Jeff Madrick

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow and Director of the Rediscovering Government Initiative
Roosevelt Institute Profile

Recent Posts by Jeff Madrick

  • Rediscovering Government

    Austerity Replaces Economics With Disciplinarian Ideology

    Jun 6, 2012Jeff Madrick

    Ludger Schuknecht's insistance on continued austerity is merely a discipinarian's argument, which has already been proven wrong time and again. 

    Ludger Schuknecht's insistance on continued austerity is merely a discipinarian's argument, which has already been proven wrong time and again. 

    The letter in today’s Financial Times, "Jointly Agreed Strategy is Good for Germany and Europe," from Ludger Schuknecht, the Director General of the German Ministry of Finance, will likely live in infamy. In any case, frame it for your children as a symbol of the folly of mankind. In the sternest terms, Mr. Schuknecht chastises Martin Wolf for demanding a reversal of fiscal austerity. Why? “The public and markets have been led to believe in short-term measures for far too long.” Goodbye to Keynes, and even Friedman.

    Moreover, he argues, “it is expansionary policies and weak fiscal positions that created the current problems of high debt and low competitiveness.” Of course, the Eurozone deficit was only 0.5 percent of GDP before the crisis. In Spain, fiscal policy was clearly restrained before the crisis. Few could argue the European Central Bank practiced loose monetary policy over these years.  

    According to Mr. Schuknecht, we need “a combination of fiscal consolidation and structural reforms.” And all of this with the goal of rebuilding confidence. How can we be hearing this again, after the failure of austerity in country after country?  Now even the conservative Spanish government is admitting failure.

    Evidence is not the issue here. Surely the impressive IMF research on the failure of austerity time and again cannot be simply dismissed. But dismiss it Mr. Schuknecht clearly does. Heaven forbid we introduce Eurobonds, which will undermine the confidence being built.

    Clearly the German government sees confidence somewhere, but it is surely not in the financial markets.

    I long to ask Mr. Schuknecht what he believes caused the Great Depression. He may have written about this somewhere; I assume he thinks uncertainty and government spending were the causes. I wonder if he can point to one credible case where austerity worked without a concurrent devaluation of the currency.

    But such arguments do not seem to turn on evidence or theory.  They come from the stern gut of a schoolmaster, and they come from a nation that has yet to suffer the consequences of the current crisis. The inability or refusal to see ahead is the sure sign of an ideologue. But I think this is not even ideology; it is the instinct of the disciplinarian. And it is mixed with a desire to diminish government. Another rap on the knuckles with the ruler will bring confidence, confidence will bring investment, and investment, prosperity. We were told the same in the 1930s, but never mind all that.  

    Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick is the Director of the Roosevelt Institute’s Rediscovering Government initiative and author of Age of Greed.

    Read more

    Share This

  • Rediscovering Government

    Defending Krugman: The Importance of Keynesian Economics

    May 25, 2012Jeff Madrick

    Keynes was right: increased government spending in the U.S. is necessary to decrease unemployment and raise demand in the near-term.

    Paul Krugman hardly needs defending, but his views about the need for Keynesian stimulus in the U.S. right now are coming under considerable fire from centrist and left-of-center economists. I find this disturbing because Krugman’s view abides by basic Keynesian principles that seem to have been discarded by many who profess themselves Keynesians. Is there a wide misunderstanding of Keynes?

    Keynes was right: increased government spending in the U.S. is necessary to decrease unemployment and raise demand in the near-term.

    Paul Krugman hardly needs defending, but his views about the need for Keynesian stimulus in the U.S. right now are coming under considerable fire from centrist and left-of-center economists. I find this disturbing because Krugman’s view abides by basic Keynesian principles that seem to have been discarded by many who profess themselves Keynesians. Is there a wide misunderstanding of Keynes?

    What seems to upset people is that Krugman argues the government must spend more money now, almost regardless of what it spends it on. The Keynesian thesis is that economies can settle at a high level of unemployment rather than re-adjust to the optimum unemployment level—or level of economic activity—on their own. This was a response to the classical, pre-Depression view that the beauty of free markets was a self-adjustment process based on falling prices in downturns. But ultimately the problem is a lack of demand, and Keynes advocated budget deficits to support an increase in demand.

