What really caused the financial crisis

The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) defines how we think about our recent past, our present and our future, yet there is no clear consensus account of why it happened. There have been so many explanations put forward. On the US side these have included the Asian savings glut overwhelming the financial system, a failure of US monetary policy and a US housing bubble (and too much lending to poor people). [1] On the European side the focus has been on excess borrowing by, or excess lending to, the Eurozone periphery, and sometimes on the poor Eurozone architecture. Yet as I have read more and more on this, it seemed to me that we should be focusing on the financial sector in both the US and the Eurozone, and of course the UK. My view has become that the crisis happened because banks in the US and Europe became too highly leveraged, and were therefore a crisis waiting to happen.

It was for this reason that I found Tam Bayoumi’s presentation of his new book so interesting.

He argues that by 2002 almost all the ingredients for the crisis were in place. In Europe we had very large universal banks (combining retail and investment banking) which were far too highly leveraged. In the US retail and investment banking were separate, with tight regulations on retail banks but little regulation on investment banking leading to shadow banking (deposits effectively moved to investment banks, like Lehmans, that again became too highly leveraged). In 2002 these two were separated by geography, but a small regulation change in 2003 allowed linkages between the two to develop, and then it was only a matter of time before we had the GFC, where ‘Global’ here means the US and Europe.

How did these banks become over leveraged? According to Bayoumi in Europe the creation of Universal Banks represented a flawed attempt to create a single European market in banking. There were subsequent failures in regulation that allowed these banks to expand (increase leverage) by manipulating their own risk weighting. This allowed these banks to move into Southern Europe and North America in a big way. In the US investment banks were not regulated because of a firm belief by the Fed that competition provided its own regulation for this type of bank.

Thus the GFC was the story of an over leveraged, interconnected banking system on both sides of the North Atlantic, just waiting for a shock significant enough to bring the whole system to crisis point. The presumption, which history confirms, is that finance is naturally prone to such crises, which is why the sector is regulated, so this story is also one of regulation errors. Bayoumi argues that each one of these errors can be put down to genuine intellectual mistakes, but he did agree with me that it was sometimes difficult to tell to what extent they were also the result of political pressure from powerful financial interests.

Have governments and regulators on either side of the North Atlantic done enough since the GFC to correct the mistakes that were made? The answer is complex, and it is best you read the book to find out Bayoumi's answer. Instead I want to end by making one observation of my own. Whenever a crisis happens, in the immediate aftermath people bring their own biases to understanding why it happened. So those who had been writing about global imbalances re orientated their analysis to explain the GFC. Those who wanted to attack US monetary policy, sometimes as a way of distracting attention from the culpability of the financial sector, did so. Those that had designed the Eurozone in such a way as to avoid profligate periphery governments talked about excess borrowing by those governments.

You can see the same with Brexit and Trump. Although a protest by the ‘left behind’ played some role, the idea that they are the full story suits some narratives but it is simply incorrect, as the new paper by Gurminder K. Bhambra argues. Over time things become clearer. What this analysis by Tam Bayoumi convincingly shows is that finance always has to be carefully regulated, and failures in regulation can have catastrophic consequences.

[1] New evidence suggests that the housing crash may have actually had more to do with lending to property speculators than low income mortgage holders.

Brexit and Sterling

Is the Brexit induced decline in Sterling a blessing in disguise? So argues Ashoka Mody, and to a lesser extent Paul Krugman. Their basic argument is that Brexit will hit the City, and it is the City that has created an unbalanced economy and an overvalued currency. Reducing the size of the financial sector is a necessary condition to rebalancing the economy, and Brexit can achieve this.

Ashoka Mody’s disdain for the City is absolutely clear. He writes: “The banking-property complex has been a parasite on the British economy, creating pathologies of financial vulnerability and exchange rate overvaluation.” We can see the overvaluation in the large UK current account deficit. Paul Krugman is less pejorative. The City is just an important UK exporter that Brexit will cut down to size, so we will need to make other UK exporters more competitive to fill the gap.

