Year: 2009

What the Smart Economists Say

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Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker is saying that we need to go back to separate investment and commercial banks, a return to something very much like Glass-Steagall, which Phil Gramm and His Evil Minions™ got repealed at the turn of the century.

In the not-fed-chair-but-a-Nobel division, we have Myron Scholes saying that “blow up or burn” over-the-counter derivative trading markets if we are serious about fixing the financial crisis:

The markets have stopped functioning and are failing to provide pricing signals, Scholes, 67, said today at a panel discussion at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Participants need a way to exit transactions and get a “fresh start,” he said.

The “solution is really to blow up or burn the OTC market, the CDSs and swaps and structured products, and let us start over,” he said, referring to credit-default swaps and other complex securities that are traded off exchanges. “One way to do that, through the auspices of regulators or the banking commissioners, is to try to close all contracts at mid-market prices.”

Alan “Bubbles” Greenspan must be turning over in his grave, or maybe he’s turning over in Ayn Rand’s grave, where he resides until the sun sets.

Paul Krugman Is Freaking Out

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Specifically, he is freaking out over the “let them eat cake” policies of Mssrs. Geithner and Summers with regard to the insolvent banking giants:

….Policy is stuck in a holding pattern.

Here’s how the pattern works: first, administration officials, usually speaking off the record, float a plan for rescuing the banks in the press. This trial balloon is quickly shot down by informed commentators.

Then, a few weeks later, the administration floats a new plan. This plan is, however, just a thinly disguised version of the previous plan, a fact quickly realized by all concerned. And the cycle starts again.

He is referring, of course to Geithner’s insistence that the big sh%$pile has an “artificially depressed value”, and Ben Bernanke’s denial of zombie financial institutions, including AIG (!).

These, quite honestly delusional preconceptions have a very real cost, as the Nobel prize winning economist notes:

But this refusal to face the facts means, in practice, an absence of action. And I share the president’s fears: inaction could result in an economy that sputters along, not for months or years, but for a decade or more.

(emphasis mine)

Personally, I lay even more of this at the feet of Lawrence Summers than I do either Geithner or Bernanke: He was one of the most vociferous free-market mousketeers, and his professional life has been marked by failure and misery left in his wake.

Of course, Summers will come out of this clean, as he has mastered the art of failing up even more than Dick Cheney.

Because Timothy Geithner is a Loser

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So, Annette Nazareth and Caroline Atkinson, have withdrawn their names from consideration for positions working in the department of the Treasury, and we have blame placed on Senate delays, and the Obama Administration’s thoroughly anal retentive vetting process.

I have no doubt that both of these issues figure prominently in some of the difficulties in staffing, though Obama is actually well ahead of the pace of recent transitions, but I think that there is another factor.

I think that a number of people out there believe that Timothy Geithner, and be extension, Lawrence Summers, simply don’t get it with the banking crisis, and that they are wrong, and that they will continue to refuse to recognize the reality that a number of the gargantuan banks in the US are simply insolvent, and so they are refusing to do the sane thing, and put them in receivership. (or pre-privatization, nationalization, or whatever the frack you want to call it)

Simply put, they recognize that in the next 6-18 months, there is a real possibility that working with Timothy Geithner on their resume will look like working with Hank Paulson, and in any case, they want no part of a policy that they see as an train wreck.

Al-Marri Detention Suit Dismissed by SCOTUS

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So the issue of indefinite detention is unresolved, though according to ScotusBlog, we have half a loaf:

The Fourth Circuit Court, in a splintered decision, upheld that authority under the 2001 Resolution, but did not rule on the government’s alternative claim that the President’s constitutional power as Commander-in-Chief supported the action. While the Supreme Court’s order Friday does not indicate how the Justices would have ruled had they gone ahead with their review, the order “vacated” the Circuit Court ruling, meaning that it no longer is a binding precedent on the issues it decided.

I’d rather see a ruling declaring the detention illegal, but the dismissal a bit better than the status quo.

Economics Update

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Scary Pix Courtesy of Barron’s Econoday

So the unemployment rate jumped ½% in February, from 7.6% to 8.1%. and 651,000 jobs were lost.

Additionally, U6, the broadest measure of un and under employment is at 14.8%, and note that U6 is the statistic closest to the 20+% unemployment rates recorded in the great depression.
….
Delightful.

If that weren’t bad enough, 20% of all mortgaged properties are under water, and something around 1 in 9 mortgages are either in foreclosure or delinquent, so any turn around in residential real estate is are greatly exaggerated.

It also looks like the FDIC is asking Congress to lend it $500 billion, because its insurance fund is depleted.

We do have Baltic Dry Index, a measure of the demand for cargo shipping, one piece of good news, in that the just hit its highest level this year, which indicates more international trade.

Meanwhile, the jump in unemployment has driven the dollar down, and oil up.

Zimbabwe Update

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I guess that the lede is that Morgan Tsvangirai has been injured in car accident, though at this time, his injuries appear “non critical”, though it has also been reported that his wife was killed.

The rest of developments have judicial with human rights campaigner Jestina Mukoko having been freed, but reporter Brian Hungwe is still in detention, albeit at a hospital.

We also had a judge ordering that MDC activist, and Deputy Minister of Agriculture designate, Roy Bennett be released on bail, though he is still in detention pending a review by the Supreme court, and the judge who issued the bail order has been arrested.

Needless to say, things in Zimbabwe remain unsettled.

Remember What I Said About the Marine Insurance Act of 1746?

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If not, see here, but once again, we are seeing the effects of ignoring this 346 year old lesson, because investors have made bets on the failure of bonds that they do not hold through Credit Default Swaps (CDS), and in so doing, look likely to be driving otherwise solvent companies into bankruptcy:

Amusement-park operator Six Flags Inc. and automaker Ford Motor Co. may be pushed toward bankruptcy by bondholders trying to profit from credit-default swaps that protect against losses on their high-yield debt.

By employing a so-called negative-basis trade, investors could buy Six Flags bonds at 20.5 cents on the dollar and credit- default swaps at 71 cents. If the New York-based chain defaults, the creditors would receive the face value of the debt, minus costs. In a Feb. 27 note, Citigroup Inc.’s high-yield strategists put that profit at 6 percentage points, or $600,000 on a $10 million purchase.

….

It was recognized centuries ago that you should not be allowed to use insurance to do this, because it leads to fraud and panics, but the free market mousketeers decided that that was old thinking, and that they had no need for no stinking insurance regulations.