I love that we get these political discussions on hacker news, but I sometimes wish we as a community would spend as much time thinking about politics as we do thinking about programming and science.
Big banks function very much as part of the government, in many ways the big banks determine government policy, certainly to a much greater extent than popular opinion does. There are many forms of this public-private merging of government. To take just one aspect, consider the revolving door whereby bank executives go between their banks and government jobs and back again: to just pick one example virtually at random, obamas chief of staff is a "former" citi group executive. I wonder, if a bank executive goes to washington for a little while, do they even notice that they changed jobs?
This article explains that the big banks wouldn't even be profitable without massive tax payer support, here is a choice quote from the article which really drives home how intense the stranglehold banks have over government policy:
"Neither bank executives nor shareholders have much incentive to change the situation. On the contrary, the financial industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars every election cycle on campaign donations and lobbying, much of which is aimed at maintaining the subsidy. The result is a bloated financial sector and recurring credit gluts."
Some people wonder what could be done about such a situation. The sad truth is that there are already an overwhelming number of ideas that are floating around that have already been demonstrated to work (see iceland). The problem is not coming up with a good idea, the problem is how to implement one of the many good ideas which have already been proven to work.
The crux of the matter is that only the power of a strong federal government can take on the even more powerful too big too fail banks. The only way political change happens is when people get organized, and the american political system gives us a lot of freedoms. If you live and a free country and abstain from participating in politics, then in my opinion you have abdicated your responsibility as a citizen.
> I love that we get these political discussions on hacker news, but I sometimes wish we as a community would spend as much time thinking about politics as we do thinking about programming and science.
I don't love it, because they retread the same arguments over and over, generate flame wars, and attract people who are more interested in politics than the niche arguments that are the bread and butter of this site.
Also, many of us do spend a lot of time thinking about politics, it's just that we don't feel the need to pollute HN with it.
Even if it's kind of watered down and crappy compared to what we would have liked to have seen. Still though, not bad for someone with no money and no connections to speak of.
Someplace like your facebook page is another good place to post one's political ramblings to, depending on one's friends...
You make a couple of great points, but you're obviously extremely misinformed about Iceland. Basically what happened in Iceland is due to an amount of stupidity that greatly exceeds the amount we're used to in the rest of Europe and the USA (not implying that the people of Iceland are stupid, but they had incredibly incompetent people at the helm). They bailed out their banks as well, just wanted to make it look like they didn't.
"[there are ideas] floating around that have already been demonstrated to work" is a bit of hyperbole and I'd love to see you get into the specifics.
The sad truth, to me, is that we are responsible because we make our governments spend too much money.
Do we now? Look at the cost of the military and its uses. I didn't make government spend on that. Look at all the paranoid post 9/11 security measures. What proportion of your money is being spent on those things compared to, say, education, health or even welfare? Who actually asked for all that? To be fair, I suppose it could be called job creation.
We don't make the government spend too much money, they chose to spend all that money because they are backed by the people who benefit from the spending of all that money, and its not the working or middle class. Remember those discussions about how bent and corrupt lobbying is? They are the people getting your money. Not "we".
Makes me laugh, all the US revulsion to socialism, while the US has one of the biggest state funded job creation strategies in the capitalist west. Its just that it is called the military rather than anything too socialist sounding. It also get the poor an education, at the risk of their lives. Shame its about killing and paranoia, rather than creating and earning.
Yes, the military drive some innovation, but man, really? In the 21st century?
Sweden followed a more sensible course of action, though. They fully nationalized the banks, kicked out the top management, wrote off the bad loans and then re-privatized the banks a few years later.
>The sad truth, to me, is that we are responsible because we make our governments spend too much money.
Our governments do not "spend too much", the main economic problems we have are too much bad debt (leading to zombie banks), an excess of fraud in the financial sector and not enough economic activity as a result, resulting in high unemployment.
A government can never spend too much money (it is created with a few strokes of a computer keyboard). They can only spend beyond the limits of the economy's capacity. Right now almost every western economy is operating way under capacity, which is obvious if you look at almost any metric from inflation to employment to inventory.
