Video of Dr. Kelton’s lecture at the 1st Fiscal Sustainability Teach-In and Counter-Conference, April 2010, courtesy of NetRootsMass.
For additional content, including audio, slideshow, and transcript click here.
William K. Black and L. Randall Wray
Our own William Black was interviewed on MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan Show regarding mortgage fraud.
Marshall Auerback was interviewed on BNN’s SqueezePlay Friday regarding the meeting of the G20’s finance ministers and Secretary Geithner’s policy proposals.
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A government review of botched foreclosure paperwork so far has found that the problems do not pose a “systemic” threat to the financial system, a top Obama administration official said Wednesday.
Yes, you heard him correctly. HUD reviewed the “paperwork” problem to see whether it threatened the banks – not the homeowners who were the victims of foreclosure fraud. But it got worse, for the second point was how the government would respond to the epidemic of foreclosure fraud.
The Justice Department is leading an investigation of possible crimes involving mortgage fraud.
That language was carefully chosen to sound reassuring. But the fact is that despite our pleas the FBI has continued its “partnership” with the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). The MBA is the trade association of the “perps.” It created a facially ridiculous definition of “mortgage fraud.” Under the definition the lenders – who led the mortgage frauds – are the victims. The FBI still parrots this long discredited “definition.” That is one of the primary reasons why – in complete contrast to prior financial crises – the Justice Department has not convicted a single senior officer of the large nonprime lenders who directed, committed, and profited enormously from the frauds.
Note that the Justice Department was not investigating foreclosure fraud. HUD Secretary Donovan’s statement shows why:
“We will not tolerate business as usual in the mortgage market,” he said. “Where there have been mistakes made or errors, we will hold those entities, those institutions, accountable to stop those processes, review them and fix them as quickly as possible.”
Note the language: “mistakes”, “errors”, “processes” (following the initial use of “paperwork”). No mention of “fraud”, “felony”, “criminal investigations”, or “prosecutions” for the tens of thousands of felonies that representatives of the entities foreclosing on homes have admitted that they committed. Note that Donovan does not even demand that the felons remedy the harm caused by their past fraudulent foreclosures. Donovan wants them to “fix” “processes” – not repair the harm their frauds caused to their victims.
The fraudulent CEOs looted with impunity, were left in power, and were granted their fondest wish when Congress, at the behest of the Chamber of Commerce, Chairman Bernanke, and the bankers’ trade associations. This troika successfully extorted the professional Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to turn the accounting rules into a farce that allowed the banks (and the Fed, which has taken over a trillion dollars in toxic mortgages as wholly inadequate collateral) to refuse to recognize hundreds of billions of dollars of losses. The accounting scam produces enormous fictional “income” and “capital” at the banks. The fictional income produces real bonuses to the CEOs that make them even wealthier. The fictional bank capital allows the regulators to evade their statutory duties under the Prompt Corrective Action (PCA) law to close the insolvent and failing banks.
The inflated asset values allow the Fed and the administration to ignore the Fed’s massive loss exposure and allow Treasury’s propaganda claiming that TARP resolved all the problems – at virtually no cost. Donovan claims that we have held the elite frauds accountable – we have done the opposite. We have made the CEOs of the largest financial firms – typically already among the 500 wealthiest Americans – even wealthier. We have rewarded fraud, incompetence, and venality by our most powerful elites.
If the government does not hold the fraudulent CEOs responsible, who is supposed to stop the epidemic of elite financial fraud? The Obama administration has the answer – the fraudulent CEOs – at a time of their choosing. You can’t make this stuff up.
But ultimately resolving the problems is not the government’s responsibility, said Michael Barr, assistant Treasury secretary for financial institutions.“Fundamentally, this is up to the banks and the servicers to fix,” he said. “They can fix it as fast as they feel like.”
So who is Michael Barr and why is saying things on behalf of the Obama administration that make it appear to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of the fraudulent lenders and servicers? He’s a Rubin protégé and he’s the senior Treasury official for banking policy.
