Back to Banking Basics: Learning from Canada

After the American Century

Once upon a time, mortgages were simple. The home buyer went to a bank, which (1) decided whether the house was worth its price, (2) whether the purchaser looked like a good risk, (3) what rate of interest to offer, and (4) how big a down payment was needed to seal the deal. Furthermore, (5) banks kept on hand a decent reserve of capital, in case some buyers defaulted on their loans. In those simpler days, all the risk was divided between just two parties: the customer and the bank. But all five of these elements of the simple mortgage have changed over time, and the disastrous results emerged in the present crisis.

(1) Houses were bought and sold for irrationally high prices. There were years when home prices rose by 20% or more. But salaries were not shooting up that fast, and banks should have considered the potential resale price to be less than the irrationally soaring market price. In Britain, for example, by 2005 people were buying houses for as much as five times their annual salary, but a good rule of thumb in the industry has long been that people cannot afford a house that is more than c. three times their salary. To find a way for ordinary people to pay extraordinary prices, banks invented all sorts of new kinds of loans, including some where the buyer only paid off on interest, without making any attempt to pay down on the loan itself. And so the bubble grew.

(2) Banks failed to make hard-nosed evaluations of whether customers were good risks. In fact, as has been documented again and again, lenders encouraged people to purchase homes that they really could not afford, secure in the knowledge that they would repackage and sell these dodgy mortgages to others. In many cases, banks divided up mortgages, repackaged them, and spread the (as it turns out toxic) risk, and so distributed these risky loans all over the world. By 2008 millions of people were defaulting on their loans, the rate of foreclosures shot up, house prices began to fall, the whole house of cards came tumbling down. In the United States, in January of 2009 alone the number of foreclosures was 274,399. Assuming an average of four occupants per home, that means more than 1 million people lost their house and all they had invested in it, in just one month.

(3) During the years of bad practices, banks also played games with interest rates. In Britain, for example, many banks offered quite low rates for the first years of a mortgage, whose cost then increased dramatically. Borrowers would then go out and pay some high fees to refinance the house and start the process over again, without ever managing to pay off much on the house itself. As a result of such practices and many other manipulation of interest rates, it became quite difficult for consumers to understand what they were really paying for a mortgage. so that "supply and demand" were not as important as (mis)perceptions of capital supply that stimulated irrational demand.

(4) Down payments have fallen over the last century. Back in c. 1920 it was not unusual to demand one third to one half of the total value of a house as a down payment. I am not suggesting that one should return to that standard, but it does put in perspective the developments since that time. After World War II, in the US, veterans could buy a house with a down payment of only $1, as the federal government insured the contract, making it risk free for the banks. Veterans did prove to be good credit risks during the expansive 1950s and 1960s. But the great success of such programs suggested that enormous economic growth could be achieved by extending more credit to more people, notably by asking for smaller down payments. Today, few people put up more than 20% as a down payment, the amount necessary to obtain the best interest rates. In some cases, cash payments were not made, as many people used their pension plans as collateral, putting their old age at risk. Thus there are people in the present crisis who are losing not only their homes but their pensions as well. Others paid higher interest rates but put up as little as a 5% down payment or in some cases even 0%.

(5) As the number of loan defaults snowballed, it quickly became apparent that banks were not prepared. They had not kept decent sized reserves on hand. In many cases, they had purchased mortgage insurance, from companies such as AIG, that is now the dead weight threatening to drown the whole banking system. For AIG became a global player in the mortgage business, giving the appearance of safety and solvency to all sorts of schemes, each of which helped banks to escape from the irritating demand that they actually have some money in their vaults. US banks on average have only about 4% of their capital value on hand in the form of actual money.

President Obama is trying to clean up this enormous mess, but it will not be easy, because the simple borrower-lender relationship has become so complex, with so much division and sale of risk, insurance schemes, and arbitrage that only accountants who specialize in this field can understand the billion dollar details. In the short term, it seems impossible to avoid pumping billions more into the under-regulated industry, to rescue the economic system as a whole. Meanwhile, the public is understandably furious that bankers should continue to be well paid.

