banking

What happens when a bank fails

pnrj critique of neoclassical economics, current events, inequality, macroeconomics, market failure, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Mar 19 JDN 2460023

As of March 9, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has failed and officially been put into receivership under the FDIC. A bank that held $209 billion in assets has suddenly become insolvent.

This is the second-largest bank failure in US history, after Washington Mutual (WaMu) in 2008. In fact it will probably have more serious consequences than WaMu, for two reasons:

1. WaMu collapsed as part of the Great Recession, so there was already a lot of other things going on and a lot of policy responses already in place.

2. WaMu was mostly a conventional commercial bank that held deposits and loans for consumers, so its assets were largely protected by the FDIC, and thus its bankruptcy didn’t cause contagion the spread out to the rest of the system. (Other banks—shadow banks—did during the crash, but not so much WaMu.) SVB mostly served tech startups, so a whopping 89% of its deposits were not protected by FDIC insurance.

You’ve likely heard of many of the companies that had accounts at SVB: Roku, Roblox, Vimeo, even Vox. Stocks of the US financial industry lost $100 billion in value in two days.

The good news is that this will not be catastrophic. It probably won’t even trigger a recession (though the high interest rates we’ve been having lately potentially could drive us over that edge). Because this is commercial banking, it’s done out in the open, with transparency and reasonably good regulation. The FDIC knows what they are doing, and even though they aren’t covering all those deposits directly, they intend to find a buyer for the bank who will, and odds are good that they’ll be able to cover at least 80% of the lost funds.

In fact, while this one is exceptionally large, bank failures are not really all that uncommon. There have been nearly 100 failures of banks with assets over $1 billion in the US alone just since the 1970s. The FDIC exists to handle bank failures, and generally does the job well.

Then again, it’s worth asking whether we should really have a banking system in which failures are so routine.

The reason banks fail is kind of a dark open secret: They don’t actually have enough money to cover their deposits.

Banks loan away most of their cash, and rely upon the fact that most of their depositors will not want to withdraw their money at the same time. They are required to keep a certain ratio in reserves, but it’s usually fairly small, like 10%. This is called fractional-reserve banking.

As long as less than 10% of deposits get withdrawn at any given time, this works. But if a bunch of depositors suddenly decide to take out their money, the bank may not have enough to cover it all, and suddenly become insolvent.

In fact, the fear that a bank might become insolvent can actually cause it to become insolvent, in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once depositors get word that the bank is about to fail, they rush to be the first to get their money out before it disappears. This is a bank run, and it’s basically what happened to SVB.

The FDIC was originally created to prevent or mitigate bank runs. Not only did they provide insurance that reduced the damage in the event of a bank failure; by assuring depositors that their money would be recovered even if the bank failed, they also reduced the chances of a bank run becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.


Indeed, SVB is the exception that proves the rule, as they failed largely because their assets were mainly not FDIC insured.

Fractional-reserve banking effectively allows banks to create money, in the form of credit that they offer to borrowers. That credit gets deposited in other banks, which then go on to loan it out to still others; the result is that there is more money in the system than was ever actually printed by the central bank.

In most economies this commercial bank money is a far larger quantity than the central bank money actually printed by the central bank—often nearly 10 to 1. This ratio is called the money multiplier.

Indeed, it’s not a coincidence that the reserve ratio is 10% and the multiplier is 10; the theoretical maximum multiplier is always the inverse of the reserve ratio, so if you require reserves of 10%, the highest multiplier you can get is 10. Had we required 20% reserves, the multiplier would drop to 5.

Most countries have fractional-reserve banking, and have for centuries; but it’s actually a pretty weird system if you think about it.

Back when we were on the gold standard, fractional-reserve banking was a way of cheating, getting our money supply to be larger than the supply of gold would actually allow.

But now that we are on a pure fiat money system, it’s worth asking what fractional-reserve banking actually accomplishes. If we need more money, the central bank could just print more. Why do we delegate that task to commercial banks?

David Friedman of the Cato Institute had some especially harsh words on this, but honestly I find them hard to disagree with:

Before leaving the subject of fractional reserve systems, I should mention one particularly bizarre variant — a fractional reserve system based on fiat money. I call it bizarre because the essential function of a fractional reserve system is to reduce the resource cost of producing money, by allowing an ounce of reserves to replace, say, five ounces of currency. The resource cost of producing fiat money is zero; more precisely, it costs no more to print a five-dollar bill than a one-dollar bill, so the cost of having a larger number of dollars in circulation is zero. The cost of having more bills in circulation is not zero but small. A fractional reserve system based on fiat money thus economizes on the cost of producing something that costs nothing to produce; it adds the disadvantages of a fractional reserve system to the disadvantages of a fiat system without adding any corresponding advantages. It makes sense only as a discreet way of transferring some of the income that the government receives from producing money to the banking system, and is worth mentioning at all only because it is the system presently in use in this country.

