Not Quite Crony Capitalism?

I haven't read this yet, but Lucas Puente -- a PhD student at Stanford -- has an interesting-looking article in the new PS (I don't see an ungated version). Abstract:

I investigate one mechanism through which financial institutions could have used political influence to receive preferential treatment in the US Department of the Treasury-administered “bailout.” I find that neither proxies of political influence nor other political variables, such as public interest in specific deals, can explain variance in the sale price of warrants (a type of financial asset) Treasury acquired through TARP's Capital Purchase Program. Moreover, I find that the more politically active the firm is, the more likely Treasury is to auction its warrants (thereby receiving fair market value). This conclusion is not consistent with recent studies investigating the role of such variables in the initial administration of TARP and can be interpreted as good news for American taxpayers.

PS summary (bold added):

In the wake of the recent global financial crisis, many have suggested that the US government's administration of the taxpayer-funded rescue of the financial industry offered disproportionate benefits to politically active firms. However, quite the opposite occurred. Puente's research into Treasury's handling of the disposition of warrants (assets similar to stock call options) acquired through the Capital Purchase Program (CPP) shows that, at least in this phase of the "bailout," political variables did not matter. That is, lobbying expenditures, campaign contributions, and connections with Secretary of the Treasury Geithner, among other independent variables, cannot explain variance in the percentage of market value Treasury received for these warrants. Moreover, according to Puente, the more politically active a firm is, the more likely Treasury is to auction its warrants (thereby receiving fair market value). This suggests that Treasury is attempting to counter-act allegations of preferential treatment. Taxpayers should be pleased. By insulating itself from politics and making efforts to maximize the taxpayer return on the warrants, Treasury may have prevented billions of dollars in taxpayer losses.

I personally don't find this very surprising. Nor would I find it surprising if preferential treatment came mainly through less transparent channels, e.g. the Fed. It looks like Puente might be investigating that question in his ongoing research.

The Great Crash 2008, Part Three

In the last chapter of The Great Crash 1929, "Cause and Consequences", JK Galbraith offers his explanation for why the Great Depression rather than a typical recession followed from the stock market collapse. Or, as he put it, why the economy was "fundamentally unsound" in the run-up to the stock market crash. There are five reasons given (beginning on pg. 177 of the 2009 Mariner paperback, for those wishing to follow at home), and it's worth thinking about each to see how they may or may not relate to today. I'm going to do them in a series for the sake of brevity. This is the third.


The third cause Galbraith gives for the length and depth of the 1930s depression was that there was a bad banking structure. His words: 

[M]any of these [banking] practices were made ludicrous only by the depression. Loans which would have been perfectly good were made perfectly foolish by the collapse of the borrower's prices or the markets for his goods or the value of the collateral he had posted. The most responsible bankers -- those who saw that their debtors were victims of circumstances far beyond their control and sought to help -- were often made to look the worst. The banks yielded, as did others, to the blithe, optimistic, and immoral mood of times but probably not more so. ...

However, although the bankers were not unusually foolish in 1929, the banking structure was inherently weak. The weakness was implicit in the large numbers of independent units. When one bank failed, the assets of others were frozen while depositors elsewhere had a pregnant warning to go and ask for their money. Thus one failure led to other failures, and these spread with a domino effect.

The banking structure in 2008 is often characterized as being dominated by the concentration of market share in a few "too big to fail" firms that were able to exploit an implicit government guarantee and thus secure rents. This led these firms to engage in more risk-taking than they would have done absent a guarantee, so the best way to promote future financial stability is to reduce the size of these firms, thus eliminating the implicit government guarantee, thus forcing firms to internalize their risk-taking, thus leading to less risk-taking and more stability. But this was more or less the state of affairs in 1929, according to Galbraith. There were many small firms and no government guarantee. But that led to instability for the opposite reason as 2008: market share was too dispersed throughout the banking sector, with no financial institutions large enough to halt the spread of contagion.

I've blogged similar arguments to Galbraith's before (and before having read the book). A big part of the resolution of the 2008 crisis involved selling illiquid and/or insolvent firms (Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, Lehman Brothers, Countrywide, etc.). The only possible buyers for firms that large and with that many problems on their balance sheets was to find other large firms that could absorb them, like JP Morgan and Bank of America. This option was mostly not available in 1907 or 1929 but, combined with strong action from the Fed and Treasury, allowed the resolution of the financial crisis much more quickly and comfortably than in those previous crises. Indeed, the actual financial shock in 2008 was worse than in 1929, and possible worse than any in previous history. The fact that since that shock we've merely had a period of slowed growth and a fairly moderate increase in unemployment rather than a Great Depression is perhaps partially attributable to the fact that we dealt with this crisis much better than previous crises.

