Daily Digest

Daily Digest - May 23: Fearing the Future

May 23, 2013Rachel Goldfarb

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What’s in millennials’ wallets? Fewer credit cards (LA Times)

Emily Alpert talks to Pipeline Fellow Nona Willis Aronowitz about why young households are carrying less and less credit card debt. According to Aronowitz, it’s all about fear of an uncertain future.

Click here to receive the Daily Digest via email.

What’s in millennials’ wallets? Fewer credit cards (LA Times)

Emily Alpert talks to Pipeline Fellow Nona Willis Aronowitz about why young households are carrying less and less credit card debt. According to Aronowitz, it’s all about fear of an uncertain future.

Why Suburban Poverty Is Less Visible and More Insidious (The Atlantic)

According to Emily Badger, suburban poverty is an incredibly isolating phenomenon. In areas where children play in back yards, not public playgrounds, and commuters drive instead of taking the subway, communal support for the poor all but disappears.

Elizabeth Warren Grills Treasury Secretary on Too Big to Fail (MoJo)

Erika Eichelberger characterizes Jack Lew’s response to Senator Warren’s questioning on breaking up the biggest banks as nothing but avoidance. In the linked video, Lew sticks to name, rank, and serial number while Warren pushes for a direct answer on capping bank size.

How Budget Cuts Could Lead To Higher Costs From Tornadoes (Think Progress)

Bryce Covert reminds us that sequestration is still happening and is causing furloughs at the National Weather Service. The NWS warned residents of Moore, OK about the tornado 16 minutes before it touched down, and we can’t afford to cut it much closer.

Fed Endorses Stimulus, but the Message Is Garbled (NYT)

Nelson D. Schwartz explains that it doesn’t look like the Fed will be cutting back its bond-buying program just yet. Bernanke’s testimony yesterday showed a sense of caution, despite the apparent signs of improvement in the job market.

Robert Kaiser on Dodd-Frank: ‘This example of Congress working also illuminated why it works so rarely.’ (WaPo)

Neil Irwin and Robert Kaiser discuss why no one would want to emulate the process required to pass Dodd-Frank, with months of negotiations for bipartisan support collapsing and the bill barely scraping by. Instead, we get no negotiation and no legislation, saving everyone time.

Why Obama’s Scandals Won’t Lead to Reform (Bloomberg View)

Ezra Klein points out the disconnect between who is upset about the policy problems raised by the IRS and AP scandals, and who wants to make a fuss about them. With those categories split, he doesn’t think we will see any changes in anonymous political spending through 501(c)(4)s or legislation to protect journalists and their sources.

U.S. Retailers See Big Risk in Safety Plan for Factories in Bangladesh (NYT)

Steven Greenhouse says major U.S. retailers are worried the accord that many European retailers have embraced will open them up to legal liability. Apparently the real risk isn’t sending workers into a death trap; it’s all the paperwork and billable hours that could result.

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Daily Digest - May 21: Fixing the Economy First, but not Yet

May 21, 2013Rachel Goldfarb

Click here to receive the Daily Digest via e-mail.

What's the best way to pass a climate bill? Fix the economy first. (WaPo)

Click here to receive the Daily Digest via e-mail.

What's the best way to pass a climate bill? Fix the economy first. (WaPo)

According to Brad Plumer, if we’re serious about climate change, we need to solve the jobs crisis first: there’s a connection between a Senator’s “green score” from the League of Conservation Voters and the unemployment rate in his or her state.

As rich gain optimism, lawmakers lose economic urgency (WaPo)

Jim Tankersley reminds us that while the economy and jobs remain a top priority for most Americans, the House has only approved three bills that could be considered economic policy this year- and one of those was the 37th attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. 

Camping Out for Five Days, in Hopes of a Union Job (NYT)

Most jobs created since the recession are low-wage, but Jessica Glazer’s story about more than 800 people camping out to apply for the training program at Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers shows how far people will go to escape that rut.

Sequestration Nation: Budget Cuts Endanger Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Victims (CAP)

Kwame Boadi lays out the effect of sequestration on one of our most vulnerable populations: domestic violence and sexual assault victims, who are losing services, beds in shelters, and more. These cuts could kill, but Congress has prioritized keeping flights on schedule.

Poverty Flees to the Suburbs (MoJo)

Josh Harkinson breaks down yesterday’s report from the Brookings Institution, showing that the suburban poor now outnumber the urban and rural poor. With most federal anti-poverty spending targeting urban communities, there’s a serious mismatch.

Senator Introduces Bill To Allow Holders Of Student Debt To Refinance (Think Progress)

Bryce Covert reports on Senator Gillibrand’s proposal to force the Department of Education to automatically refinance federal student loans with interest rates above 4 percent to fixed 4 percent loans, which would save nearly 37 million borrowers billions in interest payments.

Ready to Testify on Financial Stability, Lew Is Likely To Be Grilled on IRS Scandal (National Journal)

Catherine Hollander notes that Treasury Secretary Jack Lew is scheduled to deliver the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s annual report this week, but Congress is less interested in the global financial system than it is in what’s going on at the local IRS office in Cincinnati.

The Unemployed Need Bold, Creative Moves from the Fed (The Fiscal Times)

Mark Thoma remembers when the Fed took risks and pushed the rules to their limits in orchestrating the bailout for big financial institutions. Why, he asks, aren’t they maintaining such boldness for the sake of the unemployed?