The government spending more would actually help, although what we really need is for the banks to start writing off bad debts - which they don't want to do because then they would be insolvent.
A strange point of view. From mine, a government is generally a very bad spender and investor. Also, I prefer democracies were the power (money?) is in the hands of the citizens.
By the they spend too much, I meant that they have the tendency to throw money at problems to gain time instead of fixing things and having a vision.
I understand this point of view lies in the political territory though.
I agree with your point about sweden. Also sweden said to the banks, you can either go into our programm or we wont help you, guess what many did not want to be nationalized. Another way to get ride of management would be to let them fail.
The US just gave money to every bank, in order to 'put trust back into the system', so no bank was afaid others would default on there loans.
My understanding is that it was widely discredited before the financial crisis, back when economists thought they actually understood economy and that economic crisis were a thing of the past. Then reality happened, and it seems that US government spending has kept the economy going to the dogs. On the other hand, looking around in Europe, I don't manage to find a single country where austerity measures appear to have produced anything than deeper recession.
> My understanding is that it was widely discredited before the financial crisis, back when economists thought they actually understood economy and that economic crisis were a thing of the past.
Keynsiansm thrown away for a reason. Just because we still dont know anything better is no reason to belive that keynsiansm is right.
Thats like saying COBOL is the best language because we have figured out that Java is actually not that good.
> Then reality happened, and it seems that US government spending has kept the economy going to the dogs.
Not sure how you arrive at that.
> . On the other hand, looking around in Europe, I don't manage to find a single country where austerity measures appear to have produced anything than deeper recession.
Its kind of like saing look at these sinking ships fixing parts of the ship is really not working for them.
I main sure you can not reduce goverment spending for some amount of time but not forever. Eventually people will not give you more money. Goverment spending is no solution in greece, anybody can see that, even keynsians, the only thing they want is to wait with buged cuts until the economy is stable but that is not always a option.
Greece has particular problems. A culture of pork barrel, corruption, nepotism and tax evasion (not to mention cooking the books) does not make for sustainable governmental spending. But now that they are implementing unprecedented cuts, the country is going down the drain.
Keynesian economics is only partially wrong, the only case where it is always wrong is if the Government always buy productivity less efficiently than the free market. Given the rather poor job that financial institutions have done recently I would think it would be hard to argue that this is always the case; we all know public servants don't get paid the insane wages that bank executives do.
Regardless of whether the source is the government or employers giving money to poor people is a good way to boost productivity because poor people spend money, rich people by comparison don't.
Government buys everything less efficiently than the free market. That's what you can do when individuals aren't held accountable (I'm talking about government employees, not elected officials).
* The US spends roughly double the % of GDP of other nations in Europe with single payer on healthcare and gets similar results. That's twice as expensive for the same result. Their "government spending" is 2x as efficient as the totally private US system.
Iceland jailed bankers, and paid for the citizens' debt. I don't see why the US can't jail people responsible for the crisis, even though the banks are too big too fail. In other words, I don't see how banks are 'too big' to receive a new CEO and lose a few employees.
There are too many people who were responsible, and most of them were just doing there jobs. Who would you pick as responsible, especially when laws aren't broken.
It is too simplistic to run around decrying the fact that nobody was jailed.
That makes it more important to sort it out, not less.
>>and most of them were just doing there jobs.
That's never been a good excuse for anyone caught delivering a load of drugs.
>>It is too simplistic to run around decrying the fact that nobody was jailed.
No, not really. Jailing people is our answer to almost every problem. We imprison people even when it is obvious that imprisonment has a strong counter-productive effect. Yet, in one population where I'd argue that imprisonment would have a strong deterrent effect... nothing. It's not as though there is a lack of evidence of serious crime, either. On the contrary, criminality in finance is so glaringly obvious that people are tiring of pointing it out, while others simply work around it knowing that nothing will be done.
The vast majority of the people "responsible" were not doing anything wrong or illegal. Who is responsible? Anyone who:
-Sold a house at an inflated price
-Bought a house at an inflated price
-Sold a mortgage to someone who could not afford it
-Bought a mortgage that they could not afford
-Sold MBS
-Bought MBS
-Used or provided leverage to buy MBS
-Insured these transactions with derivatives or other instruments
Who, precisely, would you like to arrest, and for what? This was not the result of fraud (although I'm sure there was some of that) but the result of a systematic setup for failure. Even if you cleaned up all of the fraud, it still would have happened.
