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A Year of Ben Bernanke Press Conferences

Apr 25, 2012Mike Konczal

A year ago, in April of 2011, Ben Bernanke gave his first press conference.  I wrote it up for the American Prospect here.  Looking back, I had flagged that more of the questions asked Bernanke whether he was doing too much, rather than too little, to stimulate the economy.  I noted:

A year ago, in April of 2011, Ben Bernanke gave his first press conference.  I wrote it up for the American Prospect here.  Looking back, I had flagged that more of the questions asked Bernanke whether he was doing too much, rather than too little, to stimulate the economy.  I noted:

the press conference, roughly nine questions worried about inflation, a weak dollar, the country's S&P rating, oil prices, and whether the government can fashion an appropriate response to the financial crisis or long-term unemployment at all. These all reflect the worry that government is doing too much instead of too little. Meanwhile, there were only two questions asking why the Federal Reserve wasn't doing more to lower unemployment. When Binyamin Appelbaum asked, "Is it in the Fed's power to reduce the rate of unemployment more quickly? How would you do that? Why are you not doing it?" it was almost out of place.

That wasn't the case today.  The questions were much harder and more frequently about why Bernanke wasn't doing more to get the economy going.  They took for granted, as the first questioner pointed out, that "unemployment is still high, the economy is slowing, inflation is subdued" and Bernanke and the FOMC is, to their critics, "still being too cautious."  I count, on a quick scan, five questions related to the idea that the Federal Reserve has the ability to do more and is choosing not to do it, with only two more related to concerns of inflation hawks or a "bond bubble."

There's a lot of reasons for this: the wasted year of 2011 for the economy, the continued low interest rates of the United States even after a ratings downgrade, growing fears of a permanent decrease in the labor force participation rate and hysteresis, and more.  But part of this change is the result of the economics blogosphere pushing the debate about monetary policy at the zero-lower bound into the mainstream of financial and economics journalism.  The econoblogsphere should be proud of itself, and I will try to do more to advance this important conversation to whatever extent I can.

A year ago I held an event for the Roosevelt Institute on the Future of the Federal Reserve.  It was the same day as the Bernanke press conference, and as such we asked each of the participants to ask Bernanke a question, and we put them online.  Matt Yglesias' question was:  "I would ask him about his own paper on self-induced paralysis in Japan and what he has changed his mind about since then."  This change from Ben Bernanke the professor who called for aggressive monetary action to the Ben Bernanke we see now must have been on the minds of all the reporters in the room, as it is the subject of a great Krugman New York Times Magazine article this upcoming weekend.  The question finally got asked by Binyamin Appelbaum, who, as we note above, asked the hardest question about the Fed not doing enough a year ago at the first conference.  Bernanke's full answer:

Binyamin Appelbaum: Unemployment is too high and you said you expect it to remain too high for years to come, inflation is under control and you expect it to remain under control. You said you have additional tools available for you to use, but you're not using them right now. Under these circumstances, it's really hard for a lot of people to understand why you are not using those tools right now. Could you address that? And specifically, could you  address whether your current views are inconsistent with the views on that subject you held as an academic.
 
Ben Bernanke: Yeah, let me tackle that second part first. So there's this, uh, view circulating that the views I expressed about 15 years ago on the Bank of Japan are somehow inconsistent with our current policies. That is absolutely incorrect. My views and our policies today are completely consistent with the views that I held at that time. I made two points at that time. To the Bank of Japan, the first was that I believe a determined central bank could, and should, work to eliminate deflation, that it's falling prices. The second point that I made was that, um, when short-term interest rates hit zero, the tools of a central bank are no longer, are not exhausted there, are still other things that, um, that the central bank can do to create additional accommodation.
 
Now looking at the current situation in the United States, we are not in deflation. When deflation became a significant risk in late 2010 or at least a moderate risk in late 2010, we used additional balance sheet tools to return inflation close to the 2% target. Likewise, we've been aggressive and creative in using nonfederal funds rate centered tools to achieve additional accommodation for the U.S. economy. So the, the very critical difference between the Japanese situation 15 years ago and the U.S. situation today is that, Japan was in deflation and clearly, when you're in deflation and in recession, then both sides of your mandate, so to speak, are demanding additional deflation. 
 
Why don't we do more? I would reiterate, we're doing a great deal of policies extraordinarily accommodative. You know all the things we've done to try to provide support to the economy. I guess the, uh, the question is, um, does it make sense to actively seek a higher inflation rate in order to, uh, achieve a slightly increased pace of reduction in the unemployment rate? The view of the committee is that that would be very, uh, uh, reckless. We have, uh, we, the Federal Reserve, have spent 30 years building up credibility for low and stable inflation, which has proved extremely valuable, in that we've been able to take strong accommodative actions in the last four or five years to support the economy without leading to a, [indiscernible] expectations or destabilization of inflation. To risk that asset, for, what I think would be quite tentative and, uh, perhaps doubtful gains, on the real side would be an unwise thing to do.
Watch the video - Bernanke gets really agitated answering this question.  That's the argument to deal with.  I need to think this through more, but on its face it seems like they think they need to maintain their credability in order to keep rates at or below their target.  There's no tradeoff here - the credibility at best has allowed Bernanke to fight off opportunistic disinflation from becoming a goal (which may, in fact, be a victory).  
 
Meanwhile if the Bernanke wants to maintain credibility the best way to do it isn't by keeping the economy in a permanent quasi-recession but instead annoucing an NGDP target or announcing what he wants and what he is willing to tolerate to get it - say 3% inflation until unemployment is below 7%, like Chicago Fed President Charles Evans has suggested.
 
Important other notes: In response to a question about the dropping labor force participation, Bernanke noted that the rate was dropping because they are "no longer getting increased participation from women... society ages and also, for other reasons, male participation has been declining over time."  However a lot of it "represent cyclical factors, much of it is young people, for example, who presumably are not out of the labor force indefinitely, but given the, uh, weak job market, they are going to school or doing something else, rather than, than working."  As such "the unemployment rate may not fall as quickly going forward," because when the economy picks up "many of these folks are going to come back into the labor force looking for work."
 
Bernanke notes that in the absense of a zero lower bound the interest rate would be negative but that they've done other things to counteract this.  "We, we see monetary policy as being approximately in the right place at this point. Based on the analysis that we've been doing of the economy and the outlook."
 
