The Coming Conservative Backlash

THE COMING CONSERVATIVE BACKLASH....In today's column, David Brooks is already predicting a conservative backlash against upcoming liberal overreach. Sheesh. Can we please have our liberal overreach first? I'm looking forward to it.

Personally, though, I'm skeptical. I hope I'm just being my usual pessimistic self, but I'm skeptical anyway. Take this from Ezra Klein, for example, about the new Paulson bailout plan:

The liberals were right. Not the Democrats. The liberals. They were right that deregulation had gone too far....They were right that government intervention on a massive scale was needed to stabilize the capitalist system. They were so right, in fact, that Hank Paulson and George W. Bush couldn't hold the line, and will now sign into law the most profoundly socialist measure this country has seen since the 1930s.

Maybe. And this is basically what prompts Brooks to predict a social democratic renaissance hellscape, which will eventually degenerate into....something....and then produce an inevitable backlash.

But, really, is this bailout the most profoundly socialist measure this country has seen since the 1930s? In a technical sense, maybe it is (though conservatives would probably argue the case for Medicare), but I have my doubts that it's a harbinger of social revolution. The government isn't nationalizing banks, after all. They're taking what amounts to roughly 20% nonvoting stakes. And my guess is that in a couple of years, when the markets have settled down, they'll sell those stakes off and everything will return to normal. Hopefully it will be a more tightly regulated normal, but it won't necessarily have an enormous impact beyond the financial sector.

I hope I'm wrong about this. I'd like to see the social democratic renaissance that Brooks is so itchy about. But although I know that comparisons to Japan and Sweden aren't really fair since both countries are already pretty socially democratic compared to ours, it's still the case that massive bank failures in those countries in the early 90s didn't fundamentally change their characters. I have my doubts that it will happen here, either, unless Barack Obama turns out to be a far more dynamic leader than I expect him to be. I sure hope he proves my skepticism wrong, and if he does I'm perfectly willing to accept the conservative backlash in 2024 that goes along with it. We could get a lot done in the meantime.

Robot Cars

ROBOT CARS....Matt Yglesias, riffing off a Tim Lee piece, says that self-driving cars could free up lots of parking spaces. Which is true, I guess, but seems sort of like saying that cold fusion would be cool because it would allow us to build smaller cooling towers. If we ever do build a genuinely self-driving car, it means we're only a stone's throw away from nearly human-level artificial intelligence. More efficient parking will be the least of our worries at that point.

Troopergate II: The Reckoning

TROOPERGATE II: THE RECKONING....After earlier promising to cooperate fully with the Alaska legislature's probe of Troopergate (because she had "nothing to hide," natch), Sarah Palin pulled a 180 after her vice presidential nomination and denounced the probe as an obvious partisan witch hunt. Instead, she wanted the state personnel board to investigate. So how's that working out? Michael Isikoff reports:

Some Democrats ridiculed the move, noting that the personnel board answered to Palin. But the board ended up hiring an aggressive Anchorage trial lawyer, Timothy Petumenos, as an independent counsel. McCain aides were chagrined to discover that Petumenos was a Democrat who had contributed to Palin's 2006 opponent for governor, Tony Knowles. Palin is now scheduled to be questioned next week, and the counsel's report could be released soon after. "We took a gamble when we went to the personnel board," said a McCain aide who asked not to be identified discussing strategy. While the McCain camp still insists Palin "has nothing to hide," it acknowledges a critical finding by Petumenos would be even harder to dismiss.

I'm sure Scooter Libby sympathizes. I'll bet he didn't expect Patrick Fitzgerald to conduct a real investigation either. Stay tuned.

Your Salary in 2016

YOUR SALARY IN 2016....Due to the vagaries of print magazine lead times, my swan song at the Washington Monthly is only now hitting newsstands across the globe. It's part of a package called "The Stakes," and the question put to me and a bunch of my fellow contributing editors (that's the title you get when you're a Monthly alum) was how things would change over the next eight years depending on who wins the election. The subjects include China, the courts, healthcare, broadband infrastructure, and all the other wonkiness that the Monthly is famous for. And me? No mushy predictions here, my friends. My focus was on economic fundamentals, and at the end of my piece my conclusion was blunt:

Democrats really are better for the economy than Republicans, and it really does seem to be related to differences in their economic programs. Given that, then, I’ll make this prediction: If Barack Obama is elected president, the economy over the next eight years will be better than if John McCain is elected. In fact, I’ll go further and put some hard numbers to that prediction. Here they are:

Click the link to get firm dollar figure forecasts for 2016 for both McCain and Obama. Plus an explanation of where they came from. Email it to all your Republican friends!