Fortunately, there is a model for a better banking system: Canada. There, banks were kept under tighter control, and as a result the Canadians have weathered the world financial storm without much damage. Theie banks did not have so many dodgy mortgages and they had an average of 9.8% capital on hand, more than twice the US average. Canadians did not forget the five essential features to mortgage lending discussed above. In 2008 the Geneva-based World Economic Forum rated Canada's banking system as world's best. Not incidentally, the Canadian dollar today is far stronger against the American dollar than it has been historically.

Obama's Tax Plan Would Increase Equality

After the American Century

President Obama has been forced to spend much of his first month in office dealing with Bush's mistakes, particularly economic mistakes. With the submission of a new budget proposal, however, he has begun to present his own vision. He does not want to spend all his time being a fireman putting out Republican fires. Rather, he wants to redesign the economic fabric so that the economy is stronger and more resilient.

In the short term, Obama is spending lavishly to try to escape the mess Bush created. That is the gigantic budget one reads about. But longer term Obama wants to return to the tax system of that most dangerous radical, Dwight D. Eisenhower. During Ike's presidency (1953-1961) taxes on the wealthiest Americans were high, and although adjusted they remained so during the 1960s as well.

During these years the real income of the middle class (in other words their income once adjusting for inflation), rose steadily. After the weak economy of the 1970s, however, Ronald Reagan pushed through dramatic reductions in the tax rate on the wealthy, which began a sizable redistribution of wealth that has lasted for almost thirty years. I lay out the basics of this change in Contemporary American Society (161-166). Just before Reagan lowered taxes on the wealthiest Americans, the top fifth of all US citizens received 43.7% of all income, while the bottom fifth got just 4.3%. In other words, the top fifth made ten times as much as the bottom fifth. By 2005 the poorest fifth had sunk to just 3.4%, while the top fifth received 51.3%. The top fifth made fifteen times as much as the bottom fifth.

What about the middle 60%, the second, third, and fourth fifth? During the same 25 years all of them, the entire middle class, lost out to the wealthiest fifth. In short, between 1980 and 2005, fully 80% of all Americans saw their share in the nation's wealth drop.

With the collapse of the Reagan-Bush economy and its favoritism for the rich, it is time for a new tax code. Something radical. Something that Dwight D. Eisenhower and Harry Truman each supported. That something is familiar to anyone in Scandinavia, and is called progressive taxation. The object of public policy is not to take money from the poor and middle class and give it to the rich, but to give all classes an equal chance to increase their stake in society.

Expect to hear howls of protest from the Republicans and cries of socialism and fears of big government, and the usual rhetoric of the right. For Obama wants to reverse the Reagan revolution. He wants not just to end the Bush tax cuts that threw the budget into deficit years ago, but also to raise taxes on the top fifth of society, in order to pay for the sweeping changes he wants in energy policy, education, and medical care. Over the next decade, Obama wants to get almost $1 trillion in new taxes from the wealthiest Americans. In case you want to know, they are defined as people with incomes of more than $250,000 a year. (More than 1.4oo,000 DK).

Obama is also hoping to save some money through cuts to the Defense Department, partly from winding down the engagement in Iraq and partly through cutting spending on programs that have outlived their usefulness with the end of the Cold War. I wish him luck but am not too optimistic about this phase of his plans. One would have thought that the fall of communism might have reduced defense spending drastically. Back in c. 1990 there was lots of talk of a "peace dividend." There was talk of spending more money on infrastructure, notably decaying bridges and roads. But there was not much of a peace dividend then, and Obama's first defense budget is larger, not smaller, for the two year period of 2009 & 2010, weighing in at a gigantic $1.3 trillion.

Realistically, Obama is more likely to move in the direction of fiscal responsibility via higher taxes on the rich. He will probably be accused of class warfare, but he is trying to end the pillaging of the poor that began under Ronald Reagan. Obama is rejecting "trickle down" economics. He wants the US government to take more responsibility for health and education, and to give Americans back the growth and equality they had in the prosperous 1950s and 1960s. No doubt he will be called a radical and a socialist for trying to do this. Few sensible people ever mistook Dwight D. Eisenhower a socialist.