The problem is not that something illegal happened. The problem is that what happened wasn't illegal.
Prosecution is boring and pointless. We should focus on limiting the damage that the next crisis can do. There's the real problem: Nothing happens in this regard. The beneficiaries of the current system have become powerful enough to deflect any external influence on their schemes.
That is the question of our time: How can we break this regime before we find ourselves (or rather: our children) living in a dystopia. As of today the odds are not looking good.
Those are systemic changes, though. Breaking up banks, reinstating Glass Steagall, that sort of thing. I don't think those solutions are out of reach. It will be tough, but it certainly seems doable.
It is a shame that politicians are demagoguing with all this "they need to go to jail" talk, because it is a distraction from the actual problem. That is simply that when too much leverage is applied to the same bet and hedged in the same way by everyone, it will blow up catastrophically when things go bad. That has nothing to do with legality or fraud or any such thing, and everything to do with regulation. It was a political and intellectual failure, not a moral one.
It is a shame that politicians are demagoguing with all this "they need to go to jail" talk
Depending on how cynic you are you could believe this is exactly the message that $wall_street wants them to push. Everyone knows that nobody relevant is going to jail anyway, but it's a nice, superficial "debate" to keep the general public busy with...
Nice in the sense that you can apparently drag it out near infinitely. Remember: Lehmann crashed 5 years ago. Yet when you look at the state of discussion in the mainstream media you'd think it happened just yesterday.
No, it was caused almost entirely by fraud. If not for people within 'the banks' knowingly rating these mortgages as a ludicrously good buy, etc, there wouldn't be a banking crisis.
There are even further systematic abuses that should see thousands jailed, such as deceptive marketing and intentional misrepresentation of clients. None of this would have been self-sustaining without all the coverups.
The scale of the market is so huge that you would have to believe that the entire finance industry is composed of idiots for that to be true. These securities are not rocket science. They were sub prime mortgages that had a certain historical default rate. People ignored those rates all over the place and levered up. That is not fraud. That is greed.
Did fraud make it worse? Probably, but you can debate how much since people were willingly taking these risks anyway. We all knew it would end, and that it might end dramatically. But we didn't know how or when that would happen, or how bad it could get.
>There are even further systematic abuses that should see thousands jailed, such as deceptive marketing and intentional misrepresentation of clients.
I'm okay with that as long as all the homeowners who lied about their financial situation go to jail as well. How many thousands of otherwise ordinary people made false statements on loan applications?
Oh, so you aren't okay with charging a single uber-fraudster until all the little guys are safely put away. That's handy.
While I agree that the little guys committed crimes too the bankers were ALSO in a position of power AND have a duty to protect their clients AND engaged in an on-going conspiracy to commit fraud. I'd be pissed if someone tried to cheat me on EBay, I'd be livid if I discovered my banker had intentionally been giving me bad advice because he profited on every dollar I lost.
The difference in scale between these things is so monumental that it makes your comment seem absurd.
Ever wonder who was buying all the shitty mortgages packed up by Wall St? I mean who would be so stupid as to purchase that crap? Look no further than Iceland.
> How about have less government, no corporate lobbying and no corporatism?
A large, powerful government is eventually taken over by corporate interests, and becomes an active enabler of corporate goals.
A small, conservative government of the sort idealized by libertarians is too small and powerless to influence corporations, which respond by taking hold of the reins of public power, as was true in the early days of industrialization.
Believe me, I'm not advocating some alternative like Communism, which history teaches is manifestly worse than the two alternatives listed above.
I think modern corporations are an unavoidable side effect of the evolution of modern societies -- highly organized, wired, and with a natural tendency to concentrate power in a few hands. All that remains is to see which hands get the power.
"In the public interest". I'm not advocating it, just saying what the stock explanation is.
But I can think of examples that support governmental intervention. The Thalidomide story, in which a greedy drug company pressed for the right to sell a drug in the U.S. but was stonewalled by one stubborn government official. Eventually the drug was shown to create horrible birth defects in countries where it was allowed to be sold.