Our banking system evolved gradually over time, and seems to have held onto many features that made more sense in an earlier era. Back when we had arbitrarily tied our central bank money supply to gold, creating a new money supply that was larger may have been a reasonable solution. But today, it just seems to be handing the reins over to private corporations, giving them more profits while forcing the rest of society to bear more risk.

The obvious alternative is full-reserve banking, where banks are simply required to hold 100% of their deposits in reserve and the multiplier drops to 1. This idea has been supported by a number of quite prominent economists, including Milton Friedman.

It’s not just a right-wing idea: The left-wing organization Positive Money is dedicated to advocating for a full-reserve banking system in the UK and EU. (The ECB VP’s criticism of the proposal is utterly baffling to me: it “would not create enough funding for investment and growth.” Um, you do know you can print more money, right? Hm, come to think of it, maybe the ECB doesn’t know that, because they think inflation is literally Hitler. There are legitimate criticisms to be had of Positive Money’s proposal, but “There won’t be enough money under this fiat money system” is a really weird take.)

There’s a relatively simple way to gradually transition from our current system to a full-reserve sytem: Simply increase the reserve ratio over time, and print more central bank money to keep the total money supply constant. If we find that it seems to be causing more problems than it solves, we could stop or reverse the trend.

Krugman has pointed out that this wouldn’t really fix the problems in the banking system, which actually seem to be much worse in the shadow banking sector than in conventional commercial banking. This is clearly right, but it isn’t really an argument against trying to improve conventional banking. I guess if stricter regulations on conventional banking push more money into the shadow banking system, that’s bad; but really that just means we should be imposing stricter regulations on the shadow banking system first (or simultaneously).

We don’t need to accept bank runs as a routine part of the financial system. There are other ways of doing things.

Finance is the commodification of trust

pnrj core principles, ethics, financial fraud, public policy , , , , , , ,

Jul 18 JDN 2459414

What is it about finance?

Why is it that whenever we have an economic crisis, it seems to be triggered by the financial industry? Why has the dramatic rise in income and wealth inequality come in tandem with a rise in finance as a proportion of our economic output? Why are so many major banks implicated in crimes ranging from tax evasion to money laundering for terrorists?

In other words, why are the people who run our financial industry such utter scum? What is it about finance that it seems to attract the very worst people on Earth?

One obvious answer is that it is extremely lucrative: Incomes in the financial industry are higher than almost any other industry. Perhaps people who are particularly unscrupulous are drawn to the industries that make the most money, and don’t care about much else. But other people like making money too, so this is far from a full explanation. Indeed, incomes for physicists are comparable to those of Wall Street brokers, yet physicists rarely seem to be implicated in mass corruption scandals.

I think there is a deeper reason: Finance is the commodification of trust.

Many industries sell products, physical artifacts like shirts or televisions. Others sell services like healthcare or auto repair, which involve the physical movement of objects through space. Information-based industries are a bit different—what a software developer or an economist sells isn’t really a physical object moving through space. But then what they are selling is something more like knowledge—information that can be used to do useful things.

Finance is different. When you make a loan or sell a stock, you aren’t selling a thing—and you aren’t really doing a thing either. You aren’t selling information, either. You’re selling trust. You are making money by making promises.

Most people are generally uncomfortable with the idea of selling promises. It isn’t that we’d never do it—but we’re reluctant to do it. We try to avoid it whenever we can. But if you want to be successful in finance, you can’t have that kind of reluctance. To succeed on Wall Street, you need to be constantly selling trust every hour of every day.

Don’t get me wrong: Certain kinds of finance are tremendously useful, and we’d be much worse off without them. I would never want to get rid of government bonds, auto loans or home mortgages. I’m actually pretty reluctant to even get rid of student loans, despite the large personal benefits I would get if all student loans were suddenly forgiven. (I would be okay with a system like Elizabeth Warren’s proposal, where people with college degrees pay a surtax that supports free tuition. The problem with most proposals for free college is that they make people who never went to college pay for those who did, and that seems unfair and regressive to me.)

But the Medieval suspicion against “usury“—the notion that there is something immoral about making money just from having money and making promises—isn’t entirely unfounded. There really is something deeply problematic about a system in which the best way to get rich is to sell commodified packages of trust, and the best way to make money is to already have it.

Moreover, the more complex finance gets, the more divorced it becomes from genuinely necessary transactions, and the more commodified it becomes. A mortgage deal that you make with a particular banker in your own community isn’t particularly commodified; a mortgage that is sliced and redistributed into mortgage-backed securities that are sold anonymously around the world is about as commodified as anything can be. It’s rather like the difference between buying a bag of apples from your town farmers’ market versus ordering a barrel of apple juice concentrate. (And of course the most commodified version of all is the financial one: buying apple juice concentrate futures.)