 

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Monetary Policy's Jurassic Park Problem at the Zero Lower Bound

May 3, 2013Mike Konczal

Remember those scenes in Jurassic Park where everyone has to stand really still? The T-Rex finds the humans, but its dinosaur brain only senses movements, so as long as nobody moves an inch, they are safe. But if they even twitch, they are going to be ripped to shreds. Those scenes are great.

Last weekend, I wrote a piece for Wonkblog on monetary policy at the zero lower bound alongside austerity that got a great number of responses [1]. I want to respond to two points.

1. One thing I wanted to engage on, and a point I hope gets some additional comments in 2013, is that we had a major shift in “expectations” management at the zero lower bound with the Evans Rule. I think that this form of expectation management is a trial run for more serious moves like using a higher inflation target or a nominal GDP target to gain traction at the zero lower bound. So how has it gone, and how would we know?

I had thought a good measure of its success was whether short-term inflation would approach its 2 percent target, and whether or not it would go past. Other people, notably Matt O’Brien, had already flagged that 2 percent appeared to be a ceiling even with the Evans Rule in place.

Some seem to be abandoning the Evans framework entirely, such as Ryan Avent writing this week that “the Evans rule is consistent with prolonged, Japanese style stagnation.” [2] Others argue that a consistent nominal GDP with austerity is sufficient evidence to show that the Evans Rule worked.

I think this needs more exploration. We don’t often get a serious shift in expectations. That’s why I’m not sure how much the “gas pedal” from David Becksworth’s response is at play. Becksworth notes that the purchases in QE3 don’t automatically react to turbulence in the economy, and hopes that the Federal Reserve will buy more if the economy gets weaker. But if the expectations of where the Fed wants to end up are the real limiting factor for a robust recovery, why would a small change in purchases matter? This is partially why Greg Ip said the FOMC statement this week was “asymmetric,” even though the Fed said it might “increase or reduce” purchases: an increase is a small move, but a reduction is a genuine retrenchment.

2. Another point is that expectations are important. I want to push back on Ryan Avent implying I “knew what conclusions were going to be drawn before the experiment was ever run.” I actually turned more negative about the December announcement while researching the post. I spoke to several economists who supported the Evans Rule at the time to see where they stood months later. I heard from many that they were excited about the proposal at first, but that they thought the policy was undermined significantly by FOMC members’ comments in March.

What happened in March? As the Washington Post’s Ylan Q. Mui wrote in March, the Fed seemed split into two camps: “Hawks, who want to curtail quantitative easing programs because of the risks they create. And doves, who see evidence that they’re working well enough at stimulating growth that they might soon no longer be needed.” The Fed’s March minutes noted “that continued solid improvement in the outlook for the labor market could prompt the Committee to slow the pace of purchases beginning at some point over the next several meetings." Several economists I spoke with thought that this hurt the expansionary impact of monetary policy.

Watch this again in slow-motion: Aggressive monetary policy begins to expand the economy, or at least gives the impression the economy is expanding. Central bankers argue that this means that they can pull back quicker than expected. (They don’t pull back; they just say they will.) The expectations for future policy then collapse, because central bankers signal that it will end too soon. The economy then weakens, going back to where it started.

This is monetary policy in the style of those T-Rex scenes in Jurassic Park. The central bank says, “we are committing to extraordinary action,” and then everyone has to remain incredibly still for a long time. Just a random dovish member of the FOMC saying, “hey, maybe it’s working so well we should consider ending it early” is enough for dinosaurs to eat everyone the policy’s effectiveness in impacting expectations to collapse.

If you believe this is a serious problem for monetary policy, well, this is precisely the time inconsistency problem Krugman identified in the late 1990s for Japan. The neutrality of money will cause an expansion to push up either prices or output, provided markets believe that it is permanent and that the central bank won’t immediately rush to stabilize prices the moment it gets a chance. And if the comments in March show that central banks aren’t going to “credibly promise to be irresponsible” with the Evans Rule, how will they do it with 4 percent inflation?

Note that four months after the stimulus was passed, no Democrats would stand up and defend it. Yet the stimulus was carried out without a problem. Four months after the Evans Rule, it looked like Bernanke’s coalition was weakening, and that has major implications. The Wonkblog piece I wrote notes that the next step will have to be an explicit, permanent, new target. That would get around these issues about how permanent the monetary expansion will be. But if there’s barely enough support for the Evans Rule, it makes me worried we won’t get there anytime soon.

[1] Responses include: Scott Sumner, Matt Yglesias, Paul Krugman, Reihan Salam, Ryan Avent, David Becksworth, Uneasy Money, Ramesh Ponnuru, southofthe49th, as well as a communist anarchist critique at pogoprinciple which notes that my “post-Fordist national fascist state fiscal policy” is exhausted. And that while “Keynesians are playing checkers, the monetarists are playing three dimensional chess.” Hmmm.

[2] If the Evans Rule was a bust from the get-go, was all that 2012 energy put into trying to find clever ways of explaining “Delphic” versus “Odyssean” guidance language to a general audience a waste of time? Boo.

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Remember those scenes in Jurassic Park where everyone has to stand really still? The T-Rex finds the humans, but its dinosaur brain only senses movements, so as long as nobody moves an inch, they are safe. But if they even twitch, they are going to be ripped to shreds. Those scenes are great.