I'm sure there are many more examples. I'm also sure that no one will be able to write a perfectly objective assessment of the benefits and drawbacks to governmental intervention in the affairs of business.
The goverments regulation also blocks many diffrent medications for a long time that kill lots of people because they could not be sold.
Also there is the case where drugs got banned because the had bad effects on some people in some conditions, but was still fine for other people again kill or making many people worse off.
All in all goverment regulation of medicine has been horrible. Let people (adived by doctors and other organisations) decide with drugs they want.
What? I said "I can think of examples that support governmental intervention." I did not say "I have statistically analyzed governmental interventions and here are my results."
> The goverments [sic] regulation also blocks ...
Do you really not know how to spell "government"? So it seems:
> All in all goverment [sic] regulation of medicine has been horrible.
You're the one making unsupportable general claims, not me. Also, given that yours is a post about government, learn how to spell "government".
> Here is a nice interview with Marcia Angell of Harvard Medical School about big farma [sic].
Support banks until the goverment collaps? Does not sound like a great idea.
> If you live and a free country and abstain from participating in politics, then in my opinion you have abdicated your responsibility as a citizen.
Voting is irrational form any perspective. Political organisation is not really worth the time it costs. Thats that sad true, economily speaking the goverment is a externality it would be good if everybody did inform themself be active (add so on) but in reality you yourself doing it is just a waste of time.
For that reason the idea came up that there should be a constitution. The problem is that that did not work very well, the constitution was just overruled or ignored (for sometimes good reasons).
What to make of the situation is hard, some people want more federalism so the voter is more effected by his opinion, but many people oppose that because why have good things someplace and bad other places, it would be much better to have good things everywhere.Other people want a new constitution, but I do not see any reason why that would not end the same as the other consitution.
Again other have tons of ideas, change the style of voting, change the style of representation and so on. Again others become anarchists.
Iceland is an example of an economy that is small enough to fail. Alot of governements and companies in Europe lost a lot of money in that move, but not enough to be catastrophic. If a bigger economy defaulted, then we would be f*ed. China for one would not take a writedown of US debt for example.
Who is we. I dont think that if a big banks fails everybody in that country is fucked. Fucked are the people working there and the people who invested in that companys (this includes people with debit accounts since that not really diffrent from an investment).
The idea that banks are 'to big to fail' has largly been shown to be retoric. Analysis after every bank failure since 50 years has shown that actual failure would not have been as bad as predicited.
Dunno, people are wound up in investment without knowing about it. Kiss goodbye to your pension. Kiss goodbye to infrastructure and schools in your local area (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7659783.stm)
So most of the things goverment forced me to have?
Maybe that is true in some cases but infrastructure does not siappear, it may be sold of because the owner went out of buissness. In a market for education a new school would open, in a goverment system the school would not go out of buissness because the goverment is not out of money.
Maybe you pension is gone, well you should not invest in a pention fund that makes bad investments. We can not protect everybody all the time, the hole point of having a social system is that some people sometimes run out of money.
>The crux of the matter is that only the power of a strong federal government can take on the even more powerful too big too fail banks.
Sadly, this is not true. In fact, the stronger the government gets the more advantageous it is for banks (and other businesses) to put effort into capturing the regulatory apparatus.
In terms of regulation of banks or other large companies we are no better off than we were before the federal government became the intrusive monster it is today. And as proof I offer the patent system, which incumbents have been using quite effectively to stifle new competition.
I am little confused by your reply. I said only the power of a strong federal government can take on the more powerful too big to fail banks, not that a stronger government would be effective if everything else stays the way it is.
Government is neutral, much like technology is neutral, it can be used either for good or bad purposes, depending on who controls it. Right now, it is very much controlled by the big banks, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way.
Indeed your remark about regulations demonstrates exactly the point I was trying to make. Namely, that only the power of the federal government is strong enough to enforce things like regulations, which in principle are an effective counter measure against fraud and abuse in the financial system. It's not just in principle either, during the great depression, many reforms were put in place, such as glass-steigel, which stabilized the financial system for the longest period of time in american history; and many people point to the undoing of those reforms as a major contribution to the current crises.