We have a different policy view. We believe that only the government can stop fraud from growing to catastrophic levels and that among the government’s highest responsibilities is to provide the regulatory “cops on the beat” with the competence, resources, courage, and integrity to take on our most elite frauds. We believe that anything less is a travesty that causes tens of millions of Americans to be defrauded and poses a grave threat to our economy and democracy.
Prompt Corrective Action
By L. Randall Wray (via Benzinga, where it first appeared)
We have long known that lender fraud was rampant during the real estate boom. The FBI began warning of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud as early as 2004. We know that mortgage originators invented “low doc” and “no doc” loans, encouraged borrowers to take out “liar loans”, and promoted “NINJA loans” (no income, no job, no assets, no problem!). All of these schemes were fraudulent from the get-go. Property appraisers were involved, paid to overvalue real estate. That is fraud. The securitizers packaged trash into bundles that ratings agencies blessed with the triple A seal of approval. By their own admission, raters worked with securitizers to provide the rating desired, never looking at the loan tapes to see what they were rating. Fraud. Venerable investment banks like Goldman Sachs packaged the trashiest securities into collateralized debt obligations at the behest of hedge fund managers–who were allowed to choose the most toxic of the toxic waste—then sold the CDOs on to their own customers and allowed the hedge funds to bet against them. More fraud.
Indeed, the largest financial institutions were run by their management as what my colleague Bill Black calls “control frauds”. That is, the banks used accounting fraud to manufacture fake profits so that they could pay huge bonuses to top management. The latest data out on Wall Street bonuses show that these institutions are still run as control frauds, with another record year of bonuses paid by cooking the books. The fraud continues unabated.
This is the biggest scandal in human history. Indeed, all previous scandals from around the globe combined cannot even touch this one in terms of scale and scope and stench. This is the mother of all frauds and it will be etched into the history books for all time.
Many have called for a national moratorium on foreclosures. Even some of the banks that have been run as control frauds have voluntarily stopped foreclosing. And yet President Obama, ever the centrist, has taken sides with the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, which warns that “it would be catastrophic to impose a system-wide moratorium on all foreclosures and such actions could do damage to the housing market and the economy”.
No, it would expose the securities industry, itself, as the chief architect of the biggest scandal in human history.
Now we know that it was not just the mortgage brokers, and the appraisers, and the ratings agencies, and the accountants, and the investment banks that were behind the fraud. It was the digitization process itself that was fraudulent. Indeed, the securities themselves are fraudulent. Many, perhaps most, maybe all of them.
Some are trying to argue that this is just a matter of some missing paperwork. A moratorium would allow the banks to get all their ducks in a row so that they can supply all the documents needed to foreclose.
However, as reported by Ellen Brown (at Web of Debt) and by Yves Smith (at Naked Capitalism), the paperwork does not exist. Worse, as Yves has discovered, the banks are furiously working to manufacture documents, aided and abetted by companies like DocX that specialize in “document recovery solutions”—for a fee they will create fraudulent documents that banks can use in court.
The banks would like us to believe that in the speculative frenzy of the real estate boom they “forgot” to do some of the required paperwork. That is not likely. The absence of the documents was required to run the scam.
Recall that the banks invented “no doc” mortgages. This was not at the behest of no-account borrowers, high school dropouts with bad credit histories who were duping investment bankers into making mortgage loans they could not repay. No, these mortgages were created and endorsed by originators and securitizers and credit raters to create a patina of “plausible deniability” to be used later in court when they were sued for fraud by investors who bought the securities and by the borrowers who could not possibly service the mortgages. Because if the originators had ever requested the documentation from borrowers it would have demonstrated that the mortgages and the securities were frauds.
Similarly, the paperwork required for the securities was never done because the securities were fraudulent. Yves helps to explains why. The trust that purportedly underlies a mortgage backed security must hold the “note”—the borrower’s IOU (in 45 US states the mortgage that is a lien on the property is an “accessory” to the note, and is not sufficient to do a foreclosure). If the note is not conveyed to the trustee (usually before closing but sometimes up to 90 days after signing) the securities are no good.