Commodified trust is trust that has lost its connection to real human needs. Those bankers who foreclosed on thousands of mortgages (many of them illegally) weren’t thinking about the people they were making homeless—why would they, when for them those people have always been nothing more than numbers on a spreadsheet? Your local banker might be willing to work with you to help you keep your home, because they see you as a person. (They might not for various reasons, but at least they might.) But there’s no reason for HSBC to do so, especially when they know that they are so rich and powerful they can get away with just about anything (have I mentioned money laundering for terrorists?).

I don’t think we can get rid of finance. We will always need some mechanism to let people who need money but don’t have it borrow that money from people who have it but don’t need it, and it makes sense to have interest charges to compensate lenders for the time and risk involved.

Yet there is much of finance we can clearly dispense with. Credit default swaps could simply be banned, and we’d gain much and lose little. Credit default swaps are basically unregulated insurance, and there’s no reason to allow that. If banks need insurance, they can buy the regulated kind like everyone else. Those regulations are there for a reason. We could ban collateralized debt obligations and similar tranche-based securities, again with far more benefit than harm. We probably still need stocks and commodity futures, and perhaps also stock options—but we could regulate their sale considerably more, particularly with regard to short-selling. Banking should be boring.

Some amount of commodification may be inevitable, but clearly much of what we currently have could be eliminated. In particular, the selling of loans should simply be banned. Maybe even your local banker won’t ever really get to know you or care about you—but there’s no reason we have to allow them to sell your loan to some bank in another country that you’ve never even heard of. When you make a deal with a bank, the deal should be between you and that bank—not potentially any bank in the world that decides to buy the contract at any point in the future. Maybe we’ll always be numbers on spreadsheets—but at least we should be able to choose whose spreadsheets.

If banks want more liquidity, they can borrow from other banks—themselves, taking on the risk themselves. A lending relationship is built on trust. You are free to trust whomever you choose; but forcing me to trust someone I’ve never met is something you have no right to do.

In fact, we might actually be able to get rid of banks—credit unions have a far cleaner record than banks, and provide nearly all of the financial services that are genuinely necessary. Indeed, if you’re considering getting an auto loan or a home mortgage, I highly recommend you try a credit union first.

For now, we can’t simply get rid of banks—we’re too dependent on them. But we could at least acknowledge that banks are too powerful, they get away with far too much, and their whole industry is founded upon practices that need to be kept on a very tight leash.

Selling debt goes against everything the free market stands for

pnrj core principles, ethics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457555

I don’t think most people—or even most economists—have any concept of just how fundamentally perverse and destructive our financial system has become, and a large chunk of it ultimately boils down to one thing: Selling debt.

Certainly collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and their meta-form, CDO2s (pronounced “see-dee-oh squareds”), are nothing more than selling debt, and along with credit default swaps (CDS; they are basically insurance, but without those pesky regulations against things like fraud and conflicts of interest) they were directly responsible for the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing Great Recession and Second Depression.

But selling debt continues in a more insidious way, underpinning the entire debt collection industry which raises tens of billions of dollars per year by harassment, intimidation and extortion, especially of the poor and helpless. Frankly, I think what’s most shocking is how little money they make, given the huge number of people they harass and intimidate.

John Oliver did a great segment on debt collections (with a very nice surprise at the end):

But perhaps most baffling to me is the number of people who defend the selling of debt on the grounds that it is a “free market” activity which must be protected from government “interference in personal liberty”. To show this is not a strawman, here’s the American Enterprise Institute saying exactly that.

So let me say this in no uncertain terms: Selling debt goes against everything the free market stands for.

One of the most basic principles of free markets, one of the founding precepts of capitalism laid down by no less than Adam Smith (and before him by great political philosophers like John Locke), is the freedom of contract. This is the good part of capitalism, the part that makes sense, the reason we shouldn’t tear it all down but should instead try to reform it around the edges.

Indeed, the freedom of contract is so fundamental to human liberty that laws can only be considered legitimate insofar as they do not infringe upon it without a compelling public interest. Freedom of contract is right up there with freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the right of due process.

The freedom of contract is the right to make agreements, including financial agreements, with anyone you please, and under conditions that you freely and rationally impose in a state of good faith and transparent discussion. Conversely, it is the right not to make agreements with those you choose not to, and to not be forced into agreements under conditions of fraud, intimidation, or impaired judgment.

Freedom of contract is the basis of my right to take on debt, provided that I am honest about my circumstances and I can find a lender who is willing to lend to me. So taking on debt is a fundamental part of freedom of contract.

But selling debt is something else entirely. Far from exercising the freedom of contract, it violates it. When I take out a loan from bank A, and then they turn around and sell that loan to bank B, I suddenly owe money to bank B, but I never agreed to do that. I had nothing to do with their decision to work with bank B as opposed to keeping the loan or selling it to bank C.