And if you want to read all the other essays, you can find them here. Enjoy.

The New Paulson Plan

THE NEW PAULSON PLAN....Yesterday I had a couple of questions about the Treasury's plan to recapitalize America's banks. One question was, which banks would get help? Big ones? Little ones? The answer, it turns out, is all of them:

One central plank of these new efforts is a plan for the Treasury to take approximately $250 billion in equity stakes in potentially thousands of banks, according to people familiar with the matter....Treasury will buy $25 billion in preferred stock in Bank of America, J.P Morgan and Citigroup; between $20 billion and $25 billion in Wells Fargo; $10 billion in Goldman and Morgan Stanley; and between $2 billion and $3 billion in Bank of New York Mellon and State Street.

Second question: did the banks themselves pressure Paulson into doing this? Apparently not:

Not all of the banks involved are happy with the move, but agreed under pressure from the government.

The justification for forcing all the big banks to participate is that if only a few banks got help, then they'd be instantly stigmatized as failures and no one would do business with them. So it's better to force everyone to recapitalize, thus keeping everyone's relative solvency a secret.

I get the reasoning, but I wonder if it really makes sense? After all, isn't part of the point of this exercise to figure out which banks are really worth saving and which ones aren't? And should we really be wasting money on banks that don't need help? As part of the plan the Fed is also guaranteeing new debt, and it seems as if that, combined with sufficiently large capital injections, would make the rescued banks pretty sound. Plus there's this:

While the Treasury wants to put money into banks, its main goal is to attract private capital. To make sure private investors aren't scared away, the Treasury is expected to structure its investment on terms favorable to the banks and will inject capital in exchange for preferred shares or warrants, these people said, a move that is designed to not hurt existing shareholders.

If they're forcing good banks to take government cash, this is actually reasonable. And if we do it for some banks, I guess we have to do it for all of them. But that means we're also in the business of rescuing shareholders of bad banks. Why?

I dunno. I guess I'll wait for the experts to weigh in and set me straight. The whole thing sounds a little squirrelly, though. I can't help but think that aiming the money more tightly at bad banks and driving harder bargains in the process would have been a better idea.

UPDATE: Brad DeLong is thrilled with the plan. Hilzoy has some concerns.

Regulation Followup

REGULATION FOLLOWUP....British prime minister Gordon Brown, everyone's hero of the financial moment, talks about reform:

“Sometimes it does take a crisis for people to agree that what is obvious and should have been done years ago can no longer be postponed,” the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, said in London in a speech calling for the adoption of a new Bretton Woods-style agreement among major countries. “We must now create the right new financial architecture for the global age.”

I mentioned a few days ago that I'd been noodling about this, and I certainly think there's value in talking about specifics: imposing transaction fees on financial trades, tightening up mortgage rules, requiring that credit default swaps be traded on an open exchange, and so forth. But the big picture always seems to come back to two things:

• Task central banks with paying more attention to asset bubbles. Alan Greenspan famously thought we should just let bubbles inflate away and then deal with the aftermath as best we can, but events of the past decade really don't make that seem like such a great idea anymore. What's more, this piece of the puzzle probably doesn't even require drastic regulation. It's not a matter of trying to get rid of bubbles completely, after all, but of trying to keep them just a wee bit more under control. If we had managed to restrain the housing bubble by even 20% or so, for example, that might very well have made the difference between tough times and global crisis. At the very least, central banks should refrain from throwing fuel on the fire, and should try to persuade government actors to do the same. Combine that with some modest monetary brakes when bubbles are plainly out of control, and we could avoid a lot of future trouble.

• Regulate leverage everywhere, not just in the formal banking sector. This is probably even more important. If the subprime bubble had been our only problem, it probably would have meant systemwide losses of half a trillion dollars or so. Maybe a trillion. That's nothing to sneeze at, and all by itself it would very likely have led to a few big bank failures, some big losses in the stock market, and a nasty recession. But that's merely a disaster. It was the additional leverage from derivative trading based on the underlying loans that turned a disaster into a global meltdown.

  Figuring out how to fix this is a gargantuan task that's several light years above my pay grade. Simple financial leverage is straightforward enough, but effective leverage hidden in complex debt instruments, often off balance sheet, makes this a regulatory nightmare. Realistically, I suppose it probably needs to be some kind of extension of Basel II with more scope and more bite, but one way or another, after years of talking about the dangers of stratospheric leverage but taking very little actual action to rein it in, something has to be done. If we're looking for work for all the rocket scientists who have been let go from their Wall Street jobs recently, this might not be a bad place to start.
  