This is not just some pesky little rule imposed by a pin-headed regulator. This is IRS code. As reported by Brown, MBSs are typically pooled through a Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit (REMIC) that must according to the Internal Revenue Code hold all the paperwork demonstrating a complete chain of title. Done properly, taxes are avoided. Since a number of intermediaries are usually involved from the mortgage originator through to the trustee of the REMIC, there must be endorsements all along the line. However, it now appears that most of the original notes are still held in the loan originator warehouses. There are no endorsements. The trustees do not have the notes. Can anyone say “tax fraud”?
So why weren’t the notes conveyed to the REMICs? There seem to be two possibilities—probably both of them correct. Karl Denninger at MarketTicker believes it was because the REMIC trustees feared an audit by investors in the securities. If the documentation existed, it would show that the mortgage loans were fraudulent. Far better to “lose” the docs, then later manufacture new ones for the foreclosure.
According to Brown (quoting Steve Liesman and Neil Garfield), the other possibility is that the tranching process actually prohibited assignment of the notes to the REMICs. Bundles of mortgages of varying quality would be tranched into a variety of securities, say from AAA to BBB. But no individual mortgage is actually assigned to a particular tranche—until it defaults. When one defaults, it is assigned to a lower tranche security and then the foreclosure process begins. This means that from inception of that BBB security, there was no way to assign a note to the trustee because the trustee did not know in advance which mortgage would default. The REMIC trustees tried to get around that by using a dummy conduit called MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration System) that would “hold” the mortgages and assign them to the proper tranches later.
But they do not have the paperwork either, and some courts have rejected their claims as owners.
This is a complete mess. What President Obama must understand is that fraud is endemic at every level of the home finance food chain. We were long told that securitized mortgages cannot be modified because of the complexity involved—modification of most mortgages would require consent of the holders of the securities that each have a piece of the mortgage. But actually it is impossible to tell how many—if any—of these securities holders have a legitimate claim on any of the mortgages. Simply imposing a moratorium will not be enough—it will just give the banks time to manufacture false documents, encouraging even more fraud. Meanwhile, half of all homeowners with mortgages are already underwater or are within spitting distance of being underwater. Many of these are drowning because the epidemic of fraud perpetrated by financial institutions destroyed our economy and caused housing prices to collapse.
The President needs to try a different approach, consisting of the following series of steps:
1. Declare a national bank holiday that would close the biggest financial institutions—say, the top dozen or so. Send in the supervisors to examine their books to uncover fraud. Determine which ones are insolvent and resolve them. While resolving them, net their claims on one another (including derivatives). Do not allow any insolvent institutions to reopen, and do not use the resolution process to merge institutions (we don’t need even bigger “too big to fail” banks). Prosecute the crooks and jail the guilty.
2. Stop all foreclosures. Investigate and prosecute all institutions that have been selling or buying fake documents to be used in foreclosures. Prosecute the crooks and jail the guilty.
3. Announce that all homeowners who occupied their homes on October 1, 2010 will be allowed to remain in their homes indefinitely. Create a national mediation board to adjust all mortgage payments to “owner’s equivalent rent”—the fair value of rent for the home. Establish a fund to provide rental assistance to keep low income homeowners in their homes.
4. Give purported mortgage holders 30 days to produce the original notes; if they cannot find them, hand the homes over to the owner-occupants—free and clear of debt.
5. Create a process to allow securities holders to sue for recovery of value. This must be national—state courts will not be able to handle the case load.
6. Direct the GSEs to refinance mortgages at a low fixed rate. Mortgages would be provided against real estate appraised at fair market value to any borrower for a primary residence. The GSEs would pay holders of existing mortgages only current fair market value. Those holding these mortgages can seek redress through the process outlined in step 5. Only in the case of borrower fraud would the homeowner be held responsible for losses attributed to the refinancing.
7. There will be fall-out from losses. It is better to deal with the collateral damage directly than to prop up the control fraud banks. For example, pension funds hold toxic waste securities as well as equities in the control fraud banks, and by all reasonable accounting the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation is already insolvent. But it is better to directly bail-out pensions than to maintain the charade that fraudulently created securities have value.