Last weekend, I wrote a piece for Wonkblog on monetary policy at the zero lower bound alongside austerity that got a great number of responses [1]. I want to respond to two points.

1. One thing I wanted to engage on, and a point I hope gets some additional comments in 2013, is that we had a major shift in “expectations” management at the zero lower bound with the Evans Rule. I think that this form of expectation management is a trial run for more serious moves like using a higher inflation target or a nominal GDP target to gain traction at the zero lower bound. So how has it gone, and how would we know?

I had thought a good measure of its success was whether short-term inflation would approach its 2 percent target, and whether or not it would go past. Other people, notably Matt O’Brien, had already flagged that 2 percent appeared to be a ceiling even with the Evans Rule in place.

Some seem to be abandoning the Evans framework entirely, such as Ryan Avent writing this week that “the Evans rule is consistent with prolonged, Japanese style stagnation.” [2] Others argue that a consistent nominal GDP with austerity is sufficient evidence to show that the Evans Rule worked.

I think this needs more exploration. We don’t often get a serious shift in expectations. That’s why I’m not sure how much the “gas pedal” from David Becksworth’s response is at play. Becksworth notes that the purchases in QE3 don’t automatically react to turbulence in the economy, and hopes that the Federal Reserve will buy more if the economy gets weaker. But if the expectations of where the Fed wants to end up are the real limiting factor for a robust recovery, why would a small change in purchases matter? This is partially why Greg Ip said the FOMC statement this week was “asymmetric,” even though the Fed said it might “increase or reduce” purchases: an increase is a small move, but a reduction is a genuine retrenchment.

2. Another point is that expectations are important. I want to push back on Ryan Avent implying I “knew what conclusions were going to be drawn before the experiment was ever run.” I actually turned more negative about the December announcement while researching the post. I spoke to several economists who supported the Evans Rule at the time to see where they stood months later. I heard from many that they were excited about the proposal at first, but that they thought the policy was undermined significantly by FOMC members’ comments in March.

What happened in March? As the Washington Post’s Ylan Q. Mui wrote in March, the Fed seemed split into two camps: “Hawks, who want to curtail quantitative easing programs because of the risks they create. And doves, who see evidence that they’re working well enough at stimulating growth that they might soon no longer be needed.” The Fed’s March minutes noted “that continued solid improvement in the outlook for the labor market could prompt the Committee to slow the pace of purchases beginning at some point over the next several meetings." Several economists I spoke with thought that this hurt the expansionary impact of monetary policy.

Watch this again in slow-motion: Aggressive monetary policy begins to expand the economy, or at least gives the impression the economy is expanding. Central bankers argue that this means that they can pull back quicker than expected. (They don’t pull back; they just say they will.) The expectations for future policy then collapse, because central bankers signal that it will end too soon. The economy then weakens, going back to where it started.

This is monetary policy in the style of those T-Rex scenes in Jurassic Park. The central bank says, “we are committing to extraordinary action,” and then everyone has to remain incredibly still for a long time. Just a random dovish member of the FOMC saying, “hey, maybe it’s working so well we should consider ending it early” is enough for dinosaurs to eat everyone the policy’s effectiveness in impacting expectations to collapse.

If you believe this is a serious problem for monetary policy, well, this is precisely the time inconsistency problem Krugman identified in the late 1990s for Japan. The neutrality of money will cause an expansion to push up either prices or output, provided markets believe that it is permanent and that the central bank won’t immediately rush to stabilize prices the moment it gets a chance. And if the comments in March show that central banks aren’t going to “credibly promise to be irresponsible” with the Evans Rule, how will they do it with 4 percent inflation?

Note that four months after the stimulus was passed, no Democrats would stand up and defend it. Yet the stimulus was carried out without a problem. Four months after the Evans Rule, it looked like Bernanke’s coalition was weakening, and that has major implications. The Wonkblog piece I wrote notes that the next step will have to be an explicit, permanent, new target. That would get around these issues about how permanent the monetary expansion will be. But if there’s barely enough support for the Evans Rule, it makes me worried we won’t get there anytime soon.

[1] Responses include: Scott Sumner, Matt Yglesias, Paul Krugman, Reihan Salam, Ryan Avent, David Becksworth, Uneasy Money, Ramesh Ponnuru, southofthe49th, as well as a communist anarchist critique at pogoprinciple which notes that my “post-Fordist national fascist state fiscal policy” is exhausted. And that while “Keynesians are playing checkers, the monetarists are playing three dimensional chess.” Hmmm.

[2] If the Evans Rule was a bust from the get-go, was all that 2012 energy put into trying to find clever ways of explaining “Delphic” versus “Odyssean” guidance language to a general audience a waste of time? Boo.

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Is the Right Shifting Course on Dodd-Frank?

Feb 4, 2013Mike Konczal

During the 2012 election, conservatives' main goal was to either repeal Dodd-Frank completely or remove such large sections of it that it was a completely different bill. There was very little engagement with the content of Dodd-Frank itself and how to make them work better. One important example was Republican candidates like Jon Huntsman calling for bold new financial reforms that were already part of Dodd-Frank. 

It now appears that the flagship policy journal on the right, National Affairs, is moving towards a reform rather than replace agenda for Dodd-Frank and financial reform. The latest issue featured an large, 7,000+ word article, "Against Casino Finance," by Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl of University of Chicago law school. What's fascinating about the piece is less the authors' counter proposals for reform, which are lacking, than the fact that they accept two of the ideas put forward by financial reformers that have generally been resisted on the right. The first is that derivatives require regulation and the second is that prudential regulation of the largest systemically risky financial firms is necessary.