Neither author disagrees that, because the depreciation of Sterling will raise import prices (in economic speak it will lead to a deterioration in the terms of trade), people in the UK will be poorer. But there is also a difference in mechanisms between the two authors, which has implications for how you view this effect. For Mody the City has caused Sterling to be temporarily overvalued as a result of a “finance-property bubble”. As this is a temporary effect (bubble), sterling was bound to fall at some point anyway. As a result, Brexit has only brought forward the day that UK citizens became poorer.

Krugman on the other hand does not argue that sterling was overvalued in this sense: the City is just an important export industry that will particularly suffer from Brexit. As a result, Brexit does make the average citizen poorer permanently. But he notes that, to the extent that this depreciation also results in a redistribution from the City to more dispersed manufacturing, it might benefit some of the parts of the UK that heavily voted for Brexit.

There is nothing wrong with the logic of both arguments, as you would expect given the authors. The key question is whether they are empirically appropriate in this case. I have argued, prior to Brexit, that Sterling was overvalued, and it also seems that the IMF agrees as well. The key issue is why it was overvalued. If the reason for the overvaluation was something Brexit has ‘cured’, then Brexit has indeed ended that overvaluation. If Brexit has not taken away the reason for overvaluation, then the correction to that overvaluation has still to come.

Paul Krugman’s logic is closer to the one I have also used in arguing that the Brexit depreciation is a result of Brexit making it more difficult for UK industry to export. The twist Paul applies is a distributional one: rather than Brexit making it more difficult to export across the board, it hits one particular industry, allowing other industries to grow. Once again the key issue is whether Brexit does have this distributional effect, hitting the City harder than UK manufacturing.

Suppose there is something in what both authors suggest. I would make a very basic point. If we wanted to cut the City down to size, we didn’t have to achieve this using Brexit. We could instead have imposed much stronger regulations on the UK financial sector (basically higher capital requirements), and watch some of the industry leave in disgust. That way we would have avoided all the additional costs that Brexit will impose (recently restated by the Treasury, but only now considered ‘news’ by the Times), and with the additional benefit of having a financial sector that was not too big to fail. My fear is that after Brexit the opposite will happen: policymakers will go even easier on City regulation in an effort to make up for the damage Brexit will do. So I’m still finding it hard to see any silver lining in the Brexit decision.

Economists versus bankers

Nearly a year and a half ago I wrote a post about encouraging dialogue between economists and other social scientists. I concluded with the following three paragraphs:

“Let me take a real world economic problem: the response to the financial crisis. Some have suggested that banks have become too large and need to be broken up, or that the activities of high street banking need to be separated from the activities of the casino. Your economic analysis tells you that networks of many small entities can be as subject to crises as networks involving a few large banks. You are also able to devise a system of Chinese walls that mean that the activities of the casino can be separated from those of the high street even within the same company, and your political masters seem to prefer this approach. You recognise that different assets differ in their liquidity, and so you devise complex weighting algorithms for computing capital ratios. Your suggestions form the basis of negotiations between officials and bankers, and a set of rules and regulations are agreed.

Over the next few years you watch in dismay as your complex system begins to unravel. The CEOs of the large banks seem to constantly have the ear of politicians, who in turn gradually compromise your elaborate controls to render them less and less effective. Those in charge of administering the rules find it much more lucrative to work for the banks, and so regulators gradually lose expertise and resolve.

And you realise that right from the start you made the wrong choice. You decided to focus on what you knew, which was how to design systems that worked well as long as those systems remained unchanged, but which were not robust to intervention by self-interested parties. In short, they were too open to rent-seeking. You realise that actually the best thing to have done was to break up the banks so that their political power was forever diminished. And you recall a conversation with your social science colleague when this all started, who might have been trying to tell you this if only you had understood the words he was using.”

I was afterwards asked whether I had one particular UK economist, John Vickers, in mind when I wrote this. He chaired, at the government’s request, a commission on banking reform. He has become increasingly vocal about how his original commission’s proposals (pdf) are being watered down and how the Bank of England appears to be putting public money at risk once again. (For his detailed assessment, see this paper. And here is what another commission member, Martin Wolf, thinks about the financial sector. Adam Barber details how the attitude of the UK government has changed. In the US this very issue became an important point of difference between Clinton and Sanders.)