Bill Black likes to joke that economists are afraid to use the “F” word (fraud). The President must come to realize that there is no other word that can be applied to the US home finance system. Until we deal with the fraud we will never resolve this financial crisis.
(Go to www.nakedcapitalism.com for Yves Smith, “4ClosureFraud posts lender processing services mortgage document fabrication sheet”, October 3, 2010; and to www.webofdebt.com for Ellen Brown, “Foreclosuregate and Obama’s ‘pocket veto’”, October 7, 2010.)
Right now, anyone who does not comply gets fined, but, as we know, fines are not easy to enforce.
*WM*: Okay, so you put up a lot of things there. So I’ll start from the beginning. First of all, for the U.S., I’m talking about restoring income for people working for a living which will raise the sales in the private sector right now, so it’s not a question of government. You talk about stimulus, but I’m not talking about adding stimulus. I’m talking about removing drag. You can’t get something for nothing. If you have somebody running and a plastic bag falls over his head that slows him down you can remove that plastic bag. We are still limited by our productive potential, and what we have now are restrictive policies that are keeping us from achieving it. Restrictive policies are demand leakages. In the U.S., there is a powerful incentive not to spend your income as this goes into a pension fund, and in Europe you have the same types of things that reduce aggregate demand. The only way any sector can successfully “net save” is if another sector goes into deficit, so what the government is doing when it lowers taxes or increases spending, depending on what the case may be, is filling the hole in demand created by the demand leakages.
My proposal for the EU doesn’t increase anyone’s spending. All it does is this: As long as countries are in compliance with spending limits set by the EU, they receive the allocation. As soon as they are not in compliance, they risk losing this payment, in which case the market will severely punish them and cut them off. So, to address your questions, I am not advocating any excess spending stimulus beyond just making up for the drags created by what I call “saving desires” and “demand leakages” which are largely a function of the institutional structure.
Let me just say it in one more way. A government like the U.S. has to determine what the right size of government is. For example: what is the right size for the legal system? You don’t want to have to wait two years to get a court date, but you don’t want to have people calling you up asking you come to court because there are a lot of vacancies, so maybe the right waiting period is, say, 60 days. So you then size your legal system and your legal employees for that kind of public service.
Equally, you have to size the military for what the mission is. You have to size the whole government. *Once you’ve sized your government properly, you then have to determine the correct level of taxes that is needed to sustain the level of private-sector activity that you want, and invariably those taxes are going to be less than the size of the government.* So, even if you want a smaller government, which is fine, you then have to have taxes that are even lower. Why? Because that’s the only way you are going to accommodate your private sector on its savings desires.
*AT*: I know where you are coming from, Warren, and I’m sure you realize that your proposal that the ECB distribute money to European governments makes many people here in Europe jump on their seats for two reasons. One: the ECB is prevented by statute from financing national governments; and two: people fear that this is further additional printing money, creating inflation. Would you mind going back to your proposal and explaining to me and the audience, step by step, what this distribution really means, where this money comes from, and where it is going, in this score-keeping exercise that is the true character of a monetary economy?
*WM*: Right, exactly. So, yes, it would require unanimous approval of EU governments. What I’m saying is that European governments have accounts at the ECB. Under my proposal, the ECB would put a credit balance into government accounts. So what will happen is that the balance in their accounts will go up. *Just because a balance on a national bank account goes up, it does not mean there is any additional spending. It is spending that causes inflation, not just the existence of a credit balance on a central bank computer.* But what would then happen is that in the normal course of spending, borrowing and debt management, this balance would be worked down. Not by an increased volume of spending and not by a change in anything else, but it would just be worked down because, for example, when the Greek bonds would mature, the government would be able to continue its normal spending (this would be limited by compliance with the SGP and other international agencies) without having to refinance its bonds. But once the credit balance is used up, then Greece would continue its normal refinancing, but with a level of debt reduced by about 20 percent GDP the first year.
So again this has no effect on the real economy, no effect on real spending. The only effect is that there would be fewer Greek securities outstanding, and that Greek debt levels would be lower and coming down, which would facilitate their continued funding once the credit balance is used up. So it’s purely, as you stated, an operational consideration and not a real economic consideration, and yes, *people would be afraid of things that they don’t understand*. But anyone who understood central banking from the inside at the operational level would realize that this would have absolutely no effect on inflation, employment, and income in a real economy, other than to facilitate the normal funding of national governments.