A standard response to the above is to say: the new deal reforms didn't get america out of the depression, it was world war 2. Indeed, the reforms of the new deal were only partially effective because they didn't go far enough; and it was only when the entire population was mobilized behind the war effort that the government was able to intervene in the economy even more intensely than it had previously.
We can ask the interesting question: why do governments exist at all? It's because society is divided into separate factions which compete with each other. Modern society is full of contraindications, which expresses itself as conflict between the competing factions. As part of this power struggle, governments are formed with the purpose of setting up bodies of armed men, as well as other mechanisms, in order to enforce the domination of one set of these factions over the others.
If you have a better idea of how serious systemic problems like the current financial crises can be solved, without a strong federal government, I would be interested to know what that is. Or do you just think the situation is totally hopeless?
>Government is neutral, much like technology is neutral, it can be used either for good or bad purposes, depending on who controls it. Right now, it is very much controlled by the big banks, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way.
But that's my point. As the government gets stronger big businesses put more money and effort into capturing it. I guess in theory they can be prevented from succeeding, but they always seem to win unless the government is so powerful it can just take whatever it wants.
Certainly in the US as Congress slathers on more regulation it only seems to increase the power of the banking industry.
if big banks function as part of government , then they are not private businesses. You cant have it both ways. Either you are a private business and when you sink you sink on your own or you are backed by public money then you are a public entity . You cant be private when you are profitable and public when you are bankrupt and expect taxpayer to pay your bills. And some call it a free market ...
This analysis is a bit disingenuous, from the article: "The larger they are.. the result is an implicit subsidy: The banks that are potentially the most dangerous can borrow at lower rates, because creditors perceive them as too big to fail."
As an implicit subsidy it is not as if there the 83 billion dollars that can be "taken away" from the banks and used for other purposes. The implicit government guarantee has value but if you can not find a way to recover that value in some other way when taking it away from the banks you would just be robbing the economy of that growth.
That being said it seems like the way to remedy this would be to use a tax mechanism that can measure this subsidy and extract it from the banks in a manner that is fair to bank investors and citizens.
Too big to fail is a real problem, but the assertion in the article is more than "a bit" disingenuous. It is _very_ disingenuous, because what they try to measure (money saved by the big banks with lower interest rates) isn't at all what the taxpayers pay - economy isn't a zero-sum game. There will certainly be a correlation in the long run, but that number they throw there has 0 credibility imho.
Sort of. I'd rather have politicians handing out indstury subsidies by choice than being held hostage by their own frankenstein monsters. But I hear ya.
Presuming that the theory is correct, there seems to be two sides to this:
First, you're going to be transferring that money to the banks/institutions that lend to them. So the money isn't going away, it's just ending up as profit for somebody else (as compensation for them considering themselves to be taking on more risk.)
Second, the taxpayers going to get rid of that amount of cost in the form of risk; the averaged risk is paid by the taxpayers, it is just paid in bulk when the banks are about to fail.
This assumes the calculations are all correct, and it doesn't count in what indirect cost the economy would have from loans getting a bit more expensive overall.
This is the part that gets me, as I've been saying this for a while -
Left unchecked, the superbanks could ultimately require bailouts that exceed the government’s resources. Picture a meltdown in which the Treasury is helpless to step in as it did in 2008 and 2009.
Makes one side seem a little less important to me.
There were three solutions given and not one mentioned taking money away from the banks:
One option is to make banks fund their activities with more equity from shareholders, a measure that would make them less likely to need bailouts (we recommend $1 of equity for each $5 of assets, far more than the 1-to-33 ratio that new global rules require). Another idea is to shock creditors out of complacency by making some of them take losses when banks run into trouble. A third is to prevent banks from using the subsidy to finance speculative trading, the aim of the Volcker rule in the U.S. and financial ring-fencing in the U.K.
You make a pretty good point here. Breaking up the big banks would be super easy, just like ending slavery, you just set the slaves free, not that difficult.
>> Big private corporations are as bad as big public corporations.