So who should be our go-to guys on this subject? It seems like liberals were caught sort of flat-footed by the Paulson bailout plan, which made it difficult (though, in the end, not impossible) to quickly sell Congress on a different strategy. This time around, when the conversation starts, it would be nice to have some coherent strategies already on the table from people we trust. Any suggestions?

New Trade Theory and Me

NEW TRADE THEORY AND ME....I've never really paid attention to the breakthroughs in trade theory for which Paul Krugman is most famous as an economist, but Alex Tabarrok explains it this way:

Consider the simplest model [of New Trade Theory]....In this model there are two countries. In each country, consumers have a preference for variety but there is a tradeoff between variety and cost, consumers want variety but since there are economies of scale — a firm's unit costs fall as it produces more — more variety means higher prices. Preferences for variety push in the direction of more variety, economies of scale push in the direction of less. So suppose that without trade country 1 produces varieties A,B,C and country two produces varieties X,Y,Z. In every other respect the countries are identical so there are no traditional comparative advantage reasons for trade.

Nevertheless, if trade is possible it is welfare enhancing. With trade the scale of production can increase which reduces costs and prices. Notice, however, that something interesting happens. The number of world varieties will decrease even as the number of varieties available to each consumer increases. That is, with trade production will concentrate in say A,B,X,Y so each consumer has increased choice even as world variety declines.

Increasing variety for individuals even as world variety declines is a fundamental fact of globalization.

The reason this caught my eye is that it turns out I'm a disciple of New Trade Theory and I didn't even know it. Last year I wrote a piece for Mother Jones about media consolidation, and even though it made me feel like a bad liberal I said that I had never been much bothered by it. Why? Because even though the absolute number of news outlets might have declined thanks to globalization, I personally had access to many more news sources than I did 30 years ago. I called this a "paradox," but apparently it's actually now conventional trade theory. So, like Monsieur Jourdain, who had been speaking in prose for forty years without knowing it, it looks like I've been a Krugmanite for mumblety-mum years without realizing it. I guess I should get out more.

Wingnut Watch

WINGNUT WATCH....John Cole revives the Golden Wingnut Award today with a worthy successor to the original winner. Unsurprisingly, however, the actual recipient remains the same.

Treason Watch

TREASON WATCH....Did Barack Obama try to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay a security agreement with the United States? Even Republican witnesses say he did no such thing during a meeting in Baghad, but how about during a June phone call with Iraq's foreign minister? Apparently not then either:

The statement by Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari refutes a recent published report and a statement by Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin that Obama tried to influence Iraqi politicians negotiating with the United States to score political points.

Obama "never, ever discouraged us not to sign the agreement," Zebari said. "I think this was misrepresented, and I have clarified this case in a number of interviews back in the United States recently."

The ball's back in your court, wingnuts — though I guess you've already moved on to "Bill Ayers ghostwrote Obama's book" nutbaggery, haven't you? Must be hard typing while wearing a straitjacket, though.

Econ 101

ECON 101....Commenting on Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize, Matt Yglesias complains about the parlous state of public knowledge of economics:

In the public debate, my sense is that “economics” tends to be understood as mostly comprising a series of very simple models indicating the desirability of laissez faire (make it more expensive to hire workers by raising the minimum wage and the level of employment will go down — supply and demand, economics 101, QED) that leave it somewhat puzzling as to how this is even a field in which people do PhD-level research.

Actually, I think Matt gives the peeps too much credit here. For vast swathes of the public, their knowledge opinions about economics are approximately limited to (a) low taxes are good for the economy, (b) foreigners are taking away our jobs, and (c) Social Security is doomed. Frankly, Econ 101 would be a big step forward.

Paulson's Record

PAULSON'S RECORD....Ezra Klein has an eminently fair and nonshrill critique here of Henry Paulson's handling of the ongoing credit crisis. I'll just add one thing. Paulson's reluctance to push the trigger on capital infusions for banks is understandable, even if it was wrong, but his resistance to having even the power to recapitalize banks is genuinely weird. After all, before the latest phase of the crisis hit, Paulson and Bernanke had spent months urging banks to raise private capital to weather the storm. Both men knew perfectly well that bank capitalization was an issue. And before he introduced his version of the bailout bill, Paulson had twice previously bowed to reality on government takeovers and recapitalizations, first in the case of Fannie and Freddie, and second in the case of AIG.

Given all this, his continuing resistance to the idea is difficult to fathom. His caution can perhaps be written off to background and ideology, but not his flat rejection of even being given the authority. I'm not sure what the explanation is.

What's the Problem?

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?....In response to a Paul Krugman post about the Treasury wasting time implementing a capital infusion program for distressed banks, a commenter wrote:

They still don’t know why banks don’t trust enough to lend commercial paper.