Let's take those in order. First the authors argue, "[I]n today's derivatives market...no such sensible restriction exists to separate the use of the instruments as insurance from their use as gambling devices." They describe these instruments as "pure gambling," or a transaction in which "one party loses exactly what the other party gains, and both are made worse off by the additional risk they take on in this bargain." They argue that these instruments can increase pure risks and are zero-sum, differentiating them from other trades. They go as far as to argue against the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.

It isn't clear what they think of the general Dodd-Frank approach to derivatives, which emphasizes transparency through exchanges and clearinghouses, capital adequacy, private enforcement, and regulation of intermediaries. Their focus is partially on the "insurable interest doctrine" of common law as it relates to insurance, which requires that a party to an insurance contract have a stake in the event. If you can't buy fire insurance on your neighbor's house, why can you buy credit insurance on his business if you don't have an ownership claim on it? That's a dog whistle for either banning so-called "naked" derivatives or running them under state-level insurance law. The vote to ban naked credit default swaps, proposed in the Senate by Bryan Dorgan, failed (and was generally opposed on the right). 

The other regulations relate to bailouts and prudential regulations. As they put it:

When banks fail, the government must act as lender of last resort.

Today, the government serves this role in two ways. First, it compels banks to buy government-supplied deposit insurance, which covers depositors up to $250,000. Second, it provides emergency loans at below-market rates -- bailouts -- to any financial institution whose collapse would take down enough banks with it to endanger the entire economy.

Few seriously doubt that governments must play this role.

Bagehot’s rule is usually summarized as, “Lend without limit, to solvent firms, against good collateral, at high rates." In exchange for this, certain regulations are necessary. Dodd-Frank includes higher capital and liquidity requirements for larger and riskier firms, as well as certain organizational requirements (loosely referred to under the term "living wills") to help with collapsing the company in question via FDIC's resolution powers.

Again, it would be interesting if they addressed the specific reforms to lender of last resort functions included in Dodd-Frank, or the combination of regulation and resolution. Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act was amended so that "any emergency lending program or facility is for the purpose of providing liquidity to the financial system, and not to aid a failing financial company." and any such lending program has to have "broad-based eligibility.” Some have argued this is too loose to deal with a liquidity crisis. Do these authors agree? Are the regulations and FDIC's resolution powers sufficient in this case, or do we need a different approach?

Their specific recommendations for how the right should tackle Dodd-Frank, which is the last third of the piece, involve applying stricter cost-benefit analysis to all rules. There's no talk about repeal, or huge changes to the framework, or long court battles. Cost-benefit has significant problems, but that's a debate for another day. Conceptually, it is tinkering with Dodd-Frank rather than repealing it, which has dominated the conversation on the right. Will this signal a larger change?

Follow or contact the Rortybomb blog:

  

During the 2012 election, conservatives' main goal was to either repeal Dodd-Frank completely or remove such large sections of it that it was a completely different bill. There was very little engagement with the content of Dodd-Frank itself and how to make them work better. One important example was Republican candidates like Jon Huntsman calling for bold new financial reforms that were already part of Dodd-Frank. 

It now appears that the flagship policy journal on the right, National Affairs, is moving towards a reform rather than replace agenda for Dodd-Frank and financial reform. The latest issue featured an large, 7,000+ word article, "Against Casino Finance," by Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl of University of Chicago law school. What's fascinating about the piece is less the authors' counter proposals for reform, which are lacking, than the fact that they accept two of the ideas put forward by financial reformers that have generally been resisted on the right. The first is that derivatives require regulation and the second is that prudential regulation of the largest systemically risky financial firms is necessary.

Let's take those in order. First the authors argue, "[I]n today's derivatives market...no such sensible restriction exists to separate the use of the instruments as insurance from their use as gambling devices." They describe these instruments as "pure gambling," or a transaction in which "one party loses exactly what the other party gains, and both are made worse off by the additional risk they take on in this bargain." They argue that these instruments can increase pure risks and are zero-sum, differentiating them from other trades. They go as far as to argue against the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.

It isn't clear what they think of the general Dodd-Frank approach to derivatives, which emphasizes transparency through exchanges and clearinghouses, capital adequacy, private enforcement, and regulation of intermediaries. Their focus is partially on the "insurable interest doctrine" of common law as it relates to insurance, which requires that a party to an insurance contract have a stake in the event. If you can't buy fire insurance on your neighbor's house, why can you buy credit insurance on his business if you don't have an ownership claim on it? That's a dog whistle for either banning so-called "naked" derivatives or running them under state-level insurance law. The vote to ban naked credit default swaps, proposed in the Senate by Bryan Dorgan, failed (and was generally opposed on the right). 

The other regulations relate to bailouts and prudential regulations. As they put it:

When banks fail, the government must act as lender of last resort.

Today, the government serves this role in two ways. First, it compels banks to buy government-supplied deposit insurance, which covers depositors up to $250,000. Second, it provides emergency loans at below-market rates -- bailouts -- to any financial institution whose collapse would take down enough banks with it to endanger the entire economy.

Few seriously doubt that governments must play this role.