Current regulations prohibit banks from “changing the terms of the loan”, but in practice they change them all the time—they can’t change the principal balance, the loan term, or the interest rate, but they can change the late fees, the payment schedule, and lots of subtler things about the loan that can still make a very big difference. Indeed, as far as I’m concerned they have changed the terms of the loan—one of the terms of the loan was that I was to pay X amount to bank A, not that I was to pay X amount to bank B. I may or may not have good reasons not to want to pay bank B—they might be far less trustworthy than bank A, for instance, or have a far worse social responsibility record—and in any case it doesn’t matter; it is my choice whether or not I want anything to do with bank B, whatever my reasons might be.

I take this matter quite personally, for it is by the selling of debt that, in moral (albeit not legal) terms, a British bank stole my parents’ house. Indeed, not just any British bank; it was none other than HSBC, the money launderers for terrorists.

When they first obtained their mortgage, my parents did not actually know that HSBC was quite so evil as to literally launder money for terrorists, but they did already know that they were involved in a great many shady dealings, and even specifically told their lender that they did not want the loan sold, and if it was to be sold, it was absolutely never to be sold to HSBC in particular. Their mistake (which was rather like the “mistake” of someone who leaves their car unlocked and has it stolen, or forgets to arm the home alarm system and suffers a burglary) was not to get this written into the formal contract, rather than simply made as a verbal agreement with the bankers. Such verbal contracts are enforceable under the law, at least in theory; but that would require proof of the verbal contract (and what proof could we provide?), and also probably have cost as much as the house in litigation fees.

Oh, by the way, they were given a subprime interest rate of 8% despite being middle-class professionals with good credit, no doubt to maximize the broker’s closing commission. Most banks reserved such behavior for racial minorities, but apparently this one was equal-opportunity in the worst way.Perhaps my parents were naive to trust bankers any further than they could throw them.

As a result, I think you know what happened next: They sold the loan to HSBC.

Now, had it ended there, with my parents unwittingly forced into supporting a bank that launders money for terrorists, that would have been bad enough. But it assuredly did not.

By a series of subtle and manipulative practices that poked through one loophole after another, HSBC proceeded to raise my parents’ payments higher and higher. One particularly insidious tactic they used was to sit on the checks until just after the due date passed, so they could charge late fees on the payments, then they recapitalized the late fees. My parents caught on to this particular trick after a few months, and started mailing the checks certified so they would be date-stamped; and lo and behold, all the payments were suddenly on time! By several other similarly devious tactics, all of which were technically legal or at least not provable, they managed to raise my parents’ monthly mortgage payments by over 50%.

Note that it was a fixed-rate, fixed-term mortgage. The initial payments—what should have been always the payments, that’s the point of a fixed-rate fixed-term mortgage—were under $2000 per month. By the end they were paying over $3000 per month. HSBC forced my parents to overpay on a mortgage an amount equal to the US individual poverty line, or the per-capita GDP of Peru.

They tried to make the payments, but after being wildly over budget and hit by other unexpected expenses (including defects in the house’s foundation that they had to pay to fix, but because of the “small” amount at stake and the overwhelming legal might of the construction company, no lawyer was willing to sue over), they simply couldn’t do it anymore, and gave up. They gave the house to the bank with a deed in lieu of foreclosure.

And that is the story of how a bank that my parents never agreed to work with, never would have agreed to work with, indeed specifically said they would not work with, still ended up claiming their house—our house, the house I grew up in from the age of 12. Legally, I cannot prove they did anything against the law. (I mean, other than laundered money for terrorists.) But morally, how is this any less than theft? Would we not be victimized less had a burglar broken into our home, vandalized the walls and stolen our furniture?

Indeed, that would probably be covered under our insurance! Where can I buy insurance against the corrupt and predatory financial system? Where are my credit default swaps to pay me when everything goes wrong?

And all of this could have been prevented, if banks simply weren’t allowed to violate our freedom of contract by selling their loans to other banks.

Indeed, the Second Depression could probably have been likewise prevented. Without selling debt, there is no securitization. Without securitization, there is far less leverage. Without leverage, there are not bank failures. Without bank failures, there is no depression. A decade of global economic growth was lost because we allowed banks to sell debt whenever they please.

I have heard the counter-arguments many times:

“But what if banks need the liquidity?” Easy. They can take out their own loans with those other banks. If bank A finds they need more cashflow, they should absolutely feel free to take out a loan from bank B. They can even point to their projected revenues from the mortgage payments we owe them, as a means of repaying that loan. But they should not be able to involve us in that transaction. If you want to trust HSBC, that’s your business (you’re an idiot, but it’s a free country). But you have no right to force me to trust HSBC.

