Tag: banks

Confessions of a Credit Easer

A mea culpa from the manager of the Federal Reserve’s mortgage-backed security purchase program:

Confessions of a Quantitative Easer

We went on a bond-buying spree that was supposed to help Main Street. Instead, it was a feast for Wall Street.

I can only say: I’m sorry, America. As a former Federal Reserve official, I was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed’s first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing. The central bank continues to spin QE as a tool for helping Main Street. But I’ve come to recognize the program for what it really is: the greatest backdoor Wall Street bailout of all time.

Five years ago this month, on Black Friday, the Fed launched an unprecedented shopping spree. By that point in the financial crisis, Congress had already passed legislation, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to halt the U.S. banking system’s free fall. Beyond Wall Street, though, the economic pain was still soaring. In the last three months of 2008 alone, almost two million Americans would lose their jobs.

The Fed said it wanted to help—through a new program of massive bond purchases. There were secondary goals, but Chairman Ben Bernanke made clear that the Fed’s central motivation was to “affect credit conditions for households and businesses”: to drive down the cost of credit so that more Americans hurting from the tanking economy could use it to weather the downturn. For this reason, he originally called the initiative “credit easing.”

My part of the story began a few months later. Having been at the Fed for seven years, until early 2008, I was working on Wall Street in spring 2009 when I got an unexpected phone call. Would I come back to work on the Fed’s trading floor? The job: managing what was at the heart of QE’s bond-buying spree—a wild attempt to buy $1.25 trillion in mortgage bonds in 12 months. Incredibly, the Fed was calling to ask if I wanted to quarterback the largest economic stimulus in U.S. history.

This was a dream job, but I hesitated. And it wasn’t just nervousness about taking on such responsibility. I had left the Fed out of frustration, having witnessed the institution deferring more and more to Wall Street. Independence is at the heart of any central bank’s credibility, and I had come to believe that the Fed’s independence was eroding. Senior Fed officials, though, were publicly acknowledging mistakes and several of those officials emphasized to me how committed they were to a major Wall Street revamp. I could also see that they desperately needed reinforcements. I took a leap of faith.

In its almost 100-year history, the Fed had never bought one mortgage bond. Now my program was buying so many each day through active, unscripted trading that we constantly risked driving bond prices too high and crashing global confidence in key financial markets. We were working feverishly to preserve the impression that the Fed knew what it was doing.

It wasn’t long before my old doubts resurfaced. Despite the Fed’s rhetoric, my program wasn’t helping to make credit any more accessible for the average American. The banks were only issuing fewer and fewer loans. More insidiously, whatever credit they were extending wasn’t getting much cheaper. QE may have been driving down the wholesale cost for banks to make loans, but Wall Street was pocketing most of the extra cash.

If you’ve read RGD, (published in 2009), then you are aware that even at the time it was obvious that the neither the Fed nor the White House was trying to help home buyers. They could have simply written off the debts owed by mortgage holders, but instead, they funneled trillions to Wall Street.

This proves, once more, that the Federal Reserve has zero interest in fixing, saving, or otherwise improving the US economy. It has other objectives, other goals, and it is a category error to even discuss the Fed’s future actions in terms of whether they will be good for the economy or not.

To do so is like discussing whether the future run/pass ratio of the New England Patriots will be good for the New York Yankees. It’s not even relevant to the discussion except perhaps as an unintended consequence.  And notice that they changed the name from credit easing to quantitative easing just to make the concept harder to grasp for the average American. Simple, but effective, because MPAI.

No reason

The Fed is testing susceptibility to counterparty credit risk in 2014. Just to, you know, be on the safe side. Nothing to worry about here. No problems are anticipated. Hey, look there, green shoots!

Lenders including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) and Citigroup Inc. (C) will have to show they can survive the demise of a trading partner or a plunge in value of high-risk business loans in the 2014 version of U.S. stress tests.

The scenarios for the annual tests, outlined by the Federal Reserve in a statement yesterday, reflect some of the most pressing threats seen by regulators as they gauge the ability of the U.S. financial system to withstand economic shocks. Bankers will have to show what would happen to the value of leveraged loans they hold, the impact of another housing bust and how they’d fare if a firm that owes them substantial sums collapses.

The test was designed in part to build resiliency against what some see as emerging asset bubbles, said a Fed official who spoke on a conference call with reporters. The counterparty failure test aims to prevent a repeat of the 2008 crisis, when distress at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and American International Group Inc. threatened to destroy their biggest trading partners.

