2012/11/18

The Global Economic Collapse - GD Part 4.1

The Financial Collapse of 2007-08 affected everyone- globally. It has exposed inherent flaws in our globalized world- our banking and monetary systems are interconnected today to a degree that never existed before. Economists since the 1990s have been talking of "contagion;" financial turmoil in one part of the world can now easily spread throughout the entire global financial system and crush economies, bankrupt entire nations, or merely cause recessions.

The scale of the disaster is not yet known. As of right now, the US seems to believe the emergency has passed, at least if you ask officials publicly-- but high-level officials are still scrambling to fight the spread of the turmoil. That is why Europe's problems are still front-and-center in the news, and partly why it would be disastrous if any country in the Eurozone defaulted on its debt- it would begin a domino effect in Europe which could easily spread to other parts of the world.

Many economists and news sources compare the financial meltdown of 2007-08 to the Great Depression. Indeed, there are many similarities. However, the response has differed on many levels, and the result is that "the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression" still doesn't quite match the scale of the devastation wrought in those years. Yet, there still is danger on the horizon, and the experience is not quite finished.


Causes of the Collapse


Beginning in the United States and then spreading to the rest of the world due to our globalized finance system, the financial meltdown was a case of reckless investing, fraud, and regulatory neglect. What a lot of Americans don't realize is that it was a direct result of the 1999 removal of vital legislation (the Glass-Steagal Act) that was enacted in the United States following the 1929 Crash that led to the Great Depression. The Glass-Steagal Act of 1933 was designed to prevent the very type of incident that wound up happening in 2008.


In a nutshell, Glass-Steagal prevented commercial banks (banks that make loans and hold your money) from being the same institutions that buy/sell/make investments. This basically kept the banks that hold your money and loans from gambling in the stock market or reinvesting their assets and liabilities in risky financial instruments. Among several other pieces of Depression Era legislation, Federal Deposit Insurance agencies were set up to ensure that the deposits of customers at these banking institutions were protected in the case that their money was somehow lost (due to robbery, physical destruction of bank notes, bank failure, etc.). 

The repeal of these laws led to a dangerous entanglement of financial institutions- commercial banks, investment banks, securities handlers/private investment insurers and hedge funds were hopelessly interrelated with no firewall in place in case of calamity or market failure. Worse yet, in some cases they were insured by both private and federal agencies. 


Even more troubling, in a bid to make big profits even bigger, major banking institutions began leveraging their assets as high as 40:1 and investing in securities, derivatives and hedge funds to distribute the risk. American institutions were the inventors of these practices during the 1990s, but banking instituions in the rest of the world were so impressed with the profits being made, they soon began engaging in these same risky practices. What had been created was an illusion. There was a promise of well-distributed risk, but in reality the risks were mounting higher and higher while infecting every corner of the global financial system.


When the bottom dropped out of the Mortgage-backed Securities market and CDOs, banks and insurers both began to fail at an alarming rate. These institutions had just gone through a rapid merger and consolidation process throughout the 1990s and 2000s, leading to the creation of institutions that were so large their failures were a systemic risk to the economy of the entire world-- not just the US economy.
This 11-minute video explains what happened with the CDOs and Mortgage-backed Securities rather succinctly:

"The Crisis of Credit Visualized" by Jonathan Jarvis

Since the scale of the collapse was so immense, the government of the United States was faced with a rather ludicrous paradox to its capitalist system: we now had to resort to a form of socialism in order to prevent the collapse of capitalism. The banks got bailed out, through several means. 


Flawed Responses


Overtly, TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) was administered by the Bush and Obama administrations, followed by several economic stimulus programs at an ever-increasing price tag of over $3 trillion (subsidized, of course, by the American taxpayer). 


Covertly-- mainly to secure confidence in the system-- the Federal Reserve also implemented "secret" loans to some of the largest banking institutions in the world (not just American banks). These loans were delivered as short-term loans at what is known at the Fed as the "discount window" in which interest rates are at or close to zero. 



Page 131 of the GAO's Report. Dollar amounts are in billions.

The main idea behind this was to save these institutions from total collapse while encouraging lending between banks and (hopefully) to consumers in general. The Federal Reserve handed out loans to major banks worldwide (but mainly US & European banks) valuing a total of $16 trillion. It worked- but only halfway. The institutions stayed open, but credit was not freed up. This prevented a total economic collapse, but failed to stop the global Great Recession.

Aside from this arrangement, the Fed also secured a currency-swap with the Central Banks of the EU, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Singapore, and Japan, in which the Fed lent $10 trillion USD in exchange for the currencies of these countries (secured at the cost of dollars/unit of currency of the day, with no appreciation or depreciation). 



Total price tag of the Federal Reserve's efforts was $26 trillion USD. Read the GAO's report on the Federal Reserve's Activities during the bailout here: 
http://www.sanders.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/GAO%20Fed%20Investigation.pdf


Page 131 again, with emphasis added. These loans were administered without the knowledge or consent of the US Congress.

This information only came to light due to the first-and-only audit of the US Federal Reserve since its creation. The audit was administered by the Government Accountability Office and only investigated the activity surrounding the financial collapse and emergency relief funds extended to banks during the aftermath. As it turns out, the loans were largely repaid. Only about $1 trillion remained outstanding at the time of the audit. Banks mostly were able to afford this because of two things: they didn't extend credit like they were supposed to, and they levied interest and fee increases on their customers.