If it’s balance sheet issues then unloading toxic debit will work.

If it’s a need to de-leverage then a capital infusion is required.

But if it’s trust then we need regulation of and a change in management at the banks.

And if it’s fear of credit default swaps, or other essentially incalculable obligations, then they need to be unwound and banned, at least the incalculable or morally hazardous ones, going forward.

My guess is that all four of these are issues, but it's the last one that keeps me up at night (metaphorically speaking, anyway). If CDS losses turn out to be the biggest problem — and potentially, at least, they seem to be responsible for far bigger losses than the underlying subprime losses themselves — then even a big capital infusion might not make much of dent in the credit crisis. But how do we find out?

And here's another thing to be curious about. When Gordon Brown announced his capital infusion plan, Britain's four biggest banks apparently took him up on his offer almost immediately. But what about America's biggest banks? Have they been putting out feelers? Burning up the phone lines begging Paulson to get off his ass and offer them a deal? Or what? And which American banks are in weak enough shape to want fresh capital at (presumably) punitive prices? All of them? A few big ones? Lots of little ones? Wait and see, I guess.

UPDATE: That should have been "Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman's post." Apologies for the error.

Obama's Ads

OBAMA'S ADS....Politico reports on Barack Obama's fundraising:

One official close to the campaign said that September's fundraising haul set a new record, surpassing the $66 million Obama raised in August. Another aide, asked about the campaign's take, would only describe it: "big."

How big is "big"? Well, big enough that I've actually seen a few Obama ads myself. In California. I guess maybe they were national ad buys, but I don't think so. And I can hardly remember the last time I saw a presidential campaign bothering to advertise in California. (Maybe for a few days in 2000 when Karl Rove was having delusions that Bush might win here? That's all that comes to mind.)

Anyway, I don't quite know what this means, but Obama must really have money to burn if he's buying ads here in the Golden State.

Sunday Bonus Catblogging - 10.12.2008

SUNDAY BONUS CATBLOGGING.... There's too much tension and stress this weekend over our ongoing financial tsunami. What's needed is some bonus catblogging to explain in layman's terms how we got into this mess.

In today's installment, Inkblot demonstrates graphically what happened to our banking system. Like the titans of our financial industry, last night he became convinced that the answer to all his problems was increased leverage. With enough leverage, along with some positive thinking, he was sure he could fit himself into the box lying on the floor. And he almost did it. Unfortunately, he eventually found himself forced to deleverage his position, at which point the box went kablooey and he needed to be bailed out. Sort of like our banks. Lesson learned?

Quote of the Day - 10.12.08

QUOTE OF THE DAY....From IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, commenting on the financial crisis:

"Intensifying solvency concerns about a number of the largest U.S.-based and European financial institutions have pushed the global financial system to the brink of systemic meltdown."

If he means "largest" literally, he's talking about Citi, Chase, and BofA. I wonder if he's talking literally?

Also: why only U.S. and European banks? How are things going in Asia and Australia? How have they managed to avoid the contagion?

Security Agreement Update

SECURITY AGREEMENT UPDATE....From Juan Cole:

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that its sources in Baghdad say that the al-Maliki government will sign off on a security agreement with the Bush administration "within days." The report says that Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has assured the government that he will accept the agreement if it can pass parliament. Pundits are debating how likely the measure is to get through the Iraqi legislature, with some denying it has a chance and others saying it will sail through.

Cole suggests this might be an attempt at an "October surprise," but I don't really see that. It's been in the works for months, everyone knows it's been in the works for months, and even if it passes the Iraqi parliament it's hardly election-changing news anyway. I'm surprised it's taken as long as it has, but my guess is that the delay has been of a fairly mundane variety.

Tracking the Markets

TRACKING THE MARKETS....Am I the only one who finds this chart that I adapted from today's LA Times a little puzzling? Yes, financial stocks are down a bit more than either big caps or small caps, but shouldn't they be down a lot more?

As usual, maybe I'm just missing something here. But if our banking system is systemically undercapitalized; if the global financial system is close to meltdown; and if the solution is likely to include massive share dilution from a federal government equity injection, shouldn't financial stocks be sucking really, really hard? Can someone enlighten me?

Recapitalization

RECAPITALIZATION....The British plan to recapitalize their banks is proceeding apace:

Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), which has seen its market value fall to below £12 billion, is to ask ministers to underwrite a £15 billion cash call. Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS), Britain’s biggest provider of mortgages, is seeking up to £10 billion. Lloyds TSB, which is in the process of acquiring HBOS in a rescue merger, wants £7 billion, while Barclays needs £3 billion.