“But banks might not be willing to make those loans, if they knew they couldn’t sell or securitize them!” THAT’S THE POINT. Banks wouldn’t take on all these ridiculous risks in their lending practices that they did (“NINJA loans” and mortgages with payments larger than their buyers’ annual incomes), if they knew they couldn’t just foist the debt off on some Greater Fool later on. They would only make loans they actually expect to be repaid. Obviously any loan carries some risk, but banks would only take on risks they thought they could bear, as opposed to risks they thought they could convince someone else to bear—which is the definition of moral hazard.

“Homes would be unaffordable if people couldn’t take out large loans!” First of all, I’m not against mortgages—I’m against securitization of mortgages. Yes, of course, people need to be able to take out loans. But they shouldn’t be forced to pay those loans to whoever their bank sees fit. If indeed the loss of subprime securitized mortgages made it harder for people to get homes, that’s a problem; but the solution to that problem was never to make it easier for people to get loans they can’t afford—it is clearly either to reduce the price of homes or increase the incomes of buyers. Subsidized housing construction, public housing, changes in zoning regulation, a basic income, lower property taxes, an expanded earned-income tax credit—these are the sort of policies that one implements to make housing more affordable, not “go ahead and let banks exploit people however they want”.

Remember, a regulation against selling debt would protect the freedom of contract. It would remove a way for private individuals and corporations to violate that freedom, like regulations against fraud, intimidation, and coercion. It should be uncontroversial that no one has any right to force you to do business with someone you would not voluntarily do business with, certainly not in a private transaction between for-profit corporations. Maybe that sort of mandate makes sense in rare circumstances by the government, but even then it should really be implemented as a tax, not a mandate to do business with a particular entity. The right to buy what you choose is the foundation of a free market—and implicit in it is the right not to buy what you do not choose.

There are many regulations on debt that do impose upon freedom of contract: As horrific as payday loans are, if someone really honestly knowingly wants to take on short-term debt at 400% APR I’m not sure it’s my business to stop them. And some people may really be in such dire circumstances that they need money that urgently and no one else will lend to them. Insofar as I want payday loans regulated, it is to ensure that they are really lending in good faith—as many surely are not—and ultimately I want to outcompete them by providing desperate people with more reasonable loan terms. But a ban on securitization is like a ban on fraud; it is the sort of law that protects our rights.

How following the crowd can doom us all

pnrj heuristics and biases , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457110 EDT 21:30

Humans are nothing if not social animals. We like to follow the crowd, do what everyone else is doing—and many of us will continue to do so even if our own behavior doesn’t make sense to us. There is a very famous experiment in cognitive science that demonstrates this vividly.

People are given a very simple task to perform several times: We show you line X and lines A, B, and C. Now tell us which of A, B or C is the same length as X. Couldn’t be easier, right? But there’s a trick: seven other people are in the same room performing the same experiment, and they all say that B is the same length as X, even though you can clearly see that A is the correct answer. Do you stick with what you know, or say what everyone else is saying? Typically, you say what everyone else is saying. Over 18 trials, 75% of people followed the crowd at least once, and some people followed the crowd every single time. Some people even began to doubt their own perception, wondering if B really was the right answer—there are four lights, anyone?

Given that our behavior can be distorted by others in such simple and obvious tasks, it should be no surprise that it can be distorted even more in complex and ambiguous tasks—like those involved in finance. If everyone is buying up Beanie Babies or Tweeter stock, maybe you should too, right? Can all those people be wrong?

In fact, matters are even worse with the stock market, because it is in a sense rational to buy into a bubble if you know that other people will as well. As long as you aren’t the last to buy in, you can make a lot of money that way. In speculation, you try to predict the way that other people will cause prices to move and base your decisions around that—but then everyone else is doing the same thing. By Keynes called it a “beauty contest”; apparently in his day it was common to have contests for picking the most beautiful photo—but how is beauty assessed? By how many people pick it! So you actually don’t want to choose the one you think is most beautiful, you want to choose the one you think most people will think is the most beautiful—or the one you think most people will think most people will think….

Our herd behavior probably made a lot more sense when we evolved it millennia ago; when most of your threats are external and human beings don’t have that much influence over our environment, the majority opinion is quite likely to be right, and can often given you an answer much faster than you could figure it out on your own. (If everyone else thinks a lion is hiding in the bushes, there’s probably a lion hiding in the bushes—and if there is, the last thing you want is to be the only one who didn’t run.) The problem arises when this tendency to follow the ground feeds back on itself, and our behavior becomes driven not by the external reality but by an attempt to predict each other’s predictions of each other’s predictions. Yet this is exactly how financial markets are structured.

