“Risky Business”: Brinksmanship And The Return Of Financial Crisis
A government shutdown once again loomed, and familiar deadlines and ultimatums flew around Washington. And Congress just used the threat to loosen the rules created in the wake of the financial crisis, a victory for Wall Street banks in their constant and well-funded campaign against reform.
The rules they have targeted are designed to reduce the risk of another financial meltdown, like the one that drove us into the Great Recession and could have been much worse. Though the repeal has been styled by some as a technical amendment, nothing could be farther from the truth.
Think about the best way to decide legislative policy in the devilishly complex and risk-laden area of derivatives. These are the financial contracts that brought down AIG, the event that triggered the crisis. You might imagine careful deliberation and debate, leading to a thoughtful vote in Congress in which elected representatives must stand up and be counted so that they could be held responsible for a difficult decision.
Of course, that is not how the House of Representatives works, especially not the current lame duck version. A 1,600 page Omnibus Spending Bill appeared Tuesday night and passed the House late on Thursday night. We have become familiar with these spending bills that have replaced reasoned budgeting and serially risk shutdowns just so the administration can be bullied every few months.
This time around, House sponsors attached a provision amending the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. They did this in the dead of night and at the last minute. Lobbyists, who are paid to make certain that the banks can continue to do as much risky business as possible despite the new regulatory regime, pushed to have a provision repealing the “swaps push-out” section of Dodd-Frank slipped into the spending bill so that any resistance to the repeal would risk another shutdown. Citigroup lobbyists wrote 70 out of 85 lines of the original bill.
That’s Washington style representative democracy for you.
The swaps push-out provision requires banks to transact their swaps business in separate subsidiaries. The concept is that any bank swaps business should be done outside the bank itself, which is backed by FDIC deposit insurance and the many supports provided by the Federal Reserve.
Swaps are complex derivatives contracts requiring payments in the future that change as markets prices for stocks, bonds, oil and many other traded assets change. Thus, they create large and volatile financial obligations going back and forth between a bank and its contract “counterparty,” either a company (like AIG), a government or another bank.
Counterparties to the banks who rely on the banks’ performance of its obligations can rely on these federal supports and can assume that the government will step in if a problem occurs. This can embroil the government in any bank default making a bailout more likely, good news for bank creditors like the swap counterparties. To avoid this, the swaps push-out requires a separate corporation, not entitled to the federal supports, to create a firewall, insulating taxpayers from the riskiest trading.
Though swaps were regulated in Dodd-Frank, there were plenty of loopholes, so a great deal of that business will go forward just as before. The swaps push-out section now under threat was already watered down in the original Dodd-Frank deliberations. Nonetheless, it still provides important protection. With swaps push-out, there’s some possibility that the federal government wouldn’t be dragged into a bank default because of the bank safety net.
But members of Congress, urged on by big money from Wall Street, decided that this sensible buffer between casino-like derivatives trading and the American taxpayer was such a bad idea that it had to be discarded through surreptitious and disguised means.
The banks have been out to kill the swaps push-out from the beginning. That makes sense for them since the capital needed to back a subsidiary would cost them more than their basic capital. Banks can raise general capital cheaply since investors have learned that failure is not a concern for banks that are too-big-to-fail. Capital funding for a subsidiary that is separated from this safety net is more costly because a bail out is less likely.
The banks also got some of their customers who often enter into swaps with the banks to urge repeal. The customers complained that their swaps would cost more. Of course they would, since the bank subsidiary’s capital backing the swaps would cost more. But the customers, as contract counterparties, have been relying on the too-big-to-fail safety net. Like investors in the banks, these customers simply should not benefit from a pipeline to the American taxpayers. Any additional cost is an element of elimination of that benefit, nothing more.
In Washington, banks have been allowed to set the terms of the regulatory debate. The financial crisis provides many lessons, but one of its central was that allowing banks free reign leads to disastrous results for all Americans. Six years after the onset of the financial crisis, it’s too soon to forget that lesson and revive too-big-to-fail.
By: Wallace Turbeville, The American Prospect, December 12, 2014
“The ‘Cromnibus’ Isn’t Without An Upside”: Funding Certainty And A Better Deal Than Could Be Extracted In Next Congress
The so-called Cromnibus is an ugly piece of work. On balance, I’m glad — no, make that relieved — it passed the House.
The Cromnibus is the giant $1.1 trillion spending bill that will keep the government functioning — no, make that open — through the end of the fiscal year in September.