This line of thinking should give us pause when we consider whether having more small banks rather than fewer large banks would really be a good idea*. One way we might conceptualize this is to think in terms of patterns of financial integration. A financial system in which a relatively small number of firms are central to the system will generally react differently to crises than a system in which the distribution of links is more dispersed. Specifically, according to research on the spread of viruses and other crises through networks, highly-unequal systems are "robust but fragile": they are resilient to shocks in the periphery of the network, but fragile to shocks in the core. In 2008 we had a shock to the core, so the gut reaction is to reduce the importance of the institutions that comprise the core to the broader system. But that may only leave us susceptible to shocks anywhere in the financial system. This, warns Galbraith, is a very real possibility.

That doesn't seem to leave us with many good options. But here we may take some good news from the 2008 crisis: despite being a more severe financial crisis than 1929, the fallout was much less severe. This is obviously due to a number of reasons including the safety net and automatic stabilizers, as well as pretty drastic actions taken by the Fed and other central banks. But the Fed's actions were likely made more effective by the fact that they had to concentrate their efforts towards only a handful of firms at the center of the system. Once those firms were stabilized, the entire system was stabilized. The 1929 Fed didn't have that option.

This "solution" isn't much of one, admittedly. For one thing, it means that we may remain susceptible to types of crises similar to the one in 2008. That's little comfort. Additionally, it maintains the system of rents that these large firms are able to exploit, and that's unfortunate. But there may be ways of using the regulatory code, tax code, or criminal code to eliminate these rents in other ways. It may be possible to use the same tools or others to promote financial stability in other ways. In any case, it isn't obviously clear that a more decentralized financial system would be any more stable. It wasn't in 1929.

*Keep in mind that a stated goal of regulatory policy at both the domestic and international levels is to reduce the size and number of "systemically important financial institutions". These firms are likely to have higher capital requirements under Basel III, and Obama proposed a special tax for these firms. As far as I can tell these policies have had no effect at all on bank behaviors.

Quote of the Day

I respectfully submit that the bankers--like the regulators--simply did not realize that this was the first-ever significant nationwide housing bubble. And they did not realize how fragile the bubble was, due to subprime lending. Meanwhile, the Basel regulators encouraged them to leverage into the bubble by buying AA- or AAA-rated MBS. That is the crisis in three easy sentences.

From Jeffrey Friedman. More here, including four more great sentences:

The crisis has ideological ramifications. So economists of libertarian bent want to blame it on TBTF. Those of leftist bent want to blame it on bankers greedy for bonuses. Is it so difficult to imagine, though, that both the regulators and the bankers, being human, were ignorant of what was to come?

I really do think that most people underestimate the role of ignorance in the crisis. It's a bit unsatisfying, because we like blaming enemies for bad events, but that doesn't mean it isn't true.

"Too Big to Fail" vs. "Too Small So We Failed"

A couple of weeks ago I argued that having "too big to fail" banks might actually be a good thing, or at least that the alternatives might be worse. Here's a few more reasons why this makes sense. First, because without large banks it's impossible to deal with many bank failures. How? Well, if you cap bank size, then who's going to buy the banks that fail?

In addition to being a jaw-droppingly superficial idea overall, here’s another reason why breaking up the banks and capping their size would be a titanic mistake. Everyone seems to agree that normal, non-TBTF banks can be resolved without causing a meltdown in financial markets. This is, in fact, the justification given for capping bank size — it would make all banks “small enough” to be resolved smoothly, which means that no single bank failure would pose systemic risks. Mission accomplished! Of course, this argument quickly breaks down when you think for more than 15 minutes about how the FDIC resolves failed banks.

The FDIC resolves the vast majority of failed banks through what’s known as “purchase and assumption” agreements, or P&As. P&As are transactions in which a healthy bank purchases some or all of the assets of a failed bank and assumes some or all of the liabilities, including all insured deposits. ...