With this in mind, the surprise is not why markets are unstable—the surprise is why markets are ever stable. I think the main reason markets ever manage price stability is actually something most economists think of as a failure of markets: Price rigidity and so-called “menu costs“. If it’s costly to change your price, you won’t be constantly trying to adjust it to the mood of the hour—or the minute, or the microsecond—but instead trying to tie it to the fundamental value of what you’re selling so that the price will continue to be close for a long time ahead. You may get shortages in times of high demand and gluts in times of low demand, but as long as those two things roughly balance out you’ll leave the price where it is. But if you can instantly and costlessly change the price however you want, you can raise it when people seem particularly interested in buying and lower it when they don’t, and then people can start trying to buy when your price is low and sell when it is high. If people were completely rational and had perfect information, this arbitrage would stabilize prices—but since they’re not, arbitrage attempts can over- or under-compensate, and thus result in cyclical or even chaotic changes in prices.

Our herd behavior then makes this worse, as more people buying leads to, well, more people buying, and more people selling leads to more people selling. If there were no other causes of behavior, the result would be prices that explode outward exponentially; but even with other forces trying to counteract them, prices can move suddenly and unpredictably.

If most traders are irrational or under-informed while a handful are rational and well-informed, the latter can exploit the former for enormous amounts of money; this fact is often used to argue that irrational or under-informed traders will simply drop out, but it should only take you a few moments of thought to see why that isn’t necessarily true. The incentives isn’t just to be well-informed but also to keep others from being well-informed. If everyone were rational and had perfect information, stock trading would be the most boring job in the world, because the prices would never change except perhaps to grow with the growth rate of the overall economy. Wall Street therefore has every incentive in the world not to let that happen. And now perhaps you can see why they are so opposed to regulations that would require them to improve transparency or slow down market changes. Without the ability to deceive people about the real value of assets or trigger irrational bouts of mass buying or selling, Wall Street would make little or no money at all. Not only are markets inherently unstable by themselves, in addition we have extremely powerful individuals and institutions who are driven to ensure that this instability is never corrected.

This is why as our markets have become ever more streamlined and interconnected, instead of becoming more efficient as expected, they have actually become more unstable. They were never stable—and the gold standard made that instability worse—but despite monetary policy that has provided us with very stable inflation in the prices of real goods, the prices of assets such as stocks and real estate have continued to fluctuate wildly. Real estate isn’t as bad as stocks, again because of price rigidity—houses rarely have their values re-assessed multiple times per year, let alone multiple times per second. But real estate markets are still unstable, because of so many people trying to speculate on them. We think of real estate as a good way to make money fast—and if you’re lucky, it can be. But in a rational and efficient market, real estate would be almost as boring as stock trading; your profits would be driven entirely by population growth (increasing the demand for land without changing the supply) and the value added in construction of buildings. In fact, the population growth effect should be sapped by a land tax, and then you should only make a profit if you actually build things. Simply owning land shouldn’t be a way of making money—and the reason for this should be obvious: You’re not actually doing anything. I don’t like patent rents very much, but at least inventing new technologies is actually beneficial for society. Owning land contributes absolutely nothing, and yet it has been one of the primary means of amassing wealth for centuries and continues to be today.

But (so-called) investors and the banks and hedge funds they control have little reason to change their ways, as long as the system is set up so that they can keep profiting from the instability that they foster. Particularly when we let them keep the profits when things go well, but immediately rush to bail them out when things go badly, they have basically no incentive at all not to take maximum risk and seek maximum instability. We need a fundamentally different outlook on the proper role and structure of finance in our economy.

Fortunately one is emerging, summarized in a slogan among economically-savvy liberals: Banking should be boring. (Elizabeth Warren has said this, as have Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman.) And indeed it should, for all banks are supposed to be doing is lending money from people who have it and don’t need it to people who need it but don’t have it. They aren’t supposed to be making large profits of their own, because they aren’t the ones actually adding value to the economy. Indeed it was never quite clear to me why banks should be privatized in the first place, though I guess it makes more sense than, oh, say, prisons.

Unfortunately, the majority opinion right now, at least among those who make policy, seems to be that banks don’t need to be restructured or even placed on a tighter leash; no, they need to be set free so they can work their magic again. Even otherwise reasonable, intelligent people quickly become unshakeable ideologues when it comes to the idea of raising taxes or tightening regulations. And as much as I’d like to think that it’s just a small but powerful minority of people who thinks this way, I know full well that a large proportion of Americans believe in these views and intentionally elect politicians who will act upon them.

All the more reason to break from the crowd, don’t you think?

The terrible, horrible, no-good very-bad budget bill

pnrj public policy , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457005 PST 11:52.

I would have preferred to write about something a bit cheerier (like the fact that by the time I write my next post I expect to be finished with my master’s degree!), but this is obviously the big news in economic policy today. The new House budget bill was unveiled Tuesday, and then passed in the House on Thursday by a narrow vote. It has stalled in the Senate thanks in part to fierce—and entirely justified—opposition by Elizabeth Warren, and so today it has been delayed in the Senate. Obama has actually urged his fellow Democrats to pass it, in order to avoid another government shutdown. Here’s why Warren is right and Obama is wrong.

