April 8, 2010
Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Clinton, has been hitting more than a few home runs lately. At a time when too many commentators remain in lock-step with their favorite political party, Reich pulls no punches when pointing out the flaws in the Obama administration’s agenda. I particularly enjoyed his reaction to the performance of Larry Summers on ABC television’s This Week on April 4:
I’m in the “green room” at ABC News, waiting to join a roundtable panel discussion on ABC’s weekly Sunday news program, This Week.
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Larry Summers was interviewed just before Greenspan. He said the economy is expanding, that the Administration is doing everything it can to bring jobs back, and that the regulatory reform bills moving on the Hill will prevent another financial crisis.
What?
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If any three people are most responsible for the failure of financial regulation, they are Greenspan, Larry Summers, and my former colleague, Bob Rubin.
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I dislike singling out individuals for blame or praise in a political system as complex as that of the United States but I worry the nation is not on the right economic road, and that these individuals — one of whom advises the President directly and the others who continue to exert substantial influence among policy makers — still don’t get it.
The direction financial reform is taking is not encouraging. Both the bill that emerged from the House and the one emerging from the Senate are filled with loopholes that continue to allow reckless trading of derivatives. Neither bill adequately prevents banks from becoming insolvent because of their reckless trades. Neither limits the size of banks or busts up the big ones. Neither resurrects the Glass-Steagall Act. Neither adequately regulates hedge funds.
More fundamentally, neither bill begins to rectify the basic distortion in the national economy whose rewards and incentives are grotesquely tipped toward Wall Street and financial entrepreneurialism, and away from Main Street and real entrepreneurialism.
Is it because our elected officials just don’t understand what needs to be done to prevent another repeat of the financial crisis – or is the unwillingness to take preventative action the result of pressure from lobbyists? I think they’re just playing dumb while they line their pockets with all of that legalized graft. Meanwhile, Professor Reich continued to function as the only adult in the room, with this follow-up piece:
Needless to say, the danger of an even bigger cost in coming years continues to grow because we still don’t have a new law to prevent what happened from happening again. In fact, now that they know for sure they’ll be bailed out, Wall Street banks – and those who lend to them or invest in them – have every incentive to take even bigger risks. In effect, taxpayers are implicitly subsidizing them to do so.
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But the only way to make sure no bank it too big to fail is to make sure no bank is too big. If Congress and the White House fail to do this, you have every reason to believe it’s because Wall Street has paid them not to.
Reich’s recent criticism of the Federal Reserve was another sorely-needed antidote to Ben Bernanke’s recent rise to media-designated sainthood. In an essay quoting Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Reich transcended the polarized political climate to focus on the fact that the mysterious Fed enjoys inappropriate authority:
The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns – taking on tens of billions of dollars of the bank’s bad loans – in order to smooth Bear Stearns’ takeover by JP Morgan Chase. The secret Fed bailout came months before Congress authorized the government to spend up to $700 billion of taxpayer dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Fed also took on billions of dollars worth of AIG securities, also before the official government-sanctioned bailout.
The losses from those deals still total tens of billions, and taxpayers are ultimately on the hook. But the public never knew. There was no congressional oversight. It was all done behind closed doors. And the New York Fed – then run by Tim Geithner – was very much in the center of the action.
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The Fed has a big problem. It acts in secret. That makes it an odd duck in a democracy. As long as it’s merely setting interest rates, its secrecy and political independence can be justified. But once it departs from that role and begins putting billions of dollars of taxpayer money at risk — choosing winners and losers in the capitalist system — its legitimacy is questionable.
You probably thought that Ron Paul was the only one who spoke that way about the Federal Reserve. Fortunately, when people such as Robert Reich speak out concerning the huge economic and financial dysfunction afflicting America, there is a greater likelihood that those with the authority to implement the necessary reforms will do the right thing. We can only hope.
Financial Reform Might Actually Happen
April 12, 2010
The long-overdue need for financial reform is finally getting some serious attention in Washington. As banking lobbyists continue to grease palms in the Senate, we are beginning to hear a number of novel ideas from some clever commentators, focused on preventing another financial crisis.
On April 9, John Mauldin published a thought-provoking essay entitled, “Reform We Can Believe In”. At one point in the piece, Mauldin considered the question that has been hanging over our heads for the past eighteen months:
Although I left out Mauldin’s suggestion to “leave the Fed alone” from that last paragraph, his essay contains a fantastic explanation of how the Federal Reserve System is organized. Best of all, Mauldin spent plenty of time reflecting on Milton Friedman’s suggestion that we program a computer to set monetary policy, instead of leaving that authority with the Fed:
Another perspective on financial reform came from Jim McTague in the April 12 edition of Barron’s. He began with the remark that both the House and Senate reform bills lack adequate measures for “efficient and intelligent policing”. Nevertheless, the solution he embraced was simple:
The proposal for a Council of Regulators has drawn a good deal of criticism, primarily because it would be chaired by the Treasury Secretary. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, authors of The Road From Ruin, had this to say about a Council of Regulators in a recent Huffington Post piece:
Regardless of what the final product will include – one thing is becoming increasingly likely: Some semblance of financial reform legislation will eventually become enacted. It won’t be perfect but anything will be better than what we have now. (Well, almost anything . . .)