I think you miss the bigger picture the article paints, which is that the big banks actually function as part of the government in many ways. One aspect of this is described by the article, the big banks can't exist without massive financial support from the tax payers in the form of low interest rates and implied bailouts.
I also think you don't understand that only the power of the federal government can break up the banks. Show me one example in of all history where a big bank was broken up by a small decentralized governement? go ahead, ill wait...
Funny you say that. The banks that where baild out, where investment banks, the hole reason for such a rule was that normal banks would get bailed out and investment banks would.
But since its not actually about helping the people to bail out banks it did not matter.
That said, the "profitability" of the big banks is somewhat irrelevant. JP Morgan, Goldman, etc, evolved out of partnerships, where all the profits went to the partners. To this day, the banks pay out most of their revenues as compensation. "Profits" are what's left after all that.
>That said, the "profitability" of the big banks is somewhat irrelevant. JP Morgan, Goldman, etc, evolved out of partnerships, where all the profits went to the partners. To this day, the banks pay out most of their revenues as compensation. "Profits" are what's left after all that.
Couldn't the argument be easily changed to "Big bank executive compensation is subsidized by taxpayers"?
"In other words, the banks occupying the commanding heights of the U.S. financial industry -- with almost $9 trillion in assets, more than half the size of the U.S. economy -- would just about break even in the absence of corporate welfare."
That's a brilliant observation. Props to Bloomberg for this incredibly lucid op-ed.
I feel it's a little disingenuous to call it a "subsidy" since the taxpayers aren't actually writing the banks a check for $83 billion. But the key point is still spot on: without the implied backstop of a government bailout the banks would pay what everyone else must pay to borrow money, etc.
Too big to fail is simply a euphemism these days for "The government will take care of everything no matter now stupid and reckless we act." This attitude really must go. How should that be accomplished? I don't know. One thing is for certain: the banks will drag their heels kicking and screaming should someone try to change the status quo. And they'll probably get their way - but it should still be attempted.
I think Elisabeth Warren said it best when she asked "The Most Obvious Question Ever And Stumps A Bunch Of Bank Regulators" She asks federal bank regulators why no banks were taken to trial in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=m...
I think we need to drop the concept of "too big to fail." If another large bank requires a bailout, let's give it to them, but make a Ma Bell-style breakup part of the deal. i.e. You get the bailout, but you can no longer be too big to fail.
Why wait? Instead of the consolidation we've seen, what we should have done is increased reserve requirements and broken up the banks so they all had assets below a certain dollar figure. On top of that, they should be forbidden from owning securities related to other banks or insurance companies.
This should've already happened, and should happen. The big banks can not be allowed to stay this big, otherwise there's almost definitely a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis in another decade or two.
In some sense the thesis of the article makes intuitive sense. How can the banking sector really have much of a margin since they are dealing with the ultimate commodity product, money!
Trading is a zero sum game, all the banks can't make a profit doing it.
Banks provide quasi governmental services to society, so one could make an argument that they should be subsided in some way, or that they have to be subsided! Their role in the economy is too fundamental to not have.
I've come across arguments that banks should just be turned in to utilities.
Any one know how much it would cost to let a failing bank go down, but compensate the people with their money in that banks?
I never found out why we couldn't let that happen. If a bank fails, and I have $10,000 in it, give me the money, not the failed bank. Then I can pick a new back, which should in theory be stronger with the new influx of customers form the now dead bank.
Besides, what happened to capitalism and competition? We capitalists seem to ditch those principles the second it goes wrong, expecting socialist payouts from the people to bail them out. No, businesses go bust, that is the whole point. Survival of the fittest. Strength through competition. That is the American way, no?
Worse still, was the bail out of the car industry. How did that happen? A whole load of new companies killed off right there. People would have left, some would start new firms, some would got an bolster existing firms, and so on. Now, the same stagnation remains because it was propped up.
Ah, pah. Just another one of those things that leaves me depressed, confused, and cold.
> I never found out why we couldn't let that happen.
Because they frightened everyone with an imminent apocalypses if we were not to save their fraudulent asses.
I believe we should have let them fail. It would not be pretty, but we'd manage. Long term benefits would surpass temporarily hardship. First it would cleanse the system and second set a strong precedent.
