Bill Clinton's remarks about Romney's record and the Bush tax cuts demonstrate his fealty to the financial sector.

We can attribute Bill Clinton making trouble for President Obama to his unquenchable need for the limelight. He first praised Mitt Romney’s business record and private equity practices in general. He then said the Bush tax cuts should be extended, without indicating that he agreed with Obama that the tax increases on the wealthy should be retained.

Clinton’s concern about raising taxes in the weak economy while cutting federal spending is right on. America is now practicing austerity, if a milder version than Europe’s. If not reversed, we could well have a recession again in 2013. And then what happens to the still-strained financial sector?

But Clinton’s remarks are disturbing for what they suggest about his tolerance for the financial class, for lack of a better term. Was it an accident that he left out any mention of raising taxes on the wealthy? The financial class dominates that group, if we include business execs who make a great deal of money from their stock options.

The real giveaway about Clinton is how he supports the financial industry’s assertions about the good done by private equity. We’ve addressed some of that in this space before. Clinton says flat-out that they do a good job. Does he have any evidence to demonstrate that? Has he looked at the evidence that undermines those assertions? Does he really think private equity was all about saving companies rather than exploiting the ability to borrow against their assets, cut them down, and then sell the company? Was it all about making America more productive and innovative? Come on.

This is of course the Bill Clinton who wholeheartedly gave us financial deregulation—no regulation of derivatives, no restraints on bank expansion as Glass-Steagall was undone, little concern by his SEC about over-speculation and analytical lying in investment firms, allowing CEOs to get enormous stock options, and so on.

He has apparently bought the assertion that the financial engineering of the past 20 years was mostly good. Of course, Wall Street is where the campaign money is.

In his most recent book, Clinton argued for stronger government, a welcome call. But he was the one who gave us less government.

Next week, we will post a thorough piece by economist Eileen Appelbaum on the good and bad of privatization. In the meantime, keep in mind that the heyday of privatizations, then known as Leveraged Buyouts, was the 1980s, when productivity growth for America remained historically slow. It did not rise again until the mid-1990s, with the advent of the Internet. The large, large share of productivity gains was in high technology and companies like Wal-Mart, not in the buyouts of companies by Bain and others.

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

Bill Clinton image via Shutterstock.

In Joe Nocera's editorial today, "The Simplicity Solution," he calls for financial reforms to be more focused on solutions that are both simple and market-based. He draws on recent writing by Sallie Krawcheck who "lays out a handful of market-oriented ideas that would almost surely pare back the complexity risk posed by banks." Nocera goes through Krawcheck's reforms, which are focused on corporate boards and dividend policy for financial institutions.

I think people have a good sense of the arguments for simple rules in financial regulation. The clearer the lines are drawn, the less likely they are to be gamed, financially engineered-around, or ignored by regulators. As Elizabeth Warren noted in an interview with Ezra Klein, financial institutions "want layers and layers of complexity because it’s in complexity that there are loopholes. That’s where it’s possible to back up regulators who are not quite certain about the ground they stand on. And it’s a larger problem with our regulatory structure: Complexity favors those who can hire armies of lobbyists and lawyers." This is part of the big battle over the Volcker Rule.

But what about market-oriented reforms? What about reforms designed to make financial markets work better, more transparently, and in a way that prevents both cronyism and instability? The Roosevelt Institute's big financial reform program was named Make Markets Be Markets because we think that a focus on markets will be essential to the future of financial reform. There are two things worth noting: first is that the best parts of Dodd-Frank build on this insight, and secondly the first wave of battles brought by financial institutions were over smaller parts of Dodd-Frank, but parts that embraced market-based reforms.

If you look at the derivatives component of Dodd-Frank, it builds on the core essentials of New Deal financial reform for traded instruments: transparency, disclosure, clearing, capital adequacy, the regulation of intermediaries, anti-fraud and anti-manipulation authority, and private enforcement. The insight and practice is to set up the financial markets so that private entities regulate each other through transparent prices and adequate capital. Regulators need a gentler touch because they empower other parties to regulate the financial institutions in question. Clearing institutions make sure that counterparties are properly capitalized, something that was missing in the financial crisis; exchanges make sure that price information gets into the market broadly.

