William Isaac Announcements: December 23, 2021

From William Isaac’s email campaign and website:

December 23, 2021

Alex Pollock and Ed Pinto, two long-time friends of mine, who are THE leading experts on government housing programs, have written an important article on the past, present and future of government housing programs. I encourage you to read their new article on my website.

• Federal Housing Regulators Have Learned and Forgotten Everything by Alex J. Pollock and Edward J. Pinto

The full article can be found at williamisaac.com. Be safe and be well.

No, the United States Has Not Always Paid Its Debts

Published in Reason:

In 1934, Roosevelt officially devalued the dollar by increasing the price of gold from $20.67 to $35. Although contemporary press accounts characterized the government's actions as an abrogation (see the Wall Street Journal on May 4, 1933), Treasury securities issued in June and August 1933 were oversubscribed and a February 1935 Supreme Court decision upheld the government's actions. While these actions are generally portrayed today as an attempt to halt gold hoarding or end price deflation, they also appear to have had a fiscal motivation. In fiscal year 1933, the ratio of interest expense to federal revenues reached 33.15 percent, the only time this ratio has exceeded 30 percent since the post-Civil War era. The Roosevelt administration needed more funds to implement New Deal programs and wanted the flexibility to issue new Treasury securities unimpeded by gold convertibility.

Biden Pick for Bank Regulator Proposed Fed Take Over Banking, Manipulate Stock Prices

Published in the Epoch Times:

“If you have all of the deposits in the government bank, then all of the loans, or at least a very high percentage of the loans, are going to be there as well,” said Alex Pollock, former head of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago and financial research executive at the Treasury who is currently a senior fellow at the classical liberal Mises Institute.

Controlling credit means the Fed—and de facto the federal government—would have a say in most major individual economic decisions, such as what factory or office tower gets built, who gets to build or buy a home, and even who gets to go to college or buy a car.
“If you’re politically correct, well, then you can get a loan; if you’re not, you can’t,” Pollock told The Epoch Times about the implications.

...

“She wants government to control the allocation of capital in the economy, which is a recipe for politicizing everything,” said David Burton, financial regulation expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Pollock concurred: “It would become purely political.”

...

It isn’t clear what such price signals would be worth when the investors would be limited to options predetermined by the NIA, Pollock noted.

In fact, it isn’t clear how the Fed would determine what is or isn’t productive in a system in which credit flows are largely determined by the government. The ordinarily robust private credit to serve as a frame of reference would be largely absent and so the Fed would have to fall back on its own judgment.

“Nobody, especially a government bureaucracy, can know enough to do this,” Pollock commented in an email. “It is a totally naïve and, in fact, silly idea.”

At times, Omarova contrasted “productive” investment with speculative investment, which she called “misallocation of capital.”

But speculation “can be destabilizing or stabilizing,” Pollock said. Suppressing it by government mandate doesn’t necessarily heal the monetary woes. In fact, the current practice of the Fed buying up securities seen as safe, like government bonds and mortgage-backed securities, depresses yields on such instruments and pushes investors toward riskier assets, he said.

....

Pollock estimated that such an all-powerful Fed “would go on inflating the money supply by lending to the government itself (monetizing government debt) and to politically favored entities of all sorts.”

...

According to Pollock and several other economists, there are a number of problems with this view.

Let Me Vote Those Shares for You

Published in the Federalist Society.

BlackRock’s idea to give institutional clients more control over how shares of stock are voted could be a good step. Some, such as Alex Pollock, say that it is still a ladder with the first rung above the head of most investors.

The fundamental idea of owning stock in a corporation is that shareholders acquire, along with their investment, ownership rights in the company, including the right to vote on company questions commensurate with their investment. These questions can include composition of the board of directors, compensation for company executives, company auditors, and company investment and disclosure policies, among others.

As Alex Pollock notes in an October 13 letter to the editor of the Financial Times, BlackRock acknowledges, “The money we manage is not our own, it belongs to our clients.” Hence, BlackRock’s new policy idea.

. . .

BlackRock hopes to relieve some of that pressure by passing it on to investment funds that place their clients’ money with BlackRock. As Alex Pollock explains in his Financial Times letter, however, “BlackRock is handing zero voting power to the real owners of the shares which it manages as agent.” It is making it easier for others—the fund managers of your investments—to vote your shares, but they do not own your shares. You do, and the BlackRock proposal does not reach to you to learn what you think.

Your broker-dealer cannot vote your shares. In many cases, though, the managers of funds through which you own stock can. They can use your investments to vote as if they were their investments. That can give them a lot of financial and, increasingly, political clout. With your money, they can pursue their agenda, not yours.

Alex Pollock recommends in his letter that “All investment agents, both broker-dealers and asset managers alike, should have the same requirements: no voting of shares by the agents without instructions from the principals.” “From the principals” means from you, the shareholder. That is the requirement for broker-dealers. Why should it not apply to the fund managers who, without your money, would have nothing but their own?

More on the Vision of Biden’s Pick to Regulate the Nation’s Banks

Published by the Cato Institute:

Now, Alex Pollock, the former deputy director of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research, has taken a careful look at some of Omarova’s other writings. Some of the work will seem quite familiar, but most of it exposes ideas that are even more fundamentally opposed to a free enterprise system and the American system of government.

No More Debt Ceiling Increases: Let the Federal Government Default

Published in Real Clear Markets:

In the meantime, the Democratic Party and the media will predictably continue to scream, “The United States has never defaulted on its debt!” As ‘The Hill’ recently pointed out, this isn’t true, but nonetheless we’ll be told that if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling the world will end.

At AEI, a Monetary Panel Expressed Pessimism About Inflation

Published in Real Clear Markets.