You know the saying “You can’t negotiate with terrorists!”? Well, in practice that’s not actually true—we negotiate with terrorists all the time; the FBI has special hostage negotiators for this purpose, because sometimes it really is the best option. But the saying has an underlying kernel of truth, which is that once someone is willing to hold hostages and commit murder, they have crossed a line, a Rubicon from which it is impossible to return; negotiations with them can never again be good-faith honest argumentation, but must always be a strategic action to minimize collateral damage. Everyone knows that if you had the chance you’d just as soon put bullets through all their heads—because everyone knows they’d do the same to you.

Well, right now, the Republicans are acting like terrorists. Emotionally a fair comparison would be with two-year-olds throwing tantrums, but two-year-olds do not control policy on which thousands of lives hang in the balance. This budget bill is designed—quite intentionally, I’m sure—in order to ensure that Democrats are left with only two options: Give up on every major policy issue and abandon all the principles they stand for, or fail to pass a budget and allow the government to shut down, canceling vital services and costing billions of dollars. They are holding the American people hostage.

But here is why you must not give in: They’re going to shoot the hostages anyway. This so-called “compromise” would not only add $479 million in spending on fighter jets that don’t work and the Pentagon hasn’t even asked for, not only cut $93 million from WIC, a 3.5% budget cut adjusted for inflation—literally denying food to starving mothers and children—and dramatically increase the amount of money that can be given by individuals in campaign donations (because apparently the unlimited corporate money of Citizens United wasn’t enough!), but would also remove two of the central provisions of Dodd-Frank financial regulation that are the only thing that stands between us and a full reprise of the Great Recession. And even if the Democrats in the Senate cave to the demands just as the spineless cowards in the House already did, there is nothing to stop Republicans from using the same scorched-earth tactics next year.

I wouldn’t literally say we should put bullets through their heads, but we definitely need to get these Republicans out of office immediately at the next election—and that means that all the left-wing people who insist they don’t vote “on principle” need to grow some spines of their own and vote. Vote Green if you want—the benefits of having a substantial Green coalition in Congress would be enormous, because the Greens favor three really good things in particular: Stricter regulation of carbon emissions, nationalization of the financial system, and a basic income. Or vote for some other obscure party that you like even better. But for the love of all that is good in the world, vote.

The two most obscure—and yet most important—measures in the bill are the elimination of the swaps pushout rule and the margin requirements on derivatives. Compared to these, the cuts in WIC are small potatoes (literally, they include a stupid provision about potatoes). They also really aren’t that complicated, once you boil them down to their core principles. This is however something Wall Street desperately wants you to never, ever do, for otherwise their global crime syndicate will be exposed.

The swaps pushout rule says quite simply that if you’re going to place bets on the failure of other companies—these are called credit default swaps, but they are really quite literally a bet that a given company will go bankrupt—you can’t do so with deposits that are insured by the FDIC. This is the absolute bare minimum regulatory standard that any reasonable economist (or for that matter sane human being!) would demand. Honestly I think credit default swaps should be banned outright. If you want insurance, you should have to buy insurance—and yes, deal with the regulations involved in buying insurance, because those regulations are there for a reason. There’s a reason you can’t buy fire insurance on other people’s houses, and that exact same reason applies a thousandfold for why you shouldn’t be able to buy credit default swaps on other people’s companies. Most people are not psychopaths who would burn down their neighbor’s house for the insurance money—but even when their executives aren’t psychopaths (as many are), most companies are specifically structured so as to behave as if they were psychopaths, as if no interests in the world mattered but their own profit.

But the swaps pushout rule does not by any means ban credit default swaps. Honestly, it doesn’t even really regulate them in any real sense. All it does is require that these bets have to be made with the banks’ own money and not with everyone else’s. You see, bank deposits—the regular kind, “commercial banking”, where you have your checking and savings accounts—are secured by government funds in the event a bank should fail. This makes sense, at least insofar as it makes sense to have private banks in the first place (if we’re going to insure with government funds, why not just use government funds?). But if you allow banks to place whatever bets they feel like using that money, they have basically no downside; heads they win, tails we lose. That’s why the swaps pushout rule is absolutely indispensable; without it, you are allowing banks to gamble with other people’s money.

What about margin requirements? This one is even worse. Margin requirements are literally the only thing that keeps banks from printing unlimited money. If there was one single cause of the Great Recession, it was the fact that there were no margin requirements on over-the-counter derivatives. Because there were no margin requirements, there was no limit to how much money banks could print, and so print they did; the result was a still mind-blowing quadrillion dollars in nominal value of outstanding derivatives. Not million, not billion, not even trillion; quadrillion. $1e15. $1,000,000,000,000,000. That’s how much money they printed. The total world money supply is about $70 trillion, which is 1/14 of that. (If you read that blog post, he makes a rather telling statement: “They demonstrate quite clearly that those who have been lending the money that we owe can’t possibly have had the money they lent.” No, of course they didn’t! They created it by lending it. That is what our system allows them to do.)

