Tag Archives: New financial structure

The Wingnuts go after Fannie and Freddie


By L. Randall Wray

In recent weeks the wingnut right wing ideologues have made a lot of headway in their goal of gutting Social Security. Well-funded by hedge fund manager Pete Peterson as well as right wing Washington think tanks, they have promoted the preposterous notion that our wealthy and productive economy cannot afford to take care of our elders. Now they have turned their sights on Fannie and Freddie. They argue that it is time to cut Uncle Sam out of the home mortgage market. Just as he has no role to play in providing decent pensions to our retired population, he should not help make homeownership affordable for most Americans. “Free markets” can do it all so much better than Uncle Sam can do.

Give me a break. These are the same bozos that are promoting home foreclosure and happily cheering the biggest transfer of wealth to Wall Street that the US has ever seen. Without Fannie and Freddie there would be no home financing or refinancing going on right now. Oh, right, free markets did such a good job with the subprime mortgage market, creating a global financial crisis that rivals the Great Crash of 1929. Hey, let’s reward them by getting government out of the mortgage markets so that Pete Peterson can run the whole shebang for the benefit of Wall Street. That, of course, is the real goal. Wall Street wants to get back to predatory lending as quickly as possible, and hates the competition from a newly missioned Fannie and Freddie—which have turned away from the practices that assisted rapacious private lenders from 2004 to 2008. Better close them down because Wall Street hates competition.

And, yes, let’s reduce Social Security benefits and raise payroll taxes, squeezing our seniors so that they have no choice but to let Pete Peterson charge them exorbitant fees to manage their miniscule life savings. Government is running out of keystrokes and won’t be able to afford to credit retiree bank accounts fifty years from now. Better slash Social Security now.

Ain’t it all just so convenient for the Pete Petersons of the world? Shift the blame, no matter how ridiculous the claims. Our current problems are caused by runaway Fannie and Freddie and Social Security—providing safety nets that our homeowners and seniors abused, taking advantage of poor little defenseless Goldmans and Morgans and Citibanks. That was the cause of the crisis! If we had just had more free market abuse of consumers, everything would have just been fine. Besides, government is broke. We’ve got to tighten the purse strings. Running out of cash, you know. No more keystrokes to credit bank accounts.

How about a reality check? Fannie and Freddie made no subprime loans. Indeed, they originated no loans at all. Yes, they offered insurance on privately originated mortgages, and yes, they lowered their standards. This has been carefully studied, and all analysts have reached the conclusion that Fannie and Freddie got into trouble because they catered to “free” market demands that they either insure the kinds of toxic mortgages markets wanted to provide or that they become irrelevant. The free markets wanted to do Liar loans and NINJA loans, making loans that borrowers could never service. The old fuddy duddies Fannie and Freddie would never have agreed to guarantee this trash, so they were partially privatized, with big gun, high paid CEOs hired. And just like magic, they started behaving like a Goldman or a Countrywide—maximizing CEO pay while damning the firms. Yes, that is the free market solution and my colleague Bill Black calls it control fraud. Fannie became a control fraud, just like all the big boy private financial institutions. Peterson’s solution? Promote control frauds by freeing markets.

The thing that the wingnuts cannot explain is why Fannie and Freddie—which had a history that goes back to the mid 1960s – did not encounter significant problems until they were directed by Congress to replicate a market-oriented strategy. And the wingnuts cannot explain why defaults on home mortgages were so rare until the “free markets” took over the mortgage sector. Heck, Fannie and Freddie even survived the savings and loan fiasco of the 1980s, when thrifts were “freed” to pursue free market maximization that resulted in suicide for the whole industry. It was only after 2004 when Fannie and Freddie were directed to cater to control frauds like Countrywide that they got into trouble.

Make no mistake. The wingnuts are likely to win these battles. President Obama will not put up a fight—he’s already bought the Peterson story, hook, line and sinker. Social Security is a done deal. It is going to be “reformed”. That is, it will be handed over to Pete Peterson, who will manage it right down the rat hole where all the private pensions are going. Wall Street will gamble away all the funds, whilst enriching itself with management fees. And Fannie and Freddie will be shut down so that Wall Street will have free reign in the housing market. Homeownership rates will plummet. Predatory mortgages will be the rule. Wealth will trickle up. Democratic Party coffers will be replenished. Obama will declare Social Security and Fannie and Freddie to be reformed—just like the healthcare system.