All in all, the media has gotten a lot better pushing the Federal Reserve to account for its role in the weak economy over the past year.  Let's take victories where we can get them.
 

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Does Expansionary Monetary Policy Primarily Benefit Finance and Rentiers?

Apr 17, 2012Mike Konczal

Joe Weisenthal calls it the Biggest Myth in Monetary Policy Today, and recently there's been a wave of posts about it.  Would another round of expansionary monetary policy at this point - in either a QE3, a conditional higher inflation target or NGDP targeting - primarily benefit the financial sector, rentiers and the wealthy?

Joe Weisenthal calls it the Biggest Myth in Monetary Policy Today, and recently there's been a wave of posts about it.  Would another round of expansionary monetary policy at this point - in either a QE3, a conditional higher inflation target or NGDP targeting - primarily benefit the financial sector, rentiers and the wealthy?

Here are Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson at Economix, making the case in Who Captured the Fed?:

Thus was born the idea of independent central bankers, steering the monetary ship purely on the basis of disinterested, objective and scientific analysis. When inflation is too high, they are supposed to raise interest rates. When unemployment is too high, they should make it cheaper and easier to borrow, all the while working to make sure that inflation expectations remain under control.

Increasingly, however, it seems that technocratic policy-making is just a myth. We have come full circle, and the Wall Street banks are calling the shots again...

Monetary policy has an impact on inflation, output and employment. But it also has a major impact on stock market prices. Any central banker raising interest rates is reducing stock market values and thus eroding the bonuses of top bankers and other chief executives....

Those people will lobby, asserting that higher interest rates will undermine the economy and cause us to plummet into recession, or worse....

We have lost track of the number of research notes from major banks pleading for easier credit, lower capital requirements, delay in implementing financial reforms or all of the above...

As the American economy begins to improve, influential people in the financial sector will continue to talk about the need for a prolonged period of low interest rates. The Fed will listen.

I'm a huge fan of both Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson (I'm about to start each of their books, Why Nations Fail and White House Burning), so I want to take this argument carefully.  How to approach it?

First off, it isn't just the financial sector calling for low rates (if they are, in fact, calling for it, as we'll see in a second).  A generic Taylor Rule, as Paul Krugman recently pointed out, calls for low rates until 2015.  Mess with the rule and the data a bit to adjust that date at the margins, but generic macroeconomic stabilization rules still see low rates for quite some time as necessary.

I always find the following to be a useful thought exercise: imagine we wake up and find that interest rates aren't set at zero but instead at one percent.  Whoops!  Should we turn around and have the Federal Reserve lower interest rates?  Those who think that Taylor Rule is correct and that the zero lower bound is blocking monetary policy from being effective would say yes; so would people who think the Federal Reserve isn't out of ammunition at the zero lower bound, people like Christina Romer and Charles Evans.

The post argues the Federal Reserve should, when unemployment is high, "make it cheaper and easier to borrow, all the while working to make sure that inflation expectations remain under control."  The post seems to concede that monetary policy works as normal, and unemployment is high and inflation expectations are, if anything, lower than what we want.

But I feel the entire vibe of the article is wrong. The financial sector is calling for higher interest rates.  This is why Carmen Reinhart told Institutional Investor that “Financial repression is manifesting itself right now” alongside the notion that financial repression is like “the rape and plunder of pension funds.”  Members of the financial community complain to reporters about "low interest rates that have been 'artificially manipulated' by the Federal Reserve."

Or take Brad Delong's six minute debate about QE with Jim Grant from last year.  As Delong summarized it (my bold):

I found it depressing because the major unfairness Grant focused on is that, because of the Federal Reserve, investors in money market funds can get only one basis point of interest. The 9% unemployed: they are not the victims. Those who cannot sell their houses because of the foreclosure overhang: they are not the victims. Those whose businesses crash because of slack aggregate demand call they are not the victims. The real victims are the rentiers who have a right to a nice solid well above inflation safe return, and from whom the Federal Reserve is stealing that right.

And I found what I could gauge of Jim Grant's worldview depressing as well. He seemed to be selling rentier-populist ressentiment. Grant's world is full of "takers"--and the Federal Reserve is helping them. And the biggest takers in Jim Grant's mind are the hedge fund operators of Greenwich, Connecticut. Why are they the biggest takers? Because they can borrow cheap, at low interest rates, and put the money they borrow to work making fortunes. If only the Federal Reserve would shrink the money stock and raise interest rates! Then the hedge funds would have to pay healthy interest rates for their cash! Then the profits would flow to the truly worthy: the rentier coupon-clippers now suffering with their one basis point yields.

Never mind what a policy of monetary restraint to "normalize" interest rates would do to the unemployed...

You can read that in the recent statement by Mohamed A. El-Erian of Pimco, who, as Karl Smith noted, wants the Federal Reserve to focus on microeconomic goals instead of the macroeconomic problem of full employment.  This isn't new.  As Keynes noted, "the most stable, and the least easily shifted, element in our contemporary economy has been hitherto, and may prove to be in future, the minimum rate of interest acceptable to the generality of wealth-owners."

The implicit argument is that the interest rate compatible with full employment is too low for financial investors to accept.  Do we then just accept mass unemployment and the subsequent hysteresis-induced slowing of growth and human potential so Jim Grant and Pimco can make a profit they feel is worthy of their financial talents?  Of course not.

Now if you check out Jim Grant's argument to Brad Delong, there's an argument that we should split finance in two sectors - an established one that is hurt by low interest rates and one that is more focused on intermediation and/or trading for themselves, which could benefits from low rates and bubbles is stock prices and assets.

The stock market is following unemployment claims pretty closely, so it isn't clear to me that the stock market is broken from its function as a prediction of future economic activity (i.e. in a bubble).  I like two MIT economists arguing that we should disconnect stock prices from the real economy, but I think that requires an additional layer of explanation.  For instance, if monetary policy was constant and we passed another round of deficit-funded fiscal stimulus to rebuild infrastructure and employ people, I would expect the stock market to increase because the economy would be stronger.

If that's the case, that there's two financial sectors and one of them benefits from monetary expansion we have to ask - so what?  If monetary policy is working, and bringing us closer to full employment, and some hedge funds and Wall Street traders make some money off of it, why should that impact our commitment to using all levers for full employment?  Monetary policy is not a morality play, and it's not about rewarding the good people and punishing the bad ones.  It’s about stabilizing growth, prices and maximum employment without overheating the system or letting it choke to death from a lack of oxygen.

