L'esprit de Milton Friedman : New York, February 15, a day with Anna Schwartz

Guy Sorman
15 février 2009 à 22:22


Anna Schwartz must be the oldest active revolutionary on earth. Born in 1915 in New York , she can still be found nearly every day at her office in the National Bureau of Economic Research on Fifth Avenue , where she has been relentlessly gathering data since 1941. And as her experience proves, data can transform the world. During the 1960s, with Milton Friedman, she researched and wrote A Monetary History of the United States, a book that changed forever our knowledge of economics and the way governments operate. Schwartz spent ten years of detective work on the project, which helped found the monetarist theory of economics. “Not only by gathering new data, but by coming up with new ways to measure information, we were able to demonstrate the link between the quantity of money generated by the banks, inflation, and the business cycle,” she explains.

Before the monetarist revolution, most economists believed that the quantity of money circulating in the economy had no influence on prices or on growth. History, Friedman and Schwartz argued, showed otherwise. Every time the Federal Reserve (and the central banks before it) created an excess of money, either by keeping interest rates too low or by injecting liquidity into banks, prices inflated. At first, the easy money might seem to increase consumers’ purchasing power. But the increase would be only apparent, since sellers tended to raise the prices of their goods to absorb the extra funds. Investors would then start speculating on short-term bets--whether tulips in the seventeenth century or subprime mortgages more recently--seeking to beat the expected inflation. Eventually, such “manias,” as Schwartz calls them, would begin replacing long-term investment, thus destroying entrepreneurship and harming economic growth.

By contrast, when the central bank fails to provide enough money to ensure liquidity, the market collapses. There is now a near-consensus among professional economists that lack of liquidity caused the Great Depression. During the severe economic downturn of 1930, the Fed did nothing as a first group of banks failed. Other depositors became alarmed that they would lose their money if their banks failed, too, leading to further bank runs, propelling a frightening downward economic spiral.

To encourage steady growth while avoiding the pitfalls of inflation, speculation, and recession, the monetarists recommend establishing predictability in the value of currency--steadily expanding or contracting the money supply to answer the needs of the economy. “At first, central bankers and governments did not accept our theory,” says Schwartz. Margaret Thatcher was the first to understand that the monetarists were right, following the new monetarist rules when she came to power in 1979, taming inflation and reinvigorating the British economy. The U.S. soon followed during the early 1980s, led by Paul Volker, a Friedmanite then at the head of the Federal Reserve, who, with Ronald Reagan’s tough-minded support, ended raging inflation, though not without considerable short-term pain. “It was a strenuous experience,” Schwartz remembers. As Volker tightened the money supply, thus making credit harder to come by, unemployment spiked to around 10 percent; many businesses failed. But starting in 1983, the inflation beast defeated, a new era of vigorous growth got under way, based on innovation and long-term investment.

This lesson of the recent past seems all but forgotten, Schwartz says. Instead of staying the monetarist course, Volker’s successor as Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, too often preferred to manage the economy--a fatal conceit, a monetarist would say. Greenspan wanted to avoid recessions at all costs. By keeping interest rates at historic lows, his easy money fueled manias: first the Internet bubble and then, even more catastrophically, the recently burst mortgage bubble. “A too-easy monetary policy induces people to acquire whatever is the object of desire in a mania period,” Schwartz notes.

Greenspan’s successor as Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, has followed the same path in confronting the current economic crisis, Schwartz charges. Instead of the steady course that the monetarists recommend, the Federal Bank and the Treasury “try to break news on a daily basis and they look for immediate gratification,” she says. “Bernanke is looking for sensations, with new developments every day. But the market isn’t interested.”