The only possible hope is that financial markets completely collapse in the next three to four months. That would discredit Pete Peterson and the wingnuts at his think tanks. It would make it possible to stop the right wing stampede and the collective amnesia about the last three years—that is, about the global financial crisis caused by free market wingnuts. Resumption of the crisis could discredit the crazy troglodyte thinking promoted at Chicago and Washington think tanks.

What is the free market path to homeownership? A subprime crisis.

What is the free market path to private pensions? Across the board collapse of commodities, real estate, and equities markets.

What is the free market alternative to Social Security? An impoverished elderly population.

What is the free market alternative to Medicare? High priced health insurance that most elderly people cannot afford.

Not to worry, all these reductions of government interference into the finely oiled free market machine will help to enrich Pete Peterson and the other funders of the wingnut think tanks.

Ok, how about a politically feasible alternative? We all know that Pete Peterson’s well-funded effort has convinced most policy makers that the federal government has run out of money, so cannot afford costly Social Security or government guarantees of mortgages. Any federal spending must be offset by tax hikes or spending cuts. Pete Peterson’s minions are fond of “infinite horizon” calculations that show that “government entitlements” will lead to shortfalls of tens of trillions of dollars. It is all nonsense, but it guides all policy making.

So here is a proposal consistent with such calculations. Let us raise Social Security benefits today to help seniors through the current depression. Let’s have a payroll tax holiday—stop collecting the taxes from employers and employees to put more pay into the hands of workers and to reduce the costs of employing them. Let us provide debt relief to homeowners so that they can keep their homes. Let us create a jobs program to put 12 million people back to work (the number of jobs created by New Deal programs).

To please the deficit hysteria crowd we will need to offset all of this spending. So let us propose that beginning in 2050 all seniors above age 65 will be ground to produce soylent green burgers, with a proviso that implementation can be postponed by majority vote of the population annually from 2050 on. For budgetary purposes, the future savings to Social Security and Medicare can be counted today, eliminating Peterson’s infinite horizon unfunded entitlements. Voters in 2050 and thereafter can decide whether they want those burgers—year-by-year so that infinite horizon forecasts will remain favorable. Each year voters will decide whether they want to eat seniors or feed them for one more year.

Personally, I don’t eat mammals, but I won’t be voting in 2050. Now, reptiles are an entirely different matter, and only discretion prevents me from naming a few that could be candidates for reptilian burgers. Bloodsucking vampire squid cakes, anyone?

Heck, no matter what we do today, it will be voters in 2050 that will decide the fate of seniors in 2050. That is what scares the Beetlejuice out of Pete Peterson—he’s afraid that American compassion and reason will triumph, hence the scaremongering to convince voters that retiring babyboomers expecting government to credit their bank accounts using keystrokes represents the biggest threat facing America today. And that is why the wingnuts think it is so important to start cutting benefits and raising payroll taxes today—to eliminate America’s most popular government program so that no one will have any alternative to Wall Street management of pensions. Yes it is unimaginatively silly—the agenda of simpletons who have no understanding of balance sheets or of sovereign currencies or of anything else that is important to the issues of Social Security or government guarantees of home mortgages. Unfortunately, these are the most dangerous kind of simpleton—with billions of dollars to throw around to get their way.

Remember Thatcher’s motto: TINA = there is no alternative to free markets. The wingnuts have learned these lessons well. Remove any alternative to Wall Street’s complete control over all aspects of life. Then TINA will be true.

I do not want to be accused of being unfair to wingnuts. There is certainly room for debate on the necessity of reforming Social Security and government guarantees of mortgages (and student loans, and small business loans, and farm loans, and veteran’s loans). One can coherently—even if repugnantly—argue that government should play no role in helping to provide seniors with a decent living standard. Declaring that any senior who is not sufficiently lucky, industrious, and foresighted to provide for her own retirement ought to live out a miserable old age is an opinion that deserves to be debated. But declaring that government simply cannot afford current law Social Security benefits it just plain ignorant—it is a position that deserves no attention. Siding with Wall Street against government protection of homeowners might be an unpopular position but it is, again, worthy of debate. Yet claiming that Fannie and Freddie as originally constituted would have contributed in an important way to the global financial crisis does not merit consideration. It is not even worthy of Fox News. It is beyond stupid. It is an outright misrepresentation of the facts.

