounting control fraud, the creation of the largest bubble in history, and the Great Recession could not have occurred if the Clinton and Bush administrations had actually learned a great deal about what works and what fails in regulation,” Black argues.

Looking comparatively at the criminal convictions stemming from the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and the recent financial crisis, Black points out, “If you go back to the savings and loan debacle, we got more than a 1,000 felony convictions of the elite. These are not, you know, tellers or something. We today have zero convictions, zero indictments, zero arrests of any of the elite, non-prime lenders that, through their fraud, drove this crisis.”

Black has taught previously at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and at Santa Clara University, where he was also the distinguished scholar in residence for insurance law and a visiting scholar at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. He earned his A.B. at University of Michigan, J.D. at University of Michigan Law School and Ph.D. at University of California at Irvine.

“Dr. Black’s visit to campus, thus, represents a unique opportunity for students, faculty and staff of the Colleges and interested community members to understand key current issues such as financial reform, regulation and supervision and their implications for the U.S. economy,” says Assistant Professor of Economics and host of the event Felipe Rezende.


p.s: This event will be videotaped and the link to it will be posted as it becomes available.

Modern Monetary Theory and Mr. Paul Krugman: a way forward

By Pavlina Tcherneva

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
— Arthur Conan Doyle (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes)

The fact that the U.S. government is a monopoly issuer of the U.S. currency is an obvious fact. The fact that an issuer of a currency doesn’t need to borrow its own currency from anyone else in order to spend is also an obvious fact. So is the fact that a sovereign currency nation that issues two government liabilities—government bonds and central bank reserves—can always issue such liabilities and convert one into the other ad infinitum. And yet there is nothing more deceptive than the significance of these obvious facts.
Mr. Krugman in his Friday NYT blog engaged Modern Monetary Theory on these facts and received considerable flack from MMT economists and supporters for misrepresenting MMT’s assertions. Frankly, I was pleased to see Mr. Krugman address our work and was really not surprised by some of his objections. After all, he is making the same arguments we’ve been addressing for the last two decades, since the very early days of MMT. I am surprised, however, that he has relied on hearsay or critics of MMT, rather than our own writings to do them justice. Over those decades we have elucidated our position in great detail in various books, journal articles, blogs and papers (probably the most systematic responses to MMT critiques that are accessible to non-academic audiences can be found on this blog, Bill Mitchell’s, and Warren Mosler’s). Many more amazing and intellectually curious people have engaged with these ideas, and have started their own blogs (see links on this blog). There are plenty of primary sources on MMT not to mischaracterize it!
 