As Josh Mason's great guest post here mentioned, if we are worried about where the financial sector channels money, that's an argument for regulation instead of mass unemployment and scarce liquidity.  We should commit to better regulations as well as progressive taxes and/or financial taxes.  If those aren't in place (and I don't believe they sufficently are), those shouldn't be attempted with monetary policy, and they absolutely must not distract us from taking our eye off the goal - full employment in the wake of the Great Recession.

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The Next Round of Quantitative Easing Should be a Debt Jubilee

Mar 14, 2012Ben Mabie

money-question-150As part of the 10 Ideas: New Ideas for a New Economy series, a proposal to lift debtors' overwhelming burdens in order to boost the economy and give them more autonomy.

money-question-150As part of the 10 Ideas: New Ideas for a New Economy series, a proposal to lift debtors' overwhelming burdens in order to boost the economy and give them more autonomy.

On March 1st, the international Occupy movement held a day of action targeting the privatization of education. Students at the University of California, San Diego occupied the Chancellor's Office and released a comprehensive series of demands. Boston students rallied at the capitol building, demanding a reprioritization of public education. Over 80,000 students in Quebec went on strike. At my own school, the University of California, Santa Cruz, a student strike effectively shut down the campus. Four days later, thousands gathered at the California capitol building, taking the rotunda in a scene reminiscent of Madison, Wisconsin a year ago, before being evicted by state troopers. But what lingers once the days of action have settled is a burdensome debt. Since 1978, tuition at U.S. colleges has increased 650 points above inflation, contributing to the nearly $1 trillion in total student loan debt.

Debt loads are high on many Americans' minds. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported that total household debt nearly tripled from $4.6 trillion in 1999 to $12.5 trillion in 2008. Though the figure has since fallen to $11.5 trillion as of the first quarter of 2011, it still an impressive figure. "From 1997 to 2007," writes the Wall Street Journal, citing Federal Reserve Data, "household debt ballooned to 66 percent of economic output to 98 percent." Three-quarters of this debt is from mortgages. Student loan debt has also ballooned to nearly three times that of the home mortgage debt during the Clinton administration.

These debt levels are dangerous because they drown consumption. Americans, now paralyzed by a fear of debt, are spending and investing less than they did during 2005. The Wall Street Journal highlighted how "two-thirds of Americans polled online in July by the research firm Absolute Strategy Research said they planned to either reduce their debt within a year or stop borrowing altogether." The phenomenon cannot be reduced to less access to capital: this hesitation even comes from workers with excellent credit. Workers are contracting demand as they shift from spending to saving.

Students have recently catalyzed around a particular demand: debt abolition. The idea of comprehensive debt forgiveness is not new; in fact, some anthropologists suggest that it is the original revolutionary platform. In times of ballooning wealth inequalities and economic stagnation, demands for a Jubilee, a cancellation of all debts, grow with striking poignancy.

That's a good place to start in addressing our current problems: immediate relief to debtors. We need another round of quantitative easing that distributes cash to debtors based on a progressive scale of debt held relative to income. (The Fed should accompany this debt relief with its usual purchase of bonds, as it's essential that the monetary policy trigger an inflationary currency while interest rates sink, so that debtors are aided further.) I'm far from sage enough to specify an amount of capital to plunge into the economy, but the higher the amount of debt abolished, the more fruitful the results.

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What makes quantitative easing different from other forms of monetary policy is the direct injection of capital into the market by way of purchasing financial assets, or in this case, debt, from private pocketbooks and portfolios. QE3, targeting debt held by private individuals, should electronically distribute cash to debtors. In order to get a loan one often needs a bank account, so the Federal Reserve will have somewhere to inject the fresh currency. The Bank of England's exposition on this relatively new form of monetary policy "does not involve printing more banknotes. Instead, the Bank buys assets from the private sector...and credits the seller's bank account." The central bank simply creates "new money electronically by increasing the balance on a reserve account." If it can be done by "crediting the accounts of the companies it bought it from," then it can do the same to private individuals who hold debt.

In the case of a QE3 Jubilee, the Fed wouldn't be purchasing a bond or stock, as is typically the case. Instead it would be buying up private debt -- but while banks and other loaning institutions hold the debt itself, QE3 would distribute money to those who owe. Why give the money to debtors instead of creditors? There are both economic and political reasons. First, economic: if trends hold, the additional cash will aid savers, incentivizing them to spend more, raising aggregate demand. The only alternative is that debtors defy current trends and spend anyway, which seems unlikely.

Additionally, there are positive externalities of this monetary approach. Quantitative easing both lowers interest rates and prompts inflationary trends. Both conditions aid debtors in their struggle for relief. Expected inflation usually leads to rising interest rates, further burdening debtors, but the Federal Reserve's lowering of interest rates will obstruct such reactions. The more financial assets the Federal Reserve purchases, the more complete the process of debt forgiveness will be. Aiding debtors also gives them more leverage over creditors, which may force banks into restructuring privately held debt. Banks will want the influx of cash to pay off the assets they hold, encouraging them to court debtors with deals.

There are also political reasons for mass debt forgiveness. We've long been experiencing an increased privatization of our lives. Educational privatization began with the massive contractions in state subsidization of public universities. Students, unable to come up with the money for tuition, took on loans. Student loan debt has deterred thousands from entering college and is informing what students study in school and what kind of work they do. Debt is what we accumulate when our substance and savings are not enough, but it puts us in the hands of private entities, i.e. banks. Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute once wrote that it is the job of government to maximize the autonomy of its subjects. The government has an obligation to end this reliance on private actors.

A debt Jubilee at least temporarily removes debtors' decisions from the whims of the market. It gives them space to practice economic autonomy. In light of the privatization of our decisions, this should be held as an important victory. "Economic development" may mean developing economics that emancipate people's lives and decisions from an economic calculus.

Ben Mabie, a first year student in proletarian studies, started a chapter of the Roosevelt Institute | Campus Network at the University of California, Santa Cruz last fall.

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The Federal Reserve Knew About the Housing Bubble in 2004

Jan 17, 2012Matt Stoller

The data -- both anecdotal and otherwise -- was out there, and the Fed even discussed it internally. Let's not let it off the hook.

The data -- both anecdotal and otherwise -- was out there, and the Fed even discussed it internally. Let's not let it off the hook.