The same happens with the Consumer Financial Protection Bereau. The idea is to provide simple, clear rules across all firms for consumer financial products, regardless of banking charter, and let them compete against each other on price and product. Rather than racing to the bottom in terms of fees and mangled contracts, standardization of terms allows real market competition to take place. This extends across large parts of Dodd-Frank.

What's interesting is that, as I read it, the first two major battles over Dodd-Frank were precisely over these types of reforms. The first major lawsuit against Dodd-Frank, from September 2010, run by the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, was against proxy access. Proxy access allows "[a]ny investor, or a group of investors, with at least 3 percent of a firm's shares for three years...to nominate directors." It re-balances the relationship between dispersed shareholders and boards: it allows shareholders to hold ineffectual boards accountable for everything from business practices to executive pay.

Notice that no regulator is necessary here. Shareholders are granted the power to take these actions on their own, which they'll use their their advantage as necessary. Indeed, just the threat forces boards into action, even if no proxy access is formally held. And shareholders, representing their own money and interests, are going to be more forceful as de facto regulators than a handful of actual regulators staring at and trying to regulate board composition.

The other big initial fight was over "interchange fees." On the urgent lobbying of financial firms, Congress came very close to repealing the part of Dodd-Frank that dealt with these fees in 2011, but that ultimately failed. Interchange balances the relationship between vendors and financial firms in regard to the fees charged on credit cards. It allows vendors to price discriminate between credit and debit cards, and it moves debit cards to clear at par so that people's money actually reflects their transactions. Again, no regulator is needed here. Every small business owner who feels squeezed by financial firms' fees becomes a regulator in this case. Their ability to price discriminate helps keep interchange on credit cards from spiraling out of control in a way a handful of regulators sitting in Washington DC could never pull off.

Going forward, we need Dodd-Frank implimented in the simplest, clearest regulatory way. But we also need to make sure that it makes financial markets work the way they are supposed to and allows the market itself to be the best regulator. Financial lobbyists know this, and will respond accordingly.

Wall Street image via Shutterstock.

Three critiques of the notion that private equity's actions are above public concern.

The question of Romney's tenure at private equity firm Bain Capital will stay in the headlines as the Obama team releases ads on the subject and Romney continues to run on that record. But what can we take away from this debate?

Ezra Klein argues that running a leveraged buyout company ought to give one some sense of solidarity with those left behind. As LBO/private equity creates winners and losers, winners should be in favor of an expanded social safety net that helps those who lose in the layoffs get back on their feet with minimial disruptions. Since LBO overall creates more wealth, part of that wealth should be taxed for the benefit of those who need help adjusting to their new economic reality afterwards - such as providing continuous health care coverage, job training, etc.

One thing I'm noticing in these debates is an almost tautological idea that since shareholders own the firm, anything shareholders do with their firm is legitimate and outside the boundaries of public concern or critique. It was in the background of what Karl Smith was discussing on Sunday's "Up With Chris Hayes," and Josh Barro made it more explicit this morning on twitter.

A Stick

Let's imagine that I buy a stick. Under a idea of general, everyday libertarianism, since I own the stick I can do anything I want with it. I can break it in half, burn it in a fireplace, carve it into something else, turn it into woodchips, attach a kite to it, exclude people from using it, etc. I can't hit people with it, or use it to set their stuff on fire, or attach duct tape to it in order to steal their stuff - but that's a function of general prohibitions against force and fraud. Short of that, it would be weird to say that I shouldn't do whatever I want to my stick of wood - that something I do with it could be illegitimate - as long as I enjoy it.

But does a private equity firm own its portfolio businesses in the same exact way that I own my stick? Is it weird to even think, outside general prohibitions against force and fraud (which I'll treat as unproblematic as it relates to the question at hand), that their actions could be illegitimate? There are many references to increasing profits, or making firms more dynamic, or "creative destruction," but those are side effects of shareholders doing whatever they want with its portfolio. The core issue is that there could be nothing illegitimate in terms of how a private equity firm runs those businesses in the sense there's nothing illegitimate I could do with a stick I own.