Bagehot’s rule is usually summarized as, “Lend without limit, to solvent firms, against good collateral, at high rates." In exchange for this, certain regulations are necessary. Dodd-Frank includes higher capital and liquidity requirements for larger and riskier firms, as well as certain organizational requirements (loosely referred to under the term "living wills") to help with collapsing the company in question via FDIC's resolution powers.

Again, it would be interesting if they addressed the specific reforms to lender of last resort functions included in Dodd-Frank, or the combination of regulation and resolution. Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act was amended so that "any emergency lending program or facility is for the purpose of providing liquidity to the financial system, and not to aid a failing financial company." and any such lending program has to have "broad-based eligibility.” Some have argued this is too loose to deal with a liquidity crisis. Do these authors agree? Are the regulations and FDIC's resolution powers sufficient in this case, or do we need a different approach?

Their specific recommendations for how the right should tackle Dodd-Frank, which is the last third of the piece, involve applying stricter cost-benefit analysis to all rules. There's no talk about repeal, or huge changes to the framework, or long court battles. Cost-benefit has significant problems, but that's a debate for another day. Conceptually, it is tinkering with Dodd-Frank rather than repealing it, which has dominated the conversation on the right. Will this signal a larger change?

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Live at Bloomberg View, on The Federal Reserve Transcripts

Jan 28, 2013Mike Konczal

I have a new article at Bloomberg View, titled The Fed Is More Out of It Than You Thought It Was. It's about the recently released Federal Reserve transcripts from 2007, and what they say about where the Fed was and wasn't looking when it came to weakness in the economy. It's also implicitly about coverage of the economic crisis that are overtly focused on the financial sector, relevant again in all the new TARP retrospectives that are out there. I hope you check it out.

I have a new article at Bloomberg View, titled The Fed Is More Out of It Than You Thought It Was. It's about the recently released Federal Reserve transcripts from 2007, and what they say about where the Fed was and wasn't looking when it came to weakness in the economy. It's also implicitly about coverage of the economic crisis that are overtly focused on the financial sector, relevant again in all the new TARP retrospectives that are out there. I hope you check it out.

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What Was Just Watered Down in Basel's Liquidity Requirements?

Jan 8, 2013Mike Konczal

Let’s say you were trying to make a personal budget. We can imagine two reasonable ideas you would want to incorporate into this budget. The first is that you want to make sure you can pay your bills if your income suddenly freezes up or you suddenly need cash. You want to make sure your savings are sufficiently liquid in case there is an emergency.

Another rule is that you want your time horizon of your debts to match what you are buying with those debts. You don’t want a 4-year mortgage and a 30-year auto loan; you want a 4-year auto loan and a 30-year mortgage. And for our purposes, you really don’t want to buy either on a credit card, since the payment terms can fluctuate so often in the short term.

These two ideas are behind two of the additional special forms of capital requirements designed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in Basel III. The first is a “Liquidity Coverage Ratio” (LCR), which is designed to make sure that a financial firm has sufficiently liquid resources to survive a crisis where financial liquidity has dried up for 30 days. The second is a “Net Stable Funding Ratio,” which is designed to complement the first rule and seeks to incentivize banks to use funds with more stable debts featuring long-term horizons.

Basel has just introduced some changes into their final LCR rule, so let’s take a deep dive into this capital requirement rule. Before we introduce some headache-inducing acronyms, remember that the basics are simple here. Banks have a store of assets and they have obligations that they have to make. Or, at the simplest level, banks have a pile of money or things that can be turned into money and people and firms who are demanding money. So any watering down of the rule has to impact one of those two things.

Remember that in a crisis it is hard to sell assets to get the cash you need to make your payments. Also, crucially, others will want to take out more from the bank if they are worried about the bank’s assets, like in a bank run. So both of these items are stressed in the rule to get numbers sufficient to survive a crisis. Banks would prefer to count riskier kinds of things as those safe assets, and assume that firms would want to take less in times of crisis. Each allows them to have to hold less high-quality capital.

There are three major changes announced. The first is that the requirements will be slowly phased in each year for the next several years, fully online by 2019. This is to avoid putting additional credit stresses on the financial system right now. There's also a clarification that assets can be drawn down in times of crisis. But how will these regulations look when they are online? The other two changes are the way the actual mechanisms are calculated.

Let’s chart out those last two changes that were just introduced:

Originally there were just two levels of assets, level 1 and level 2. The second change is to create a new level of assets, called “Level 2B.” Level 1 is unchanged, as well as the old Level 2, which is now Level 2A. Level 2B will be no more than 15 percent of total assets, but it will include lower rated corporate debt (BBB- or above) and, more shockingly, equity shares. Equity is not what you want as a liquidity buffer, as its value will plummet and volatility will skyrocket during crises. In a crisis all correlations go to 1, and that’s especially true in a financial crisis. The fact that it might have done well in the 2008 crisis is no excuse because, as Economics of Contempt pointed out on this topic, there were massive government bailouts and interventions in the market, which is what we want to avoid.

On the plus side, rather than just putting equities in “Level 2,” they created a separate bucket with harsher penalties. Equities will receive a 50 percent haircut toward qualifying, much larger than the 15 percent haircut Level 2A assets get.

The third change is the lower outflow rate for liquidity facilities, corporate deposits as well as other sources of outflows. To get a sense of this, stable deposits with a serious system of deposit insurance – think of your FDIC savings account – originally had a 5 percent outflow. A bank would have to be prepared for 5 percent of its deposits to leave during this financial crisis. That has been reduced to 3 percent in the new rule.