And yes, at its core, it was printing money. A lot of economists will tell you otherwise, about how that’s not really what’s happening, because it’s only “nominal” value, and nobody ever expects to cash them in—yeah, but what if they do? (These are largely the same people who will tell you that quantitative easing isn’t printing money, because, uh… er… squirrel!) A tiny fraction of these derivatives were cashed in in 2007, and I think you know what happened next. They printed this money and now they are holding onto it; but woe betide us all if they ever decide to spend it. Honestly we should invalidate all of these derivatives and force them to start over with strict margin requirements, but short of that we must at least, again at the bare minimum, have margin requirements.

Why are margin requirements so important? There’s actually a very simple equation that explains it. If the margin requirement is m, meaning that you must retain a portion m between 0 and 1 of the loans you make as reserves, the total amount of money supply that can be created from the current amount of money M is just M/m. So if margin requirements were 100%—full-reserve banking—then the total money supply is M, and therefore in full control of the central bank. This is how it should be, in my opinion. But usually m is set around 10%, so the total money supply is 10M, meaning that 90% of the money in the system was created by banks. But if you ever let that margin requirement go to zero, you end up dividing by zero—and the total amount of money that can be created is infinite.

To see how this works, suppose we start with $1000 and put it in bank A. Bank A then creates a loan; how big they can make the loan depends on the margin requirement. Let’s say it’s 10%. They can make a loan of $900, because they must keep $100 (10% of $1000) in reserve. So they do that, and then it gets placed in bank B. Then bank B can make a loan of $810, keeping $90. The $810 gets deposited in bank C, which can make a loan of $729, and so on. The total amount of money in the system is the sum of all these: $1000 in bank A (remember, that deposit doesn’t disappear when it’s loaned out!), plus the $900 in bank B, plus $810 in bank C, plus $729 in bank D. After 4 steps we are at $3,439. As we go through more and more steps, the money supply gets larger at an exponentially decaying rate and we converge toward the maximum at $10,000.

The original amount is M, and then we add M(1-m), M(1-m)^2, M(1-m)^3, and so on. That produces the following sum up to n terms (below is LaTeX, which I can’t render for you without a plugin, which requires me to pay for a WordPress subscription I cannot presently afford; you can copy-paste and render it yourself here):

\sum_{k=0}^{n} M (1-m)^k = M \frac{1 – (1-m)^{n+1}}{m}

And then as you let the number of terms grow arbitrarily large, it converges toward a limit at infinity:

\sum_{k=0}^{\infty} M (1-m)^k = \frac{M}{m}

To be fair, we never actually go through infinitely many steps, so even with a margin requirement of zero we don’t literally end up with infinite money. Instead, we just end up with n M, the number of steps times the initial money supply. Start with $1000 and go through 4 steps: $4000. Go through 10 steps: $10,000. Go through 100 steps: $100,000. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger, until that money has nowhere to go and the whole house of cards falls down.

Honestly, I’m not even sure why Wall Street banks would want to get rid of margin requirements. It’s basically putting your entire economy on the counterfeiting standard. Fiat money is often accused of this, but the government has both (a) the legitimate authority empowered by the electorate and (b) incentives to maintain macroeconomic stability, neither of which private banks have. There is no reason other than altruism (and we all know how much altruism Citibank and HSBC have—it is approximately equal to the margin requirement they are trying to get passed—and yes, they wrote the bill) that would prevent them from simply printing as much money as they possibly can, thus maximizing their profits; and they can even excuse the behavior by saying that everyone else is doing it, so it’s not like they could prevent the collapse all by themselves. But by lobbying for a regulation to specifically allow this, they no longer have that excuse; no, everyone won’t be doing it, not unless you pass this law to let them. Despite the global economic collapse that was just caused by this sort of behavior only seven years ago, they now want to return to doing it. At this point I’m beginning to wonder if calling them an international crime syndicate is actually unfair to international crime syndicates. These guys are so totally evil it actually goes beyond the bounds of rational behavior; they’re turning into cartoon supervillains. I would honestly not be that surprised if there were a video of one of these CEOs caught on camera cackling maniacally, “Muahahahaha! The world shall burn!” (Then again, I was pleasantly surprised to see the CEO of Goldman Sachs talking about the harms of income inequality, though it’s not clear he appreciated his own contribution to that inequality.)

And that is why Democrats must not give in. The Senate should vote it down. Failing that, Obama should veto. I wish he still had the line-item veto so he could just remove the egregious riders without allowing a government shutdown, but no, the Senate blocked it. And honestly their reasoning makes sense; there is supposed to be a balance of power between Congress and the President. I just wish we had a Congress that would use its power responsibly, instead of holding the American people hostage to the villainous whims of Wall Street banks.