    The lack of demand in the economy now is palpable. Krugman’s contention is that in the near-term, we can solve this problem if we have the will to do so. The economy can reduce its rate of unemployment fairly rapidly with adequate Keynesian stimulus. It is clear that monetary stimulus at this point is not enough.

    This view is not incompatible with longer-term concerns about the economy -- inadequate education for too many, infrastructure decay, old energy technologies, and so on. Many seem to criticize Krugman for not acknowledging “structural” changes in the economy, and they implicitly agree with classical conservative observers that the unemployment rate really can’t fall much below 7 percent. I can’t speak for Krugman, but he seems to be saying that we should not mix up longer-term structural issues with near-term demand inadequacy. It’s very likely the unemployment rate can fall much farther without igniting inflation.

    I can’t see how he is wrong about this; indeed, he is urgently right about it. We are facing a year or two when the federal government will likely contract spending and will certainly not increase stimulus markedly. Of even greater concern is the refusal in Europe to recognize that austerity—the opposite of Keynesian advice right now—will lead to further recession, which in turn could spill over to the U.S., jeopardizing Obama’s candidacy.

    When so many commentators criticize Krugman’s view, insisting that any new spending must be investment in infrastructure, must not go to the military, or that there should be no new spending at all, they are ignoring the Keynesian process. Krugman will not advocate against military spending cuts (and I certainly wouldn't myself). But priorities are important here. Let’s keep them clear.

    In sum, let’s understand that more aggregate demand now will reduce the unemployment rate. There is a near-term solution, not to America’s long-term issues, but to an economy that is sputtering and may lead to a political environment in which those who plan to do more damage win office.  

    One of the true advances in contemporary thinking is that both a power and a duty of government is to use fiscal and monetary policy to ameliorate downturns and create economic expansions. This is the legacy of Keynes, well supported by empirical research.  

    Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick is the Director of the Roosevelt Institute’s Rediscovering Government initiative and author of Age of Greed.

    Read more

    Share This

  • Rediscovering Government

    The Case Against Tax Breaks for Private Equity

    May 23, 2012Jeff Madrick

    Private equity disproportionately rewards privatization companies while others are burdened with the risks. 

    Private equity disproportionately rewards privatization companies while others are burdened with the risks. 

    I wanted to wait a few days before commenting on Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s spontaneous criticism of Barack Obama for picking on Mitt Romney's experience at Bain Capital. Booker doesn’t know much of anything about private equity, but many financial services donors have his ear. He took in nearly half a million dollars in campaign donations from the industry over the last nine months, and he frankly sounded like its mouthpiece.

    Booker backtracked, but it would be nice if he knew something about the private equity business before he spoke publicly about it. This expectation of knowledge should also apply to widely read columnists like David Brooks, who, as usual, reflexively defended the Wall Street practice without presenting evidence. He issued a piece of public relations diatribe that no doubt soothed the right but contributed nothing to our understanding. The contention is that these buyouts turned fat American companies into lean and productive ones since the 1970s. Other pundits less well known for their conservative reflex responses have also given partial defense of private equity.

    So let’s begin with one point: there is a place for private equity. In a privatization or leveraged buyout, a company is bought by an investment partnership with moneys borrowed against the company itself. The new money can be used productively even when levels of debt against the company’s assets and profits soar. A smaller company that cannot raise adequate equity can raise money by being bought by a private equity partnership. A company that is doing poorly can benefit from added capital and new management. Sometimes trimming labor costs in the process makes sense, of course. 

    But the record of leveraged buyouts and private equity reflects its excesses, and most importantly, the lopsided nature of the financial incentives for doing the deals in the first place. Companies like Romney’s Bain or Steve Schwartz’s Blackstone or Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the early industry leader when privatizations were called leverage buyouts (LBO), take advantage of a major government-provided benefit. The interest on debt is tax-deductible, and high levels of debt are the source of profits in these transactions. It is just like buying a house with a small down payment; if you can sell as the value goes up, the return on the down payment is high and the interest was deductible all along. In the meantime, the house is collateral for the loan. Similarly, partners are rarely if ever on the line for the debt; the company being privatized is. The one difference is that if the collateral value of the house falls, as it has recently, the homeowner is on the line. This is usually not so with privatizers.  