I noticed something odd about the recent release of the 2006 Federal Reserve Open Market Committee transcripts. Binyamin Appelbaum has a characteristically good article about the inept chatter at the FOMC meetings that year, where the various participants missed the housing bubble completely. And there has been suitable mockery of the Fed.

What I'm finding, though, is a bit of an apologia for these folks in the form of "no one knew." This is just not true. I remember in 2002-2003 I heard crazy stories about housing, where people would list their home and get 15 bids in 24 hours. It's why I didn't consider buying a home. It wasn't just anecdotal, but the data was out there.

fedrentprice

And it's clear, from going into earlier transcripts of FOMC meetings, that the Fed actually knew there was a housing bubble as early as 2004. Or rather, it had the data, both anecdotal and quantitative, and even discussed the possibility of a bubble internally. Ryan Grim and Calculated Risk picked this up in 2010.

Here's Grim:

Federal Reserve bank president from Atlanta, Jack Guynn, warned that "a number of folks are expressing growing concern about potential overbuilding and worrisome speculation in the real estate markets, especially in Florida. Entire condo projects and upscale residential lots are being pre-sold before any construction, with buyers freely admitting that they have no intention of occupying the units or building on the land but rather are counting on 'flipping' the properties -- selling them quickly at higher prices."

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And Calculated Risk found that the Fed discussed the rent-to-price ratio that Dean Baker relied on for his accurate diagnosis of the bubble.

MR. FERGUSON [Roger Ferguson, Fed Vice Chairman in 2004]: The other question I have deals with chart 3, on housing prices. My question is about the footnote, which says that the rent-price ratio is adjusted for biases in the trends of both rents and prices. Is that where you pick up demographics and lifecycle factors? What are these biases in the trends, and how does one think about changing demographics and the relative attractiveness of owning a home versus renting? Give me some sense of whether or not the shape of the curve that you show here is likely to reverse, as you imply, or likely to stay relatively low.

MR. OLINER [Stephen Oliner, Fed associate research director]: The biases referred to in that footnote were really technical biases in the construction of the two measures shown here, the rent measure and the price measure. Had we not adjusted for them, the rent-to-price ratio would have been much lower at the end point. So it would have looked more alarming. In part we think the published data have some technical problems that need to be taken care of before this analysis can be done in a way that is meaningful. With regard to the question of owning versus renting, it depends to some extent on what is happening to interest rates because that changes that calculation at the margin. So it’s really important to plot any kind of valuation measure relative to an opportunity cost. Just showing the rent-to-price ratio I think would have been somewhat misleading; it’s really that gap that we think is the meaningful measure of valuation. And it looks somewhat rich, taking account of the fact that interest rates are relatively low and income growth has been relatively strong. I don’t want to leave the impression that we think there’s a huge housing bubble. We believe a lot of the rise in house prices is rooted in fundamentals. But even after you account for the fundamentals, there’s a part of the increase that is hard to explain.

Alan Greenspan understood very well the importance of withdrawing equity from homes as a driver of demand, which comprised 6-8 percent of all disposable income from 2003-2006. There was an enormous amount of chatter about a possible housing bubble (see this Google trend search.) It wasn't just heroic figures like Dean Baker and Josh Rosner who were warning of a bubble (and the possibility of a severe recession when it burst) since 2001; there were books coming out in 2003 with subtle titles like The Coming Crash in the Housing Market. Read the reviews of that book, and you'll see discussions by normal people in the industry pointing out how creepy the market had become.

That the Fed engaged in extreme groupthink is not a surprise. But let's not pretend like no one knew there was a bubble, or that no one knew that it could become a deeply serious problem. Many normal people knew. Non-corrupt policymakers and thinkers got it. And the Fed saw the signals; its officials even discussed the possibility internally. It simply ignored the pricing signals the market was sending. Funny, that.

Matt Stoller is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and former Senior Policy Advisor to Congressman Alan Grayson.

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Fed Transcripts: Why Was Congress in the Dark During the Crafting of Dodd-Frank?

Jan 13, 2012Matt Stoller

Records of the Fed's meetings at the height of the housing bubble provide more evidence that our central bankers need to be held accountable.

Records of the Fed's meetings at the height of the housing bubble provide more evidence that our central bankers need to be held accountable.

The latest release of the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee transcripts is a doozy. Binyamin Appelbaum read through the transcripts and wrote a great article on what he found. The people on the FOMC straight up did not understand the economy, and that becomes very obvious when you parse their nonchalance through the pivotal year of 2006. That's true as far as it goes, but there's a political angle here as well.

My question is, why don't we have the transcript for 2007? Or 2008? Or beyond that? Why didn't Congress have the evidence that Bernanke was an incompetent central banker when he was up for reconfirmation in late 2009? Why didn't Congress know any of what was revealed yesterday while it was tasked with rewriting the rules governing our entire financial architecture?!? It might have been useful to know that the Fed was staffed by an inept, embarrassing group of fools fiddling over inflation while Rome was being set ablaze.

I wrote a piece on this back in May of 2011:

There’s an easy way, however, for the Federal Reserve to lose its aura of undemocratic secrecy. It could release transcripts of its Federal Open Market Committee meetings within one year — or be compelled to do so with a congressional subpoena.

These committee meetings are the real guts of U.S. economic policymaking. You can already get a summary of each meeting within three weeks. But the actual transcripts — the debates among Fed policymakers at those meetings — are released with a minimum lag time of five years.

Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, had pledged last year to look into this issue. But he has not acted.

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So, we still do not know what top Fed officials were debating from 2006 through 2010 as the housing bubble ballooned and the banking system collapsed. Were Fed officials privately worrying about the housing market? Were they aware of leverage in the system? Did they understand the dangers of credit default swaps?

The democratically elected Congress should have known these things before attempting to fix the financial system. Several congressional postmortems on the crisis should have had access to these records. And as Congress debates Rep. Mike Pence’s bill to change the Fed’s mandate, it should have access to this information.

Why doesn't Congress issue a subpoena to get the information about FOMC meetings from 2007-2010, so that we know what the Fed is thinking? They do not deserve the presumption of competence anymore. Darryl Issa promised this during the transition to GOP congressional rule in 2010 but he has not followed through. Perhaps he should.