These changes are particularly large for liquidity facilities. Instead of the assumption that firms will go gunning for any emergency liquidity that they can find, and as such use up most of these outlines, there are much more financial-friendly outflow estimates. In fact, many of these rates have been cut by more than half, with Basel now estimating that liquidity facilities, for instance, will only be drawn down 30 percent instead of 100 percent.

These are dramatic reductions. If they are predicated on more closely aligning with 2008 numbers, backstopping the entire liquidity of the financial markets was the whole point of the bailouts and the Federal Reserve’s emergency interventions. The numbers should be much worse in this case.

There is finally a global rule declaring a necessary, but not sufficient, minimum level of liquidity in financial firms. Liquidity does nothing if a firm is insolvent, but it by itself can generate panics. However these rule changes almost all entirely benefit the financial system, and call for less liquidity than in the first drafts. Undercounting the liquidity facilities, as well as letting more of the HQLA consist of assets like stocks and MBS, is a major change from the previous version.

The Basel committee notes that its Liquidity Coverage Ratio is an absolute minimum rate, and that “national authorities may require higher minimum levels of liquidity.” Authorities within the United States should take this seriously. Dodd-Frank calls on regulators to put in sufficient liquidity regulations for large financial firms. Basel III provides a baseline, but regulators could go further by themselves if necessary via their Dodd-Frank mandate. Understanding why the outflow assumptions have so dramatically changed will be one point to follow.

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Let’s say you were trying to make a personal budget. We can imagine two reasonable ideas you would want to incorporate into this budget. The first is that you want to make sure you can pay your bills if your income suddenly freezes up or you suddenly need cash. You want to make sure your savings are sufficiently liquid in case there is an emergency.

Another rule is that you want your time horizon of your debts to match what you are buying with those debts. You don’t want a 4-year mortgage and a 30-year auto loan; you want a 4-year auto loan and a 30-year mortgage. And for our purposes, you really don’t want to buy either on a credit card, since the payment terms can fluctuate so often in the short term.

These two ideas are behind two of the additional special forms of capital requirements designed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision in Basel III. The first is a “Liquidity Coverage Ratio” (LCR), which is designed to make sure that a financial firm has sufficiently liquid resources to survive a crisis where financial liquidity has dried up for 30 days. The second is a “Net Stable Funding Ratio,” which is designed to complement the first rule and seeks to incentivize banks to use funds with more stable debts featuring long-term horizons.

Basel has just introduced some changes into their final LCR rule, so let’s take a deep dive into this capital requirement rule. Before we introduce some headache-inducing acronyms, remember that the basics are simple here. Banks have a store of assets and they have obligations that they have to make. Or, at the simplest level, banks have a pile of money or things that can be turned into money and people and firms who are demanding money. So any watering down of the rule has to impact one of those two things.

Remember that in a crisis it is hard to sell assets to get the cash you need to make your payments. Also, crucially, others will want to take out more from the bank if they are worried about the bank’s assets, like in a bank run. So both of these items are stressed in the rule to get numbers sufficient to survive a crisis. Banks would prefer to count riskier kinds of things as those safe assets, and assume that firms would want to take less in times of crisis. Each allows them to have to hold less high-quality capital.

There are three major changes announced. The first is that the requirements will be slowly phased in each year for the next several years, fully online by 2019. This is to avoid putting additional credit stresses on the financial system right now. There's also a clarification that assets can be drawn down in times of crisis. But how will these regulations look when they are online? The other two changes are the way the actual mechanisms are calculated.

Let’s chart out those last two changes that were just introduced:

Originally there were just two levels of assets, level 1 and level 2. The second change is to create a new level of assets, called “Level 2B.” Level 1 is unchanged, as well as the old Level 2, which is now Level 2A. Level 2B will be no more than 15 percent of total assets, but it will include lower rated corporate debt (BBB- or above) and, more shockingly, equity shares. Equity is not what you want as a liquidity buffer, as its value will plummet and volatility will skyrocket during crises. In a crisis all correlations go to 1, and that’s especially true in a financial crisis. The fact that it might have done well in the 2008 crisis is no excuse because, as Economics of Contempt pointed out on this topic, there were massive government bailouts and interventions in the market, which is what we want to avoid.

On the plus side, rather than just putting equities in “Level 2,” they created a separate bucket with harsher penalties. Equities will receive a 50 percent haircut toward qualifying, much larger than the 15 percent haircut Level 2A assets get.

The third change is the lower outflow rate for liquidity facilities, corporate deposits as well as other sources of outflows. To get a sense of this, stable deposits with a serious system of deposit insurance – think of your FDIC savings account – originally had a 5 percent outflow. A bank would have to be prepared for 5 percent of its deposits to leave during this financial crisis. That has been reduced to 3 percent in the new rule.

These changes are particularly large for liquidity facilities. Instead of the assumption that firms will go gunning for any emergency liquidity that they can find, and as such use up most of these outlines, there are much more financial-friendly outflow estimates. In fact, many of these rates have been cut by more than half, with Basel now estimating that liquidity facilities, for instance, will only be drawn down 30 percent instead of 100 percent.

These are dramatic reductions. If they are predicated on more closely aligning with 2008 numbers, backstopping the entire liquidity of the financial markets was the whole point of the bailouts and the Federal Reserve’s emergency interventions. The numbers should be much worse in this case.