Of course, regular readers here know another way to spell “a plunge in value of high-risk business loans”. C-R-E-D-I-T-D-E-F-L-A-T-I-O-N.

Mailvox: the Fed imbalance

JD asks about the Fed’s balance sheet:

Fed balance sheet may not return to normal until 2019?  What does this mean to lay people?  Would you enlighten The Dread Ilk, please?

The short version is that quantitative easing, which is the Federal Reserve’s euphemism for “printing money” under the current monetary regime, is not working in terms of returning the economy to full employment or stimulating economic growth. However, the Fed doesn’t dare stop QEn because doing so would almost instantly crash the stock market and hurl the global financial system into crisis, if not collapse. So, the program is going to continue indefinitely, which we already know due to the appointment of Janet Yellen, who is even more expansionary-minded than the man named Helicopter Ben.

Wikipedia has a good definition of quantitative easing: “Quantitative easing (QE) is an unconventional monetary policy used by central banks to prevent the money supply falling when standard monetary policy has become ineffective. A central bank implements quantitative easing by buying specified amounts of financial assets from commercial banks and other private institutions, thus increasing the monetary base. This is distinguished from the more usual policy of buying or selling government bonds in order to keep market interest rates at a specified target value.

“Expansionary monetary policy typically involves the central bank buying short-term government bonds in order to lower short-term market interest rates. However, when short-term interest rates are at or close to zero, normal monetary policy can no longer lower interest rates. Quantitative easing may then be used by monetary authorities to further stimulate the economy by purchasing assets of longer maturity than short-term government bonds, and thereby lowering longer-term interest rates further out on the yield curve. Quantitative easing raises the prices of the financial assets bought, which lowers their yield.”

This is why the stock market is up considerably since early 2009 and why corporate borrowing is up when the other private borrowing sectors are down. The reason that the QE program has continued for nearly five years now is that it hasn’t had the triggering effect that it was supposed to have in 2009 or any subsequent year. This is exactly what I have been talking about for years, in pointing out that the Fed cannot expand the money supply in the same way that was done in Weimar Germany and in Zimbabwe, because there are material and significant differences in the way the Fed “prints” money and the way past governments have printed money.

The Fed won’t simply print money in the traditional manner because the coterie of investment institutions they serve can’t profit that way; it is all inflationary downside without a leveraging upside. The US government could certainly do it, of course, and all it would have to do is completely shake off the chains of Wall Street first. So, needless to say, printing trillions of dollars and distributing them to the citizenry is not going to happen.

Given that they STILL haven’t taken the simple step of forgiving mortgage debt to free up disposable income, it should be obvious that they’re not going to indiscriminately hand out cash to everyone either.

My case for debt-deflation doesn’t rest on the physical impossibility of money printing, but on the improbability of Wall Street voluntarily giving up the goose that has laid so many dollar-filled eggs for 100 years. I think they will kill the economy before they give up control, especially since widespread bankruptcies and foreclosures taking place under the present regime would put huge swaths of U.S. property in their hands. It is very much a heads they win, tails you lose situation.

As for 2019, they might as reasonably have given a date of fiver. If you look at L1, it is very clear that all QE has done for the last five years is prevent the bottom from falling out completely while encouraging an astonishing amount of malinvestment via the corporate and federal sectors. So, I anticipate more of the same until the household sector defaults begin, which should set off the third, and more serious, stage of the financial crisis.

Timing? I don’t do timing. How will the crisis be resolved? I don’t know. These things cannot be known until they happen. All we can know for certain is that the present course of credit disinflation and substitution of private debt for public debt is not going to continue indefinitely, since it would result in the complete socialization of the national economy by 2030.

Hawks and doves at the Fed

Female managers tend to seek consensus, and it looks as if we can be certain that Yellen will have whatever organizational support she requires to keep the Fed’s monetary policy as expansionary as possible.  Notice that she is considered to be even more dovish than Helicopter Ben. And one of the newcomers, Kocherlakota, is arguably even worse.  In 2011, he claimed that the Federal Reserve didn’t cause the housing bubble, and worse, that he was “agnostic” with regards to what did cause it.

So, we not only have Tweedledim at the Fed, but Tweedledimmer voting to support her futile attempts to print credit in 2014.

Mailvox: what could possibly go wrong?