The honest answer is that I did not have him in mind. It was a fictional account designed to make a point, and so I took elements from different debates which together apply to no one country or individual. The point is that in finance good reforms are those that can best resist political or economic manipulation by banks, and perhaps economists in general have been slower to see that than some of their colleagues in other social sciences..

It would probably be fair to say that before the financial crisis economists got on pretty well with the financial sector. There was a common interest in monetary policy (although the motivation for that interest might have been different) and the sector was a useful source of funds for conferences and (for a few) consultancy. Most economists did not look too hard at what the financial sector was actually doing, although those that did often raised serious questions. Behind this nice piece by Ben Chu is an army of academic research which suggests that fees paid to manage funds are a waste of money.

The situation changed after the financial crisis, for obvious reasons. Since then economists have increasingly questioned whether the whole business model behind banking is sound. In particular they have questioned why banks should be so different from other companies in terms of the amount of equity capital they hold in relation to their assets. These economists include the previous governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King. They have also questioned whether one of the side effects of current regulation is to maintain the monopoly power of big banks.

If all that was not bad enough, we have the influence that the financial sector has on monetary policy. Mainstream macro has put a lot of emphasis on the importance of day to day monetary policy being independent of politicians, and far too little on it being independent of the influence of finance and bankers. Paul Krugman has talked about the links between interest rates and bank profits and how that might ‘guide’ the views of bankers. If you want to see a clear case of that, read this FT op-ed by David Folkerts-Landau, chief economist at Deutsche Bank.

The article could not be more wrong. The reason the Eurozone has performed so badly compared to the US, Japan and even the UK is not because of lack of structural reform, but because of the relative reluctance of the ECB to stimulate the economy. Rates were raised in 2011, and Quantitative Easing delayed until 2015. The article is full of hopeless lapses in logic. If there is any sense here at all, it is that high unemployment is required as a political incentive to undertake structural reform. So the ECB “has become the number one threat to the eurozone” because it has allowed politicians to put that reform off.

Here I can do no better than quote Adair Turner. “Vague references to “structural reform” should ideally be banned, with everyone forced to specify which particular reforms they are talking about and the timetable for any benefits that are achieved. If the core problem is inadequate global demand, only monetary or fiscal policy can solve it.” In the Eurozone the core problem is lack of aggregate demand, as below target inflation shows.

Why this hostility from German bankers to low or negative rates? What the author does not tell you is that the profits of German banks, and the viability of other parts of the German financial system, are particularly (IMF pdf, box 1.3) vulnerable to low rates. (For those that can access it, Wolfgang Münchau in the FT provides an excellent summary.) And also that the profitability of Deutsche Bank is not great right now, as Frances Coppola notes. In the UK or US if this kind of nonsense from bankers appears in the press it gets a lot of kick back from economists - in Germany perhaps less so.

So who cares if economists have crossed swords with bankers? It matters because finance gets away with so much partly through a process of mystification. Mystification is how banks can perpetrate widespread fraud on consumers and businesses. When bankers say that being forced to ‘put aside’ more capital keeps money out of the economy it sounds plausible to many, even though it is completely false. (Admati and Hellwig (pdf) list 30 other similar false claims.) There is also a belief that because bankers are involved in financial markets, they must know something about how the macroeconomy works, a belief which the FT op-ed shows is clearly false. In all these cases, economists can provide demystification.

If we are ever to cut finance down to size (metaphorically, and perhaps also literally), economists are going to be vital in the battle to do so.

More (dark) thoughts on interest rates

The following has numbers for the UK, but the logic if not the numbers also apply to the US: see Mark Thoma here.

Imagine the following lottery. If you win, you receive a total of £5000 over the next few years. The cost of a ticket? The risk that inflation will be 0.5% higher than it would otherwise have been for a couple of years, where inflation includes the rate that wages increase.

To enter the lottery in the UK you need to cut interest rates. This lottery is just another way of describing the key argument I made in Monday’s Independent article (now complete with chart).

Of course you want to know the odds of getting the prize. The odds come in the form of a puzzle. What are the chances that the economy has, over the last ten years, permanently lost 15% of its normal ability to produce goods and services. Something that has probably never happened to the UK before. [1] Those are the chances of you NOT winning.