But this is an opportunity for dialogue because we are all on the same side here. We are all convinced that poor understanding of the economy leads to bad policy. For MMT, poor understanding of the monetary system leads to especially bad policies. So if we do anything together, Mr. Krugman, let’s build one bridge and let that be a bridge of understanding of what the possibilities are under sovereign currency regimes.
Here I want to make the simple point that it is not sufficient (although it is necessary) to just recognize these obvious facts; indeed we must have a framework for thinking about these facts to move economics and policy forward. Yes, you recognize that we are a sovereign currency nation, but nevertheless conclude in your second piece on MMT that we can (at some point) become insolvent. Your argument looks at bond vigilantes’ behavior to which I will turn in a second.
It is an obvious fact that the U.S. government’s liability is unlike those of the private sector, because only the government pays by using its own liability and there is no limit to which it can issue those. This has been an important point of departure for MMT, but it has been recognized by some of your saltwater colleagues as well. And yet, they have not been able to provide the intellectual leadership to move us forward.
Let’s take Mr. Woodford, for example — a saltwater star economist, who developed the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level (FTPL), which I must admit I have criticized considerably. Problems with FTPL and DSGE models, notwithstanding, Woodford has recognized the obvious fact that sovereign currency nations cannot default on their obligations:
“A subtler question is whether it makes sense to suppose that actual market institutions do not actually impose a constraint … upon governments (whether logically necessary or not), given that we believe that they impose such borrowing limits upon households and firms. The best answer to this question, I believe, is to note that a government that issues debt denominated in its own currency is in a different situation than from that of private borrowers, in that its debt is a promise only to deliver more of its own liabilities. (A Treasury bond is simply a promise to pay dollars at various future dates, but these dollars are simply additional government liabilities, that happen to be non-interest-earning.) There is thus no possible doubt about the government’s technical ability to deliver what it has promised…” (Woodford 2000, p. 32)
Even more surprisingly, Woodford has used this logic to make the point that:
“it is possible for a government to finance transfers to an initial old generation by issuing debt that it then ‘rolls over’ forever, without ever raising taxes” (2000, p. 30).
In other words, programs like Social Security are forever sustainable! Some may wonder why an economist of Mr. Woodford’s standing would make such a claim and yet remain silent at a time when Social Security, the most popular American social safety-net, is under attack by deficit hawks. The reason is because recognizing a simple and obvious fact does not provide the tools for intellectual leadership.
Does the recognition that sovereign governments like the U.S. (he calls these Non-Ricardian Regimes) cannot possibly default on their obligations tell us anything about what fiscal policy should look like? NO, it does not. Does it give guidance on what stabilization policy must look like? Absolutely not. There is nothing in this work of use for economic policy. The reason is that the recognition of this obvious fact has been coupled with a whole series of flawed assumptions, problematic models, and dubious transmission mechanisms, which lead him to conclude that government spending is inherently inflationary.
You too made this logical leap and argued that in normal circumstances when:
“we’re no longer in a liquidity trap, running large deficits without access to bond markets is a recipe for very high inflation, perhaps even hyperinflation”. (NYT, March 25, 2011)
There is a problem with this claim. As MMT has demonstrated through the use of double-entry book-keeping, in reality, the government always spends by crediting bank accounts, i.e., by creating ‘money’. Yet, considering the inflation data, we’d be hard pressed to make the case that government spending in the postwar era has set unsustainable inflationary processes in motion, much less hyperinflation. Inflation is not a function of too many liabilities in circulation. But both you and Mr. Woodford are assuming that this is the case.
There is another problem with your arguments. You are saying that because government spending has to be financed by the private sector, it can be held hostage by the bond vigilantes. In other words, you argue, the government still needs someone to buy its debt before it can spend. This is not the case as we have explained in detail in our blogs. But even if we assume for a moment that this were the case, how are these bond vigilantes going to finance the government debt? What will they use to buy these bonds? The answer, of course, is reserves. The next logical question would be: how did these reserves get into the hands of the vigilantes in the first place? And since we know that reserves come from one place only – the government – they have to be spent into existence first before they can be used to buy bonds. In other words, government spending is financed through reserve creation by the Fed, not through borrowing from the private sector. We know of course that the Fed cannot force reserves on the banking system (Post Keynesians have made this point for decades, but mainstream economists have come around to understand this too). When the federal government spends, however, be that on military aircraft, Collateralized Debt Obligations, or Social Security, the Fed clears all government spending by crediting the bank accounts of Boeing, Goldman Sachs, or grandma (or anyone else for that matter who gets payments from the government, be they in the form of contracts, bailouts, or income assistance). This is how government spending creates reserves. Bond sales only drain any excess reserves from the system, to allow the Fed to hit its interest rate target, sales which are no longer needed since the Fed started paying interest on reserves (see here).
Now, many saltwater economists use Woodford’s idea that if the government injected bonds into the hands of the population without committing to raising taxes in the future to ‘repay’ these bonds, this bond injection will create net wealth in the hands of the private sector that would produce a wealth effect to stimulate the economy. The logic of this argument is completely upside down. There are two main problems: 1) ‘A bond injection’ does not increase net wealth, because households/investors give up reserves in order to buy Treasuries. Their net wealth position remains unchanged since they lose one asset (reserves) and gain another (a Treasury)—both of which are liabilities and a monopoly of the government. 2) It is a huge leap of faith to argue that more reserves or bond holdings would create a wealth effect. It might, but the transmission mechanism is highly problematic—the banking sector is bursting with reserves as we speak, yet bank lending to consumers and investors continues to be sluggish. The textbook money multiplier is completely wrongheaded and the transmission mechanism from reserves to deposits is fundamentally flawed. Putting aside Milton Friedman’s famous mea culpa and admission that the Central Bank cannot control the money aggregates (Financial Times, June 9, 2003), MMT has always said that it is loans which create deposits, and loan creation is never reserve constrained. Bank lending is based on the credit worthiness of borrowers, bank liquidity preference, capital requirements, regulation, but not on the availability of reserves. Reserves are provided by an accommodating Central Bank after the banking sector has made its loans, which have created the deposits that are subject to reserve requirements.
Note, however, that when a commercial bank makes a loan and creates a deposit, it can get reserves from the Fed (in order to meet its reserve requirement) in two ways: 1) it can borrow them (either at the discount window or through repos, i.e., through temporary OMOs) or 2) it can sell securities outright to the Fed (permanent OMOs) in exchange for reserves. When commercial banks borrow, they acquire an asset (the reserves) and a liability (borrowing from the Fed) so the net wealth position of the private sector does not change! When they sell securities to the Fed to get reserves, they lose one asset (a Treasury security) and gain another (reserves). Again the net wealth position remains unchanged.
Fed direct lending and temporary or permanent OMOs do not change the net financial wealth of the private sector. However, government spending does! When the government spends, private agents get reserves in their bank accounts. The banking sector will then convert these excess reserves into interest bearing assets—Treasuries. Bond sales are only undertaken by the Fed to drain reserves from the banking system and hit its interest rate target. Reserves come first and borrowing comes later. It is government spending that adds net new financial assets to the private sector. If you prefer to use Friedman’s analogy, helicopter drops of money are fiscal operations.
Another saltwater economist seems to get this. That is Mr. Bernanke who knows that the Fed cannot rain reserves unilaterally on the population or that the government cannot technically go broke. But he too has not provided much intellectual leadership even though he has a unique responsibility to do so.
Now, Mr. Krugman, you argue in your blog that “the rapid growth in monetary base since 2007 has taken place because the Fed is trying to rescue the economy, not because it’s trying to finance the government.” This statement is not quite correct because the Fed cannot adequately rescue the economy without financing its government’s purchases, like those of toxic financial assets. Note, the Fed has been lending to the private sector too, but this does not increase the net financial assets (NFA) in the hands of the private sector (a requirement for the saltwater economists’ presumed wealth effect). But according to Bernanke, a wealth effect can be generated, when the Fed finances government spending, (which as MMT’ers have been saying, it always does).
As I have explained in detail elsewhere Bernanke’s recipe for fighting crises and deflationary forces depends on fiscal policy (forthcoming in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Spring 2011). Bernanke clearly recognizes that the Fed cannot increase the holdings of net financial assets (NFA) of the population without the Treasury. Only when monetary policy finances government spending are NFA created into existence. This is what he calls the fiscal components of monetary policy. When the Fed buys toxic financial assets from private banks, it buys worthless (or almost worthless) private sector assets on behalf of the Treasury and replaces them with reserves. Because a private sector asset is also a private sector liability, there is no net wealth created by the private sector as a whole when, for example, one private sector entity issues a CDO and another one buys it. But when the government (or the Fed on behalf of the Treasury) buys the CDO, it provides an asset – a reserve (in exchange for the nonperforming asset), while the issuer of the CDO is no longer liable for his payment. In other words a private sector liability has been extinguished whereas the toxic asset has been replaced by a default risk free asset—the government’s liability. Some private sector entity doesn’t have to pay up anymore, because the Treasury just did. So NFA in the private sector as a whole have indeed increased.
Also, when the government sends everyone a check in the mail (think of the Clinton or Bush Jr. tax cuts), the Fed clears them and creates what Bernanke has called ‘money financed tax cuts’. Bernanke has clearly stated that there is no limit to which the government can finance these.
“Under a fiat (that is, paper) money system, a government (in practice, the central bank in cooperation with other agencies) should always be able to generate increased nominal spending and inflation, even when the short-term nominal interest rate is at zero… The U.S. government has a technology, called a printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent) that allows it to produce as many U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.” (Bernanke 2002)
In fact, Bernanke prefers money financed tax cuts to any other type of ‘alternative monetary policy measure’ (see Bernanke 1999). He prefers fiscal policy as a stabilization policy (or to use his vernacular he prefers these types of fiscal components, see here for details). Bernanke has also stated that we are not using taxpayer money to finance these fiscal components, just like we are not using taxpayer money when we lend to banks. The way the government spends or lends is by crediting bank accounts to private agents.
Scott Pelley: “Is that tax money that the Fed is spending?”
Chairman Bernanke: “It’s not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed.”
(60 minutes interview, June 7, 2009)
Why then is the Chairman appearing before Congress arguing that we have a long-term deficit problem and that Social Security and Medicare must be scaled back? Where is the intellectual leadership from this saltwater economist on issues of policy?
Mr. Krugman, you have also made this claim, namely that the government will eventually run into difficulty meeting its long-term obligations. My question is, if the Fed can clear any tax cut check that we get in the mail today, it can certainly clear the social security checks we will get in the future. If the government faced no technical limits to buying toxic financial assets, it clearly can pay for grandma’s social security today and mine in the future. More than that, the government can buy the labor of the unemployed today and put them to work on useful projects. The important question is what can we buy with these checks? MMT has always argued that we have to get past the illusion of financial constraints to start asking the meaningful questions of what the real resource constraints of our economy are and how to employ the idle resources to overcome these constraints in order to provide for the young, poor, unemployed and elderly and to increase the standard of living for all.
There are many economists who still don’t ‘get’ these obvious facts, but a number of saltwater economists do. Yet, ‘getting’ these obvious facts is not enough. We have to, indeed we must, engage in a conversation about the kind of spending we should be financing. Clearly we can finance any kind, but different types of spending will produce different real outcomes. Spending on anything politicians want without limit is absolutely the wrong conclusion to draw from recognizing the obvious fact that sovereign governments do not go bankrupt without self imposed political constraints (e.g., debt limits). Instead, we must ask the question: should the government be buying the junk of the financial sector or should it be buying the productive services of the unemployed? What type of government spending would pose greater risk of inflation than others, when would that happen, and in which sectors?
I’ve already argued that the mainstream cannot offer intellectual leadership on this last question because it assumes inflationary effects from government spending, all evidence to the contrary. MMT can and does fill this intellectual void. We have explained the problems with the traditional view of inflation and have ourselves offered policies for price stability. This work has also been concerned with true inflation beyond full employment and has offered a recipe to address it. We are worried about hyperinflation, and have carefully explained why Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany are extreme and unlikely special cases. From inception, we have been concerned with real economic problems like unemployment, and have argued that we can and must put the unemployed resources to work. We have objected to the inhumane notion economists hold that we can use unemployment to fight inflation and have provided alternatives. We have spelled out the key ingredients of what responsible fiscal policy would look like. We have offered specific policy proposals for addressing this crisis and our long term real economic challenges – policies, such as a payroll tax holiday and the job guarantee. We have argued that Social Security is not broken and that we can always make payments to the retired, but we have been very concerned with what the elderly can buy with these payments. We have always focused on the real productive capacity of the economy and whether it can generate the goods and services that the elderly will need. We have worried about the environment and have suggested specific policies for environmental renewal and sustainability. And on and on and on…..
So Mr. Krugman, let’s get past the obvious fact that sovereign currency nations are not financially constrained in their spending and start thinking about the genuine economic possibilities such systems can provide. Only then can we engage in the dialogue that we so desperately need. As I have argued before if we keep confusing solvency with sustainability, we will remain hostage to dated notions of insolvency, and will never get to ask the meaningful questions of what the government should do and how it should do it? But if we start this dialogue, I am sure that we will find a lot of common ground—and you will see that MMT has very specific proposals to prevent the government from running amuck and spending irresponsibly. We can and indeed we must challenge the current state of economic thinking and propel a new generation of economists forward—economists of the real world, not of the archaic textbooks.