*AT*: Are you saying that the effect of such annual distribution would be like the effect of the discovery of a new gold mine every year in a country under the gold standard?
*WM*: Well, no, it’s different, because on a gold standard what we call the money supply is constrained in any case, whereas when you get to a currency it’s the opposite: the currency itself is never constrained. So you have a whole different dynamic.
Let me just expose my point from a slightly different point of view. The reason the EU can’t simply guarantee all the nations, and the ECB can’t simply guarantee all the national governments is because if they did, whoever “deficit spends” the most, wins. You would get a race to the bottom of extreme moral hazard that quickly winds up in impossible inflation. So *therehas to be some kind of mechanism to control government deficit spending for the member nations*. They did it through the SGP, that sets the 3 percent limit, and there’s no way around that dilemma. It can’t be done through market forces. It has to be done through the SGP. What they did is to leave the national government on a stand-alone basis, so there would be market discipline, but we’ve seen that that does not work either. They’ve got to get back to a situation where they are not subject to the mercy of market forces but at the same time they don’t want the moral hazard of some unlimited fiscal expansion where anybody can run a 5, 10, 20 percent deficit with inflationary effects.
*My proposal eliminates the credit risk at the national government level, so they are no longer restrained by the markets in their ability to borrow, but it makes them dependent on annual distributions from the ECB in order to maintain this freedom to fund themselves*.
And because they are dependent on the ECB’s annual check, the ECB has a policy to then be able to remove that check to impose discipline on these countries. *By having this policy tool to withhold payments, rather than implement fines, the EU would be in a much stronger position to enforce the deficit limits they need to prevent the race to the bottom of nations*.
*AT*: Your proposed ECB distribution would have the immediate effect of reducing the interest rate spread between German and Greek bonds. However, if the 3-percent deficit constraint remains in place, there is not much hope of prosperity in Europe. Do you agree?
*WM*: Right. The demand management would be based on the SGP: if they decide a 3-percent deficit is not adequate for the level of aggregate demand they may go up to 4, 5, or 6 percent or whatever level they choose. It’s always a political decision for them, and it’s always going to be a political decision. If they choose something too low, then they’re going to have higher unemployment. If they choose something too high, they’re going to have inflation. And so it’s going to be a political choice, no matter how you look at. But the thing is, how do you enforce the political choice? Right now they can’t enforce it. Right now, they’ve been enforcing it through the fining of member nations. But it doesn’t work. So they’ve lost their enforcement tool.
The other problem they have is this: because of the credit sensitivity of the national governments, when countercyclical deficits go up like now, which are needed to restore aggregate demand, output and employment, what happens is that the deficits challenge the creditworthiness of the national governments. *This is an impossible situation with national governments risking default because of the insolvency risk. They are in a completely impossible position to accomplish any of their goals. *
Whereas, reversing the situation, i.e., going from “fines as discipline” to “withholding payments as discipline” puts them in a position that is manageable. It still then requires wise management for the correct level of deficits, for the correct level of aggregate demand, but at least it’s possible. Right now, it’s unstable equilibrium, and what I am proposing switches it to a stable equilibrium, as they used to say in engineering class.
*AF*: If I understand correctly, the essence of the policies that you are suggesting, both in the U.S. and in Europe, involve a certain level of deficit spending and debt accumulation. Then one could expect the dollar/euro exchange rate not to move much because people would probably tend to dislike both currencies the same way. How would you see the interaction of these two areas with emerging markets that are in a totally different economic environment and cycle, and whose currencies are actually currently on the rise?
*WM*: Right, if you look at nations like India and even Brazil, they all have high interest rates and high deficits that help them get through. China, as well, maintains an extremely high deficit offsetting its internal savings desires. China may have overdone it, and it has to face an inflation problem, but this is a different story. *I think that the U.S. is in a far better situation than the euro zone right now, because our budget deficits do not represent the sustainability issues or credit issues*.