There is finally a global rule declaring a necessary, but not sufficient, minimum level of liquidity in financial firms. Liquidity does nothing if a firm is insolvent, but it by itself can generate panics. However these rule changes almost all entirely benefit the financial system, and call for less liquidity than in the first drafts. Undercounting the liquidity facilities, as well as letting more of the HQLA consist of assets like stocks and MBS, is a major change from the previous version.

The Basel committee notes that its Liquidity Coverage Ratio is an absolute minimum rate, and that “national authorities may require higher minimum levels of liquidity.” Authorities within the United States should take this seriously. Dodd-Frank calls on regulators to put in sufficient liquidity regulations for large financial firms. Basel III provides a baseline, but regulators could go further by themselves if necessary via their Dodd-Frank mandate. Understanding why the outflow assumptions have so dramatically changed will be one point to follow.

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New Article on QE3, Plus the Kocherlakota Move

Sep 24, 2012Mike Konczal

I have a new article on understanding QE3 at The American Prospect which I hope you check out.

Several people have commented on it already, but I want to note that Narayana Kocherlakota is now in favor of more monetary action.

I have a new article on understanding QE3 at The American Prospect which I hope you check out.

Several people have commented on it already, but I want to note that Narayana Kocherlakota is now in favor of more monetary action.

To put this in perspective, here's the September 21st 2011 FOMC statement: "Voting against the action were Richard W. Fisher, Narayana Kocherlakota, and Charles I. Plosser, who did not support additional policy accommodation at this time." Kocherlakota also voted against this action in August.

At this time, he was making arguments that since "the U.S. economy has experienced large increases in the federal budget deficits, contributing substantially to the overall federal debt" and "In response to the recession, the federal government extended the duration of unemployment insurance benefits," this could have caused the natural rate of unemployment to shift so that "the implied u* is 8.7 percent." That the natural rate of unemployment was incredibly high was an argument Kocherlakota had been pushing for some time: here he is in August 2010 arguing mismatch had pushed the NAIRU up 3 percentage points in this recession.

A month later, in the November 2nd, 2011 FOMC statement, there was the first dissent on behalf of the unemployed and in favor of more easing during the entire Great Recession. "Voting against the action was Charles L. Evans, who supported additional policy accommodation at this time."

Now, almost a year later, Kocherlakota is arguing a version of the Evans rule: "As long as the FOMC satisfies its price stability mandate, it should keep the fed funds rate extraordinarily low until the unemployment rate has fallen below 5.5 percent." He explicitly credits Evans with this rule, noting "President Charles Evans of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago has also proposed what I’m calling a liftoff plan...Those familiar with his plan will see that my thinking has been greatly influenced by his. This is perhaps hardly surprising, since he sits next to me at every FOMC meeting!"

Even though this is a relatively conservative version of the Evans rule, there are two important consequences. The first is that dissent is now taking place on Evans' terms. During 2010-2011 the debate, especially on the hawks side, was about "structural unemployment" and whether or not the Federal Reserve should accept that unemployment should remain well above 8%. Now it is about what the Fed is willing to tolerate to get unemployment below 6%. This is a major sea change.

This also takes away the intellectual firepower of the monetary hawks. Kocherlakota is an academic's academic, and his arguments were always based in the dense mathematics of job search models and job-opening ratios. Now that he's moved over to Evans' framework on tradeoffs, it isn't clear that there will be anyone at the regional levels of the Federal Reserve producing numbers arguing that we should focus mainly on how to match workers to job openings. That's a major victory towards a more sensible monetary policy going forward.

 

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The Recession Ends. Then What?

Sep 24, 2012

It may be hard to imagine, but (we all hope, anyway) some day the recession and meager recovery period will come to an end. At that point, will the debates we're having now about the economy become completely irrelevant? What will we have to fight about? Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal and EPI's Josh Bivens took this question on in the latest Fireside Chats episode on Bloggingheads:

It may be hard to imagine, but (we all hope, anyway) some day the recession and meager recovery period will come to an end. At that point, will the debates we're having now about the economy become completely irrelevant? What will we have to fight about? Roosevelt Institute Fellow Mike Konczal and EPI's Josh Bivens took this question on in the latest Fireside Chats episode on Bloggingheads:

As Mike points out, "Right now the debates seem very focused on things very specific to this recession," such as what the Federal Reserve could do to make things better or whether we should reduce mortgage burdens to boost consumption. Those are "very technical and very important debates to be having," he points out, "but they’re very narrow to the moment we’re in right now." Once we one day leave these issues behind, what will liberals decide to promote? And will we all be able to get on board?

The first issue Josh sees rearing its head is what we consider the "natural" rate of unemployment to be. Right now it's pretty obvious that unemployment is too high. At what point does it fall so much that some people, including the Fed, start to say it shouldn't go any lower? This question will have larger implications as well. As Mike says, "You see policy experts running around trying to figure out how to boost the wages of the lower quintile, but we know what has done it in the past 30 years, and it’s when unemployment is below 5 percent for a sustainable period of time." In fact, he says, a low unemployment rate "is the ultimate jobs program, it is the ultimate policy solution," and boosts wages for everyone -- not just those at the bottom.

What else will we squabble over when the economy once again booms? Bivens predicts social insurance programs -- Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare -- will have to be on the agenda. And related to that will be just how high we can go with tax rates on the rich. "Obviously you can have a fairness argument and a just deserts argument, but the economic case is pretty clear that [tax] rates [on the wealthier] could go much higher," Mike says. "But we’re seeing resistence to just getting to near 40 percent at this point." Brace yourself, political battles are coming.

