Begging the Banks

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson today called on the banks that the federal government has just given $250 billion dollars to make that money available to others in the economy.

“We must restore confidence in our financial system,” Paulson said. “The needs of our economy require that our financial institutions not take this new capital to hoard it, but to deploy it.”

The “needs of our economy” might require that the banks not hoard the money that the government has given them, but the Bush administration isn’t requiring much of anything.

I agree with Paulson that the economy will not begin to recover until there is liquidity in the credit markets.  That, indeed, was the rationale behind the government’s massive and unprecedented bailout of the financial industry.

Why, then, is Paulson asking the banks to do the only thing that justified giving them those billions of taxpayer dollars?

If, as is apparent to just about everyone, the economy will not recover until liquidity is restored to financial markets, why doesn’t the federal government require that the banks not hoard the billions that the government is giving them?

The answer is that, despite the acuteness of the financial crisis, and despite the government’s belated decision to take large scale action, the basic approach of the Bush administration has not changed.

In fact, for the past year, the Bush administration has taken a consistent, and faulty, two pronged approach to dealing with the expanding economic crisis, and this approach has not changed with the latest bailout.

This two pronged approach is

• (1) make capital available at extremely low rates to banks and financial institutions with the goal of restoring liquidity, and then
• (2) beg and plead with these same banks and financial institutions to move this capital into the economy.

As the housing and mortgage crisis worsened, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced a series of cuts in interest rates.  Each time, Bernanke repeated his call for lenders to voluntarily reduce the principal on delinquent loans to adjust them for the drop in home prices, rejecting the far more more forceful action proposed by Democrats favoring legislation that would require the refinancing of hundreds of thousands of mortgages.

Of course, the banks did not voluntarily do what Bernanke requested.

Now Treasury Secretary Paulson is following the same dead end path in asking the banks to voluntarily take the actions that are needed for the restoration of the market.

The Bush adminstration’s beg and plead approach did not work in the past, and it will not work now.

Of course, no one, except the apocalypticals of the far Left and Right, and Libertarians driven crazy by ideology or alcoholism, want to see the global economy collapse.  Sane people don’t want to see bread lines or live with their guns at the ready in a bunker in the woods.

But we can now longer expect that capitalists, driven by personal gain, will voluntarily act to save the system that sustains them.

What is needed is a comprehensive and mandatory overhaul of the entire banking and financial system and the credit markets on the order of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934.

And for that, we’ll have to wait at least until a new Congress, a new administration, and a new political and economic philosophy take over in January 2009.

I hope we last that long.

Bankers Reject Free Market Ideology and Call for More Regulations and Protections for Investors

Free-market ideologues tend to blame most economic problems on government interference in the market.  And their response to economic crisis is invariably to call for the reduction or elimination of government regulations.

But free-market ideologues are usually pundits, professors, and politicians, and not capitalists themselves.

Real capitalists care less about ideology, and more about what is actually important — that is, capitalism.

That’s why it should come as no surprise that in the face of the potentially catastrophic crisis that is now gripping the banking industry, it is the bankers themselves who are calling for more, rather than less, government regulation.

As the Financial Times reports, “Many of the world’s biggest banks are proposing reforms that would limit the size and scope of their businesses in one of the most dramatic responses to the credit crisis. The proposals would hold down the number of investors who can buy complex financial products, bring large swathes of the derivatives markets into regulators’ sights and call on banks to spend more on technology and risk management.”

“Backed by banks including JPMorgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, HSBC, Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, the proposals are being delivered to global regulators in the hope of producing rules for credit markets that would cut risk of contagion and restore confidence.”

Here is the story:  Last week, a panel of high-power bankers calling themselves “Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group III,” lead by Goldman Sachs managing director E. Gerald Corrigan, issued a report to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. and Mario Draghi, chairman of the international Financial Stability Forum, calling for more regulation and governmental oversight of the banking industry and new standards for monitoring and managing risk.

The Washington Post reports that the bankers’ panel “suggested that big investment houses regularly perform ‘liquidity stress tests’ to measure their expected flexibility in the face of a crisis. It also urged firms to make sure they have accurate snapshots of their exposures to institutional trading partners, with the ability to compile detailed reports within hours.”

“In the current crisis, ‘some of the worst failures were in risk monitoring, which was before you even got to risk management,’ Corrigan, a former chief executive of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said in an interview.”

Included in the panel’s recommendations is a prohibition on selling high-risk and complex financial products to anyone except “sophisticated investors.” 

According to the Financial Times, under the panel’s recommendations “even pension funds and other institutional investors would no longer be automatically allowed to buy bonds backed by assets such as subprime mortgages. All but the wealthiest retail investors would be barred from buying structured products, such as auction rate securities, a $330bn market used by municipalities and student loan providers to raise funds.”

Corrigan said “the ‘markets had been sandbagged by complexity’ and suggested the new rules would help ensure sophisticated financial products were only sold to investors with the resources and skills to understand and monitor them.”

We agree with the panel’s report and recommendations. 

It is long overdue that investors in financial products have at least the kind of “qualified investor” protections that exist under the Securities and Exchange Act — both for the sake of the investors and the stabiliity of the financial markets.

And it is good to see that real capitalists care more about preserving the world’s financial markets than about preserving some ideologically pure notion of free-market capitalism.

On other hand, in the short term, it would not be good for the economy if the banks used these recommendations as a rationale to further restrict the availability of credit to qualified borrowers.