The EU has put its member nations in the same position as the U.S. states, as if Germany, or Greece, were like Connecticut, or California. They put all their member nations in the same position as state governments but without the federal government spending that the U.S. uses to help them out. This puts the whole burden of sustaining aggregate demand on European member nations. To get an analogy in the U.S., *if the U.S. had to run a trillion and a half million dollar deficit last year at the federal level, and if the only way that could have happened was at the state level, the U.S. would have been in much the same position as the EU, with all our states right on the edge of default.* So because we have our deficit at the federal level, instead of state level, we are in a much stronger position than the EU right now.
You may have already reviewed the mechanics of how nations like the U.S. or the U.K. do their public spending in the conference, but let me do it very quickly. When the United States spends money that it doesn’t tax, it credits the reserve account of whoever gets that money. Now, a reserve account at the central bank is nothing more than a checking account.
Let me now use the example of China so I can combine the problem of external debt with deficit spending at the same time. China gets its dollars by selling goods and services in the United States. When China gets paid, the dollars go into its checking account at the Federal Reserve Bank, and when China buys Treasury securities, all that happens is that the Federal Reserve transfers the funds from their checking account at the Federal Reserve to their securities accounts at the Federal Reserve. U.S. Treasury securities are accounted much like savings accounts at a normal commercial bank. When they do that, it’s called “increasing the national debt”, although when it’s in their checking account it doesn’t count as national debt. The whole point is that the spending of dollars by the federal government is nothing more than the Federal Reserve Bank changing numbers off in someone’s reserve account. The person doing this at the Treasury doesn’t care if funds are in the reserve account at the central bank; it makes no difference at all, operationally. *There is no operational connection between spending, taxing, and debt management.* Operationally, they are completely distinct. And the way any government like the United States or the U.K. or Japan pays off its debt is the same: just transfer funds from someone’s security accounts back to the reserve accounts at your own central bank, that’s it. And this happens every week with hundreds of billions of dollars. None of this acts as an operational constraint on government spending. There is no solvency issue. There is no default condition in the central banks’ computer.
Now, when you get to the EU, it all changes because all this has been moved down to the national government level, and it’s not at some kind of federal level the way it is in the United States. There is no default risk for the U.S., for the U.K., or for Japan where the debt is triple that of the U.S. and double that of Greece. It is all just a matter of transferring funds from one account to another in your own central bank.
*AT*: I’m glad you touched upon the question of China accumulating credits with the U.S., because this is poorly understood. Money that Chinese earn by sending merchandise to the United States are credits in the U.S., and these credit units are nonredeemable, so Chinese owners can do nothing with these things unless they use them to buy American products, and if they do, those units become profits for American firms. But there is also another possibility, which sometimes raises concerns in the larger public, and this is what happens if China should choose to get rid of these dollars by selling the U.S. securities they own. While the amount of dollars owned by foreigners doesn’t change, the price of the dollar would in fact decline. If China sells off American debt, dollar depreciation may be substantial.
*WM*: Operationally, it’s not a problem because if they bought Euros from the Deutsche Bank, we would move their dollars from their account at the Fed to the Deutsche Bank account at the Fed. The problem might be that the value of the dollar would go down. Well, one thing you’ve got to take note of is that the U.S. administration is trying to get China to revaluate currency upward, and this is no different from selling off dollars, right? So, what you are talking about (selling off dollars) is something the U.S. is trying to force to happen, would you agree with that?
*AT*: Yes!
*WM*: Okay, so we’re saying that we’re trying to force this disastrous scenario—that we must avoid at all costs—to happen. This is a very confused policy. *What would actually happen if China were to sell off dollars? Well, first of all, the real wealth of the U.S. would not change: the real wealth of any country is everything you can produce domestically at full employment plus whatever the rest of the world sends you minus what you have to send them, which we call real terms of trade.* This is something that used to be important in economics and has really gone by the wayside. And the other thing is what happens to distribution. While it doesn’t directly impact the wealth of the U.S., *the falling dollar affects distribution within U.S., distribution between those who profits from exports and those who benefit from imports.* And that can only be adjusted with domestic policy. So, number one, we are trying to make this thing happen that we are afraid of, and number two, if it does happen, it is a demand-distribution problem, and there are domestic policies to just make sure this happens the way we want it to be.
