January 4, 2010
David Reilly of Bloomberg News did us all a favor by reading through the entire, 1,270-page financial reform bill that was recently passed by the House of Representatives. The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (HR 4173) was described by Reilly this way:
The baby of Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the House bill is meant to address everything from too-big-to-fail banks to asleep-at-the-switch credit-ratings companies to the protection of consumers from greedy lenders.
After reading the bill, David Reilly wrote a commentary piece for Bloomberg entitled: “Bankers Get $4 Trillion Gift from Barney Frank”. Reilly seemed surprised that banks opposed this legislation, emphasizing that “they should cheer for its passage by the full Congress in the New Year” because of the bill’s huge giveaways to the banking industry and Wall Street. Here are some of Reilly’s observations on what this bill provides:
— For all its heft, the bill doesn’t once mention the words “too-big-to-fail,” the main issue confronting the financial system. Admitting you have a problem, as any 12-stepper knows, is the crucial first step toward recovery.
— Instead, it supports the biggest banks. It authorizes Federal Reserve banks to provide as much as $4 trillion in emergency funding the next time Wall Street crashes. So much for “no-more-bailouts” talk. That is more than twice what the Fed pumped into markets this time around. The size of the fund makes the bribes in the Senate’s health-care bill look minuscule.
— Oh, hold on, the Federal Reserve and Treasury Secretary can’t authorize these funds unless “there is at least a 99 percent likelihood that all funds and interest will be paid back.” Too bad the same models used to foresee the housing meltdown probably will be used to predict this likelihood as well.
More Bailouts
— The bill also allows the government, in a crisis, to back financial firms’ debts. Bondholders can sleep easy — there are more bailouts to come.
— The legislation does create a council of regulators to spot risks to the financial system and big financial firms. Unfortunately this group is made up of folks who missed the problems that led to the current crisis.
— Don’t worry, this time regulators will have better tools. Six months after being created, the council will report to Congress on “whether setting up an electronic database” would be a help. Maybe they’ll even get to use that Internet thingy.
— This group, among its many powers, can restrict the ability of a financial firm to trade for its own account. Perhaps this section should be entitled, “Yes, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., we’re looking at you.”
My favorite passage from Reilly’s essay concerned the proposal for a Consumer Financial Protection Agency:
— The bill isn’t all bad, though. It creates a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, the brainchild of Elizabeth Warren, currently head of a panel overseeing TARP. And the first director gets the cool job of designing a seal for the new agency. My suggestion: Warren riding a fiery chariot while hurling lightning bolts at Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke.
The cover story for the December 30 edition of Business Week explained how this bill became so badly compromised. Alison Vekshin and Dawn Kopecki wrote the piece, explaining how the New Democrat Coalition, which “has 68 fiscally conservative, pro-business members who fill 15 of the party’s 42 seats on the House Financial Services Committee” reshaped this bill. The New Democrats fought off proposed changes to derivatives trading and included an amendment to the Consumer Financial Protection Agency legislation giving federal regulators more discretion to override state consumer protection laws than what was initially proposed. Beyond that, “non-financial” companies such as real estate agencies and automobile dealerships will not be subject to the authority of the new agency. The proposed requirement for banks to offer “plain-vanilla” credit-card and mortgage contracts was also abandoned.
One of my pet peeves involves Democrats’ claiming to be “centrists” or “moderates” simply because they enjoy taking money from lobbyists. Too many people are left with the impression that a centrist is someone who lacks a moral compass. The Business Week story provided some insight about how the New Democrat Coalition gets … uh … “moderated”:
Since the start of the 2008 election cycle, the financial industry has donated $24.9 million to members of the New Democrats, some 14% of the total funds the lawmakers have collected, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Representative Melissa Bean of Illinois, who has led the Coalition’s efforts on regulatory reform, was the top beneficiary, with donations of $1.4 million.
As the financial reform bill is being considered by the Senate, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has stepped up its battle against the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency. The Business Week article concluded with one lawmaker’s perspective:
“My greatest fear for the last year has been an economic collapse,” says Representative Brad Miller (D-N.C), who sits on Frank’s House Financial Services Committee. “My second greatest fear was that the economy would stabilize and the financial industry would have the clout to defeat the fundamental reforms that our nation desperately needs. My greatest fear seems less likely … but my second greatest fear seems more likely every day.”
The dysfunction that preserves this unhealthy status quo was best summed up by Chris Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics:
The big banks pay the big money in Washington, the members of Congress pass new laws to enable the theft from the public purse, and the servile Fed prints money to keep the game going for another day.
As long as Congress is going through the motions of passing “reform” legislation, they should do us all a favor and take on the subject of lobbying reform. Of course, the chances of that ever happening are slim to none.
Beyond The Banks
February 4, 2010
I recently saw the movie Food, Inc. and was struck by the idea that there are some fundamental problems that span just about every situation where government corruption and ineptitude have facilitated an industry’s efforts to crush the interests of consumers. At approximately 36 minutes into the film, Michael Pollan explained how government efforts to prevent abuses in the food industry are undermined by the fact that the government always relies on the “quick fix” or “band-aid” approach, rather than a strategy addressed at solving a systemic problem. In other words: government prefers to treat the symptoms rather than the disease.
As I thought about Michael Pollan’s remark, I was immediately reminded of our financial crisis. In that case, the solution was to bail out the “too big to fail” financial institutions. As legislative proposals are introduced to address the systemic problems and prevent a recurrence of what happened in the fall of 2008, the lobbyists have stepped in to sabotage those efforts.
There were two other factors discussed in Food Inc. as presenting roadblocks to effective consumer-protective legislation: the revolving door between the industry and Washington, as well as “regulatory capture” — a situation where government regulators are beholden to those whom they regulate.
We have seen the impact of these two factors in the financial area and they have been well-documented. The “revolving door” was the subject of two recent essays by John Carney at The Business Insider website. Carney discussed “The Banking Blob” as a secret club of Senate staffers and Wall Street lobbyists:
Carney had previously discussed the problem of Senate banking committee staffers who see their job as simply a stepping stone to a lucrative banking job:
The third problem — “regulatory capture” — is best epitomized in the person of “Turbo” Tim Geithner. Joshua Rosner recently dissected Turbo Tim’s often-repeated claim that he has always worked in “public service”. Rosner demonstrated that the only sector that has been “serviced” by Geithner was the banking industry:
One important lesson to be learned from our government’s inability to do its job regulating the financial sector, is that this failure is primarily caused by three problems:
Legislators, consumer advocates and commentators should focus on these three problem areas when addressing any situation where our government proves itself ineffective in preventing abuses by a particular industry.