Many people did get what was happening -- 2006 was the year that the big banks began cutting warehouse lines of credit to mortgage originators, which would eventually topple the whole housing ponzi scheme. Dean Baker had been trying to sound the alarm about a housing bubble as early as 2003. Yves Smith started her site Naked Capitalism in 2006 and Josh Rosner began noticing what was going on that year; moreover, the dangers of leverage had been recognized as far back as the early 1990s by such economic luminaries as Jane D'Arista.

It's not just that the people on the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee -- the real rulers of America -- are insultingly out of touch with reality. It's also that the public does not even get to see what they are doing and that Congress doesn't really want to know. This, more than anything else, is animating figures like Ron Paul, who accuses the Federal Reserve of foisting an unwanted monetary system on the American public.

The reality of our times is that the people in charge of powerful institutions are driven by nothing so much as a desire to be the maintainers of consensus. That is what the FOMC participants were. And if we don't fix this state of affairs and hold powerful people accountable for being incompetent and wrong at least some of the time, America is done for.

Matt Stoller is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and former Senior Policy Advisor to Congressman Alan Grayson.

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The Foreclosure Crisis: A Government in Denial

Jan 9, 2012Bruce Judson

mortgage-crisis-150The Federal Reserve sent a warning shot that housing is the greatest threat to the economy. The government should take note.

mortgage-crisis-150The Federal Reserve sent a warning shot that housing is the greatest threat to the economy. The government should take note.

As we start the New Year, the executive branch and Congress continue to pretend the gravest risk to our economy and social stability does not exist: the ongoing foreclosure crisis. The financial crisis began with the housing crisis and it will not end until we resolve housing. Government policymakers who seemingly ignore this basic fact are leading the nation to another potential catastrophe.

This past week, a number of important events occurred in Washington, including important recess appointments by President Obama. However, the most noteworthy event did not make front page news: the Federal Reserve's (apparently) unsolicited memo to the committees of Congress that oversee financial services warning of the dangers the current housing market poses for the economy.

This represents an extraordinary action and underscores both the seriousness of the continuing crisis and the absence of meaningful discussion of the problem in Washington. Bernanke's memo reviewed federal actions to date and effectively concluded that they were unlikely to solve this national tragedy. The memo concluded, in part:

The challenges faced by the U.S. housing market today reflect, in part...a persistent excess supply of homes on the market; and losses arising from an often costly and inefficient foreclosure process (and from problems in the current servicing model more generally)... Absent any policies to help bridge this gap, the adjustment process will take longer...pushing house prices lower and thereby prolonging the downward pressure on the wealth of current homeowners and the resultant drag on the economy at large.

This memo is notable for several reasons. First, it's important to remember that when the Fed speaks, it does so in sober, limited terms. So an unprompted Fed warning suggesting "a persistent excess of supply" and a "resultant drag on the economy" is comparable to the Secretary of Homeland Security holding a press conference to warn of the risk of an imminent national emergency. Second, an unprompted memo from Bernanke to the House means that he is so deeply worried he felt the need to speak out in as strong a voice as his position permits. Third, the Fed rarely speaks on issues unrelated to its direct activities. Indeed, The Wall Street Journal subsequently wrote, "For an institution that jealously guards its independence, the Federal Reserve is wading into treacherous political waters."

Finally, co-ordinated speeches by three top Fed officials further indicate the depth of the Fed's concerns. On Friday, the presidents of the New York and Boston Fed banks and Betsy Duke, a Fed Governor, all gave speeches detailing the need for aggressive action to spur a housing recovery. For example, William Dudley, President of the New York Fed, told a group, "The ongoing weakness in housing has made it more difficult to achieve a vigorous economic recovery."

There are a multitude of other indicators that our current treatment of the housing sector will at minimum prevent an economic recovery and at worst have disastrous consequences for the stability of the financial sector as well as the health of the middle class. (For the record, my analysis leans toward the latter of these two viewpoints.) These include the reportedly poor health of our financial institutions (zombie banks), the administration's seeming efforts to cover this fact up, and the inevitable failure of federal homeowner assistance programs that rely on the cooperation of financial institutions whose profit incentives are in the reverse direction.

Consumer spending represents 70 percent of the nation's economy and is central to any economic recovery. To achieve sufficient aggregate demand (i.e. total spending on goods and services), this will require spending by middle-income individuals in addition to what we now call the 1%. The Fed report suggests that the housing crisis makes such a recovery unlikely.

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The report found that, in the aggregate, more than $7 trillion in home equity -- more than half of the aggregate home equity that existed in early 2006 -- has now been lost, noting, "This substantial blow to household wealth has significantly weakened household spending and consumer confidence." Moreover, "Middle-income households, as a group, have been particularly hard hit hit because home equity is a larger share of their wealth in the aggregate than it is for low-income households (who are less likely to be homeowners) or upper-income households (who own other forms of wealth such as financial assets and businesses)." These households have seen their home equity decline by an estimated 66 percent.

Moreover, the fear of a continuing loss of wealth (which is a cushion against job loss or other economic emergencies), the fear of job loss itself, the negative effects of underwater homes, lack of forbearance for unemployment (a point the Fed particularly emphasizes), and consumers struggling to meet mortgage payments in a far more difficult environment are all dragging the economy down.

There is also a far worse possibility. Today, an estimated 29 percent of all homes with mortgages are underwater. In addition, at least one respected analyst estimates that a total of 14 million homes will be foreclosed on from 2007 to the end of the crisis. This represents a hard-to-imagine one in every four mortgages. With foreclosures increasing, there is now such a looming imbalance of supply and demand that, as the Fed notes, further decreases in home prices are likely. Some believe home price reductions of another 20 percent are likely. This would, in all likelihood, have disastrous consequences on at least three fronts -- and ripple effects that are impossible to predict.

First, so many homeowners would be so far underwater that massive walkaways would be likely. The negative impact on consumer spending of such price declines would almost certainly lead to a vicious cycle of more job losses, leading to further walkaways by struggling consumers.

Second, the mortgage securities market would be in chaos. Nonperforming loans would lead to the forced recognition that bank capital (based on the value of mortgages in bank portfolios) is weak or insufficient.