*AT*: Would you like to elaborate on another theme of today’s symposium? How do you see the income distribution effects of the U.S. fiscal package? Is it going in the right direction in your opinion?
*WM*: Well, we had 5 percent growth on the average maybe for the last 2 quarters while unemployment has continued to go up. If GDP is rising and people in the world are getting hurt, and real wages are continuing to fall, then who is getting the real growth? Well, everybody else. And so what we’ve seen from a Democratic administration is perhaps the largest transfer of real wealth from low income to high income groups in the history of the world. Now, I don’t think that was the intention of their policies but it has certainly been a result, and it comes from a government that does not understand monetary operations and a monetary system and how it works.
*AT*: Warren, what would be your first priority, the one action that you would enforce immediately to improve the current situation?
*WM*: The United States has a punishing regressive tax which we call payroll taxes. These take out a fixed percent of our income, 15.2 percent (7.6 percent paid by employees and 7.6 percent by employers), so it starts from the very first dollar you earn, and the cap is $108,000 a year. *I would immediately declare a payroll tax holiday, suspend the collection of these taxes. This would fix the economy immediately from the bottom up. A person making $50,000 a year would see an extra $325 a month in his pay check, simply by having the government stop subtracting these funds from his or her pay.*
Our economy has always worked best if people working for a living have enough take-home pay to be able to buy the goods and services that they produce. Right now, in the United States, people working for a living are so squeezed they can pay for gasoline and for food and that’s about it, maybe a little bit of their insurance payments, and so we’ve had an economic and social disaster. *The cause of the financial crisis has been people unable to make their payments.* The only difference between a Triple-A loan and “toxic assets” is whether people are making their payments or not. And you can fund the banks and restore their capital and do everything else, but it doesn’t help anyone making their payments. We’re two years into this and we’re still seeing delinquencies moving up, although they leveled off a little bit, at unthinkably high levels. Hundreds of thousands of people getting thrown out of their homes—that’s the wrong way for a Democratic administration to address a financial crisis. To fund a bank, simply stop taking the money away from people working for a living so they can make their payments and fix the financial crisis from the bottom up. *All that businesses and banks need and want at the end of the day is a market for their products; they want people who can afford to make their payments and buy their products.* So my first policy would deliver exactly that, which is what I think we need to take the first big step to reverse what’s going on.
*AT*: The action you proposed, the payroll tax holiday, entails some form of discretionary fiscal policy and this raises two questions. First, discretionary fiscal policy has been discredited. Economists like to model politicians’ behavior in a way that we cannot trust their decisions as they just aim at winning the next elections. So how do we make sure that discretionary fiscal policy would be used correctly to achieve full employment and avoid inflation?
*WM*: My proposal is not talking about discretionary spending. It’s about cutting taxes and restoring incomes for people who are actually working for a living, who are the people that at the end of the day we all depend on for our lifestyle, so it is not an increase in government spending, it is a tax cut on people working for a living. The only reason this hasn’t happened is because of what I call “the innocent fraud” (from my book, *The seven deadly innocent frauds*, available on my website), that the government has run out of money, the government is broke, the federal government has to get funding, has to get revenues from those who pay tax, or it has to borrow from China and leave it to our children to pay back. This is complete myth, and it is the only barrier between us and prosperity. Now, in terms of using excess capacity and create inflation, the theory says yes, it can happen, though I’ve never seen it in my forty years in the financial markets.
As they say, in order to get out of a hole, first you have to stop digging, right? Right now, we’ve got an enormous amount of excess capacity in the United States. Unemployment is at 10% only because they changed the way they define it. Using the old method, we have up to 22% unemployment.
The payroll tax holiday will both increase spending power and lower costs, so we get a little bit of deflationary effect as spending starts. Should there be a time when we see demand starts threatening the price level, then it can come a point where it makes sense to raise taxes, but not to pay for China, not to pay for social security, not to pay for Afghanistan (we just need to change the numbers up in bank accounts) but to cool down demand. We have to understand that taxes function to regulate aggregate demand and not to fund expenditures.