For a Nobel Prize-winning economist's positive evaluation of the Obama budget, click here.

"Rumsfeld Wing" for Baghdad Museum?

Postmodern ruins could symbolize Bush Era

After the American Century

This week the partially looted museum of antiquities "reopened" in Baghdad. Only special guests could see the collections, however. Before the invasion, world archaeologists warned the Pentagon that it needed to be protected. It was not. That looted museum is perhaps a fitting symbol of the Bush years. The former director fled Iraq due to threats to his family, and now teaches on Long Island. The museum itself is not ready to receive tourists, due to security concerns.

One of the many ignoble moments of the Iraq War and its aftermath was Donald Rumsfeld's response to reports that priceless collections had been looted. "Stuff happens" he said. That formulation denies human action and responsibility. But "stuff" does not happen. Rather, generals make mistakes, ignore advice, and are directly responsible for the destruction of cultural heritage. And for as long as people remain interested in the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, Donald Rumsfeld will be remembered as a modern barbarian.

Indeed, they ought to build a special wing in his honor. In the "Rumsfeld 'Stuff' Wing" would be placards next to empty spaces and broken pedestals, each describing missing objects. In the center of the room one could place shattered objects, broken in the thieves' scramble. Such a monument would best be placed underground and lit only by broken skylights. Very deconstructive and postmodern.

To save architectural fees in these difficult times, one might build an identical "W" wing somewhere between 9/11 and Wall Street, and place there valueless commercial paper from failed banks, copies of auditor's reports from Lehman Brothers, and repossessed furniture from executive offices. There should be a place, too, for framed copies of some of the millions of dollars in bonus checks issued to the MBAs who masterminded the mortgage market. Indeed, why not inscribe the names of all who received these infamous checks on walls, in alphabetical order, together with the size of their bonuses, so that every Americans can come and see who they were. It seems only fair, as the American people bailed them out.

Click here for more about the "reopened" museum.

Exective Pay and the Angry Public

After the American Century

The average American is furious at Wall Street firms, banks, fat-cat executives, and government bailouts, which do not seem to be helping the ordinary people. But the executives themselves appear only vaguely aware of the unjust disparities between their incomes and those of most people. President Obama has proposed that firms receiving Washington bailouts must limit executive salaries to $500,000.

There is a passage in Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities which explains how easily a salary of $1 million a year disappears in New York City. The protagonist of that novel feels he must live in a certain part of Manhattan, send his children to private school, and drive German car, which requires a protected indoor parking space, and so on. The joke is that the monthly $80,000 always disappears before payday, and at the end of the month he feels a little pinched for spending money just like anyone else.

For an up-dated, real life estimation of the costs of being an executive in New York City, an article in the New York Times by Allen Salkin explains how difficult (read impossible) it will be to get along on an annual salary of "only" $500,000 (2.8 million kroner). The assumption is that such executives must have an armed chauffeur, a second summer house that costs $4 million (more than 20 million kroner), and so forth. Reading the piece, one is not entirely certain that the reporter can see the absurdity of these "needs."

But for the record, here are a few comparative facts and figures. Salkin reports that such an executive (defined as male with a non-working spouse) has the following expenses:

Mortgage and monthly fee for a Coop $192,000
Nanny $45,000
Private School $32,000 (per child)
Garage $8400
Driver $75,000-125,00
Personal trainer (3 times a week) $12,000
Formal gowns (for "charity balls"), $35,000
etc.

It is perfectly obvious to the 99.9% of the world that does not have an income of $1 million or more a year, that this mortgage is too expensive and that all the other items on the list are unnecessary. Indeed, in New York City even a car is unnecessary, as they have a subway and taxis there the last time I checked.

Now consider the expenditures of the average American family, from the Statistical Abstract of the United States.