Let Banks Choose: Bonuses or Bank Charters?

L. Randall Wray

Now here is the best idea we have seen yet. Britain’s Financial Services Authority has come up with the ultimate response to bank claims that they must pay high bonuses to the geniuses who caused the crisis. Just as Timmy Geithner claimed, while trying to protect his Wall Street handlers, UK banks always say that contracts are contracts and so no matter how repulsive it might be, they have to pay out bonuses as spelled-out in their contracts. The FSA said fine, go ahead, but if you do you will lose your license to do banking in London. In other words, it is the bank’s choice: be a bank, or pay bonuses. You cannot have it both ways (see here).

So here is the deal. President Obama should direct his administration to offer our bankers the same choice: either forgo all bonuses until the US unemployment rate drops below 5%, or lose your bank charter. Indeed, he should go further. Banks are really public-private partnerships, and bank management and other employees should not receive pay in excess of civil servant pay. Assign the appropriate civil servant pay grades to our regulated and protected banking institutions. Any banks that wish to pay higher salaries than that to retain “rocket scientists” can do so, but they will give up their bank charters. They will slip into the dark “shadow banking” sector and will lose all access to government protection.

Then adopt a strict version of the Volcker rule. Should any of those shadow banks find themselves in trouble, they will not be bailed out. Instead, they will be “resolved”—that is, shut down, with creditors paid whatever the government can recover on assets. If that rule had been in place two years ago, no more Goldman Sachs. Instead, Goldman was handed a bank charter, which allowed it to stay in business, to hoover up manufactured profits, to manipulate government policy, and to pay out bonuses using government bail-out money.

As to the complaint that banks will not be able to retain all the geniuses that helped to create the crisis, Obama’s response ought to be: Goodbye and good riddance. Go find jobs in the Caribbean. Banking does not need rocket scientists. It is basically a simple business: assess credit worthiness, make loans that have a high probability of repayment, and issue deposits. It used to be known as the “three-six-three” business: pay three percent on deposits, charge six percent on loans, and hit the golf course at three p.m. That was good banking and it did not need high remuneration. Tens of millions of Americans bought homes, started businesses, and sent their kids to college. It was good enough.

“Why is Obama Championing Bush’s Financial Wrecking Crew?”

By William K. Black

“First Published on New Deal 2.0
Tom Frank’s book: The Wrecking Crew explains how the Bush administration destroyed effective government and damaged our social fabric and our economy. The Obama administration has chosen to reward two of the worst leaders of Bush’s crew – Geithner and Bernanke – with promotion and reappointment. Embracing the Wrecking Crew’s most destructive members has further damaged the economy and caused increasing political and moral injury to the administration.

Last week was a bad one for Geithner and Bernanke. Senator Dodd said that Bernanke’s confirmation was no longer a done deal. The House Financial Services Committee revolted against the administration, the Fed, and Chairman Barney Frank. It voted for a strong bill to audit the Fed. Senate Banking Chairman Schumer went to a conference at Columbia University – where a generation of students salivated at the prospects of Wall Street wealth – and was overwhelmed by an audience denouncing the continuing stranglehold of the finance industry over successive administrations and the Congress. Neither Barney’s blarney nor Schumer’s schmooze was any avail before an outraged public.


The administration promptly secured a column in the Washington Post claiming that the effort to fire Geithner “buoy[ed]” him because, as the subtitle to the article explained: “Even ex-Bush aides sympathetic, sources say.” The article didn’t note that Geithner is an “ex-Bush” senior official who, with his fellow “ex-Bush aides” (particularly Bernanke and Paulson) produced a chain of disasters: the bubble, an “epidemic of mortgage fraud” by lenders, the Great Recession, and the scandalous TARP and AIG bailouts. Of course they’re “sympathetic” to a fellow member of the Wrecking Crew that destroyed effective regulation and turned the nation over to Wall Street. The craziest part of the story is that the anonymous Obama administration flack that spread this anecdote believes that we should support Geithner because his fellow members of the Bush Wrecking Crew empathize with him because they too have been criticized for wrecking the economy.