So in other words, the people paid for this crisis twice (or three times, depending on how you count): Once in lost assets, once in tax money administered by the government bailouts in all forms, and then once again in fee increases imposed upon banks' customers.


No wonder the economy was in such a shambles! The money at the Federal Reserve is "printed" at our expense; the banks financed their repayment of the debt to the Fed on fees imposed on you & me, and the banks still refused to resume lending. You may remember that at the time during & following the bailout, credit card companies began charging ridiculous interest rates on new and at-risk customers-- rates far beyond what used to be called "usury" -- up to 75%.

Meanwhile, homeowners- even ones in good standing- began to experience the loss of their biggest investment. House prices fell so rapidly that many homeowners suddenly realized they were paying on mortgages that far outmatched the present value of their homes (we call these "underwater mortgages").

Foreclosure rates not seen since the Great Depression ensued, and unemployment skyrocketed (While it's important to be sure the scale of today's problems aren't understated, it's worthwhile noting that the home foreclosure and unemployment rates never really came close to the rates of foreclosures and unemployment during the Great Depression). We had entered the Great Recession.


Socialism For the Rich, Capitalism for Everyone Else


What followed these events led to the eruption of populist uprisings like Occupy Wall Street (OWS). The average American was outraged that, not only had the government bailed-out these irresponsible banks, but they refused to institute effective regulation of these institutions. The OWS battle cry became, "Banks got bailed out; we got sold out!" the core concepts of capitalism seemed to be torn asunder. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) said of the bailouts, "This is a clear case of socialism for the rich and rugged, you're-on-your-own individualism for everyone else."

For the banks, this institutionalized a concept called "moral hazard" in which the banks know they are too big to fail, and that if they are on their way down, the government must step in to save them, or risk the collapse of the entire system and contagion to the rest of the Global Economy, thus incentivizing systemic risk if the potential short-term gains are high.

Countries in the European Union are still reeling from this disaster, and while it cannot be said that it was the only cause of their woes, the financial collapse was the catalyst that caused countries like Spain, Greece, Ireland and Italy to slip toward bankruptcy.

The Federal Reserve Bank continues to treat the problem by "Quantitative Easing" (inflating the money supply domestically) and by sending trillions of dollars to the EU, to prop up their Central Bank. Normally, this would cause inflation rates to soar, but the problem we could be facing in absence of this tactic would be massive deflation.

To be clear: there are many details and inner workings of the real economy that complicate and exacerbate the situation of frozen credit markets; large corporations often borrow money to cover R&D, new acquisitions and, yes, even employee payroll. Thus, the reason for rampant unemployment: if companies can't get easy credit, they can't expand as easily, nor can they afford to hire American workers.

My opinion is that the bailouts, while repugnant to the core principles of capitalism, were utterly necessary to prevent a second Great Depression. Where the US government's response failed was at three points:

1. The bailouts weren't big enough to solve the credit crisis, and banks remained leery of loaning money, even to each other.

2. U.S. banking institutions should have been dismantled to pre-1999 sizes, separating commercial banks from investment banks, and should have been led through government-managed bankruptcy proceedings as a condition of accepting federal funds.

3. Homeowners whose mortgages were threatened by falling home prices and frozen credit should have had their debts forgiven by failing banks. At least then there would have been an equitable extension of "socialism" for all and a suitable punishment for the banks and financial institutions that caused the crisis, while freeing up what little liquidity there still was in the private economy.

The real betrayal happened in more recent days, however. While the US is still facing high unemployment, the stock market has regained almost all of its losses, the GDP of the US is higher than ever (albeit at a slightly reduced rate of growth) and corporate profits after taxes are at record highs. While many common folk seemed to (bafflingly) blame the government for this predicament, the onus falls squarely on bankers and the directors of large corporations.

Yet, the "solutions" proposed by this group of the richest people in the world are the same exact reckless philosophies that led to the crisis in the first place. They are demanding reduced regulations in banking and lower corporate, individual and Capital Gains taxes.

The question at the root of all of this is whether or not to support what some economists call "Market Fundamentalism" in which a free, unregulated market allegedly functions perfectly and makes "natural" corrections, or to return to what is known as Keynesian Economics, in which the government allows a certain amount of economic freedom in a pre-determined market, while controlling liquidity and interest rates through a government-supervised Central Bank. 

I personally think the concept of "Market Fundamentalism" (an extreme view of neo-liberal economic policies) is more akin to "Economic Anarchy." Think of it on a social scale: if there were no laws, there would be no police and no judicial system. Would that eliminate crime? Would society "correct itself" and regulate itself? I'd hate to see the brutal Darwinist world that would emerge from such a policy, just as I'd like to avoid the emergence of a Darwinist economic anarchy of a "truly free" market as these fundamentalists envision. What would inevitably emerge would be giant corporations and megalithic monopolies that would steamroll over small business and crush workers. We may as well submit to feudalism.


We've already seen the consequences of loosening regulations. I don't need any more proof. Do you? 



For additional information on this topic, I highly recommend "Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy" by the Nobel Prize-winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz.

You can find an excellent film called "Inside Job" on this topic at Netflix.com or at your local video rental location.

For additional historical perspective on this topic and how it relates to Globalism and Free Trade Agreements, please watch this PBS series, "Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy."

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