Annual income: $48,000 (Black families only $30,800, single mothers, $23,000)
(one tenth the cap Obama has proposed, half what the executive pays for a chauffeur)

House: 6 rooms ( in 2006 before the economy collapsed) $404,000
(one tenth the cost of the executive's summer house)

Automobiles (including monthly payments, insurance, gasoline, etc.) $8,300
(what the executive pays for parking)

Nanny? Are you kidding?
Personal Trainer? The family dog insists on walks
Formal Gowns? Get real.

The average American has every right to be angry, especially when they learn that even as the banks were failing they granted their executives billions in bonuses, paid for by the US taxpayers. But what will be the political consequences of this anger? Will it build up pressure for Obama's programs? Or will it be channeled elsewhere?

Republicans Spent Much More on Iraq War Than Obama Wants for Stimulus Package

After the American Century

Those who thought I was too hard on the Republican Party yesterday might want to read Paul Krugman's column today. He also feels that their proposal to substitute tax cuts for spending is a failed Bush policy.

Elsewhere in today's New York Times there is an interesting story about the Japanese economy during the 1990s, when it went into deflation. Then the Japanese government spent a great deal of money on economic stimulus, and there is considerable debate about whether this was successful or not. But one thing is clear. Not all stimulus money is equally effective. Money spent on infrastructure gave the least bang for the yen, while money spent on education was the most beneficial. The test should be whether spending will develop new skills (education), new capacities (spreading broadband more widely), or renew the population (e.g. preventive health care). Such things make the economy more resilient. The least effective way to stimulate the economy is to build more weapons. A row of tanks worth a billion dollars for the most part just sits there, and never creates any new wealth.

However, if you a Republican, then a row of tanks represents a chance to wreck not just one economy, but two, as the economic cost of the Iraq war comes to mind. According to an article in the Washington Post last March, the total cost of that conflict will be more than $1.5 trillion, perhaps even as high as $3 trillion. Thus the Republican Party gladly spent at least twice as much on that war as the Democrats want to use to stimulate the American economy. Is there any logic to Republican thinking? The Republicans have destroyed billions in resources in the deserts of the Middle East, but they will not invest in the future of their own country. They have used billions to defend access to foreign oil, but they will not spend money on green energy which could free the US from dependence on that oil.

A paranoid on the far right might think that subversives (call them economic terrorsits) who hate the United States have infiltrated the Republican Party and twisted its thinking so it will embrace policies that are destructive to the United States. Not being anywhere near that paranoid, I can only conclude that the Republicans are illogical and that they choose badly.

The Republican Desire for Disaster

After the American Century

In the last month it has become clear: Republicans want disaster. They want the economy to get so much worse that the public will forget who got them into this economic mess. They are willing to let millions of people lose their jobs and their homes, if only it will take the heat off them and make Obama look like the culprit. How else can one explain the fact that all Republican members of the House of Representatives voted against the stimulus package, even as virtually all economists, regardless of party affiliation, agree that the stimulus package is needed immediately? How else explain that the Senate Republicans seem ready to block the stimulus bill if they can?

The Republican Party may have become irrelevant, and it may be time for Americans to ask themselves if such a party really ought to survive. The death of major political parties is a rare event in US politics, and one has to go back to pre-Civil War times to find an example, when the Whig Party foundered and died rather suddenly, because it could not deal with the sectional crisis. The Republicans emerged as their replacement, and this very year we are celebrating the bicentennial of the birth of the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln. But as noted earlier in this space, Lincoln would not recognize his party today. He had no Southern support at all, and won what are now called the blue states. Today's Republicans are not the heirs of Lincoln, and conceivably the public will realize this.