The nickname stems from its dual function as “continuing resolution” and “omnibus” spending bill, but I like the term for its echoes of cronut, the calorie-laden combination of croissant and doughnut. Like the cronut, the Cromnibus is stuffed with some things that aren’t necessarily good for you.
Such as a toxic change in the campaign finance laws that helps usher back the bad old days of multimillion-dollar “soft money” donations to national political parties from wealthy individuals.
Without notice, without the legislative fig leaf of debate, the Cromnibus raised the limit tenfold for individual donations to the national party committees.
With the change, an individual could contribute $1.5 million during a two-year election cycle. A married couple — call them Mr. and Mrs. Plutocrat — could contribute $3 million. That’s enough money to get the Republicans’, or Democrats’, attention. This is bipartisanship in the service of self-interest.
There is a reasonable argument against tight caps on giving to political parties in the aftermath of the Citizens United decision and other developments that enhanced the power of super PACs and even less-transparent outside groups. With the cacophony of outside voices, the parties lose control of their message and their candidates, and the voters lose the ability to know what interests are financing the elections. The playing field could use some leveling.
Yes, but there remains a difference between the corrupting influence of money that flows straight to political parties and money that goes to outside groups. There was a reason Congress, just a dozen years ago, banned unlimited soft money donations from wealthy individuals, corporations and labor unions.
With this move, what comes next? And by what undemocratic, last-minute sleight of hand?
A similar case could be made against the stealth dismantling of part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, passed in the aftermath of the 2008 economic collapse. As the White House said in not threatening to veto the spending bill, the Citigroup-authored change would “weaken a critical component of financial system reform aimed at reducing taxpayer risk.”
That provision, known as Section 716, required banks and other institutions to move certain risky financial instruments into separate entities in order to limit the exposure of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Federal Reserve — i.e., taxpayers — from having to bail the financial institutions out if the deals should go south. Banks remained able to trade in nearly all derivatives, just not the more exotic ones.
Again, there are some reasonable arguments for undoing the remaining restriction. The change doesn’t unravel Dodd-Frank’s regulation of derivative instruments. Section 716 was controversial from the start, with some bank regulators arguing it would increase systemic risk, not reduce it. The impact of the change is debatable; after all, according to FDIC Vice Chairman Tom Hoenig, who opposes undoing the provision, it would not affect 95 percent of derivatives.
Of course, changes like these should be made in the ordinary course of legislative business, not stuffed into a Cromnibus. So why would I express relief about the Cromnibus’s passage?
Because, to some extent, my reference to the ordinary course of legislative business is civics textbook hooey. In practice, it has long been true that special-interest goodies are tucked into must-pass bills. Real-world legislating requires a horrific amount of nose-holding.
The reason is simple: The imperative for horse-trading and compromising is an immutable fact of political life. And so the question, for lawmakers and the Obama administration, is not whether the measure is perfect — it’s whether the trade-offs are acceptable. This is a judgment call; reasonable people, even reasonable Democrats, can differ.
In the case of the Cromnibus, the upside is a year of funding certainty and a better deal than could be extracted in the next Congress. Democrats avoid being blamed for causing a shutdown but, post-floor fight, reap the benefit of having fired a shot across the bow of Republicans and the White House as their caucus revolted.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had a legitimate point in contending that House Democrats were being “blackmailed” to vote for the spending bill. Still, there is something worse than legislative sausage-making in Washington. That is the inability to produce any sausage at all.
By: Ruth Marcus, Columnist, The Washington Post, December 12, 2014
“More Silliness And Hysteria”: Gripes About Excessive Regulations And Taxes Often Are Baseless
In the last couple of months we have seen the country whipped up into near hysteria over the virtually nonexistent threat of Ebola.
While the only people who contracted the disease in this country were those who treated a man who died of the disease, tens of millions of people became convinced they were in danger on airplanes and public buses and even routine visits to the supermarket.
Politicians have sought to exploit the same sort of fears with their rants about regulations and high taxes sinking the economy. These complaints have as much foundation in reality as the Ebola threat.
The regulation screed usually focuses on the number of pages in bills like the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. While lengthy bills are unfortunate from the standpoint of the trees cut down for the paper, the length bears no relationship to the amount of regulation.
To take one example, the Volcker Rule, which prohibits banks with government insured deposits from engaging in risky speculation, ended up more than three times its original length as the industry carved out an array of exceptions. The greater length was associated with less regulation, not more.