Watch the full episode below, in which Mike and Josh discuss how little we all take home and whether inequality and the social safety net have anything to do with it:

 

Crossroads image via Shutterstock.com.

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Rediscovering Government

Central Banks Are Saving Democracy From Itself

Sep 17, 2012Jeff Madrick

We may want more democratic control over the Federal Reserve, but its independence is allowing it to push back against austerity.

We may want more democratic control over the Federal Reserve, but its independence is allowing it to push back against austerity.

The Federal Reserve's recent announcement of aggressive new policies is more than a little welcome. It involved a new round of quantitative easing focused on mortgage-backed securities, but more importantly, a statement that the Fed would keep rates low for a long time, even if the unemployment rate begins to fall markedly. In other words, the Fed will be more tolerant of rising inflation. A couple of points are clear and have been widely discussed:
 
First, more inflation is what this economy needs. It will reduce “real” interest rates down the road. It will also reduce the level of debt, which will now be paid off in somewhat inflated dollars. Lenders will pay the price; borrowers will benefit.
 
Second, the Fed is at last accepting its dual mandate, which is not only to keep inflation in check but also to keep unemployment in check as well. Inflation got almost all the focus since Paul Volcker’s reign in the early 1980s.
 
Third, inflation targeting as almost the sole purpose of any government policy is now either not applicable to current circumstances or never really was the answer to our prayers. The main claimant on the uses of either hard or soft inflation targeting was none other than Ben Bernanke himself. He was the champion of the Great Moderation, which held that less GDP volatility and low inflation were admirable ends in themselves -- proof of a nearly perfectly managed economy.  
 
Never mind that growth in the late 1990s was supported by high-tech speculation in the stock market, or that growth in the early 2000s was supported by a housing bubble and crazy, risky practices on Wall Street. And forget that job growth was the worst of the postwar period under George W. Bush, even before the 2008 recession, and wages had been performing poorly for 30 years. It was all really great, said Bernanke, and only a few mainstream economists disagreed.
 
But there is another point that needs emphasis and is being passed over. This one is about democracy. Bernanke is acting aggressively because the American Congress and president are locked in an austerity embrace. Fiscal stimulus is now turning into de-stimulus. Even the president’s budget calls for fiscal restraint. The deficit bugaboo is strangling the world.   
 
Those who want to make the Fed more subject to democratic control – and to a degree, I am sympathetic -- should heed a lesson here. Democracy -- that is, a democratically elected Congress and president -- is choosing a damaging course of austerity. In Europe, it is far worse. 
 
Needed policies are coming from America’s central bank, which was deliberately created as an independent entity. Note that it is Romney who is saying he wants Bernanke out of there and crying wolf about inflation. Bernanke, not subject to the whims of democracy, has had the courage to change his own thinking. He knows the consequences of tight policy now.
 
So what do we do? We should be a little modest about the universal benefits of democracy. For example, I think democracy may yet work to end the severest levels of austerity in Europe. People are mad. Governments are changing for the better. Demoracy in America is the only answer to an ever-richer and more powerful oligarchic class in the U.S., which wants to lower taxes, limit regulations, and cut government into ever smaller pieces.
 
But we must also deal with the disturbing fact that one of the least democratic of our institutions, the Fed, is the only one saving the day now. The same is true in Europe, where the European Central Bank is now acting intelligently, in contrast to the fiscal hawks dominated by the German policymakers and apparently supported by a majority of the German people. This issue is not simple.
 

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

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Konczal and Grunwald: Could the Stimulus Have Been Better Without Being Bigger?

Sep 10, 2012

We've all heard the standard arguments about the stimulus: progressives think it should have been bigger, while conservatives think it was a pork-filled monstrosity.

We've all heard the standard arguments about the stimulus: progressives think it should have been bigger, while conservatives think it was a pork-filled monstrosity. But in the latest episode of the Roosevelt Institute's Bloggingheads series, Fireside Chats, Mike Konczal talks to Michael Grunwald, author of The New New Deal, about four stronger criticisms of the bill from the left.

Konczal notes that it probably wouldn't have been possible to pass a larger stimulus through Congress, but his first question is "Why didn't we have a WPA? President Roosevelt went out in one month and hired like four million people," so if we're facing a similar jobs crisis now, "why don't we just go and hire five million people to do whatever?"

Next, the Michaels discuss President Obama's rhetorical pivot toward deficit reduction and "the idea that you couldn't pass the first stimulus, you couldn't do more to expand the economy, without also bringing down the long-term debt," which led Obama to "straitjacket himself on this issue of worrying about the bond market."

Third, Konczal argues that "President Obama very much looked at how to attack the problem of unemployment as a budgetary phenomenon as opposed to using every lever at his disposal," including the Federal Reserve and the nationalized GSEs. Rather, he chose to "kick the can on housing, hoping unemployment would come down in two years."

Finally, Konczal says "the New Deal brought in kind of a new contract with government" that involved the creation of a safety net and a much stronger role for the federal government in the economy. He and Grunwald explore whether Obama's policies have the potential to create another paradigm shift that is "fundamentally a new kind of social reality, a political reality."

For more, including details on what was actually in the stimulus and how it reflected President Obama's broader agenda, check out the full video below:

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