Third, it is almost impossible to imagine foreclosures on the massive scale anticipated without dire social consequences or even some form of social unrest. As Peggy Noonan has observed, the real meaning of Occupy Wall Street is that this is just the beginning of the protests we are likely to see. "OWS is an expression of American discontent, and others will follow," she predicts. Protests and social unrest are particularly likely if people feel they are unfairly losing their homes to support irresponsible, law-breaking institutions that have successfully disregarded the fundamental rules of capitalism and good citizenship. Mechanisms to avoid this possibility are one of the central issues I address in my forthcoming book, Making Capitalism Work for the 99%: A Manifesto.

What is shocking is the almost total lack of attention the administration has paid to suffering homeowners. It's hard for me (and apparently Chairman Bernanke) to understand how the administration can possibly hope to revitalize the economy without seriously addressing the overhang of consumer housing debt. Moreover, the failure to address the risk this poses for a broader economic catastrophe borders on the inexcusable.

If President Obama is serious about saving the middle class and reducing income inequality, the administration needs to be far more aggressive in developing policies to keep homeowners as homeowners. As I have written before, this was one of FDR's central goals in the New Deal. Detailed proposals for addressing this extraordinary risk do exist. However, they will require a determined effort. There are solutions, but they are not simple.

What is most important right now is that we recognize we are in a lifeboat that will not reach land. We need to focus on implementing a meaningful solution to the problem. A clock is ticking and Washington needs to acknowledge that a witching hour is approaching.

Bruce Judson is Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute and a former Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management.

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Why Does the Dallas Fed President Want to Destroy West Coast Port Unions?

Dec 12, 2011Matt Stoller

The FOMC is far more secretive than most government agencies, and after reading the transcripts of its meetings, it's not hard to see why.

The people that really run the world are not elected, but sit on the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve (FOMC). This is the crew of Fed insiders -- mostly regional reserve bank presidents hired by banks as well as finance-friendly Fed governors appointed by the president -- who set monetary policy. They are the ones who decide whether interest rates go up or down and whether to heat or cool the economy.

The FOMC is far more secretive than most government agencies, and after reading the transcripts of its meetings, it's not hard to see why.

The people that really run the world are not elected, but sit on the Federal Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve (FOMC). This is the crew of Fed insiders -- mostly regional reserve bank presidents hired by banks as well as finance-friendly Fed governors appointed by the president -- who set monetary policy. They are the ones who decide whether interest rates go up or down and whether to heat or cool the economy.

You can actually read the deliberations of their meetings, but only for those that took place five years ago or more. Unlike most federal agencies, their meetings are kept secret for at least five years.

Still, it's interesting what you can find in the records that are public. This is from 2005, when Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher was echoing complaints of American CEOs that we simply didn't have the port capacity to take as many imports from China as they wanted (emphasis mine):

Everyone I’ve talked to continues to try to figure out ways to exploit globalization. Each of them, from the IT [information technology] guys to the big box retailers to the specialty chemical firms to the service firms, wants to have offshore supply. One of the CEOs said, “We have a long way to go in exploiting China.” We’ve heard that forever. And one of my favorites was the comment, “China, India, and Indonesia can make Italian ceramics better than Italians can now or could 200 years ago.” [Laughter]

The problem that I’m beginning to hear seeping into the conversation, Mr. Chairman, has to do with U.S. infrastructure. If you read the New York Times article two days ago about Shanghai’s new deep water port, you have to realize that those facilities are being built to ship goods out of China, not so much to ship goods into China. And consider this, as reported by one of the shippers I spoke with: 50 percent of all the ships on order for construction are container ships. Capacity expanding container business is increasing at 15 percent or more per annum to carry cargo from Shanghai and other parts of the world to the United States.

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Now, this is good news on the disinflationary front. As the CEO of Northern Navigation, one of the larger shippers told me, “Transportation by ship will essentially be free when these numbers are realized in the marketplace. The bad news is stateside. We don’t have the capacity to absorb it. Long Beach and the Northwest harbors are constrained. Work rules, according to our interlocutors, are very slow to adjust. But there are ways to beat the bottlenecks, and I just want to mention two. UPS reports that they have gone from 6 to 18—and now for next year 21—flights from China. WalMart just built a four million square foot warehouse in the Houston port, in order to shift part of the burden from Long Beach. But it is evident that the enemy is us as far as exploiting globalization, and I think that’s a long-term problem that we might want to take note of over time.

It really is clear what is driving the elites. Disinflation is a wonky term meaning reducing the rate at which costs go up. And in this context, when he thinks no one is paying attention, Fisher is clear about whose ox will be gored, and who is driving the conversations.

So while some port workers might not like the tactics of the Occupiers and might think the structural critiques by the occupiers about the banking system are a bit abstract, perhaps the link is more direct than they assume. It is, after all, the President of the Dallas Federal Reserve who is bragging about his region's work to undermine West Coast port worker bargaining leverage. Otherwise, his CEO friends might not be able to exploit China fast enough.

Matt Stoller is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and former Senior Policy Advisor to Congressman Alan Grayson.

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The Fed Scrambles to Save Banks, Stalls on Unemployment

Nov 28, 2011Mike Konczal

Side-by-side, two worst case scenarios elicit very different reactions from the Federal Reserve.

Side-by-side, two worst case scenarios elicit very different reactions from the Federal Reserve.

I never congratulated Charles Evans, President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, for dissenting in the most recent FOMC meeting on behalf of the unemployed. ("Voting against the action was Charles L. Evans, who supported additional policy accommodation at this time.") I'm a big fan of the Evans Rule and am surprised inflation doves haven't been more vocal about it. As Goldman Sachs noted, "This was the first 'dovish' dissent since December 2007 (President Rosengren)." Given that unemployment has turned out to be worse than the Fed's projections at any time, it is about time that those who are worried about unemployment inside the Fed start making noise.

These first murmurs instead stand in contrast to the financial bailouts. Bloomberg just released a big story, based on its successful FOIA requests, that uncovered just how aggressive the Federal Reserve was with its emergency lender-of-last-resort powers. Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglesias, and Paul Krugman argue that what is really shocking is how total the rescue and backing of the financial sector was while the real economy was left to rot. As Krugman puts it, "The real scandal isn’t so much that those banks got rescued as that the rest of the population didn’t."

Part of why the bailouts were packaged the way they were was because Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy went a lot worse than the Federal Reserve's expectations of how the collapse of a major investment bank would go. When the collapse went far worse than its expectations, it reacted with maximum force.