Only Lying Lenders Made “Liar’s” Loans

By William K. Black

(cross-posted with Benzinga.com


If you read this column you are familiar with our family rule that one can never compete with unintentional self-parody. The Justice Department is the latest exemplar of this rule. Joe Nocera’s March 25, 2011 column, “In Prison for a Taking a Liar Loan” discusses the case. Spoiler alert: Joe ends his column with a twist that is the thrust of my column so please read his column first.

I have explained in prior columns some of the principal myths about “liar’s” loans. See particularly “How did a Relatively Small Number of Subprime Loans Cause a Record Crisis?” and “Lenders Put the Lies in ‘Liar’s’ Loans.” The answer to the question posed was that nonprime loans were a large portion of the residential housing finance market, roughly half of new mortgage originations by 2006 according to Credit Suisse’s estimate. Other estimates are that nonprime loans were over one-third of all new mortgage originations by 2006. Under either estimate nonprime lending caused an enormous increase in mortgage lending. Nonprime lending caused the “epidemic” of mortgage fraud that the FBI first publicly warned about in September 2004. Nonprime lending led to such a large increase in home purchasers that it hyper-inflated the financial bubble.

Credit Suisse found that by 2006, half of all new residential loan originations in the U.S. called “subprime” were also “liar’s” loans, i.e., they were made without verifying essential financial information about the borrower (typically income and employment). Most people assume that “subprime” and “alt a” (aka, “stated income” and “liar’s loan) were officially defined, mutually exclusive categories of loans. Both assumptions are false. There were multiple, inconsistent definitions of “subprime.” The confusion was deliberate. Nonprime lenders and sellers and purchasers of nonprime paper profited by systematically and dramatically overstating the credit quality of nonprime loans they owned.

Liar’s loans got that name because they were pervasively fraudulent. The fraud incidence in liar’s loans was often 80% or above. I have explained previously why, in the mortgage context, liar’s loans inherently produce intense adverse selection and that adverse selection causes such lending to have a negative expected value. (In plain English, this means that making liar’s loans is guaranteed to cause lenders severe losses.) This explains why honest home lenders do not make “liar’s” loans. For reasons I have explained, lenders that made material amounts of liar’s loans had to engage in accounting (and if they were publicly traded, securities) fraud. Entities that sold or held substantial amounts of liar’s loan paper also had to engage in accounting and securities fraud. Sellers could not disclose to their purchasers that the liar’s loans were pervasively fraudulent and would produce enormous losses. Holders of liar’s loan paper could not establish the loss reserves required by GAAP (and by the SEC) for the losses inherent in liar’s loans because the losses would have been so large that the firm holding the paper would have to report it was unprofitable and likely insolvent. I refer to the lenders that made significant numbers of liar’s loans as “lying lenders.”

Liar’s loans are optimal for only one group of lenders – those engaged in accounting control fraud. The four ingredients of the recipe for fraudulent CEOs of lenders to maximize the bank’s (fictional) short-term reported income and (real) longer-term losses are:

1. Rapid growth
2. Making loans at a premium yield even to the uncreditworthy
3. Extreme leverage
4. With grossly inadequate allowances for loan and lease losses (ALLL)

The officers that control the lenders that follow this recipe achieve what Akerlof & Romer aptly termed a “sure thing.” The recipe is mathematically guaranteed to produce record short-term income (until the bubble collapses) and, with modern executive compensation, make the officers wealthy. The lender fails (or is bailed out), but the controlling officers walk away rich. Akerlof & Romer’s title emphasized that dynamic – “Looting: the Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.”

Liar’s loans were ideal ingredients for optimizing this recipe for maximizing fictional income and executive compensation. The two most obvious advantages were that competent underwriting takes time and costs money. Not underwriting, therefore, allowed fraudulent lenders to lend more cheaply (if one ignores the resultant, catastrophic losses) and more quickly. Not underwriting aided the first ingredient – it made rapid growth easier and, by reducing expenses, increased reported short-term income.

Liar’s loans also aided the second ingredient of the fraud recipe. Lending even to those who will often fail to repay the loan requires the bank to subvert normal underwriting and internal controls. Liar’s loans are the most elegant solution to subverting normal underwriting and internal controls. Liar’s loans, by definition, eviscerate essential underwriting and make it difficult for internal controls to operate effectively. (One could, of course, demand verification of income and employment of a sample of the liar’s loans – but lying lenders did not want to document that they knew their loans were pervasively fraudulent.) Lying lenders are able to grow rapidly and charge a premium yield to borrowers. Anyone can qualify for a liar’s loan – all it requires is fraud and the mortgage bankers own anti-fraud specialists (MARI) warned the industry in 2006 that “stated income” loans deserved to be called liar’s loans because they were “an open invitation to fraudsters.” Even a poor credit history could be overcome by enough fictional borrower income and fictional housing value. Millions of liar’s loans were made even to borrowers with credit histories so poor that the loans were considered subprime.