GV writes to observe that the USA is about to experiment with an economic application of Hultgreen-Curie Syndrome:

I was listing to the radio when I heard the news that Janet Yellen would be named the next fed chair.  I went online to confirm this story and found this news story by NBC News.

It appears you were right about what you wrote in your blog post on 9/16/2013 entitled The job no one wants.  You wrote that you assumed it would be Janet Yellen.  It’s funny how the link to the NBC news story talks about her being the first women to head the central bank and some of her accomplishment but it leaves out the quote you put at the end of that blog post were she said the following;

 “For my own part I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.”
– Janet Yellen, 2010

With someone like that in charge what could possibly go wrong.

Christine Lagarde at the IMF and Janet Yellen at the Fed. This should be an interesting test of whether putting women in charge will make it all better. I wouldn’t mind being wrong, for all of our sakes, but I’m not terribly sanguine about the probabilities here.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard summarizes: “So there we have it. The next chairman of the Fed is going to track the labour participation rate. Money will stay loose.”

Enforcing Obamacare

It never occurred to me to imagine that the federal government
wouldn’t enforce its fines for failure to engage in required economic
activity with its usual bag of tricks, including seizing bank accounts and placing property liens:

If true, the implementation of Obamacare is going to be a whole lot more draconian than Americans have been led to believe. 

“I actually made it through this morning at 8:00 A.M. I
have a preexisting condition (Type 1 Diabetes) and my income base was
45K-55K annually I chose tier 2 “Silver Plan” and my monthly premiums
came out to $597.00 with $13,988 yearly deductible!!! There is NO
POSSIBLE way that I can afford this so I “opt-out” and chose to continue
along with no insurance.

“I received an email tonight at 5:00 P.M. informing me
that my fine would be $4,037 and could be attached to my yearly income
tax return. Then you make it to the “REPERCUSSIONS PORTION” for
“non-payment” of yearly fine. First, your drivers license will be
suspended until paid, and if you go 24 consecutive months with
“Non-Payment” and you happen to be a home owner, you will have a federal
tax lien placed on your home. You can agree to give your bank
information so that they can easy “Automatically withdraw” your
“penalties” weekly, bi-weekly or monthly! This by no means is “Free” or
even “Affordable.””

The federal government has consistently denied that any
fines pertaining to Obamacare non-compliance could be seized from bank
accounts, despite reports last year that the IRS had hired 16,500 new agents to harass citizens who attempt to evade the new law.

The
system is breaking down, and it appears to be breaking down
increasingly fast. Once people stop paying their Obamacare fines, how
long will it be before they stop paying other taxes? And using the
banking system as an enforcement device for the sake of compliance is
more likely to break the banking system than it is to allow this
expansion of the tax system to function as envisioned.

More gasoline

With the flames threatening to die down, Ben Bernanke decides to pour more on the fire:

The Federal Reserve has decided against reducing its stimulus for the
U.S. economy, saying it will continue to buy $85 billion a month in
bonds because it thinks the economy still needs the support. The Fed said in a statement Wednesday that it held off on tapering
because it wants to see more conclusive evidence that the recovery will
be sustained. Stocks spiked after the Fed released the statement at the end of its two-day policy meeting.

(laughs) Apparently the Fed lost their nerve when they saw stocks plunging in anticipation of the end of QE IV. The Fed knows deflation and credit collapse is lurking right around the corner and they are desperately attempting to stave it off. What they think will save them, I don’t know, but we appear to be rapidly approaching a potentially critical nexus with prospective war in Syria, yet another debt ceiling showdown with the Republicans running the risk of looking even more foolish than they usually do when they cave for a third straight year, and the possibility of a Hultgreen-Curie scenario at the Fed.

The job no one wants

Zerohedge ponders why Larry Summers and Tim Geithner have both indicated that they don’t want to replace Helicopter Ben:

The next chairman’s main job is going to be deciding how soon and how aggressively to pull back on Fed programs; and as none other than Fed whisperer John Hilsenrath notes, Larry Summers’ withdrawal increases the likelihood of continuity in central-bank policy for the next few years – meaning any Fed wind-down of its easy-money programs will be slow and gradual. Of course he posits Yellen and Kohn as potential front-runners but throws Tim Geithner and Roger Ferguson back into the mix. Business-as-usual is back and the doves are in control – all the Fed needs now is bigger deficits to enable it to keep the pumps primed…

We can’t help but wonder why Summers really stepped away – is it perhaps that he knows (deep in his cold bloodless heart) just what a disaster this is all going to be and prefers to keep his ‘perceived’ legacy in place?  Now we have Geithner clearly not wanting to be touched with the Fed
s—– stick… seems like we will end up with the lowest common
denominator Fed head – great stuff.