*AT*: Discretionary fiscal policy also includes discretionary changes in taxes, not only discretionary changes in spending, so how do we make sure that the political ruling class will raise taxes when needed?
*WM*: Well, right now they’re raising taxes, so they don’t seem to have much of a reluctance to do that, and they also understand that voters have an intense dislike for inflation. It’s not justified by the economic analysis, it’s just an emotional dislike for inflation. They believe it’s the government robbing people of their savings and they believe it’s morally wrong. And so they are always under intense pressure to make sure that inflation does not get out of control or they are going to lose their jobs.
But that’s the checks and balances in a democracy. It’s what the population votes for. And the American population has shown itself to vote against inflation time and time again. The population decides they want more or less inflation, it boils down to whether you believe in democracy or you don’t.
And I’m on the side to believe in democracy.
*AT*: In terms of democracy, this choice is not available to Europeans right now. The ECB has been given an institutional mandate of price stability, and the decision of what’s more evil, inflation or unemployment, has been removed from voters’ preferences on the ground that price stability is the premise to growth and full employment!
But I’m afraid our time is over. Warren, thank you very much. Although the volcano in Iceland prevented you from attending today, at least we had this opportunity to discuss via teleconference.
*WM*: Was the volcano a result of the financial crisis over there?
*AF*: It was a way for Iceland to take revenge on the Brits!
Warren, we thank you very much for making this conference possible and thank you for your time. I encourage anybody who is interested to go to your website to get a view of your most recent ideas, and all the best from this side of the Atlantic on your campaign.
*WM*: Thank you. If anyone has more questions just write to my email address [email protected] and I’ll be happy to correspond with anyone looking for more information.
*AT*: Thank you Warren.
*WM*: Okay, thank you all!
Correction: September 4, 2010
An earlier version of this article, citing American and Afghan officials, erroneously stated that the United States would contribute money to help the Kabul Bank. American officials say the United States is providing technical assistance but no funds for the bank.
The problem is that the “earlier version” was correct – the correction is incorrect. Kabul Bank has been revealed to be a “control fraud.” Control frauds occur when those that control a seemingly legitimate entity use it as a “weapon” to defraud. Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime – combined. Control frauds can also cause immense damage to a nation because they are run by financial elites that curry favor from political elites. The result is that they are often able to loot “their” banks for years with impunity. They also degrade the integrity of the entire system.
**Bill Black is also a white-collar criminologist and former financial regulator. He is the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One.
Timmy and his staff are trying to carefully parse words: it all depends on what one means when one says that Timmy worked for Goldman. If you mean by work “on Goldman’s payroll”, then technically Timmy’s employment at Goldman is yet to come. It is future tense: Timmy “will work” for Goldman. He’ll take a top management position on Wall Street when and if President Obama ever wakes up to the scandal going on at Treasury.
Until then, Timmy is just carrying water for Goldman, funneling Uncle Sam’s money to the firm in the biggest wheelbarrows he can find. He’s not “working for” Goldman—just watching out for the firm’s interests—since he is not yet technically on the payroll.
Timmy has been fighting the perception that he worked for Goldman since his career in “public service” began, working in the Reagan administration. Most of his career has been in Treasury, where he worked for Treasury Secretary Rubin, and at the NYFed where he worked closely with Treasury Secretary Paulson—both of whom had been on Goldman’s payroll.
Even Rahm Emanuel’s wife remarked at a dinner party that Timmy must look forward to returning to Goldman.
Why does everyone think Timmy worked for Goldman? Because he did, and he does. Like a good CEO, he is taking his pay in deferred compensation. When he retires from “public service”, he will go to Wall Street and he will be richly rewarded for his many years of service.
Look, Timmy, the careful parsing of words just doesn’t work. Ask Bill Clinton, who famously tried this tack, after he had said in reference to Monica “there’s nothing going on between us”:
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the–if he–if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not–that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement….Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been completely true.”
So, Timmy, is there anything going on between you and Goldman?
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