The Bright Shining Lies Underlying Liar’s Loans


Lying lenders found liar’s loans ideal for predation. Yield and growth are the keys that determine which types of loans maximize fictional accounting income. The fundamental attraction of liar’s loans was the premium yield. The higher yield, of course, was harmful to the borrower and no rational, informed borrower who could qualify for an underwritten loan at a lower interest rate should have taken out a liar’s loan. Liar’s loans were marketed and sold under a series of bright shining lies. The primary lie was that liar’s loans were really prime (“A”) loans that were underwritten under an alternative, equally effective means – hence the term “alt-a.” The alternative to traditional underwriting was to rely instead almost entirely on the borrower’s credit score – without verifying the borrower’s income, employment, etc. This lie implicitly claimed that “alt-a” borrowers were providing the lenders a free, premium yield unrelated to increased risk.

The bright shining lie was premised on four subsidiary lies. One, “alt-a” borrowers really had the same credit quality as other prime borrowers but could not verify their income. Two, the reason borrowers could not verify their incomes did not constitute a credit risk. Three, the borrowers actually had the income stated on the loan application. Four, a borrower’s credit score is an equally effective alternative means of underwriting credit risk to traditional underwriting (which verifies the borrower’s actual income, employment, etc.).

The typical bright shining lie story was the self-employed business person who could not credibly verify his own income. The story was not simply nonsense; it was obvious nonsense. The IRS has long had a form to cover this concern. The borrower signs it to authorize the IRS to release to the lender copies of the borrower’s federal income tax returns. Americans do not deliberately overstate their income on their tax returns because doing so would increase their taxes, so the tax return provides highly reliable information to the banker on the self-employed. The spread between prime and liar’s loans shrank over time (the opposite would have occurred if liar’s loans were not fraudulent and markets were efficient), but a liar’s loan was always substantially more costly to the borrower over the life of the loan. No honest self-employed borrower would opt to pay tens of thousands of dollars in additional interest rather than provide the IRS form and give the bank access to his tax returns. A credit score inherently cannot underwrite a borrower’s ability to repay a mortgage loan and it is an unreliable measure even of a borrower’s willingness to repay a jumbo mortgage loan. It is easy to game a credit score by taking out, and promptly repaying, a series of small loans and a borrower can readily fraudulently “borrow” another person’s higher credit score.

Why Borrowers took out Liar’s Loans


There are four obvious reasons why a borrower would pay the higher interest rate required to obtain a liar’s loan. One, the borrower did not have the income necessary to receive any mortgage loan. The loan officer and the loan broker knew the minimum incomes (though even the minimums were often negotiable). They would falsify the income or direct the borrower to falsify the income stated on the loan application. Normal underwriting easily detects and prevents this fraud – which is why credit losses on traditional residential mortgages were minimal for nearly 50 years. Fraudulent lenders designed liar’s loans to remove these underwriting protections against fraud. Their fraud-friendly design was so successful that their own industry anti-fraud experts (MARI) denounced their product as “an open invitation to fraudsters.” The officers controlling the lying lenders designed and implemented the perverse incentives that produced the intended “echo” fraud epidemics among loan brokers, loan officers, appraisers – and some borrowers. The combination of liar’s loans and the echo epidemics helped the controlling officers produce the first two ingredients of the lender fraud recipe – rapid growth at premium yields. The officers that controlled the lying lenders wanted to be able to make loans to the uncreditworthy – as long as they could do so at a premium yield. Liar’s loans made it easy to do both – and prevented the creation of an incriminating underwriting paper trail documenting that the lender knew the information on the loan application was false when it made the loan. The resultant deniability is implausible to anyone that understands fraud mechanisms, but it does fool the credulous.

Two, the borrowers would pay the higher interest rate if they had the requisite income but were hiding its existence from their current or prior spouse or the IRS. Do not make the mistake of believing that this situation represents minimal credit risk to the lender. A borrower who will lie to loved ones and the government (both of which are typically criminal acts) in order to keep from paying them legal obligations poses an exceptionally great credit risk to the lender. The borrower’s character is one of the most important determinants of credit risk.

Three, the borrowers could receive better loan terms if they inflated their income on the loan application. This could prompt borrowers to engage in fraud. Fraudulent borrowers could get larger loans at a lower interest rate if they made the debt-to-income ratio on the loan appear to be smaller by inflating their incomes. Borrower fraud of this nature obviously posed an enormous credit risk to the lender. The third and fourth categories of borrowers who would be willing to take liar’s loans illustrate the complexity of accounting control fraud. To understand these categories of borrowers one must understand the officers who controlled the lying lenders. The controlling officers wanted to make large loans, in enormous, growing volumes, at premium yields because doing so produced a “sure thing” of record (albeit fictional) short-term income and high bonuses.

The controlling officers, of course, have preferred to maximize the yield on liar’s loans but they did not have the power to do so. The controlling officers faced several tradeoffs. If they got honest information on the uncreditworthy lenders they could not grow rapidly by making loans at a premium yield to that group – and lending to that group was essential to their fraud strategy. In a reasonably competitive, mature industry like home lending a bank cannot grow rapidly and achieve premium yields by making enormous numbers of high quality loans. High quality borrowers typically can borrow from any bank at a low yield. A lender that tried to grow rapidly by making high quality residential loans would have to “buy market share” by lowering its yield. Its competitors would match the lower yields and the result would be that the home lenders active in that regional market would suffer materially lower reported income (reducing executive compensation). The implication of this first tradeoff (among growth, yield, and credit quality) was that the only sure way to grow rapidly and charge premium yields in a reasonably competitive, mature home loan market (ingredients one and two in the fraud recipe) is to make large numbers of loans to the uncreditworthy.

The other major tradeoff arose from the need to loan to the uncreditworthy. I have explained why this always requires the lender’s controlling officers to suborn the bank’s underwriting and internal and external controls in order to implement their strategy of accounting control fraud (what Akerlof & Romer aptly termed “looting”). Control frauds are so dangerous in large part because they are routinely able to suborn successfully these systems. Suborning underwriting and controls, however, requires a tradeoff. It inherently leaves the lender exceptionally vulnerable to internal and external frauds by parties other than the controlling officers. Fraud begets fraud. Eviscerating underwriting and controls makes the bank environment highly criminogenic and often kicks off an “echo” epidemic of fraud by others.