    Great deal? You bet. The owners of the privatizing firm put up very little capital; it is their limited partners who put up more.  Then they borrow like mad from banks, pension funds, hedge funds and so on. If the new company can be sold or brought to market again at a higher price, they make a bundle compared to their equity down payment. The CEOs of the company, or the new executives brought in, are given huge amounts of stock. They too make a bundle. Are these incentives conducive to good business decisions?

    Most likely, the investment decision is based not on how much the company can be improved, but how much can be borrowed against its assets. The second concern is the interest rate on the debt. There is no evidence that privatizers mostly buy struggling companies to resuscitate them.

    Moreover, companies with high levels of debt are subject to great risk of bankruptcy. Macy’s did one of the first leveraged buyouts of its size, the CEO made out wonderfully, and soon Macy’s was in bankruptcy. It reorganized and reemerged successfully due to its retailing skills, but these were not enhanced by the LBO partners.  

    Data shows the newly bought firms create fewer new jobs—or result in more lost jobs—than firms that are not subject to private takeover. But what about the much-lauded productivity gains? On balance, these target firms mostly increase productivity by selling or closing low-productivity units. Arguably, they also make their employees work harder. The fear of lay-offs can enhance productivity. There is no evidence that these firms improve productivity mostly by investing in new technologies, new managerial methods, and so on, which is often their claim.

    And of course what productivity gains they have had (overall they are small) did not reinvigorate the American economy. The two main sources of productivity gains in the U.S. were high-tech companies and the retailing behemoths led by WalMart. Many retailing targets of privatizations eventually went bankrupt.

    The best recent paper on private equity was written by Eileen Appelbaum of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Rosemary Batt of Cornell University. The David Brookses of the world will cry that these researchers are of a liberal bent. But read the paper to see how carefully it is done. The exegeses of much of the right in defense of private equity are essentially outright propaganda.   

    However, the basic point comes back to government and regulation. A major tax advantage gives rise to these buyouts. The privatization partnerships are lightly regulated. After-fee returns to the limited partners seem to be below average. But as for their benefits to society, privatization rewards investors by cutting short-term costs. For a long time, the stock market pushed up the stock prices of companies that kept short-term earnings growing. The influence of such corporate governance has been to keep downward pressure on wages and stoke fear in employees for three decades.

    Let’s be clear; some private equity investments were healthy and some of these partnerships do a good job. But all in all, it is clear most are simply exploitations of tax law, market fashions, and their power to borrow money. There is no reason America should reward these investors with a tax break on their huge loans.   

    Privatizers didn’t rebuild America. They were rarely the people who planted the garden, watered it, or designed it.  They were by and large the ones who weeded it, sometimes recklessly, throwing out the gorgeous roses in the process. Gardens do need to be weeded, but should those who do the weeding, often heedlessly, make so much more money than those who do the planting? And with the added help of government tax breaks?

    In the end, Romney’s Bain made money even though its takeover target, American Pad & Paper, went out of business. Consult Appelbaum and Batt on how some of these strategies work, involving mortgaging real estate holdings and transfer pricing to reduce taxes. Privatization was mostly, if not entirely, about working the system, not building capitalism.  On balance, evidence suggests it hurt more than helped. Any way you read the evidence, it is clear the rewards for private equity firms clearly exceeded the risks. That’s not good for free markets.  

    Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick is the Director of the Roosevelt Institute’s Rediscovering Government initiative and author of Age of Greed.

    Read more

    Share This

  • Rediscovering Government

    Why Wall Street Needs Government Regulation to Save It From Itself

    May 15, 2012Jeff Madrick

    The inherent problems and contradictions of Wall Street trading make government intervention a necessity.  

    The fiasco at JPMorgan Chase is most disturbing because it reflects the inherent riskiness of modern financial trading. Few articles have pinpointed this as the problem. It is the reason strong regulations and high capital requirements are necessary; you can’t outsmart these inherent contradictions.

    The inherent problems and contradictions of Wall Street trading make government intervention a necessity.  

    The fiasco at JPMorgan Chase is most disturbing because it reflects the inherent riskiness of modern financial trading. Few articles have pinpointed this as the problem. It is the reason strong regulations and high capital requirements are necessary; you can’t outsmart these inherent contradictions.