I wonder who's going to get rescued in the United States? Of the big investment banks, Bear and Lehman are gone, Merrill has been purchased, Goldman still seems able to raise private capital, and Morgan Stanley will probably be acquired by Mitsubishi if worse comes to worst. The three big conglomerates seem to be in OK shape. Smaller depository institutions are a mixed bag, but the FDIC seems capable of dealing with failures in that sector. Hedge funds, we're told, aren't eligibile for bailout. So who does that leave?

I guess we'll find out soon. Maybe it will turn out that BofA and Citi and Chase aren't in such great shape after all. Maybe there are some other insurance company time bombs lurking in the bushes. Who knows?

Confusing times. Confusing for everyone, too, not just us financially unlettered types. It's remarkable, after all, that as recently as mid-September almost no one was suggesting mass recapitalization as the answer to our banking woes. Today, a mere three weeks later, it's not merely a suggestion, it's the virtually unanimous recommendation of every economist in the country. But how did our entire thundering herd of economists change their minds so quickly? It's a mystery, because despite their often injured tone over not being listened to, they've never explained to the rest of us why they're suddenly so sure that recapitalization is the only answer to our problems. It's yet another round of "trust us," only with different players this time.

It's not that I think they're wrong. It seems a perfectly reasonable conclusion, in fact. But exactly what research have they done in the past three weeks that's so abruptly convinced them of this? Is it just based on events on the ground? New evidence from the market itself? Why are we so absolutely sure that there isn't something else going on as well? I wish they'd clue the rest of us in.

Troopergate Finale

TROOPERGATE FINALE....I read most of the Branchflower report on Troopergate last night, but the MSM seemed to be doing a fine job of reporting the results all its own so I never got around to posting about it. The basic story, of course, revolves around Todd and Sarah Palin's crusade to get their ex-brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, fired from his job as a state trooper, and their efforts to get Alaska's Commissioner of Public Safety, Walt Monegan, to do the firing. Most of this story is pretty well known already. However, Time's Nathan Thornburgh points out the aspect of the report that struck me as the most remarkable:

The result is not a mortal wound to Palin....But the Branchflower report still makes for good reading, if only because it convincingly answers a question nobody had even thought to ask: Is the Palin administration shockingly amateurish? Yes, it is. Disturbingly so.

The 263 pages of the report show a co-ordinated application of pressure on Monegan so transparent and ham-handed that it was almost certain to end in public embarrassment for the governor.

....Monegan and his peers constantly warned these Palin disciples that the contact was inappropriate and probably unlawful. Still, the emails and calls continued — in at least one instance on recorded state trooper phone lines.

The state's head of personnel, Annette Kreitzer, called Monegan and had to be warned that personnel issues were confidential. The state's attorney general, Talis Colberg, called Monegan and had to be reminded that the call was putting both men in legal jeopardy, should Wooten decide to sue. The governor's chief of staff met with Monegan and had to be reminded by Monegan that, "This conversation is discoverable ... You don't want Wooten to own your house, do you?"

Monegan pointed out to a steady stream of people that (a) Wooten was protected by civil service and there was nothing more that could be done since he'd already gone through a formal disciplinary procedure, and (b) any conversation about Wooten was discoverable in court if Wooten ever got tired of being hounded and decided to file a civil suit. And yet the contacts kept coming and coming and coming — and coming and coming. And Branchflower documents them in painful detail. It's all quite remarkable.

In fact, here's the part that really puzzles me: what exactly did Todd and Sarah Palin hope to accomplish? Surely they knew perfectly well that Monegan was right: he couldn't have fired Wooten even if he wanted to. And they must also have known that even if Monegan were replaced, any replacement would quickly check into the situation and report back the same thing. Wooten had already been disciplined, and unless something new cropped up there was simply nothing that anyone could do to force him out of his job. In fact, the Palins' efforts probably made it nearly impossible even to reassign Wooten since it would so obviously have been politically motivated. It was a completely futile crusade they were on.

So what were they thinking? Or were they?

Banks

BANKS....Justin Fox on the "shadow banking system":

And another thing: If you borrow short and lend long, you're effectively a bank. It's becoming ever less clear to me what justification there is for nonbank borrow-short-lend-long-institutions other than regulatory arbitrage.

Brad DeLong responds:

Not just "effectively" a bank. You are a bank. Not until the twentieth century did we have organizations that borrowed short and invested long that did not call themselves "banks." The emergence of non-bank banks has always been the result of attempts at regulatory arbitrage.

So what's the answer? What should our 21st century definition of "bank" be for regulatory purposes? Any entity that invests other people's money in any way? That can't be right, can it? Or can it?