But think about how potential acquiring banks would respond if the FDIC approached them and offered them a waiver on the $100bn cap in exchange for agreeing to a P&A. They would think:

"Well, the government begged JPMorgan to buy Bear and begged BofA to buy Merrill, but then the government turned around and forced JPM and BofA to break themselves up a few years later! So thanks but no thanks, Sheila, we’re not interested in buying a bank that you’re just going to force us to divest in a couple years.”

So with a cap on bank size, P&As would likely be off-the-table for the largest bank failures. But if the FDIC can’t use P&As, then it can’t ensure that the largest banks will be resolved smoothly—and thus pose no systemic risks—even with a cap on bank size in place! And if the FDIC can’t ensure that the failure of the largest banks won’t pose systemic risks, then what was the point of the cap on bank size in the first place?

In other words, imagine what the world would look like right now if JP Morgan couldn't/wouldn't buy Bear Stearns, or if Bank of America couldn't/wouldn't buy Merrill Lynch. It's a world with several other Lehman-type collapses, many more small bank failures (there was 140 in 2009, with potentially hundreds more still to come), and a broader systemic collapse. Either that, or a much larger public intervention than we actually had.

In fact, that's exactly what happened during the Great Depression:

Indeed, one of the major contributors to bank failures during the Great Depression was the National Banking Act of 1864. That law, according to monetary historian Jeff Hummel, an economist at San Jose State University, banned any branching (interstate or intrastate) by nationally chartered banks, except for a few grandfathered banks. Because banks during the Great Depression were so small, they were undiversified. So when the agriculture sector went under, in part because of the Smoot-Hawley Act that attacked free trade, many rural banks failed. Call it "too small, so we failed."

It's possible that the relationship between bank size and systemic stability is parabolic: at first there are increasing returns, then those flatten and eventually recede. But if that's the case, I've not yet seen an argument as to where the "socially optimal" margin lies, if such a thing could even possibly exist. As a rule, arguments in favor of shrinking the banks do not discuss unintended downside consequences. That is reason enough to be suspicious.

True or False?

1. "Private regulation generally has proved far better at constraining excessive risk-taking than has government regulation.”

2. "If a small-enough-to-fail bank takes too many risks and fails, the systemic consequences are manageable. If a TBTF bank takes too many risks and fails, it can drag down the entire economy."

Both come from here. The first is Alan Greenspan in 2005, but he has since recanted. The second is Felix Salmon, arguing that we should chop down too-big-to-fail banks until they are small enough to fail.

#1 is interesting to me, because Salmon seems to think that it is an obviously false statement; even its originator disagrees with it now. But I'm not necessarily convinced. First of all, what does Salmon mean by "government regulation"? Well, according to this post he means the Federal Reserve. Is it true that the Federal Reserve has proved better than market discipline at constraining excessive risk-taking by banks? I believe that's an open question. That doesn't mean that markets are perfect; but surely regulators aren't either. Is it obviously the case that regulators are less flawed than markets? Neither performed well in this crisis.

When you have systemic collapses, it's because you have systemic failures in risk-pricing. That means both markets and regulators get it wrong. But look statement #1 again: I think there is a strong case to be made that in general markets do a better job of disciplining banks than governments do, even if I accept that markets did worse in this particular case.

Now, about #2. Is it really the case that small banks can't cause systemic collapses? Well I guess you can do what Salmon does and make the answer tautological. If a bank collapses and sets off a broader collapse, then it was ipso facto TBTF. But Salmon is talking about chopping up TBTF banks until they are a manageable size. But how big is too big? Bank Herstatt wasn't very large, but it caused quite a bit of damage. The Great Depression was not caused/exacerbated by the collapse of one or two TBTF institutions, but rather by the spread of panic throughout the entire system. Smaller community banks failed first, touching off a panic that led to bank runs that caused other banks to fail. It's simply not true that we're protected from a systemic banking crisis if we limit the size of financial institutions.

Suppose we all do as as Salmon and others are asking, and move our money from large TBTF banks to smaller community banks. What happens the next time a panic enters financial markets? If we can isolate a handful of very large institutions, we can stabilize the system by stabilizing those few institutions. But if market power is much more diffuse, then containing the contagion is much more difficult: counterparty obligations can still have cascading effects, but it's more difficult to see how, when, where, and why. You may end up having to bailout or nationalize the entire banking system rather than just a handful of institutions.

In other words, perhaps TBTF is actually the best scenario. It allows us to focus recovery efforts where they can do the most good.

UPDATE: I should say that I'm not actually persuaded that any of this is actually right. Just thinking out loud.