The Washington Post article then offers a metaphor that serves as an apology for the Bush Wrecking Crew. The metaphor is driving over a cliff.

“Secretary Geithner has helped steer the American economy back from the brink, and is now leading the effort on financial reform,” White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

Geithner pushed back against Republicans who questioned his performance, telling them, “you gave this president an economy falling off the cliff.”

“You” – how about “we”? Bush’s financial Wrecking Crew “gave this president an economy falling off the cliff.” Geithner was President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York from October 23, 2003 until President Obama chose him as his Treasury Secretary. He was supposed to be the lead regulator of many of the largest bank holding companies. His failures as a regulator were a major cause of the “economy falling off the cliff.” Bernanke held prominent positions in the Bush administration from 2002 to the end of the administration and failed as a regulator and as an economist. Geithner and Bernanke failed to regulate even after the FBI publicly warned in September 2004 that (1) there was an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud and (2) it would lead to a financial crisis if it were not contained. Their refusal to take responsibility for the harm they did our nation as leaders of Bush’s financial Wrecking Crew adds to their unsuitability. Rewarding their perennial failures with a promotion and reappointment represents a dereliction of duty by the Obama administration.

The administration apologists praise Geithner and Bernanke for “steer[ing] the American economy back from the brink.” Greenspan, Paulson, Bernanke, and Geithner were the leaders of Bush’s financial Wrecking Crew. They were the guys blinded by their pro Wall Street ideology that drove the car 120 mph down an icy mountain road and lost control of it. They took us to the “brink” of running “off the cliff” and creating the Second Great Depression. The bizarre claim is that we should praise them because they, and Wall Street, only wrecked the economy – they haven’t (yet) utterly destroyed it. Under their metaphor, we’re supposed to cheer Geithner and Bernanke because once they finally figured out that they were careening toward the cliff they decided to sideswipe a row of trees in order to avoid going off the cliff. They wrecked the car but they walked away from the crash without a scratch. If your teenager gets drunk, speeds, crashes into a school bus (injuring dozens of kids), and flips the Ford Focus – but walks away from the crash – you don’t praise him, give him the keys to the family minivan, and have him drive the soccer team to practices. You take all the keys away from him and ground him.

The Obama administration promoted Bush’s architects of the financial disaster and demands that we hail them as heroes. President Bush was ridiculed for saying: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” FEMA administrator Michael Brown stood by while Hurricane Katrina reduced a single large city to ruin. Geithner and Bernanke stood by while scores of large cities were devastated.

I suggest that we will build on the momentum we’ve achieved on the Fed audit by making the following issues our near term financial priorities:

1. Fire the senior leaders of Bush’s and Clinton’s financial Wrecking Crews and stop treating them as financial experts. President Obama should not reappoint Bernanke as Fed Chairman. He should dismiss Geithner and Summers and cease to take any advice from Rubin. Replace them with the Reconstruction Crew – people with a track record of getting things right and being effective economists, regulators, and prosecutors. Members of Bush’s financial Wrecking Crew run far too many regulatory agencies, often as “Actings.” They can, and should, be replaced promptly.

2. End “too big to fail.” These banks are “systemically dangerous institutions” (SDIs). They should not be allowed to grow, they should be shrunk to the point that they no longer pose systemic risk, and they should be subject to vigorous regulation while shrinking. They are too big to manage and too big to regulate. They are ticking time bombs that will cause recurrent global crises as long as they are SDIs.

3. Adopt Representative Kaptur’s proposed to provide the FBI with at least 1000 additional white-collar specialists. Senator Durbin and (then) Senator Obama made a similar proposal several years ago.

4. End the perverse executive compensation systems that reward failure and fraud. The private sector has made compensation worse since the crisis. Modern executive compensation creates a virtually perfect crime – “accounting control fraud.” Until we fix the perverse incentives of executive compensation we will have recurrent epidemics of fraud and global financial crises.
5. Kill TARP and PPIP. Use the funds to help honest homeowners that would otherwise lose their homes because of predatory loan terms.