Is there an equivalent story for unemployment? I'll try to graph this using the FRB's Summary of Economic Projections. From its FAQ: "Economic projections are collected from each member of the Board of Governors and each Federal Reserve Bank president four times a year, in connection with the Federal Open Market Committee's usual two-day meetings (typically held in January, April, June, and November)... The unemployment rate is the average civilian unemployment rate in the fourth quarter of a year."

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Members of the Federal Reserve get together four times a year and project their expectations of unemployment for several years going forward. Below is that data plotted against the unemployment rate. Specifically, it has the average projected unemployment rate across the entire year and takes the average of the core tendencies that are reported as that rate. The actual unemployment is in bold red and projections from each point going forward are in shades of orange (click for larger image):

As you can see, there's no point in which unemployment was projected to be worse than it actually was. Especially in 2009-2010 -- the actual unemployment rate was significantly higher a year or two later. Here's a zoomed in view of the 09-11 range (click for larger image):

If we were to replace the FRB with a group of monkeys armed with darts, one would imagine that they would make at least a few projections above the actual rate of unemployment. It's funny -- the FRB tried to revise how bad unemployment is but doesn't revise it anywhere near enough to lower it to where the economy actually is.

So to recap: Lehman Brothers goes worse than the Federal Reserve's projection and the Fed goes to the most extreme lengths it can find to extend emergency lending. Every single unemployment number turns out to be worse than all of the Federal Reserve's projections, and it finds every excuse to look the other way. Only Charles Evans has the courage to say that we should let inflation go to 3 percent while unemployment is over 7 percent to catch up to trend growth. Amazing.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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What Would Keynes Do? More Stimulus, More Monetary Policy

Oct 24, 2011Mike Konczal

Keynes's advice to FDR still holds overwhelmingly true for combatting our own crisis.

Keynes's advice to FDR still holds overwhelmingly true for combatting our own crisis.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt President Library and Museum has put scans up of several important documents that highlight FDR's transition from trying to balancing the budget in the Great Depression to, after the crash of 1937, his ability to see that Keynesian deficit spending could help the recovery. The page that has the resources, plus a history, is located here: FDR: From Budget Balancer to Keynesian.

It includes several campaign speeches by Roosevelt as they evolved over the 1930s, and it also includes John Maynard Keynes's 1938 private letter to President Roosevelt. The Keynes letter is great. He is a model of clarity, wit, and seriousness with a towering intellect on all matters economic.

After the fiscal and monetary contraction that brought on the crash of 1937, liberals in the Roosevelt administration weren't sure what to do. Keynes, in his letter, outlined a five step plan including both what had just worked and what to continue doing until the economy healed:

This is how we should judge our current elites and opinion leaders. How well do they understand this game plan for addressing a massive crisis like the one we are in, and under what economic ideology and rationality are they deviating from it? Right now it is a full-time job trying to convince elites that this is the right program for the country, rather than rewriting federal and state law to businesses' liking and focusing obsessively on the deficit. So little has been learned, and what we've learned has been forgotten.

Keynes also noted that getting the housing market straightened out is one of the best ways to handle the Depression. "Housing is by far the best aid to recovery because of the large and continuing scale of potential demand; because of the wide geographical distribution of this demand; and because the sources of its finance are largely independent of the Stock Exchanges." Getting the housing market right is also an uphill battle for our recession and administration.

Keynes Does the Twist

There's a debate within left-liberal economic circles over the relative importance of monetary versus fiscal policy in dealing with the economic downturn. Often you hear that all the stuff Bernanke is doing, from QE to Operation Twist, is a rejection of what Keynes would advise if he was living today.

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Since we are looking at Keynes' letters to President Roosevelt, let's look at his 1933 open letter to FDR, published in the New York Times. Among other recommendations, he advises the new administration to do two things on the domestic front (my bold):

If you were to ask me what I would suggest in concrete terms for the immediate future, I would reply thus... In the field of domestic policy, I put in the forefront, for the reasons given above, a large volume of Loan-expenditures under Government auspices. It is beyond my province to choose particular objects of expenditure. But preference should be given to those which can be made to mature quickly on a large scale, as for example the rehabilitation of the physical condition of the railroads... You can at least feel sure that the country will be better enriched by such projects than by the involuntary idleness of millions.

I put in the second place the maintenance of cheap and abundant credit and in particular the reduction of the long-term rates of interest. The turn of the tide in great Britain is largely attributable to the reduction in the long-term rate of interest which ensued on the success of the conversion of the War Loan. This was deliberately engineered by means of the open-market policy of the Bank of England. I see no reason why you should not reduce the rate of interest on your long-term Government Bonds to 2½ per cent or less with favourable repercussions on the whole bond market, if only the Federal Reserve System would replace its present holdings of short-dated Treasury issues by purchasing long-dated issues in exchange. Such a policy might become effective in the course of a few months, and I attach great importance to it.

His first suggestion constitutes fiscal stimulus. But his second suggestion is urging the Federal Reserve to replace its short-term bonds with long-term bonds to bring down the rates on the long-term bonds -- just like Operation Twist! Equally interesting, instead of naming an amount of Treasuries to buy, like $800 billion or $2 trillion, Keynes says to hit a specific rate. The Federal Reserve can either set a rate or an amount, and we've been doing QE through setting purchase amounts. Maybe this other way that he suggests, having QE set a target for long-term rates, is a better way of doing QE? He's a pretty smart fellow.

Keynes "terrified lest progressives causes...suffer injury"

Going back to the 1938 letter, I find Keynes' conclusion chilling.

In this letter, Keynes is saying that if FDR didn't handle the recovery correctly the whole New Deal would be at risk. Full employment is hard to accomplish, very hard, but it isn't impossible. And the stakes are higher than just the economic recovery -- failure means that progressive governance and polices are both at "risk to their prestige" from a prolonged downturn. Taking the economic downturn "too lightly" puts all of it -- from responsibly combating global warming, to bringing fairness and justice to those working in the shadows of labor market, to making sure everyone has access to insurance against sickness and poverty in old age, to the rest of the liberal governance project -- at risk. And, as we see the years pass by, it is too easy to lose precious time.

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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The Obama Economy: What Could Have Been

Oct 13, 2011Mike Konczal

Are President Obama and his economic team really victims of circumstance, or were they brought down by their own poor judgment?

Are President Obama and his economic team really victims of circumstance, or were they brought down by their own poor judgment?