Dodd-Frank was about curbing the sorts of abuses that gave us the financial crisis. Is the argument that we need corrupt banks to foster growth?
The screams over the ACA are equally misguided. The rules have little impact on large firms, the vast majority of whom already offered insurance that met ACA requirements. It might have been expected to affect mid-sized firms that did not previously offer insurance, but none of the complainers has yet presented any evidence that these mid-sized firms have been especially hard hit in the last few years.
The tax complaints require some serious amnesia. Tax rates were higher for most people in the 1990s when we saw the strongest growth in almost three decades. We then lowered taxes in 2001 and saw a weak recovery followed by the collapse in 2008.
The explanation for the continuing weakness is not a surprise to those of us who warned of the housing bubble before the crisis. The bubble had been driving the economy both directly through its impact on construction and indirectly through the impact that $8 trillion of housing bubble wealth had on consumption. When the bubble burst, the economy lost its driving force.
The building boom of the bubble years lead to enormous overbuilding of housing. When the bubble burst, construction didn’t just fall back to normal. It fell to the lowest levels in 50 years, costing the economy more than four percentage points of GDP, amounting to $700 billion annually in lost demand. The loss of housing wealth meant that consumption fell back to more normal levels.
While both housing and construction are up from their low-points in the recession, they are not going to return to bubble peaks, at least not without another bubble. This means that the economy continues to have a huge shortfall in demand. Cutting taxes and reducing regulation will not magically fill this gap in demand.
There are essentially two ways to increase demand. One is directly through more government spending. This is currently taboo in Washington since we are all supposed to hate budget deficits.
The other is by reducing the trade deficit. The way to reduce the trade deficit is to make U.S. goods more competitive with a lower-valued dollar. Talk of a lower dollar is also taboo in political circles.
In short, it is not difficult to find ways to boost the economy; the problem is that politics prevents them from being discussed. Instead we get silliness about taxes and regulation.
By: Dean Baker, Co-Founder of the Center for Economic Policy and Research; The National Memo, November 20, 2014
“Will The Voters Listen?”: The Tape Doesn’t Lie; Mitch McConnell Is Serious About Another Shutdown
One week ago, when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) gave an interview vowing that a Republican Senate majority would attach partisan riders to spending bills in an effort to blackmail President Obama into rolling back his agenda — a tactic that would almost certainly lead to another government shutdown — his campaign tried to walk back his remarks.
“Evidently Alison Lundergan Grimes’ interpretation of how the U.S. Senate works is that senators must rubber-stamp President Obama’s agenda or the government shuts down,” McConnell spokeswoman Allison Moore said in response to the Democratic candidate’s critique of McConnell’s strategy. “Unlike Grimes’ commitment to the Obama agenda, Senator McConnell will fight for Kentucky priorities whether the president is interested in them or not.”
But new audio obtained by The Nation confirms that McConnell meant exactly what he said. In a June 15 speech to a Republican donor conference led by Charles and David Koch, McConnell was secretly recorded laying out largely the same case that he pitched to Politico last week:
So in the House and Senate, we own the budget. So what does that mean? That means that we can pass the spending bill. And I assure you that in the spending bill, we will be pushing back against this bureaucracy by doing what’s called placing riders in the bill. No money can be spent to do this or to do that. We’re going to go after them on health care, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board (inaudible). All across the federal government, we’re going to go after it.
To be clear: If Republicans load must-pass appropriations bills with riders to undo the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, or any other key Democratic achievements, President Obama will veto them. Unless Republicans relent, the government will shut down. McConnell’s campaign (and some impartial observers like Bloomberg View columnist Jonathan Bernstein) may claim that that isn’t the minority leader’s intent, but without the shutdown threat, Republicans would have no leverage to “go after” the Democratic agenda.
McConnell had plenty else to say at the Koch gathering (for example, he remarked that “the worst day of my political life was when President George W. Bush signed McCain-Feingold into law,” suggesting that campaign finance reform outranks 9/11 on his list of disasters). But the promise of more congressional brinksmanship will likely prove to be the key takeaway, given the obvious political implications.
Nobody should be surprised that McConnell is eager to escalate a confrontation with the White House. After all, he’s far from the only Republican to promise it. Earlier this week, Marco Rubio made similar remarks with regard to immigration. Over in the House, startlingly influential Rep. Steve King (R-IA) did the same.