6. Make the Federal Reserve System public. It is a largely private structure that creates intense conflicts of interest and ensures that it is controlled by the systemically dangerous institutions. We have already decided that such a structure is inherently improper. The Federal Home Loan Bank System was set up along the same institutional lines and suffered from the same conflicts of interest. Congress ordered an end to these conflicts in the 1989 FIRREA legislation. It should end private control of the Fed.

7. Defeat any proposal to make the Fed the “Uberregulator.” The Fed, for inherent institutional reasons, is unsuited to be the “systemic risk regulator.” The Fed has never cared about regulation. The Fed cares about monetary policy and (theoclassical) economic theory and research. Regulation is, at best, a tertiary concern. Its economists wrote frequently about systemic risk – but missed the obvious, massive systemic risk of the financial bubble and the epidemic of accounting control fraud. Its policies intensified rather than restricting systemic risk. Theoclassical economists have no effective theories (or policies) to deal with bubbles or epidemics of accounting control fraud. Greenspan, Bernanke, and Geithner epitomize the Fed’s inability to recognize or reduce systemic risk. Their policies consistently increased systemic risk. Greenspan didn’t believe that the Fed should act against fraud. Geithner testified before Congress that he had never been a regulator (a true statement – but one that should have gotten him fired rather than promoted). Bernanke praised the subprime loans that caused the crisis and were so often fraudulent.

8. Sever the Consumer Financial Product Agency portion from the broader (and deeply flawed) regulatory reform bills in the House and Senate and adopt it into law. Revise the broader bill to strip out its many anti-reform provisions.

9. End the waste of long-term unemployment. Anyone able and willing to work should be employed by the government as an employer of last resort and should help repair our crumbling infrastructure. Paying people to do nothing or allowing them to become homeless (the status quo) is an insane system.

10. Adopt a $250 billion revenue sharing program. American state and local governments are in economic crisis. They are slashing spending at the worst possible time when their services are most vital and when cutting spending is pro-cyclical and will delay our recovery from the Great Recession. Revenue sharing was a Republican initiative. Republicans and “Blue Dog” Democrats killed the revenue sharing provisions of the administration’s proposed Stimulus bill. That was an enormous mistake. The federal government is not like a state government (or a household). It is a sovereign government with its own currency and a central bank. It can – and should – run large deficits during deep recessions, but the states and local governments cannot. Revenue sharing is the ideal answer to the crisis and it is an answer with an impeccable conservative pedigree. State and local governments should come together and demand a program to offset the state and local cutbacks – roughly $250 billion. (The Obama administration’s claim that reducing the deficit should be a priority – at a time when unemployment has reached tragic levels – is economically illiterate. It repeats the error that FDR made when he listened to conservative economic advisors and slashed the budget deficit during the Great Depression – causing a surge in unemployment and the extension of the depression. The large federal deficits of World War II reversed the policies of his conservative economic advisors and ended the Great Depression.)

The Global Reserve Currency

From the Financial Times by Michael Hudson:

“For starters, the six countries intend to trade in their own currencies so as to get the benefit of mutual credit, rather than give it to the US. In recent months China has struck bilateral deals with Brazil and Malaysia to trade in renminbi rather than the dollar, sterling or euros.

Many foreigners see the US as a lawless nation. How else to characterise a country that holds out a set of laws for others – on war, debt repayment and the treatment of prisoners – but ignores them itself?

The US is the world’s largest debtor, yet has avoided the pain of “structural adjustments” imposed on other debtor nations. US interest rate and tax reductions in the face of exploding trade and budget deficits are seen as the height of hypocrisy in view of the austerity programmes that the “Washington consensus” has forced on other countries via the International Monetary Fund and other vehicles. The US tells debtor economies to sell off their public utilities and natural resources, raise their interest rates and increase taxes while gutting their social safety nets to squeeze out money to pay creditors.”

Financial Architecture Fundamentals

Click here to view Warren Mosler’s presentation on financial architecture fundamentals.

Minsky and the Regulation of the Financial System

Click here to read Jan Kregel’s presentation at the 18th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference.