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On Economists and Psychopaths

On January 24, 2012, in Economy, Housing, Our Culture, by Tim

After reading through some of the recently released transcripts from the 2006 Federal Reserve policy meetings, it occurred to me for about the thousandth time that economists are particularly ill-suited to oversee an economy where the financial system is, from time to time, run by psychopaths each trying to one-up the other.

During normal times, economists’ models of how the world works seem to function reasonably well, but when a multi-decade orgy of money and credit creation came to a head a few years back, they were completely unaware of how badly some people were acting and how contagious this was.

The central bank meets this week and is expected to revamp how they communicate their thinking about monetary policy to the world, but, maybe they should spend more time figuring out how to better observe what’s going on in the world – looking beyond the charts, tables, and models that they had their noses buried in back in 2006, oblivious to the looming crisis in housing and credit markets.

It was all there to see for anyone willing to make a modest effort to get out into the real world and look around.

Wild-eyed buyers lined up for blocks to buy new condos and mortgage brokers with barely a high school education were raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in commissions by peddling all kinds of “exotic” mortgages to borrowers who, in many cases, didn’t really understand what they were signing.

As we’ve come to find out, there was a good deal of fraud involved here by both lenders and borrowers as few seemed to care about how their individual actions might affect others in the fullness of time.

You might say that a good asset bubble brings out the psychopath in many of us.

(more…)

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“Forcibly Retired”

On January 24, 2012, in Economy, Our Culture, by Tim

Of all the new phrases heard in recent months, particularly at year-end when this sort of thing gets talked about a lot, the term “forcibly retired” to describe the plight of many jobless over the age of 50 caught my attention and it was the subject of this Guardian story.

The year 2011 will be remembered as the time when many ever-optimistic Americans began to give up hope. President John F Kennedy once said that a rising tide lifts all boats. But now, in the receding tide, Americans are beginning to see not only that those with taller masts had been lifted far higher, but also that many of the smaller boats had been dashed to pieces in their wake.

In that brief moment when the tide was indeed rising, millions of people believed that they might have a fair chance of realising the “American Dream”.

Now those dreams, too, are receding. By 2011, the savings of those who had lost their jobs in 2008 or 2009 had been spent. Unemployment cheques had run out. Headlines announcing new hiring – still not enough to keep pace with the number of those who would normally have entered the labour force – meant little to the 50-year-olds with little hope of ever holding a job again.

Indeed, middle-aged people who thought that they would be unemployed for a few months have now realised that they were, in fact, forcibly retired. Young people who graduated from college with tens of thousands of dollars of education debt cannot find any jobs at all.

It gets even more depressing the further you read, a point that should have been clear from the title – Many Americans gave up hope last year – 2012 will be worse – but, I couldn’t help think what it’s like for the millions of people my age who took a very different route through life, perhaps worsening their financial situation as a result of the housing bubble.

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On Root Cause(s), Four Years Hence

On January 20, 2012, in Housing, Our Culture, by Tim

I’ll get to the existing homes sales report in just a bit, but, before doing so, I wanted to point readers to this commentary by Jonathon Weil at Bloomberg today that points out one of the most disturbing aspects related to the nexus of politics and finance today – the ongoing partisan divide over what caused the financial crisis a few years back.

The way the discussion gets framed tends to go like this: Did Fannie and Freddie cause the crisis? Although this is the wrong question, I’ll try to answer it anyway by highlighting the difference between the meaning of the words “a” and “the.”

Here goes. Fannie Mae was a cause of the financial crisis. So was Freddie Mac. U.S. government housing policies, which often encouraged people to take out loans they couldn’t repay to buy homes they couldn’t afford, were also a cause. None of these was “the” cause of the crisis, because there was no single cause.
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Two people often cited as proponents of the notion that Fannie and Freddie caused the crisis are Peter Wallison and Edward Pinto. Both are fellows at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. Wallison was a Republican member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission who wrote a 98-page dissent to the panel’s final report in 2011.

Last month, in an article responding to a column by Joe Nocera of the New York Times, Wallison and Pinto framed their thesis this way: “Our argument is and has been that the financial crisis would not have occurred but for government housing policy implemented principally through Fannie and Freddie and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.”

It’s a debatable, if not a particularly useful, observation. One reason Wallison and Pinto have drawn so much criticism for their work is that they consistently dismiss every other possible cause of the crisis, so that only Fannie, Freddie and U.S. housing policies survive the scholars’ own “but for” test. Never mind interest rates held too low for too long, worthless regulators or banks with excessive leverage, for instance.

Even New York Mayor Bloomberg came down in the “the cause” camp a month or so ago when referring to the role the government played in the housing bubble. It’s simply amazing to me that so many people seem to insist on viewing this as a black-and-white issue – that either Washington or Wall Street are to blame, but not a combination of the two.

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BofA Automated Teller Truth Machines

On January 16, 2012, in Banks, Our Culture, by Tim

The Understory reported that the Rainforest Action Network transformed about 85 Bank of America ATMs in San Francisco into Automated “Truth” Machines the other day using the overlay sticker shown below, one more sign that, though still quite popular in Washington D.C., big banks are increasingly unpopular in the rest of the country.

On a related note, according to this McClatchy report, BofA and other too-big-to-fail banks have settled on their pick for President this fall – Mitt Romney. Employees at the big banks gave the Romney campaign $600,000 through September of last year, dwarfing the $200,000 sent to the bankers’ second choice – President Barack Obama – virtually ensuring that there will be little change to the status quo, big-bank-wise, until 2017 or later.

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Stephen Colbert for President?

On January 15, 2012, in Our Culture, by Tim

There is real value in good political satire (for those who recognize and appreciate it) and Stephen Colbert has been making a pretty good living at it, most recently announcing the formation of an exploratory committee for a run at the GOP presidential nomination, a move that required him to transfer his “super PAC” to Daily Show host Jon Stewart last week.

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Colbert appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos earlier today and, while providing more than a few chuckles, shed light in his own satirical way about how money in politics has entered a new and more dangerous phase following the 2010 Supreme Court decision that changed the rules for corporate political donations that, essentially, allows unlimited spending by any group that registers as a political action committee, so long as their activities are not “coordinated” with a candidate.

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Americans Gorge on Credit Card Offers

On January 10, 2012, in Economy, Our Culture, by Tim

It would appear that the Federal Reserve’s guarantee of freakishly low interest rates until at least 2013 (soon to be extended into 2014 or beyond) and the resulting push by credit card companies to clog mail boxes with all sorts or tempting offers had the desired effect on Americans as they racked up new credit card debt in November at a rate not seen since before the wheels fell of the global financial system back in early-2008.

The data for December might be even more impressive since, what U.S. citizen in their right mind wouldn’t borrow a thousand dollars or two to get that big flat screen TV and new sound system at Christmas time if they could do so without incurring any interest charges and making only minimal payments for the next year or two.

While some say this indicates renewed confidence in the U.S. economy – one where 70 percent of all activity is based on consumer spending -  others think this is akin to a drunk “falling of the wagon” after almost three years of sobriety.

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