Three Critiques

Starting from this baseline, the critiques as far as I read them (which will draw on two previous posts) break down along three lines:

1. Tax/regulatory loopholes. I did an interview with Josh Kosman, author of The Buyout of America, where he argued that the whole point of the enterprise is to game tax law loopholes. Private equity "saw that you could buy a company through a leveraged buyout and radically reduce its tax rate. The company then could use those savings to pay off the increase in its debt loads. For every dollar that the company paid off in debt, your equity value rises by that same dollar, as long as the value of the company remains the same."

A recent paper from the University of Chicago looking at private equity found that “a reasonable estimate of the value of lower taxes due to increased leverage for the 1980s might be 10 to 20 percent of firm value,” which is value that comes from taxpayers to private equity as a result of the tax code.

That's one thing in an industry with large and predictable cash flows. But after those low-hanging fruits were picked, as Kosman explained, "firms are taken over in very volatile industries. And they are taking on debts where they have to pay 15 times their cash flow over seven years — they are way over-levered."

This critique has power as far as it goes. But let's combine it with another issue.

2. Risk-shifting among parts of the firm. Traditional "creative destruction" is about putting rivals out of business with better products and techniques. Leveraged buyouts and private equity are about something different, something that exists within a single firm. This is often described as putting new techniques into place, firing people and divisions that are not performing, and generally making the firm more efficient.

The critique here is that, instead of making the firm more efficient, it often simply shifts the risks into different places. As Peter Róna, head of the IBJ Schroder Bank & Trust in New York, described it in 1989:

The very foundation of the LBO is the current actual distribution of hypothetical future cash flows. If the hypothesis (including the author’s net present value discounted at the relevant cost of capital) tums out to be wrong, the shareholders have the cash and everyone else is left with a carcass. “Creating shareholder value” and “unlocking billions” consists of shifting the risk of future uncertainty to others, namely, the corporation and its current creditors, customers, and employees…

 

The notion that underleveraging a corporation can cause problems is neither new nor unfounded. What is new is the assertion that shareholders shouid set the proper leverage because, motivated by maximizing the return on their investment, they will ensure efficiency of all factors of production. This hypothesis requires much more rigorous proof than Jensen’s episodic arguments… although Jensen denies it, the maximization of shareholder returns must take place, at least in part, at someone else’s expense.

If you look at the dividends stuff that private equity firms do, and Bain is one of the worst offenders, if you increase the short-term earnings of a company you then use those new earnings to borrow more money. That money goes right back to the private equity firm in dividends, making it quite a quick profit. More importantly, most companies can’t handle that debt load twice. Just as they are in a position to reduce debt, they are getting hit with maximum leverage again. It’s very hard for companies to take that hit twice...

 

The initial private equity model was that you would make money by reselling your company or taking it public, not by levering it a second time...Right after this goes on for a few years, you’ve starved your firm of human and operating capital. Five years later, when the private equity leaves, the company will collapse — you can’t starve a company for that long. This is what the history of private equity shows.

This runup in dividend payouts is feature of the post 1980 financial markets more broadly, one that LBO had a hand in creating:

The blue line is profits, the solid red line is payouts. As Josh Mason noted (my bold), "In the pre-neoliberal era, up until 1980 or so, nonfinancial businesses paid out about 40 percent of their profits to shareholders. But in most of the years since 1980, they’ve paid out more than all of them...It was a common trope in accounts of the housing bubble that greedy or shortsighted homeowners were extracting equity from their houses with second mortgages or cash-out refinancings to pay for extra consumption. What nobody mentioned was that the rentier class had been doing this longer, and on a much larger scale, to the country’s productive enterprises."

Versions of these three arguments form the core of the private equity critique. Instead of simply carving a figurine or starting a BBQ, private equity uses its stick to game tax law while cashing out short-term value, leaving others in the firm worse off and the firm itself more prone to collapse and less able to produce long-term value. Do you find this critique convincing? What else is missing?

Mike Konczal is a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.