Yet isn’t Bernanke a disciple of Friedman and Schwartz? He publicly refers to them as his mentors, and thanks to their scientific breakthrough, he has famously declared, “the Great Depression will not happen again.” Bernanke is right about the past, Schwartz says, “but he is fighting the wrong war today--the present crisis has nothing to do with a lack of liquidity.” President Obama’s economic stimulus is similarly irrelevant, she believes, since the crisis also has nothing to do with either a lack of demand or a lack of investment. The credit crunch, which is the actual cause of the recession, comes only from a lack of trust, argues Schwartz. Lenders aren’t lending because they don’t know who is solvent, and they can’t know who is solvent because portfolios remain full of mortgage-backed securities and other toxic assets.

In order to rekindle the credit market, the banks must get rid of those toxic assets. That’s why Schwartz supported, in principle, the Bush administration’s first proposal for responding to the crisis--to buy bad assets from banks--though not, she emphasizes, while pricing those assets so generously as to prop up failed institutions. The administration abandoned its plan when it appeared too complicated to price the assets. Bernanke and then-treasury secretary Henry Paulson subsequently shifted to recapitalizing the banks directly. “Doing so is shifting from trying to save the banking system to trying to save bankers, which is not the same thing,” Schwartz says. “Ultimately, though, firms that made wrong decisions should fail. The market works better when wrong decisions are punished and good decisions make you rich.”

What about “systemic risk”--much heard about these days to justify the government’s massive intervention in the economy in recent months? Schwartz considers this an excuse for bankers to save their skins after making so many disastrously bad decisions. “The worst thing for a government to do, though, is to act without principles, to make ad hoc decisions, to do something one day and another thing tomorrow,” she says. The market will respond positively only after the government begins to follow a steady and predictable course. To prove her point, Schwartz points out that nothing the government has done to date has really thawed credit.

Schwartz indicts Bernanke for fighting the wrong war. Could one turn the same accusation against her? Should we worry about inflation when some believe deflation to be the real enemy? “The risk of deflation is very much exaggerated,” she answers. Inflation seems to her “unavoidable”: the Federal Reserve is creating money with little restraint, while Treasury expenditures remain far in excess of revenue. The inflation spigot is thus wide open. To beat the coming inflation, a “new Paul Volker will be needed at the head of the Federal Reserve.”

Who listens to her these days? “I’m not a media person,” she tells me. She rarely grants interviews, which distract her from her current research: a survey of government intervention in setting foreign exchange rates between 1962 and 1985. Never before have these data been put together to show what works and what doesn’t. In her mid-nineties, she remains a trendsetter.

Subprime crisis : the overall picture

In many aspects, the current financial meltdown that brought many banks and insurers to insolvency may be compared to the nuclear meltdown that affected the Chernobyl power plant. And whatever Big Government pundits may tell us endlessly - without real in-depth arguments - inappropriate state intrusions in the economy are as much responsible for the financial crisis as poor state management of nuclear facilities by USSR was for the Chernobyl disaster.

If the mechanisms of the so-called “Chinese syndrome” can be described as a process of ignition, amplification, and then propagation of atomic reactions, likewise, the current crisis is a story of state interventions in the economy, that ignited, amplified, and then propagated the meltdown from its original core to the whole financial system.

Ignition

The main factor that ignited the current crisis is how politicians forced two state regulated enterprises, Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac , to refinance a growing part of unsecured loans to low and very low income families. In exchange, Fannie and Freddie were exempted from some accounting requirements generally expected from ordinary firms, allowing them to leverage too much credit compared to their equity, by an extensive use of off balance “special purpose vehicles.” All these operations were made under an implicit taxpayer provided safety net, as the statutory rules of the department of Housing and Urban Development made possible the nationalization of Fannie and Freddie in the case of bankruptcy.

These government provisions, coupled with a law mandating banks to find ways to originate loans to some high risk-profiled borrowers (the much discussed and controversial Community Reinvestment Act), reversed the usual prudential rules governing company CEOs: first, don’t fail, and then, make a profit. Due to their government backing, Fannie and Freddie only had to expand their volume of business, without too much consideration of the underlying risks. The purchase of so many bad loans by two state-backed giants encouraged reckless lending by banks and mortgage brokers to many risk-unaware families.

