Behind The Financial Debacle: Conservative Misrule

How did it come to this? The banksters issue a threat: Hand over $700 billion in taxpayers’ money–on top of the $600 billion already forked over–or we’ll take down the global economy.

There will be a lot of obfuscation—fingers pointing every which way—but the story is very clear.

The immediate cause is the inflating and busting of the housing bubble. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan will be remembered for stoking a bubble economy [1]. Coming out of bursting of the dot.com bubble, Greenspan lowered interest rates and kept them there. With his war and tax cuts, President Bush racked up record deficits. Struggling with stagnant incomes, Americans took on record debts. Foreign creditors, like Chinese central bankers happy to loan us money to buy their goods, flooded the U.S. with dough. With mortgage rates low, housing prices rose. An unregulated shadow banking system [2] began marketing exotic mortgage-backed securities across the globe. As the housing bubble grew, brokers hawked shakier and shakier Alt-A and subprime mortgages. Ninja loans—no income, no jobs, no assets—became the rage.

Since the brokers sold off the mortgages immediately, they had a stake in making the loan, not whether the loan would be repaid. The banks and investment houses sliced and diced the loans into ever more exotic securities, which got prime ratings, although no one really knew what was in them. European banks and others bought more and more of the stuff. To escape capital limits, they invented credit default swaps in which companies like AIG guaranteed the loans in case of default. That totally unregulated over-the-counter market soared to $60 trillion. Banks set up off-balance-sheet entities to evade capital limits. Investment houses like Bear Sterns and Lehman Brothers borrowed at 30 times their capital to speculate in these markets. Wall Street’s executives were pocketing tens of millions from the take.

The regulators turned their heads. Greenspan not only fueled the cheap money; he cheered on the exotic mortgages, even while refusing to acknowledge, much less limit, the housing bubble. The Securities and Exchange Commission exempted five major investment houses from their normal capital requirements. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s executives profited personally as their enterprises started buying Alt-A mortgages.

Everything was great so long as housing prices went up. When they topped out, the bottom fell out. Defaults and foreclosures soared. Suddenly, no one knew what the value of the securities they held was, much less what was in the balance sheets of other banks. Much of the exotic paper turned toxic; no one wanted to buy it. As the banks slowly were forced to write down its value, they had to raise capital. With everyone trying to sell at the same time, the values went through the floor. Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch collapsed into bankruptcy or fire-sale mergers. The insurance giant AIG and Fannie and Freddie were taken over by the federal government.
And now, Washington is gearing up for the largest bailout in history, throwing an estimated $700 billion more to buy up the toxic paper from the banks to keep the entire financial system from collapsing.

This catastrophe was the direct result of conservative misrule. In the Great Depression, our grandfathers learned a simple lesson: Finance is too important to be left to bankers. So President Franklin D. Roosevelt saved the banks, but in exchange put them in a regulatory straitjacket. Currencies, interest rates, capital requirements, limits on leverage and on financial instruments—all were regulated to create a banking system that could provide financing needed by businesses and homeowners without debilitating speculative excesses.

In the 1970s, with the country experiencing stagflation, oil shocks and the Vietnam War, and with President Nixon moving to floating currencies, banks started pushing hard for deregulation. Wall Street money in Washington paved the way. With the election of Ronald Reagan, true believers—those whom George Soros calls “market fundamentalists”—took over Washington. Government was the problem, not the solution. Deregulation was the order of the day.

Conservatives argue now that the problem was poor regulation, not unbridled markets. But conservatives trumpeted that markets were self-correcting, and so systematically set out to weaken the regulatory agencies—not simply repealing laws, but appointing regulators who scorned the very responsibilities they were given.

Republicans led this charge, naturally, but Democrats also imbibed the conservative Kool-Aid. Deregulation became a bipartisan enterprise; Democrats began trumpeting their dedication to markets, and pocketing contributions from Wall Street. The deregulation of the savings and loans in the first months of the Reagan administration was a bipartisan effort. That disaster, which allowed S&Ls essentially to gamble with government guarantees, ending up costing taxpayers about $150 billion. We didn’t learn the lesson.

Led by such zealots as Republican Phil Gramm, Congress freed the banking system from its New Deal restraints. With the support of Bill Clinton and his Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed, ending the divide between commercial and investment banks. Commodity exchanges were exempted from regulation, leading to the over-the-counter credit swap trading that Warren Buffett warns is a financial weapon of mass destruction [3]. The SEC exempted five investment houses—Goldman Sachs, Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and Lehman Brothers—from capital requirements. Three of them are now gone. Questions about the survival of the other two triggered the current frenzied bailout. With the cop on the financial beat disarmed, the casino opened for business [4].

So once more we pay dearly to learn the lesson. Finance cannot be left to bankers. Banks can get too big to fail; unregulated financial systems tend to speculative frenzies because the speculators can profit greatly by taking very large bets—and now have good reason to believe that the government may cover their losses.

We need new and strict regulation on the entire financial system—no more shadow entities operating on the side. That regulation should include strict capital requirements, limits on leverage, transparency, and policing of instruments allowed and compensation schemes. We’ve got to rearm the cop on the financial beat—and elect leaders and appoint regulators who do not scorn the government they lead.

This won’t be easy. The bailout is designed to forestall a global depression. A depression would be destructive, but in the destruction the most irresponsible firms would be liquidated, the wastrels would be ruined, and the public would demand that government crack down on Wall Street.

With the bailout, getting Wall Street back under control won’t be easy. Wall Street is using the crisis that they’ve created to demand immediate action. Regulation, their lobbyists argue, can come later. Forget about a stimulus for the economy. Don’t complicate the bailout with requirements for renegotiating the mortgages or keeping people in their homes.

Wall Street wants the rescue without the regulation. The wastrels will have their losses covered. Wall Street money will bribe Congress to leave them alone. The public may be more relieved than angry. The market fundamentalists are already blaming the crisis on government, not on the banksters on the make.

The reality, however, is clear. Finance cannot be left to bankers. Citizens have to get into this argument. We’ve got to demand conditions on any bailout. (See the conditions we’re seeking here. [5]) And we’ve got to reject the market fundamentalism, the scorn for government and cynicism about the common good that has led us directly into this debacle.