I assume it’s going to be Janet Yellen, given Barack Obama’s fascination with his own historical significance. Also, women are less likely to feel they should be held responsible for anything they do, much less for anything that happens on their watch, and they also tend to place undue importance on being a Hultgreen-Curie candidate. So, unlike Summers and Geithner, Yellen is likely to discount the risk of catastrophic failure to her reputation. If that is true of her, and we’ll know it does if she doesn’t take herself out of the running fairly soon, then we can be fairly confident that she’ll take the system down on a conventional, consensual, and by-the-book basis.

This promises to be the ultimate Hultgreen-Curie scenario: the first female Fed Chairwoman is at the helm when the global financial system goes down.  And it would be a spectacular example if it took place while Christine Lagarde, the first female head of the International Monetary Fund, was still running the IMF.

Keeping in mind that I repeatedly issued warnings about the 2008 financial crisis beginning in 2002, here is what the current Fed frontrunner had to say about it after the fact.

“For my own part I did not see and did not appreciate what the risks were with securitization, the credit ratings agencies, the shadow banking system, the S.I.V.’s — I didn’t see any of that coming until it happened.”
– Janet Yellen, 2010

This should end well.

Worker unrest at Walmart

I’m considerably less unsympathetic to this labor action than my natural hostility to unions might indicate.

Walmart workers and their supporters are planning to launch protests in stores in 15 cities across the US on Thursday, as part of a small but vociferous movement to raise wages and improve conditions for some of the nation’s lowest paid workers.

The action follows strikes last week by fast food workers demanding a higher minimum wage and a civil disobedience action in Washington DC in August, where a coalition of Walmart workers and unions called for a minimum annual wage of $25,000 and the reinstatement of 20 employees they claim were illegally fired by the company after strikes in early June.

OurWalmart, a union-backed members group, says it has filed more than 100 unfair labour practice charges against Walmart with the National Labor Relations Board, including 20 illegal terminations and 80 disciplinary actions. The board said it was looking into “several cases”.

I’ve seen some commentators pointing out that the Walmart workers don’t seem to realize that their wage demands would eliminate the corporation’s operating profits. Whether that is true or not, I think it is totally insane to expect low-income workers to demonstrate more concern for the health of the corporation than the vast majority of Fortune 500 executives do.

We’ve spent the last five years watching bank executives rape their banks of more than FIFTY PERCENT of the profits, then pay themselves bonuses as the federal government hands them trillions to prevent them from going under.  Why on Earth shouldn’t the Walmart workers feel justified in demanding a mere $25k annual minimum wage?  It’s a lot more affordable than bailing out the banks again.

Why central bankers never learn

Zerohedge reports on India’s central bank digging its hole deeper:

With the value of the rupee plunging to new lows, the current account deficit at an all-time high and inflation running at nearly a ten-percent annual clip, India is in serious economic trouble. Indeed many are beginning to wonder whether the country is edging toward a replay of the events in the summer of 1991. Back then, an acute balance of payments crisis forced New Delhi into the indignity of pawning its gold reserves in order to secure desperately needed international financing.

At a small public event the other week, Duvvuri Subbarao, the outgoing head of the central bank, pointedly referred to a recent book, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, and conceded that policymakers rarely learn from their mistakes. He conceded that:

        “… in matters of economics and finance, history repeats itself, not because it is an inherent trait of history, but because we don’t learn from history and let the repeat occur.”

This is a theme that policymakers have been pondering for a while. More than a year ago, at what was ostensibly a celebration of an updated book on the economic reforms catalyzed by the 1991 debacle, Subbarao warned that the dangers sparking that crisis – ballooning fiscal and current account deficits – were once again lurking. At the same time, a high-ranking commerce ministry official told a group of business leaders that economic indicators were provoking “a sense of déjà vu.” Worried that conditions were ripe for a replay of the 1991 crisis, he exclaimed:

        “Why are we dodging these [policy challenges]? In 1991, we were candid enough to take these decisions. The quicker we take these decisions, the better it would be, instead of acting like ostriches.”

The reason is fairly simple. Men have a very difficult time understanding things when their continued financial well-being depends upon them failing to understand them.