This behavior was greatly helped by Alan Greenspan’s decisions to lower and maintain very low interest rates in the early 2000s without consideration of the obvious asset bubble that was emerging in the housing sector. When credit is too cheap, borrowers tend to be less careful in their investments.

Amplification

But these facts do not explain by themselves how big the housing bubble has become. The average Joe, in the mortgage broker’s office, was not as unsophisticated as generally described. He could lose his common sense and succumb to easy credit only because the brokers could show him impressive Case-Schiller index curves, which seemed to show that any housing investment could gain more and more value every year, making the purchaser richer even while he was sleeping. Without this apparent housing inflation, many people wouldn’t have jumped so recklessly onto the easy credit bandwagon.

But this housing inflation did not occur everywhere in the country. Some of the most dynamic metro areas, in terms of population growth, haven’t experienced any housing bubble. Recent Nobel Prize Paul Krugman, supported by several research papers, notably from academics like Ed Glaeser or Wendell Cox, explained it by land use regulations : when these regulations are flexible and tend to be respectful of the property rights of the land owner, housing bubbles cannot even get started. But when regulations allow the existing real estate owners to prevent farmland holders to build the houses required to satisfy all housing needs, housing prices start skyrocketing.

Housing mortgage debt owed by families grew from 4.8 to 10.5 trillion USD (in french) from early 2000 to late 2007. But had every city in the USA had the same flexible land use regulations that they had in the fifties, and that still exist in fast growing areas like Houston or Atlanta, this exposure to risk would have been much lower, by 3 to 4 trillion. More borrowers would have qualified for the prime credit market and its less risky loans, since the lower price of the purchased homes would have resulted in better credit ratings. So, despite the bad lending practices mentioned above, the risk of a general collapse of the credit market would have been nearly equal to zero.

Propagation

At this point, we just explained the roots of a mortgage crisis. What is still missing is the way it has spread throughout the financial system. Once again, bad laws are to blame.

First, this crisis shows how risky the bank’s business model, grounded on low equity and very high leveraging ratios, has become unsound in these time of high volatility of some assets. Some will blame banks for this, but you should be aware that before the creation of the FED in 1913, most banks’ business models were based on equity levels over 60%: the shift from a high equity to a low equity model comes first from tax policies which have, in nearly every country of the world, severely taxed capital gains, but encouraged debt by deducting the interest payment from the corporate tax base. The second reason is that central banks, as “last recourse lenders,” usually with a state’s warranty, have themselves favored this shift to a highly leveraged model: borrowing money was de facto a cheaper resource than raising capital to finance operations.

But of course, this doesn’t explain how a 10% default risk on a credit niche market (the subprimes), totaling less than 10% of the total housing debt (12 trillion at the end of 2007), itself less than one fifth of the total assets being exchanged on American financial markets, generated such turmoil.

The culprits must be sought within a set of rules --- whose latest version is known as “Basel II” --- and their declinations in local laws in most countries, aimed at regulating the activities of banks or insurance companies. In some cases, poorly designed accounting rules may have contributed, too.

Basel II rules — and the like — mandate banks and insurers to hold a diversified portfolio of assets aimed at providing them the liquidities they need to face hard times: for a bank, a major loss of customers; for insurers, a series of major disasters. These rules were supposed to “protect” investors from reckless diversification policies. So institutional investors were mandated to own only high quality bonds, or to value some kinds of assets, like stocks, with a weighting that de facto prevented their securities from handling such assets directly.

But banks and insurers needed the yields of “lower quality” bonds, or even stocks, to remain attractive to private investors. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to beat the performance of state labeled bonds, and thus wouldn’t bring any added value to their customers, forcing them out of the market.