    JPMorgan ran its trading operation out of its risk management group, which was supposed to offset risk, not take on new ones. But even if you are trying to implement a pure hedge—that is, minimize risk—there are two big issues here. One is the inefficiency of markets and the lack of adequate information. You can buy or sell a security—usually a derivative, or a leveraged security based on the ups and downs of another security—to hedge a position, such as a portfolio of bonds you think might readily fall in value. This was the Chase situation. 

    However, the first problem with this is that the hedge is not necessarily properly priced, because the markets are inefficient and prices are not transparent to all. It is often too cheap. Second, the counter-party—the seller or buyer on the other side of the transaction—may not meet his or her commitment. This is what happened when AIG sold insurance (credit default swaps) to Goldman Sachs and then couldn’t pay it off without a government bailout when markets collapsed.

    The next big issue is the human one. Judging from press accounts, JPMorgan wasn’t trying merely to hedge. In truth, there are no pure hedges or people wouldn’t make money at all. Nothing can eradicate risk completely. Rather, JPMorgan looked like they were taking long and short positions on balance—that is, trying to win bigger by guessing the direction of the markets, not just hedge.   

    Again, there are two problems within this larger issue. First is the inalterable human temptation to make a big killing, especially when the individual bankers are being paid big bonuses to do so and suffer relatively little if they guess wrong. Call this asymmetric incentive. They may even have changed their own yardstick, or value at risk, to seem like they were taking less risk. No doubt they had some kind of argument to do so.

    The second is a more subtle one. Traders usually believe that at some point securities prices will revert to their long-term values compared to each other. This was the philosophy behind the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). It is very likely the traders at JPMorgan doubled down rather than try to unwind their positions, believing that markets would soon adjust to some historical averages and prove them right. The people at LTCM bought when others were selling, certain that they could hold on until markets adjusted. They could not.

    These basic facts of Wall Street life are inescapable. Thus, the JPMorgan fiasco is a repeat of what happened time and again in 2007 and 2008, such as with AIG, and what happened in the 1990s with LTCM, and many others.   

    Why did Jamie Dimon think he knew better? The repetition even extends to the fact that the risk manager and the trader were friends. The same was true at Citigroup before it lost a ton of money, to the surprise of its own management, as mortgage markets began to crack a few years ago.

    These are fundamental, baked-in problems for Wall Street trading. Some, like today’s Wall Street Journal, will say losses are a part of capitalism and capitalists learn from their errors. The main lesson here is that they don’t learn and they can’t.

    This is a job for government. Tough regulations are needed. If these firms and their employees had to absorb their own losses, perhaps there would be justification for some of these risks. That banks like JPMorgan are supported by FDIC-insured funds, that they have shareholders, and that they are so big their losses will always be guaranteed by the taxpayers, are all reasons that strong regulations are necessary. Their losses were a failure of regulation once again, reflecting the continued need for strong capital requirements, a broader Volcker rule, and transparency and margin requirements in derivatives trading. Some of that is coming. Clearly, it is not here yet and may not be here at all.

    Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick is the Director of the Roosevelt Institute’s Rediscovering Government initiative and author of Age of Greed.

    Read more

    Share This

  • Rediscovering Government

    The Dimon Fiasco: A Stark Lesson on Why Finance Needs Government Regulation

    May 11, 2012Jeff Madrick

    J.P. Morgan Chase's trading losses are a perfect example of why we need increased government regulation of banks.

    Many people see the $2 billion in trading losses announced by J.P. Morgan Chase as the quintessential example of why strong regulation is needed. There is a lot of irony in this story. It is a true story about the importance of government.

    J.P. Morgan Chase's trading losses are a perfect example of why we need increased government regulation of banks.

    Many people see the $2 billion in trading losses announced by J.P. Morgan Chase as the quintessential example of why strong regulation is needed. There is a lot of irony in this story. It is a true story about the importance of government.

    When Sandy Weill, the rough and tough entrepreneur, ultimately built a financial conglomerate from many pieces—including Salomon, Smith Barney, and Travelers Insurance—into Citigroup, Jamie Dimon, someday to be the outspoken CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, had always been at his side. A bright and dutiful young man, Dimon stayed with him when Weill was consigned to a number two role at American Express after selling his firm, Shearson Loeb Rhoades, to the credit card giant in the early 1980s. He was with him in San Francisco, when Weill was charged with slimming down American Express’s subsidiary, Fireman’s Fund. Weill’s expertise was making companies lean and mean, which often entailed ruthless lay-offs. Dimon ran the numbers for Weill and participated in the implementation of the lean and mean philosophy.