We can of course discuss those numbers. But in the UK that discussion appears largely absent. Instead all the talk is about interest rate increases. We seem to have collectively written off 15% of national GDP with just a shrug. ‘Oh that must be supply and there is nothing conventional macro policy can do’ is the general view. That view may be right, but it is important enough that this should be the centre of the national debate. Instead we talk about the need to normalise interest rates, as if the real economy was doing just fine.

Time for a DeLong type lament. If you had told me ten years ago that a decade hence UK output per head would be 15% below the 1955-2008 trend, inflation was zero and yet people would be talking about raising interest rates I would have said you were mad. If you had said that at a time when interest rates and real wages are at record lows the government was proposing to not invest for the future because that was the best way to prepare for the next crisis I would have said you knew nothing about business and economics. If you had said that just years after a huge financial crisis, followed by a host of financial scandals, the City regulator would be sacked because the Chancellor wanted less tough regulation I would have said you were thinking about some corrupt state and not the UK. If this is all a bad dream, what will it take to wake people up?

[1] Economies do appear to suffer some permanent loss to potential output after financial crises: there is a handy summary of studies here (table 4.1) - HT Andrew Goodwin   

How can Labour say it didn't crash the economy

If my memory serves me correctly, one of the rounds of applause received in the UK election debate on Thursday was when Clegg said that Miliband should have apologised for crashing the economy when they were in office. That suggests that a significant number of people (I suspect not including Nick Clegg, but that may be optimistic) think it is true that Labour should apologise for crashing the economy. Are they right?

You can see why they might think this, because much of the press keeps saying they did. In addition, the more non-partisan parts of mediamacro hardly ever challenge members of the governing parties when they make the claim that Labour crashed the economy.

The difficulty here is that ‘Labour crashed the economy’ is not complete fiction. If the accusation was that Labour crashed the economy through fiscal profligacy (which it sometimes is), that is a straightforward falsehood, and it is easy to show it is a lie. The economy crashed because of the global financial crisis. But if fiscal profligacy is not mentioned, the claim cannot be dismissed as completely wrong. This is because the Labour government, like their Conservative predecessors, brought about or tolerated a regulation regime and a financial sector that allowed the global financial crisis to have a particularly damaging effect on the UK economy.

 

That is I guess why Ed Miliband seemed to respond to this accusation by saying something like: “yes we did get financial regulation wrong, but …”. That may be an honest reply, but it is not very effective, because many will read it as admitting Labour caused the recession. A better reply would be: “everyone knows that the recession was caused by the global financial crisis and insufficient regulation, but the recession would have been worse if the Conservatives had been in power.” As Mervyn King says “the real problem was a shared intellectual view right across the entire political spectrum and shared across the financial markets that things were going pretty well”, a view which he of course shared. I think the claim that the recession would have been worse if the Conservatives had been in government can be justified on two grounds. First, the Conservatives did accuse Labour of too much financial regulation, not too little. Second, they were against Labour’s fiscal stimulus in 2009.

Why is it important that Labour combat this charge effectively? Because it seems to me, being as impartial as I can be, that when it comes to a contest of macroeconomic competence between the last Labour government and the current coalition, Labour wins hands down. That is not so much because Labour were so good (although they got some important things right, like not joining the Eurozone, setting up the Monetary Policy Committee, and fiscal stimulus in 2009), or because the coalition has been all bad (setting up the OBR was clearly a positive move). It is because the coalition made such a bad mistake with austerity, a mistake that very many warned them about. Losing the equivalent of at least £4,000 per household is a big deal, with no obvious equivalent in my professional lifetime. Even if we were prepared to forgive this as a genuine mistake, to plan to make exactly the same mistake again either suggests a complete inability to learn, complete incompetence, or a duplicitous pursuit of ideology over social welfare.

On a more positive note, if you want a detailed assessment of the coalition’s record on a whole range of economic issues, look both here and at the Coalition Economics website. The latter is by the same team that made an assessment of economic policy under Labour for the Oxford Review, and that issue is also available on the website, so even if the authors do not make an explicit comparison between the two governments, you have the information to do so. Some excellent articles are already there (including one on financial regulation), and more are to follow.