Ezra Klein wrote a 7,000 word summary of what went right and wrong on economic policy during the first three years of the Obama administration. It's well-reported and fun to read, and you should check it out. I imagine that the piece will function as a kind of baseline argument for critiquing the Obama administration on the economy from the liberal wonkosphere corner of the blogosphere. I'm going to throw out some critical thoughts below.

The piece is quite consciously avoiding the narrative, storytelling approach to politics and the presidency. It reads as almost the mirror image of something like Drew Westen's approach to how Obama did on the economy -- Obama's passion isn't in question here. Klein's piece is all projections based on available evidence, political possibilities given political constraints, and negotiating with hostile counterparties. As such, there are a couple of ideas-level issues at play that should be made more explicit.

Fiscal Policy

First off, Obama is much more of a fiscal conservative than I had imagined. Or more specifically, he's someone who generally takes Rubinonomics for granted but couldn't shift gears when it came to the largest downturn since the Great Depression. Hence a lot of concerns over the deficit and, more importantly, a real focus on expanding the short-term deficit if and only if it involved closing the long-term deficit.

Noam Schieber at The New Republic was getting word from Treasury as early as late 2009 that it thought that it needed “some signal to U.S. bondholders that it takes the deficit seriously” and that “spending more money now [on stimulus] could actually raise long-term rates, thereby offsetting its stimulative effect.” This naturally led the administration to want to strike "grand bargains" with the other side, a path that led it down some bad roads.

The flip side of this is the administration's focus on "confidence" -- financial markets, Wall Street, and the business community -- as a way of bringing growth up and unemployment down. This has most obviously driven policy in regards to Wall Street and the financial markets (more on that in a second), but we see this in terms of dealing with the deficit. It has also brought in approaches that emphasize positions that are much more "supply-side" -- patent reform, regulation cutting, appointing senior business leaders to key positions, a key State of the Union based on "Winning the Future" through education investments -- that can't be justified as getting us back to full employment. By the time of the debt ceiling fight, these administration talking points were becoming a parody of right-wing talking points and Hooverism.

In Klein's article, he writes that the consequence of misjudging the severity of the recession was not being not able to go back to Congress later. I think a more important problem is that it created a priority for tax cuts over longer-term investments, which would have been better stimulus. I've had staffers tell me on background that members of Congress would approach the administration in 2009 looking to build out huge, New Deal-style infrastructure on a separate track, only to be told that the recovery would be fully underway by the time it kicked in -- thus wasted. There was no response to this. That's a problem given the narrow window they had to operate in the Senate.

Monetary Policy

Ryan Avent has tackled the Federal Reserve problem here. There's a new Federal Reserve iPad app. It is pretty rad. You can click on all the members of the FOMC. You can also click on the two vacant seats and it says that they are vacant:

Even iPad apps are mad at Obama for not being aggressive on the Fed appointments!

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Housing

First of all, the article focuses on a "This Time Is Different" approach to financial crises. One antibody our country had for financial crashes in the 19th century, pre-Keynes, was mass temporary bankruptcy for bad debts. During the 19th century you saw bankruptcy laws passed in the aftermath of bad financial crises to assign the losses and move the economy forward, which were repealed shortly thereafter. This happened with the Panic of 1837, which was followed by a devastating recession.

The Obama administration was either indifferent or hostile to changes in the bankruptcy code -- like cramdown -- following this crash, even though Obama campaigned on it. A technical point: cramdown isn't about making the banks eat the loss; it's about the loss coming from credit writedowns versus a fire sale of a house in foreclosure -- hence cramdown wouldn't raise costs. But either way, in addition to forgetting things since Keynes, we are also in the business of forgetting things from the 19th century.

David Dayen wrote up all the failures in housing policy. The important thing to follow is that the whole housing market approach was predicated on not upsetting the financial sector -- even to the point of not investigating basic unlawful behavior in foreclosures -- so that this "confidence" would get us back on track. Backing the financial sector instead of housing and people turned out to be backing the wrong horse. There's a backlog of housing that isn't going to go anywhere, armies of creditors and rentiers fighting each other indefinitely in the courts, investors wary of investing in a neighborhood when 2 million foreclosures hang over the economy each year, people's lives devastated, etc. Dayen:

The Administration set aside $75 billion through TARP for HAMP, and to date have used $1.6 billion or so on a program that is effectively irrelevant at this point (and they have cleverly revised history to claim that it was only a $50 billion allotment, to make this look a little better). Without any need to clear Congress, the Administration had all the authority they needed to put this $75 billion to work, including the ability to punish servicers who failed to comply with guidelines...

Then, for two years, Treasury swore up and down there was nothing they could do to punish servicers who didn’t comply. Finally, a few months ago, they started withholding incentive payments for noncompliance, as if they just magically acquired the power. It turns out, as Paul Kiel from Pro Publica displayed in a story this week, that Treasury wasn’t even checking on servicer compliance for at least the first year of the program...

The truth that emerges from all of these facts is that the Administration had no interest whatsoever in using more than a token amount of the TARP authority they had already husbanded for mortgage relief and foreclosure mitigation....You can call this the function of bad politics, but I’d say it was more an extension of bank policy, a policy to preserve the wonderful sub-1 percent growth and still-vulnerable financial system we have going for ourselves....Even today there are programs that could be scaled up to work for the mass of homeowners. They aren’t being done not because of some Tea Party-fueled backlash, but because Wall Street would face trouble.

Crisis

Klein's final take is that the Obama team got some right, some wrong, but were ultimately boxed in by failing institutions and a crisis too big to handle.

For a fun counterpoint, Corey Robin wrote in Dissent recently:

My impression of American history was that those presidents universally considered great—Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt—were beset by crises: the founding of a new nation, the Civil War, the Depression, the Second World War. And far from “balancing crisis management” with their pursuit of long-term goals, the great presidents saw, or found, in those crises an opportunity for reconstructing American politics from the bottom up. It was the crises, in other words, or at least how they handled those crises, that enabled them to pursue their long-term goals.

That at any rate was the final judgment Teddy Roosevelt rendered on his own presidency: that he would never be remembered as another Lincoln because he didn’t have the benefit of confronting catastrophe.  Or so I remember reading somewhere, perhaps here.

Whatever one thinks about Obama, it really makes no sense to say that he can’t be all that his supporters want him to be because of the Great Recession, two (now three) wars in the Arab and Muslim world, a recalcitrant opposition, and so on. Other presidents would have killed for opportunities like these.

Your thoughts?

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

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