The Republicans have moved from irresponsible leadership to irresponsible opposition, and they are quickly losing any meaningful relationship to the emerging majority of the American public. They have lost more than two thirds of the support of Blacks, Hispanics, scientists, and humanists. Even those who used to support them such as doctors and even many stockbrokers are deserting the party. They need to change, or they ought to die, and do so quickly, so another party can take their place. I know, it will probably never happen. Yet at present they are a ball and chain tied to the body politic. They are a useless mass of backward thinkers, with nasty political practices, and they have strong tendencies to xenophobia and red-baiting. Their ranks are rotten with anti-evolutionary and anti-science neanderthals. Indeed, their very persistence as a party may be a kind of proof that human evolution has not taken place. More than half of them actually thought Sarah Palin was qualified. Doubtless, they will long survive because so many of them are so narrow and ill-educated that they cannot change. But can the US remain a world power chained to such a throwback party?

Hiding University Reform inside Tax Reform

After the American Century

The traditional tax problem for Danes is how to reduce the world's highest taxes while keeping the welfare state. A Tax Commission has just proposed 35 billion kroner (a bit less than 7 billion dollars) in income tax reductions, to be financed by changes in the tax structure. I want to focus on just one area, reductions in student grants, because this is far more than it appears to be, amounting to a major reversal of government policy on higher education.

The proposal is that student study grants be reduced so that they cover four years. To people outside Denmark, this still sounds wonderful. Not only do no university students pay tuition, but all students qualify for a scholarship worth about 55,000 kroner ($10,500) each year, after taxes. These grants have made it possible for children of working class parents to make their way into the professions. More than just about any other nation, Denmark has made its education system egalitarian. I have had many students who were the first in their families to attend university, and some of them have gone on to quite distinguished careers.

By comparison, in the United States taxes are considerably lower, but parents start saving early to send their children to college. It can easily cost $150,000 (c. 800,000 kroner) to send just one child to university, when tuition, room, board, transport, health insurance, computers, and books are all taken into account. The hardest economic years for American parents are those when children are in college. In contrast, Danish parents may pay huge taxes, but the year a child begins at university creates no hardship, because of the generous "SU," or student grant. In effect, Danish parents have been forced to save for their child's education, and reap the benefits if a child goes to university. But the Tax Commission in effect wants to steal the money middle-aged couples have saved through taxation for the last twenty years. They have paid in with the expectation that their children will receive student aid. But the Tax Commission will divert that money to income tax reductions, and these parents will have to pay a second time if they want their children to get an advanced education.

In theory, it takes a Dane a minimum of five years to complete a BA and MA. In practice, the average student needs six years or more. Reducing the student grant to 4 years means that it will be impossible to get an MA without taking sizable loans, which supposedly will be made available to all who apply, though one wonders if this will really be so. A great many students will likely stop after the BA degree, because they do not want to saddle themselves with large loans.

The Tax Commission surely understands that Denmark will produce fewer MA students as a result. Indeed, I assume that this is their goal, in this way forcing more people to start working full time at a younger age. When the same political coalition was in power during the 1980s and early 1990s it forced changes in Danish education with the professed goal of making the BA a terminal degree for most students. They also cheapened the BA+MA education by cutting it one full year, from six to five. The notion then was that too many people were getting advanced degrees. The then Minister of Education was Bertel Haarder, and people joked that BA stood for Bertel's Academics.

Students see the BA as a second-rate degree and most of them still want to go on for the MA. Yet that earlier reform did save money by reducing the BA+MA combination to five years. This meant that there was a full year less time to really learn a foreign language such as Russian, and it meant that students were less ready to write an MA thesis. For faculty, students losing a year of education meant a reduction of almost 20% in how many people there were to teach. For the gymnasiums, it meant that new teachers were less educated.

The Tax Commission's proposed reduction in student aid extends this earlier downsizing. Once again, the goal is to get more students to stop after their BA, and to reduce the numbers at the graduate level. Once again, the universities will have fewer to teach and suffer cutbacks in staff. The loss of entire departments may follow in some cases.

It is disingenuous to claim that the government's goal is to reform taxes. The amount spent on the extra year of SU is 750 million kroner a year, or a little more than 2% of the proposed savings on personal income taxes. The real goal is to further reduce graduate programs and eliminate some MA programs. One very real result will be a decline in the number of faculty positions, saving half a million kroner or more per eliminated position.