Republicans are being quite honest about what the GOP would do with control of Congress. At this point, the only question is whether voters will listen.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, August 27, 2014
“Keeping Regulation At Bay”: One More Step Toward The Next Meltdown
The delaying tactics we told you about nearly two years ago have worked beautifully. The bailout worked (if not for homeowners, at least for the banks). It worked so well that the underlying problems that led to the financial crisis have remained largely ignored.
The regulations that have been written (and continue to languish during their extended comment period) are on their way to being eliminated or weakened yet again by Congress. The House helped out this week by passing a bill (HR 4413) that ensures that if any regulations do get approved, they will be difficult to enforce.
As we reported back in 2012, JPMorgan Chase in London managed to avoid examination and enforcement by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission simply by labeling their massive speculation in credit default swaps as “portfolio hedging.” It was a loophole big enough for a whale to swim through.
Another loophole made enormous by HR 4413 is the cutoff separating “end users” from “swap dealers.” In the CFTC draft regulations written after Dodd-Frank initiated oversight on the swap business, any market player with more than $100 million in swaps per year was considered a dealer, and subject to stricter oversight and capital requirements.
After the industry complained, the CFTC agreed to delay that stronger oversight for two years and put in a temporary $8 billion cap that was due to drop to $100 million later this year. The bill that passed the House makes that $8 billion cap permanent. Now any firm that wants to do $100 billion in business without regulation has the option to create 13 separate companies.
From the point of view of the people who profit from the lack of regulation, streamlining the lack of oversight is financially sound. After all, real estate values in waterfront Greenwich estates, the Hamptons, and even Park Avenue will likely suffer if bankers and hedge fund managers make less money.
For those who trade in opaque markets, profits are maximized when some participants have information that their customers and competitors don’t have. An open market with published prices and capital reserves would limit profits and return on equity. Complying with regulations and keeping records available for supervisory review costs money. It all cuts into profits.
And if profits get squeezed by an overbearing, overregulating government, how can a valuable part of our capital markets survive? It’s not cheap, after all, to employ the people needed to execute this business that virtually no one understands and that the government doesn’t want to regulate.
Remember when AIG Financial Products blew up? Even though there were traders, accountants, clerks, lawyers and others from Lehman who found themselves jobless, the Treasury Department decided to pay more than a million dollars in bonus payments to each of the valuable AIG employees that had bet so big, and so badly.
Thankfully, the lobbyists hired by the industry have figured out how to keep the business profitable, and how to turn the task of complying with new regulations into a potential new profit center. They helped incorporate a brilliant strategy into HR 4413, and got 265 members of the House to vote for it.
The CFTC will be required to create and publish cost-benefit studies prior to adopting new compliance policies, and those studies will be subject to judicial review. That will take some time. After the CFTC rules go into effect, market participants will be free to argue that the cost estimates were inaccurate. Because the studies are subject to judicial review, the companies being regulated can theoretically get the government to pay them for any additional costs they incur when complying. With a little creative accounting, maybe the swap dealers will turn a profit on compliance departments.
While the delaying tactics written into the bill keep regulation at bay, trading in credit default swaps will continue as it has, with the risks it has, here and abroad. Over half of the hundreds of trillions of dollars in swaps on the books of our banks belong to foreign subsidiaries. A condition of the new bill requires the CFTC and the SEC to certify that derivatives regulations are not already in place in those foreign jurisdictions before they become subject to the new “regulations.” All a bank or hedge fund needs to do is dispute the nature of existing derivatives regulations in their legal places of business overseas, and any oversight can come to a grinding halt while they all work it out. In the meantime, they can enter into lots of credit default swap contracts.
Perhaps the most brilliant part of HR 4413 is hidden in the budget. The congressionally mandated increased workload has no accompanying increase in the commission’s budget. It won’t be easy to run thousands of legal and economic analyses without the people to do it or the money to hire them.
Speaking of people, the bill passed in the House also peculiarly reinvents the org chart. Key regulatory and enforcement personnel currently report directly to the commissioner of the CFTC, but under the new law, those people would instead report to five different members of the commission. Hiring, firing, and departmental budgeting will be decided by all five members together.
Have you ever reported to five bosses at the same time? I did, for about a year, and it’s nearly impossible to get anything done.
By the way, in case you thought our government didn’t have a sense of humor, Congress tells us we can call HR 4413 the “Customer Protection and End User Relief Act.”
Correction: The “hundreds of trillions of dollars” figure cited in the 12th paragraph refers to all swaps, not just credit default swaps as this post originally stated.
By: Howard Hill, Former Investment Banker, The National Memo, June 27, 2014
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