So the late 80’s and the 90’s saw the onset of a huge market of “derivatives,” all based on the following principle: lower quality assets (like subprime based securities bonds) are put together in another security, which itself sells new bonds sliced into several “tranches.” The first slice, the “z-tranch,” is a very risky one, which is aimed at bringing a higher yield to unregulated investors as hedge funds but must absorb primarily the first percentages of any losses of the security. Other tranches bear a lower risk but serve a lower yield. The “cushion effect” of the high risk tranch allows the lower tranch bonds to receive an AAA rating from rating agencies, particularly if they are covered against credit default by a special derivative called a “credit default swap,” allowing lender and borrowers to reinsure themselves against defaults on their bonds. And there can be other “derivatives of derivatives” involved in these designs. In many cases, institutions issuing AAA tranches guaranteed the payment of the corresponding bonds.

So the current situation is that many institutional investors do not hold many real stocks or bonds in their portfolios. They mostly hold a majority of derivatives.

But all this incredibly complex financial engineering not only is extremely costly, but has one perverse effect: while reducing the probability of AAA tranches to default, it actually makes the amount of the risk higher in the event that losses are high enough to impact the AAA tranches. And all these complex designs of derivatives make it increasingly difficult to understand where the risks are located in complex securities mixing prime mortgages, subprime mortgages, and other kinds of credits. So when an AAA tranch is impacted by higher than forecast losses, nobody really knows what is the resulting worth of the best tranch if it has to be sold. Is it 95% of the nominal? 60%? Nobody seems able to value these bonds reliably.

So when the mortgage debtors began to be insolvent in a higher proportion than usual, the losses on subprimes derivatives began to exceed the “cushion” effect of Z-tranches. AAA bonds were impacted. Some holders of these bonds, forced to sell off in panic in order to get cash, couldn’t find purchasers, except some highly speculative funds that toughly negotiated the price.

But then, because of inflexible accounting laws, all institutions holding the same kind of toxic assets had to write down the values of these assets in their balance sheets, even if their treasury level didn’t force them to proceed to a fire sale of these assets. So they might have been declared virtually insolvent even if actually they were not. This affected their ability to borrow on short term liquidities markets, and thus led some of them ultimately to file for bankruptcy.

If no regulatory limitations had been placed on the assets that banks and insurers could hold, it is likely that they would not have found the use of exotic derivatives so attractive, and that early difficulties in subprime credits would have resulted in clear signals prompting securities managers to recompose their portfolios. Some investors’ failures could have occurred earlier, but would not have reached such proportions.

Big Government is the culprit

So, at the root of every mechanism identified as a catalyst of the current crisis, we can find a bad federal or local regulation.

Does this mean that private institutions have no moral and technical responsibility in the current mess? Certainly not. They’ve deliberately chosen to take advantage of these poisonous regulations instead of fighting them, even though some of the underlying risks were clearly identified. Many of them ifnored warnings issued by economists like Nouriel Roubini, or atypical politicians like Ron Paul, and preferred to listen to reassuring assessments of the soundness of the system written by star economists like Joseph Stiglitz. People don’t like dream breakers.

Competition to overturn bad regulations doesn’t exonerate financial private institutions from having failed to do so properly. Whatever conditions are created by the states, firms must act wisely. Many of them obviously did not. But in the ranking of responsibilities, states’ inaccurate and inordinate regulations obviously rank highest. Had its diverse regulations and interventions focused on principles (honesty in contracts, no concealment of malpractice, full disclosure of operations, respect of property rights) and court litigation; had they let private individuals or enterprises decide what was good for them without trying to curb their behaviors in particular directions, none of the elements that allowed this crisis would have been in place.

Government’s economic interventions in human interactions once again have proved counterproductive and finally wrought havoc. This should make people very careful about government claims that new interventions are necessary to solve the crisis and avoid the next one!

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Vincent BENARD is the president of the "Institut hayek", a French speaking think tank based in France and Belgium - http://www.fahayek.org/ . French-savvy readers who enjoyed this article might be interessed in my 16 other articles (and counting) dealing with the subprime crisis; some of them also having been published by the Institut Hayek.

Thanks to Don Hank for the language corrections brought to my initial draft.----