The Tax Commission ignores these larger consequences because they would be unacceptable to many Danes. Indeed, cutting down graduate studies is the exact opposite of the government's own professed desire to invest more in research, raise the education level, and prepare for a future where a highly-educated workforce is the key to success. But this new tax proposal will shrink the pool of highly qualified graduates, eliminate faculty positions, close some MA programs, and undermine the efforts of Danish universities to remain competitive with other nations. It will further demoralize faculties (especially in the humanities) that have been suffering cutbacks for years already. One likely result could be a brain drain, as many of the very best graduates go to work in better financed universities abroad.

As far as education is concerned, this is not a tax reform but a reversal of the government's supposed program.

Stimulus Package, or Stimulus Interruptus?

After the American Century

Politics is the art of the possible, and a good politician can parlay one success into widened possibilities. Surely the desire to widen his consensus is what has Obama going to visit the Republicans, seeking their support for the $825 billion stimulus package. The Republicans, having learned nothing much from the failure of the Bush approach to the economy, want more tax cuts, while the Democrats point out that if you don't have a job, a tax cut is useless. The Obama plan does include tax cuts of $275 billion, so that is part of the package, but the majority of the money would be spent on projects. Since a staggering 75,000 layoffs were announced yesterday alone, the need for direct government spending, priming the pump, seems obvious, though not to Republicans, evidently. Most economists agree on this.

But where is the 800 billion going to be spent? The particular projects the Democrats support are in line with Obama's call for a greener society with a comprehensive Internet that reaches all parts of the United States. In effect, he wants to create the equivalent of a Rural Electrification program to link up all parts of the US with cyberspace. This idea has real merit, because studies have shown that better communications reduces the need for as much physical movement, increasing energy intensity. The obvious example would be the shipment of documents as email attachments rather than as special delivery or FED-EX packages. A comprehensive information system will improve productivity and put the entire nation into contact with cyberspace.

Other spending would improve the electrical transmission system, which has not been growing much at all. In fact, deregulation slowed down the building on transmission lines, for reasons that would require a long Blog - actually that required about 3,000 words in chapter five of my new book. But leaving aside the mistakes of the past, the present need is to replace old equipment and expand capacity, because the connections are simply not robust enough.

The Democratic plan does have some pork in it, however, and perhaps Obama can use the Republican complaints to cut out some of that fat. But one man's useless pork is someone else's bacon. Or, in this case, condom. For some of the stimulus plan was originally intended to go to family planning, which included purchase of large numbers of condoms. I call that recontaining the stimulus. Obama has apparently agreed to drop the condoms. (Sarah Palin and her oldest daughter could only agree). After all, a baby boom would stimulate the economy both immediately and in the long run.

Now that the condoms are off, as it were, let us hope the Republicans get more excited. Without their support, we might have a filibuster, or stimulus interruptus.

The Honeymoon

After the American Century

New presidents have a honeymoon with the public that lasts a few months in most cases. Obama certainly is having a good honeymoon, with an approval rating of 73%, with only 14% disapproving. Another way to look at this is to recall that Bush's rating fell to around 25%, with some fluctuations. So there is one quarter of the public that supported Bush no matter what he did, and presumably this same group does not like Obama much. He has probably achieved the highest rating possible in the wake of the Republican debacle.

Furthermore, the public is not equally enamoured of Congress, which therefore is in a weak position to oppose his agenda. The chance to achieve real change exists, but the opportunity will not outlast the spring - at least if history is any guide. Were these normal times, Obama could move immediately on creating a new medical system. Instead, he has to use this precious time to fix the Bush economy, and one can only hope that some innovative programs are part of the stimulus package.

Look on the right column of this Blog, and each day you can see precisely how much of Obama's first hundred days remains. That is roughly the honeymoon's length, though the term 100 days comes from Roosevelt's New Deal. FDR accomplished an incredible amount in 1933, in good part because the Depression had already lasted for more than three years, and Congress felt a great urgency to repond. This suggests that, paradoxically, Obama may benefit, in the short term,. if the economy remains weak for a few more months, forcing Congress to act.