Besides, it would be very much in terms with capitalism - failed in competition goes under. Yet funny how the banks that lobby for ever more independence, rely so heavily on social welfare from the government :)
The US allready has the FDIC, meaning that in every account you allready have 50k insured, witch would take care of the 'poor people who suffer the most'.
Saving the banks was never about saving the poor who have money in the bank, or saving the 'banking system'.
> That is the American way, no?
Not anymore, banks are saved, so are car companys, motorcycle companys and so on.
The 'socialist' swedenish let there car company fail.
The article says that without subsidies the big banks would about break even. Does that presuppose that toxic assets are recorded accurately in their books? I recall that there was controversy about this, and then the issue seemed to vanish. If toxic assets have not been accounted for accurately, how big is the discrepancy?
They're not talking about a one time thing, but a perpetual artificially low cost of capital afforded only to the largest banks, basically at the cost of everyone else.
That statement is disingenuous. Collateral based bad mortgages were a small fraction of the toxic assets. Banks only ended up forgiving around $20 billion in mortgage debt, which is nothing compare to the size of other issues. The bad mortgage issue has been a red herring from the beginning to distract attention from criminal fraud by bankers and absurdly focus on homeowners instead.
Almost all of the toxic assets, or more properly, speculative loss that will never be paid, was on the derivatives market which could be as much as $1.2 quadrillion dollars, 20 times the size of the entire world economy, of which even the $16 trillion in bailouts was a small amount.
The toxic assets have been moving around and ending up off of bank sheets and on federal government sheets as part of loan paybacks, which is more of the massive scam and stealth bailouts going on.
Every one of these mega banks should be dismantled. The same scams continue.
>Almost all of the toxic assets, or more properly, speculative loss that will never be paid, was on the derivatives market which could be as much as $1.2 quadrillion dollars, 20 times the size of the entire world economy, of which even the $16 trillion in bailouts was a small amount.
This is quite literally unbelievable. Do you have anything to back it up?
In theory these unwind cleanly, and the actual risk is low. As the article says, if there is even a small discrepancy in how they unwind, the real numbers are insane. A big part of the freak out when Lehman failed is that everyone knew that in theory the deals would unwind, but it had never been tested in practice on anything like that scale.
I've never read anything I thought was credible from washingtonsblog, and this is no exception. The number is based largely on speculation, and if you follow the chain of blogs and investor articles the whole thing just stinks of the sort of hype you see when an investment site is trying to scare you.
So I thought this article was pretty opaque. They didn't really discuss the subsidy enough. They just said there was a subsidy that allowed the banks to borrow money at a reduced rate. Who is giving them this preferential treatment? How do those particular banks get that subsidy? Why not charge all banks the same rate and let the size of these banks eat themselves. It's not a hard concept to swallow if you've had economics 101. Law of diminishing returns which happens to any business when it gets too large. But, I think it didn't really layout a case for why this subsidy exists.
The subsidy discussed is not an issue of economics directly, but capital markets, i.e. finance.
The paper infers a subsidy level for state-supported financial institutions by comparing the level of state support embedded in credit agency ratings and comparing them to their long-run average value. The authors control for the factors such as the sovereign's own ability to support, because sovereign debt is also rated by agencies, and for institutions intrinsic rating values.
Credit ratings are used directly and indirectly by capital market participants to determine the level of funding costs across all debt markets. So, they are the best available proxy for determining at least a floor for this preferential rate. As can be seen from previous financial crises, actual bailouts would be highly dependent on the nature of crises and may be substantially higher than expected.
How do those particular banks get that subsidy?
- from other market participants. In a sense, governments are permitting the misallocation of capital from other market participants, including governments and government agencies (hence taxpayers are directly involved), into the state-supported institutions. It is not a zero-sum game because of how that capital is then used.
Why not charge all banks the same rate and let the size of these banks eat themselves.
- there is no central rate allocation. Market participants use market prices and their best available information for funding costs. A state-supported institution is naturally considered by many participants to be a lower risk than a non-state supported institution.