    When Weill finally left American Express, Dimon again went with him. Finally, they found the consumer finance company Commercial Credit Corp, which made high interest loans to low-income consumers, including early subprime mortgages, much like the old Money Store. According to biographers, Dimon liked the industry because it was unregulated. He and Weill took over the company, fired lots of people, issued a stock offering quickly, and used it to rebuild the Weill dynasty, which would soon include Smith Barney, Shearson again, and, the giant Travelers Insurance in 1993.

    But Weill still had no serious investment banking presence, so he turned his attention to Salomon Brothers, king of risky bond and currency trading, the birthplace of what later became Long-Term Capital Management, and maker of much money and several major trading losses. How risky was this trading firm?

    Dimon was skeptical. But here is the irony. Weill sent Dimon to study how Salomon made its money, and the originally hesitant Dimon said he now believed the risks could be controlled. Immediately after the acquisition in 1997, however, Weill was clobbered by Salomon losses due to the East Asian financial crisis and many more to come. Weill quickly limited trading exposure at Salomon. Dimon must have learned that losses are inherent in such businesses.

    Dimon was finally at Weill’s side when Travelers merged with Citicorp to form Citigroup, becoming a massive financial giant. He left soon after in a personal dispute as Citigroup took on more and more risk, more and more debt, and adopted unethical practices that were later unearthed by Eliot Spitzer, which resulted in more fines than for any other company.

    Dimon wound up running J.P. Morgan Chase, where he emerged as a hero after limiting mortgage market risks before the crisis that felled so many. He became the most respected of Wall Street’s leaders, and he was arguably the best of them. But Wall Street trading profits are too tempting, and individual Wall Street traders too hard to control. Even with tight oversight, they often go their own way. And they often lose hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of dollars in the process.

    Dimon may have known precisely what his London trader, the “Whale,” was doing. I doubt it. But it’s likely the so-called “London Whale” had been making big bucks for the firm for a long while. Giving him more line would only be natural.  

    Herb Allison, former president of Merrill Lynch, is a strong skeptic of commercial and investment banks’ trading operations. He even thinks over time they may all lose money. What happens is that they make plenty along the way, then lose it in a big bust.  As author Michael Lewis divulged, a Morgan Stanley trader, Howie Hubler, lost $9 billion in 2007 and 2008. Nevertheless, Hubler left Morgan with millions of dollars, and later returned to work on the Street.

    Dimon, among the most cautious of executives, couldn’t control this trading animal with a life of its own, either. That’s the important conclusion. A Volcker rule to limit speculative trading for banks is necessary. They are using federally insured money to finance much of their banking operations, enabling them to leverage other facets of the company. They are using shareholder money, not their own, to take risks, yet they take enormous bonuses when all goes right. And they are implicitly using taxpayer money, because if they lose too much, they will be bailed out by the federal government. They remain too big to fail.

    Serious capital requirements must be implemented against such trading, and banks must also change banker compensation procedures further. For traders, it’s a heads I win, tails you lose proposition. And so it is with the bank CEO as the firm’s overall earnings rise and are socked with a blow only every once in a while. These compensation plans have changed under pressure from the federal government to some degree. But probably not enough. The firms’ partners and employees have to be on the line for losses over time.

    All this is a case study in why finance needs more government rules and regulations than most other industries. The omnipresent claim that such rules undermine liquidity in markets is almost laughable. In truth, we have a lot of liquidity when we don’t need it and little when we do—such as after the Lehman Brothers catastrophe in the fall of 2008. As regulations were eliminated and weakened after the 1970s, finance became more unstable, crises more frequent, and trillions of dollars were invested down the rat holes of speculation and fantasy, while Wall Street employees made countless millions. Yes, finance is important to economic growth, but only if government controls it properly. Otherwise it can be and has been damaging.       

    Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Jeff Madrick is the Director of the Roosevelt Institute’s Rediscovering Government initiative and author of Age of Greed.

     

    Banner image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

    Read more

    Share This

Pages