Strictly speaking, the controlling officers who are looting the bank through accounting fraud neither desire nor necessarily know in advance of the specific acts of secondary fraud by others. The CEO that is looting “his” bank would prefer not to share to the fraud gains with others, but this represents another tradeoff. The fraudulent bank CEO needs to incent large numbers of individuals to act perversely in order to accomplish the primary fraud that he is directing. He must unhinge effective underwriting and controls, so he must expose the bank to secondary internal and external fraud by others. Similarly, fraudulent bank CEOs frequently found it desirable to pay generous bonuses to their agents (i.e., loan officers and loan brokers) in order to incent them to make loans to the uncreditworthy and produce false loan applications and appraisals that would cause the loans to deceptively appear to be far less risky – which translates into far more valuable loans (which are a lender’s assets). Again, they traded much greater growth in loans with premium yields that falsely appeared to be of relatively low credit risk for loans that were, in reality, far more likely to be based on fraudulently inflated borrower income and appraised values and therefore far more likely to default and to cause larger losses upon default. The perverse incentive structures the officers controlling the lying lenders created for their employees and agents made it inevitable that liar’s loans would be pervasively fraudulent. The law allows us to hold the CEO’s who controlled the lying lenders criminally responsible for the predictable consequences of these perverse incentives.
 
Indeed, accounting control fraud is finance’s “weapon of choice” in much of the developed world because it is the superior solution to the tradeoff between the risk of being sanctioned for looting and the rewards from looting. Even the most powerful bank CEO faces a grave risk of being imprisoned if he sticks his hand in the till and steals $10,000. If, instead, he uses accounting control fraud to loot the bank of $50 million he has an excellent chance of never even being prosecuted. All he has to do is limit his means of converting bank assets to his personal benefit to seemingly normal executive compensation received because the bank “earned record profits” in the short-term.

The recipe for accounting fraud is a “sure thing” that will produce those (fictional) record profits and quickly make the CEO exceptionally wealthy. The record income, of course, will be blessed by a top tier audit firm. The recipe fraudulent U.S. bank CEOs use maximize short-term reported income and their compensation is attractive because it is a “sure thing” with minimal risk of prosecution, but it does represent a tradeoff. Fraudulent CEOs can convert a higher proportion of bank assets to their personal benefit (“fraud efficiency”) if they make themselves the direct beneficiary of the fraud. They can do so by stealing money from the vault, causing the bank to lend money to them that they do not repay, or causing the bank to lend money to them through a nominee (also called “straw man” or a “shill”). Indeed, the fact that most fraudulent U.S. bankers overwhelmingly loot “their” banks through accounting control fraud tells us that they still fear prosecution. In nations where the CEOs believe that they can loot directly with impunity they employ cruder frauds that achieve greater fraud efficiency.

I need to emphasize several words of caution about the concept of optimization, particularly when applied to very large corporations. Readers who have lived through conventional microeconomics and then worked in the real world know that the neo-classical claims of firm optimization in perfect competition are, to be gentle, misleading. Neo-classical economists’ assumptions about rationality fail descriptively and often fail to predict behavior. Anyone that has dealt with CEOs knows that ego, a desire for fame, a feeling of exceptionalism – they are not subject to the same rules as govern lesser persons – and a consuming drive for dominance can drive decisions. Criminology arose from sociology and psychology is our cousin. White-collar criminologists have long employed a non-ideological view of rationality. We have long-recognized that from the perspective of the fraudulent CEO, the economic and psychological aspects of their fraud schemes tend to be mutually reinforcing. It is the rare CEO who is exceptional (in a positive manner) relative to his peers. The “sure thing” aspect of accounting control fraud simultaneously makes mediocre or failing CEOs wealthy, famous, and powerful. Criminologists never expect perfect optimization. Perfect optimization never occurs in large organizations. Large organizations have various fiefdoms which may have variant professional cultures. Unfortunately, neither honest nor fraudulent CEOs require perfection to pursue (imperfectly) an overall banking strategy.

Lying lenders that sold their liar’s loans found other aspects of these loans optimal. The best loan originations from the perspective of the secondary market had four characteristics: a premium yield, on a larger loan, loan structures that would postpone as many early defaults as possible (e.g., “teaser” initial interest rates so low that they failed even to pay the interest – producing negative amortization), and the appearance of relatively low credit risk. Liar’s loans were superb devices for obtaining, simultaneously, these four (sometimes inconsistent) objectives. The loan brokers commonly inflated seriously the borrowers’ real income and knew that this would produce very high early period defaults (EPDs) unless the borrowers’ payments were reduced substantially. The loan broker could structure the loan to employ an initial, far lower, “teaser” rate in order to greatly reduce EPDs. The loan brokers and loan officers frequently created a “Gresham’s” dynamic (bad ethics drives good ethics out of the market) to induce an echo epidemic of appraisal fraud. By inflating the appraisal and the borrower’s income, the loan officers and brokers were able to maximize their fees and bring in huge loan volume. Inflating the borrowers’ income lowered the reported debt-to-income ratio and inflating the appraisal lowered the reported loan-to-value (LTV) ratio. The two forms of fraud made it appear to those purchasing liar’s loans that the loans were lower risk. By structuring the loans to delay the inevitable defaults the loan brokers and officers were able to reduce EPDs and allow more time to refinance the liar’s loans. Collectively, these characteristics led to premium prices being paid by those purchasing liar’s loans for the secondary market. The officers controlling the lying lenders structured the perverse financial incentives they paid to the loan brokers and officers – and made it clear to them by approving liar’s loans and paying the brokers and officers large bonuses for making fraudulent loans sure to default frequently – that they would not effectively kick the tires to prevent the endemic fraud the criminogenic incentives were certain to produce. Liar’s loans were the financial variant of “don’t ask; don’t tell.”

Four, some borrowers who took out liar’s loans were relatively low risk, even prime, borrowers. The ideal mortgage loan for an accounting control fraud is a very low risk loan paying a premium yield. (Recall that this was the lying lenders’ bright shining lie about liar’s loans.) Theoclassical economists asserted that it was impossible to make loans having both characteristics. Such loans would not occur in efficient financial markets. They can occur, however, under predation. Predatory lenders take advantage of information asymmetries to induce lower-risk borrowers to borrow at excessive yields. The information asymmetry is greatest when lending to the financially unsophisticated and those that cannot comprehend the loan terms because they are not literate in the language used in the loan documents. Those asymmetries, statistically, are more likely to be large among Latinos and African-Americans. Some borrowers, therefore, could have provided “free” premium yields to the lying lenders. However, one should be cautious about assuming that the premium yield was a “free” premium even in cases of predation. Loan brokers and officers were operating under such perverse incentives (created by the lying lenders), that they are likely to have exploited the information asymmetries by encouraging financially unsophisticated clients to purchase homes they could not afford under the premises/promises that the loan could always be refinanced and home prices always rose. The more expensive the home being purchased, the larger the loan, and the greater the fee the loan brokers and officers would receive. But this also meant that the victims of predation were being abused in multiple ways and put into homes and loans they could not afford – which caused severe credit risk and meant the purported yield premium was not remotely large enough to compensate the bank for the credit risk of making the liar’s loan.