I get the feeling the author of that piece didn't quite understand what the "subsidy" represented, hence why the author didn't explain it very well. If I can sum up what you said these bigger banks get better credit ratings because rating agencies give them better ratings because of their size and perceived safety. Overtime these small changes give them an edge in lending rates.
It's not a real subsidy. They're saying that by allowing banks to get too big to fail, the banks are in a sense using the assets of the federal government as if they owned them. Everyone knows the feds will bail them out, so they can borrow money more cheaply than they would be able to otherwise.
Law of diminishing returns doesn't work like that (they're not adding just a single factor of production), and you're fighting against economies of scale (which are also economics 101).
... Because it is in the best (short and mid-term) interests of a debt-laden and debt-fuelled state to support those entities which can maximize further debt creation.
Banks do not exist in isolation. You could go as far as to say the problem is not so much Too Big to Fail, though that produces its own problems, as Too Interconnected to Fail. These issues have only become worse since 2008.
You could go as far as to say the problem is not so much Too Big to Fail, though that produces its own problems, as Too Interconnected to Fail.
This seems to be poorly understood and critically important. Too big, too connected, and too many people making the same bet at the same time with too much leverage. This will happen again unless something is done. And they went and made it worse...
I think he's saying we need cheap capital right about now, and this quasi-government lending machine is just about the only practical way to do that. But it's not a forever thing, and it's going to break again.
Or as a character in Margin Call put it:
"If you really want to do this with your life you have to believe that you’re necessary. And you are. People want to live like this in their cars and their big fucking houses that they can’t even pay for? Then you’re necessary. The only reason they all get to continue living like kings is because we’ve got our fingers on the scales in their favor. I take my hand off and the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly and nobody actually wants that. They say they do but they don’t. They want what we have to give them, but they also want to play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. That’s more hypocrisy than I’m willing to swallow. Fuck them. Fuck normal people."
citizens should get the money directly. why should a private bank be able to borrow at x% and sell the money to me at x+4%? if you are going to have the fed system the government should loan out mortgages directly at the same rate plus a fixed fee for a government approved appraiser.
I have seen this argument countless times but the BEP just gives money to the Fed. It's pathetic. From Wikipedia:
> The Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP) is a government agency within the United States Department of the Treasury that designs and produces a variety of security products for the United States government, most notable of which is paper currency for the Federal Reserve.[1]
None of the banks talked about in this article can make money. Only the Federal Reserve Banks can. Equating one of the non-profit, tax-exempt Federal Reserve banks which are controlled by the Federal Government, but "owned" by member banks with a consumer finance bank is ridiculous.
Heck this article is talking about subsidized bank borrowing costs. The Federal Reserve Banks have zero borrowing costs!
In practice the Federal Reserve "prints" money when it purchases Treasury Bonds. Where does the Fed get the money from? That's the whole point--the Fed is able to create money out of thin air.
Big banks function very much as part of the government, in many ways the big banks determine government policy, certainly to a much greater extent than popular opinion does. There are many forms of this public-private merging of government. To take just one aspect, consider the revolving door whereby bank executives go between their banks and government jobs and back again: to just pick one example virtually at random, obamas chief of staff is a "former" citi group executive. I wonder, if a bank executive goes to washington for a little while, do they even notice that they changed jobs?
This article explains that the big banks wouldn't even be profitable without massive tax payer support, here is a choice quote from the article which really drives home how intense the stranglehold banks have over government policy:
"Neither bank executives nor shareholders have much incentive to change the situation. On the contrary, the financial industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars every election cycle on campaign donations and lobbying, much of which is aimed at maintaining the subsidy. The result is a bloated financial sector and recurring credit gluts."
Some people wonder what could be done about such a situation. The sad truth is that there are already an overwhelming number of ideas that are floating around that have already been demonstrated to work (see iceland). The problem is not coming up with a good idea, the problem is how to implement one of the many good ideas which have already been proven to work.
The crux of the matter is that only the power of a strong federal government can take on the even more powerful too big too fail banks. The only way political change happens is when people get organized, and the american political system gives us a lot of freedoms. If you live and a free country and abstain from participating in politics, then in my opinion you have abdicated your responsibility as a citizen.