Which (finally) brings us back to Nocera’s Column


The twist in Joe Nocera’s column is that the borrower on a liar’s loan from Countrywide is in prison for lying on a loan product that Countrywide’s controlling officers structured knowing that it would produce endemic fraudulent applications. Countrywide’s controlling officers structured their liar’s loans in this manner to facilitate their vastly greater looting of Countrywide’s creditors and shareholders. The prosecution of Countrywide borrowers for fraudulent liar’s loan applications is the modern variant of the old joke.

“What does chutzpah mean?”
“A son killed his parents and asked the court for mercy because he was an orphan.”

Nocera’s story is also a wonderful illustration of how insane our lack of prioritization is in prosecuting the lying lenders that drove the “epidemic” of mortgage fraud that hyper-inflated the financial bubble and caused our financial crisis and the Great Recession. No senior officer of the major nonprime lenders that caused the catastrophe has been prosecuted. (One will be, but even he is a special case because the investigation and indictment were triggered by an alleged effort to defraud the TARP program.) The contrast to the S&L debacle, where we obtained over 1000 felony convictions in “major” cases and ensured that the most culpable, most elite frauds would be prosecuted by creating the “Top 100” list of fraudulent S&Ls is stark and should prompt public outrage. The FBI deserves great credit for warning about the “epidemic” of mortgage fraud in its September 2004 testimony – over six-and-a-half years ago – and predicting that it would cause a financial crisis if it were not contained. Countrywide went heavily into liar’s loans after that warning and went even more heavily after MARI denounced the loans in 2006 as “open invitations to fraudsters.” The FBI can place undercover agents in banks without even changing their resumes or names. If it had sent undercover agents into the ten largest lying lenders in 2004 it could have prevented the Great Recession. Banks engaged in accounting control frauds operate in ways designed to superficially mimic honest lenders, but there are clear markers of fraud that a special agent who understands fraud mechanisms would be able to spot within days. Honest lenders do not make liar’s loans, do not inflate appraisals, do not suborn their underwriting staff and internal and external controls, do not create perverse incentives for loan brokers and officers and other corporate officers, do not forge borrowers’ signatures, and do not suggest or provide false information on loan applications. Lying lenders and/or their agents routinely did each of these things. The IRS, in a situation in which we prosecute none of the lying lenders’ controlling officers and only prosecute around 1000 of the roughly one million annual cases of mortgage fraud – a strategy that guarantees failure – used a wired undercover special agent to investigate one of those individual frauds. It did so while giving a pass to Countrywide’s CEO, the exemplar of “bankruptcy for profit.” Countrywide was shocked, shocked to hear that there was lying going on in its liar’s loans. The loan broker (a confessed fraud) suggested the fraudulent statement of income on the loan application and may have forged the borrower’s name on the application. (Both practices were common because lying lenders, including Countrywide, structured their bonuses to loan brokers to ensure that the brokers could make very large amounts of money by fraudulently inflating the borrower’s income and appraised value of the home.

Nocera’s story demonstrates that the Justice Department has mastered the art of unintentional self-parody. Attorney General Holder should resign as a matter of principle and the administration should find a real AG. I suggest a novel choice that the Republicans could not block: Sol Wisenberg. Sol was chief of the Financial Institution and Health Care Fraud Unit in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Texas, where he successfully brought one of the “Top 100” S&L fraud cases. He later became a senior prosecutor in Ken Starr’s Office of Independent Counsel (conducting a famous deposition of President Clinton). Sol left the Federalist Society because it wasn’t conservative enough for his tastes. The point is that prosecuting elite white-collar criminals isn’t a political or ideological act. It is essential to our democracy and our economy.
I’ve seen Sol train FBI agents and prosecutors how to investigate and try sophisticated financial frauds. I’ve seen him prosecute in court. We share the same fundamental attitude. We don’t care about the politics, power, or ideology of the folks we investigate. We don’t scream. We don’t think bankers are crooks by definition. We know that if cheaters prosper markets become perverse. We try to make sure that cheaters don’t prosper. President Obama, please start to use the “f” word – call the frauds “frauds” and demand accountability. Did you read Nocera’s story? What did you order Attorney General Holder to do in response? I urge the next reporters who interview the President to ask both of these questions.

A Cartoon by Ruben Bolling

From politicalirony.com

Why we need regulatory cops on the beat – and why they make bankers cringe

(cross-posted with Benzinga.com)

One of the paradoxes of effective financial regulation is that the best way to help bankers and banks is to virtually never think in terms of helping banks and bankers. Financial regulators’ primary task is to detect, put out of business, and deter accounting control frauds. Those are the frauds that cause catastrophic individual failures, hyper-inflate financial bubbles, and produce our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. Accounting control frauds also produce “echo” epidemics in other professions (e.g., auditors, appraisers, and credit rating agencies) and industries, e.g., loan brokers. Fraud begets fraud and it can make fraud endemic in entire lines of business such as liar’s loans. The senior officers of investment and commercial banks spread these frauds through an industry and to other industries and professions by deliberately creating “Gresham’s” dynamics. In this context, the dynamic refers to situations in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the market. George Akerlof first used this variant of the Gresham’s dynamic in his famous article on markets for “lemons” that led to the award of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Akerlof explained that if firms that defrauded their customers gained a competitive advantage over their honest rivals private market discipline became perverse and drove honest firms into bankruptcy.

The CEOs that lead accounting control frauds create intensely criminogenic environments by shaping perverse incentives that maximize such Gresham’s dynamics among their own officers – by basing executive compensation largely on short-term reported (fictional) income. They create perverse incentives among loan officers, “independent” professionals, and other firms (e.g., loan brokers) by hiring, firing, promoting, praising, and making wealthy those that will create and “bless” their fraudulent accounting practices. The art is to suborn – not defeat – “controls” by perverting them into allies.

The senior officers that control fraudulent banks are exceptionally successful in using these Gresham’s dynamics to produce fraud epidemics and massively overstated asset values and earnings. They routinely get clean accounting opinions for financial statements that do not comply with GAAP and are deliberately contrary to reality. They routinely get grossly inflated appraisal values. They routinely got “AAA” ratings for toxic waste that was not even single “C.” They routinely got “liar’s” loan applications and appraisals that their employees and agents falsified to make them appear to have far lower loan-to-value (LTV) and debt-to-income ratios. The result was loans with a premium yield that looked (to the credulous) as if they were not exceptionally risky. The lenders could sell these fraudulent liar’s loans at a premium or keep them in portfolio and claim high (fictional) earnings. Liar’s loans, of course, produce severe adverse selection and negative expected value (losses). The fictional reported income in the near-term, however, is a “sure thing” for accounting control frauds because they do not create remotely adequate allowances for loan and lease losses (ALLL).

These unique abilities, and dangers, posed by banks that are accounting control fraud mean that regulators are the only ones that can break a Gresham’s dynamic prior to catastrophe. Regulators’ unique advantage is that they are not paid, hired, or fired by bank CEOs. This logic also explains an important exception – if banks can create a “competition” in laxity among regulators (as they did with the Office of Thrift Supervision during the recent crisis) they can crate perverse incentives that can drive laxity. The worst bank CEOs often seek to create this competition in regulatory laxity by threatening to move internationally to the weakest regulator. They also seek to create regulatory black holes that serve as safe havens for control fraud.

When financial regulators are not captured by the industry and do not seek to serve the industry, then they can serve as regulatory cops on the beat. Their function is to break the Gresham’s dynamic by making it far less likely that cheaters will prosper through fraud. Regulators are in a better position to exercise real independence than any private sector “control.” This means that vigorous financial regulators who make fighting control fraud their top priority are honest bankers’ best friends and the control frauds’ worst nightmare.

As with Adam Smith’s paradox (which works well for the local village baker and fails utterly for global banker) financial regulators can be successful only when they do not act out of any desire to help banks, but rather to serve as the regulatory cop that is passionate about enforcing the law against even the most powerful banks when they engage in intentional misconduct. By taking the profit out of fraud, successful financial regulators help honest bankers and greatly reduce the scope, length, and damage of financial crises.

All of this explains why the “reinventing government” movement (a bipartisan project of then Texas Governor Bush and Vice President Gore) was a disaster for financial regulation. We were instructed to refer to banks and bankers as our “clients.” This is the worst possible mindset for effective financial regulation. Unfortunately, key politicians are determined to recreate this disastrous mindset.

Spencer Bachus (R. Ala.), the incoming Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, told the Birmingham News: “In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”

Ron Paul (R. Tex.), asked to comment on Bachus’ statement, said: “I don’t think we need regulators. We need law and order. We need people to fulfill their contracts. The market is a great regulator, and we’ve lost understanding and confidence that the market is probably a much stricter regulator.”

The latest manifestation of this mindset was in response to Professor Elizabeth Warren’s recent congressional testimony. Dana Milbank’s March 16, 2011 column reported:

“You kept saying ‘cop on the beat, cop on the beat,’ ” complained Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who chaired the day’s hearing.

Basically, the members of the panel didn’t want the new [Consumer Financial Protection Bureau] CFPB to have anything that would displease bankers.

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-Mo.) said the agency was “the last thing that our lenders need.” Rep. Robert Dold (R-Ill.) ridiculed the “theoretical consumer protection” the agency would provide. Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.) complained that, in Warren’s agency, “consumer protection could trump safety and soundness.” 

Apparently, these politicians learned nothing useful from the crisis. The first thing honest bankers need is an end to fraudulent mortgage lending. Ending fraudulent mortgage lending does not “trump safety and soundness” – it is essential to attain and maintain safety and soundness. Liar’s loans destroyed trillions of dollars in wealth and caused many lenders to fail. They created inverse Pareto optimality – both parties were made worse off by the typical liar’s loan. The agents were the winners. Akerlof & Romer explained this dynamic in the title of their 1993 article – “Looting: the Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.” The looting causes the bank to fail (unless it is bailed out) but the senior officers walk away wealthy. Fraud is almost always a negative sum transaction – the losses exceed the gains. Accounting control fraud produced exceptional net losses at banks because the recipe for creating short-term fictional reported income also maximizes real losses.

A vigorous regulatory cop on the beat, and Elizabeth Warren is the exemplar, is exactly what honest banks and bankers need. But even honest bankers are typically Pavlovian about financial regulation. They have been taught for decades by theoclassical economists and anti-regulatory ideologues that regulation is evil. Regulators also ask embarrassing questions and criticize senior managers. So, it is the rare honest bank CEO who will publicly support vigilant regulation. If you have a psychological need to be liked by the bankers or if you think of them as your “clients” or “customers” you are unsuited to be a financial regulator because you are incapable of functioning as a cop on the beat.

The Assault on the Already Crippled SEC and CFTC Will Increase “Control Fraud”

By William K. Black

(cross-posted with Benzinga.com)

The SEC and the CFTC’s budgets are not provided by the federal budget. The agencies, as with the federal banking regulatory agencies, are funded by user fees. None of these agencies’ budgets contribute to the deficit. When these agencies fail to stop epidemics of “control fraud” the result can be a Great Recession and trillions of dollars in increased deficits. The asymmetry is so stark that anyone serious about deficits would make ensuring the effectiveness of the SEC, CFTC, and the banking regulatory agencies among their greatest priorities. Supposed deficit hawks in the House are also among the strongest proponents of cutting the SEC, CFTC, and banking regulatory agencies’ budget even though this cannot have any positive effect on deficits and is exceptionally likely to produce the next financial and economic crisis that will produce the next sharp increase in the federal deficit. This is significantly insane, and it is even more insane that no one seems to call them on their insanity.

The purported logic for slashing the SEC and CFTC budgets represents another form of insanity. The logic is that the SEC and the CFTC failed to prevent the epidemic of accounting control fraud that drove the current financial crisis, the Great Recession, and the growing budget deficit. That is true, but proves the opposite. The SEC and the CFTC failures were self-fulfilling prophecies by kindred ideologues of those now seeking to slash the SEC and CFTC budgets.

Deregulation was part of the story. The Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000 deliberately created two regulatory black holes. The Act’s primary goal was to block Brooksley Born’s efforts to protect the public from the risks of credit default swaps (CDS), but the subsidiary goal was Enron and its fellow cartel members’ desire to manipulate energy derivatives in order to produce the California energy crisis and reap monopoly rents. I have written previously about the SEC farce of supposed “comprehensive” regulation of the largest U.S. investment banking firms (designed explicitly to exempt them from comprehensive regulation by the European Union).

The larger part of the story, however, was desupervision and de facto decriminalization. My prior columns have detailed how our anti-regulatory leaders were selected precisely because they opposed vigorous enforcement of the nation’s securities and banking laws.

Collectively, the three “des” – deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization – created a crippling “systems capacity” crisis that achieved its goal of eliminating effective financial regulation in the U.S. for roughly a decade. The result of removing the regulatory system’s capacity to deal effectively with accounting control fraud was an epidemic of such fraud that caused the worst financial and economic crisis in 75 years. There is something outright obscene for the ideologues that gutted regulatory effectiveness to claim that their “success” in causing the regulatory failures justifies exacerbating those failures by budgetary cuts.

Deliberate, crippling limitations on financial regulatory budgets, staffing levels, and pay have played important roles in causing systems capacity problems in prior crises. Consider six recent financial regulatory staffing crises and the House’s ongoing attempts to worsen the SEC and the CFTC’s systems capacity problems.

1. In the savings & loan debacle, the Reagan administration froze the hiring of examiners and OMB refused to allow the agency the authority to hire any material increase in staff. Congress limited the Federal Home Loan Bank Board’s pay authority to levels materially less than its sister regulatory agencies. This mandatory pay disparity caused the Bank Board to suffer from excessive turnover, staff shortages, and inadequate staff quality. Bank Board Chairman Gray’s innovative use of the Federal Home Loan Banks to hire staff at competitive pay levels and his personal recruitment of senior banking regulators with a track record of vigorous regulation proved essential to the successful reregulation and supervision of the industry that contained that debacle before it could cause an economic crisis.

2. In the run up to the Enron era crisis, Congress limited the SEC’s pay grades to levels materially below the banking regulatory agencies. This produced the same pattern of high turnover, staff shortages, and impaired quality. Republicans in Congress repeatedly sought to exacerbate the SEC’s systems capacity crisis by reducing its budget – at a time when its regulatory duties were growing massively because of the extraordinary growth of finance.

3. In the run up to the current crisis the FDIC’s leadership, over the course of 15 years, cut the FDIC staff by more than three-quarters. The FDIC often used “early outs” to shed its most expensive staff, i.e., its most experienced staff. The combined effect was that the FDIC’s remaining staff was so grossly inadequate that it could not examine the banks. It responded to its systems incapacity by greatly reducing its non-safety and soundness examinations (particularly examinations of compliance under the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA)), by virtually ending the use of its “backup” examination authority of banks for which the FDIC was not the primary regulator, and by adopting the infamous MERIT examination system for safety and soundness examinations. MERIT was a travesty. It achieved its purported “maximum efficiency” by directing examiners not even to review a sample of bad loans. Again, this was insane – failing to examine loan quality makes examination a farce. The FDIC gutted its staff even as the need for examination and supervision grew dramatically due to the profusion of fraudulent liar’s loans and the hyper-concentration of smaller banks in commercial real estate lending.

4. The Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) also cut its staff in the run up to the current crisis. It did so even though S&Ls were the leading federally insured lenders making fraudulent liar’s loans and the need for intense examination and supervision required greatly increased staff.

5. The SEC and the CFTC suffered from severe budgetary and staffing limitations in the run up to the current crisis. Congress initially expanded the SEC’s budget and staff in response to the Enron-era crisis, but the number of SEC staff fell materially during the key years in the run up to the financial crisis. For the SEC and the CFTC, this decreased staffing was particularly harmful because the agencies faced a substantial need to provide staff to investigate the Enron-era frauds and greatly increased market manipulation at the same time that the epidemics of accounting control fraud and the underlying mortgage fraud were surging. The SEC and the CFTC also faced the overall rapid expansion of finance and technological changes in derivatives and hyper-trading. These changes caused critical inadequacies in SEC and CFTC staff levels, staff expertise, and technological resources.

6. Contemporaneously, the FBI and the Department of Justice suffered from critical staffing inadequacies to deal with the twin, related epidemics of accounting control fraud and mortgage fraud. The FBI transferred 500 FBI agents specializing in white-collar crime investigations to national security in response to the 9/11 attacks. The administration refused to allow the FBI to replace these lost white-collar specialists. The loss of the white-collar FBI agents was made far worse by the need to assign hundreds of the remaining FBI white-collar crime specialists to investigate the Enron-era accounting control frauds. The combined effect was that as late as FY 2008 there were only 180 FBI agents assigned to investigate mortgage fraud. There were 1000 FBI agents assigned to investigate S&L frauds during the debacle. Those FBI agents, working closely with the regulators, were essential to producing the over 1000 felony convictions in “major” S&L frauds committed during the debacle. The current crisis, of course, is vastly greater than the S&L debacle but we have roughly one-fifth as many FBI agents assigned to investigating the current frauds (and they are overwhelmingly assigned to relatively minor cases).

Not a single senior executive at the large fraudulent lenders making the liar’s loans has been convicted. Our most elite accounting control frauds now loot with impunity. The deliberate creation of severe systems capacity problems is an important contributor to the death of accountability and the rise of crony capitalism in the United States.

In my next column I will draw on the warnings of Lynn Turner, the SEC’s former chief accountant, about the increasing systems capacity problems at the SEC and the CFTC and the role of proposed budget cutbacks in creating the criminogenic environment that will help produce the next financial crisis. Again, none of these insane policies reduce governmental debt, but they do cause the recurrent, intensifying financial crises. Those crises caused hundreds of billions of dollars of losses in prior crises and now cause trillions of dollars of losses and deficits.

Marshall Auerback on Fox Business

Marshall Auerback appeared earlier today on Fox Business to answer the question: “Is the US really broke?”  The video can be viewed here.

William Black interviewed on KKZZ

William Black was recently interviewed on KKZZ’s Brainstormin’ with Bill Frank.  The interview can be heard here.

Deficit Spending: Time to Reframe the Debate

By Stephanie Kelton

As followers of this blog have discovered, we work within a framework that has been dubbed Modern Money Theory (MMT). The approach itself is fundamentally descriptive, although there are logical ways to apply the principles of the approach to any number of policy-oriented (i.e. prescriptive) economic problems. Above all, we are committed to describing the way government spending works in a modern money system. Once that is understood, it becomes apparent that a government with flexible exchange rates and a sovereign currency (US dollar, British pound, Mexican peso, etc.) can afford to purchase anything that is for sale in its own sovereign currency.
This means that debates about “affordability” become inapplicable. As this becomes more widely understood, we can begin to have a completely different — and vastly more important — debate about the size and role of government.  What do we, as Americans, want? Medicare for all? A job guarantee?  High-speed rail? Renewable energy?
As promoters of MMT, we are all very keen on Abba Lerner, who was one of the first to articulate the foundations of the approach. Lerner believed that the government should maintain the level of aggregate spending in the economy (either by reducing taxes, increasing its own spending or a combination of the two) at the rate consistent with full employment. We agree. This is the overarching goal. How we get there is, as I said, a matter of (political/social) choice.
But we cannot ‘get there’ until we dispense, once-and-for-all, with the erroneous belief that deficit spending is reckless and irresponsible, something akin to “fiscal child abuse”, as Kotlikoff and Burns so disgracefully characterized it.
Insteaad, just remember this fundamental accounting identity:
Private Sector Surplus = Public Sector Deficit + Current Account Surplus
For me, this is the most important identity in economics. It holds true in every nation at every point in time, and it is useful when you run thought experiments like, for example, “What will happen to the private sector’s balance sheet position if the government’s budget is cut by X% of GDP and the current account deficit remains Y% of GDP?”
So, for example, in the US we have a current account deficit of, roughly, 5% of GDP. This SUBTRACTS from the Private Sector Surplus. So, the only way the private sector can have positive net savings (i.e. a surplus) is for the government to run a deficit that is LARGER than the current account deficit. This is exactly what the government has been doing, and it is the reason the private sector has managed to sharply increase its savings in the downturn. Cutting the public sector deficit will reduce the private sector surplus one-for-one in a closed economy (i.e. one with no foreign trade and therefore no current account). It is an easy way to demonstrate that the government’s deficit is the private sector’s surplus.
So the next time someone tells you that the US government cannot “afford” to keep its promises to retirees, fund the arts, build bullet trains, and so on, ask them whether they understand any of this!
** And, no, it does not follow that because the US government “can” do something that it “should” do it.  It has the ability to puchase anything for sale in terms of its own currency.  Let us accept that point and then debate whether, when, and to what extent it should exercise this power.