“While their conjectures are as speculative as any vulnerability identified in an official financial stability report, unlike official financial stability reports, they have the freedom to identify government policies and regulatory shortcomings as vulnerabilities,” Kupiec said.

The first panelist to speak was Alex Pollock, distinguished senior fellow at R Street Institute, a free market think tank in Washington, DC. Pollock mentioned several possible causes of the next financial crisis, including errors in judgment by the world’s central banks, a housing-market collapse, a future pandemic, or war. He cautioned that a crisis could be caused by a factor that “nobody sees coming,” which would inevitably hamper state response.

“If the next crisis is again triggered by what we don’t see, the government reaction will again be flying by the seat of their pants, making it up as they go along,” Pollock said.

Read the rest here.

A Public Letter of Concern about the Federal Reserve

Published in National Review.

This is not a partisan issue. Our objections would be equally strong if the Fed involved itself in industrial policy or national security. All Americans benefit from a central bank devoted to effective monetary and regulatory policy. The Fed should refocus on its core missions.

…

Alex J. Pollock — Former Principal Deputy Director, Office of Financial Research

United States Department of the Treasury; Distinguished Senior Fellow, R Street Institute

Read the rest here.

Inflation pain allegedly caused by Biden’s spending demands transparency, Republican says

Published in Fox Business.

But Alex Pollock, a distinguished senior fellow for finance, insurance and trade at the libertarian R Street Institute, told FOX Business that despite the other factors, he “certainly” thinks the president’s policies are playing a large role in the current inflation.

Pollock said the biggest contributor is massive government spending that’s financed by monetizing the debt. And the inflation, Pollock emphasized, is reducing Americans’ “real wages” and cutting the value of their savings.

Read the rest here.

Financial pain in the behemoth assets

Published in The Australian:

“Are banks too big to fail? Of course they are, as much as ever and probably even more so,” says Alex Pollock, who was deputy director of financial research at the US Treasury until February.

...

The US Federal Reserve banks have become the biggest player in the commercial banking system. “They are now huge home lenders; their $US2.2 trillion of mortgage loans is bigger on an inflation-adjusted basis than the entire savings and loans industry before its collapse in the 1980s,” Pollock says.

Governments and regulators quite like a big, concentrated financial system, which explains why little real reform was achieved in the wake of the financial crisis. What did happen was a huge increase in complexity that benefits large incumbents and regulators themselves. Regulators can “manage the system” more easily and treasurers can enjoy lower interest rates. And activist central banks can ensure governments enjoy much lower borrowing costs than otherwise.

“Banking everywhere has been, is and will be a deal between bankers and politicians,” Pollock says.

What Drove Five Decades of Big Changes in Banking?

Published by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

A new post authored by Alex J. Pollock, Hashim Hamandi, and Ruth Leung (2021) on the Office of Financial Research (OFR) website helps answer that question, and it focuses specifically on the changes in U.S. banking that occurred from 1970 to 2020. The analysis includes chartered state and national banks, other depository institutions, and some specialized banking intermediaries, such as the 12 Federal Reserve Banks, and what the authors label the government mortgage complex, which consists of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae. It also considers subgroups of banks—in particular, the ten largest commercial banking enterprises.

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Much of this is well known. What is less understood is how the expansion in the generosity of deposit insurance has fueled real estate lending by deposit-financed intermediaries. A typical U.S. bank today has about three-quarters of its lending devoted to real estate loans of some kind. As observed by Pollock (2019), “We still use the term ‘commercial banks,’ but a more accurate title for their current business would be ‘real estate banks.’” This is a far cry from the prohibition on real estate lending for national banks prior to 1913. How does increased deposit insurance generosity affect banks’ mortgage lending?

…

Alex J. Pollock (2019), “Bigger, Fewer, Riskier: The Evolution of U.S. Banking since 1950,” The American Interest , February 25.

Alex J. Pollock. Hashim Hamandi, Ruth Leung (2021). “Fifty-Year Changes in the Banking Credit System, 1970-2020.” Post, Office of Financial Research.

In Memoriam: George Kaufman, PhD

Published in Loyola University Chicago.

At a retirement dinner held following the conference, banking leader Alex J. Pollock gave a speech about Kaufman and his contributions to the field entitled “57 Years of Banking Changes and Ideas.” He ended his remarks: “Let us raise our glasses to George Kaufman and 57 years of achievement, acute insights, scholarly contributions, policy guidance and professional leadership, all accompanied by a lively wit. To George!” Read Pollock’s entire speech→

Are Remote Workers More Productive? We Finally Have the Answer

Published in FOND.

Productivity is typically measured by an individual’s output vs. input over a period of time. One example of this is gross domestic product (GDP) per worker, which measures output by person over the course of a year. However, the ways in which we measure productivity today are much more complex.

The New Campus Housing Bubble

Published in Forbes, The Independent Institute, Ohio University College of Arts & Sciences Forum, and Catalyst.

My good friend, banker-scholar Alex Pollock of the R Street Institute, has shared with me some startling new data. High priced, comparatively luxury college student housing has been popular, and in this century lots of apartment complexes have been built with many amenities —granite or marble counter-tops, fancy swimming pools or saunas, etc. With unemployment rates below four percent and  low overall real estate delinquency since recovering from the traumas of a decade or more ago, this sector should be booming. But according to a story published by Wolf Street (Wolf Richter), delinquencies are rising dramatically.

Taxpayers are the GSEs’ true stockholders

Published by the American Enterprise Institute and National Mortgage News.

At a conservative 16 basis points per year, taxpayers would earn some $7 billion annually after taxes, according to one estimate.

Crypto mining and buying under threat from US Congress?

Published in Crypto Disrupt.

Many of the committee members warned that having such a central system could amplify the risk of bank runs with several major institutions already recoiling against the idea. A senior person at the R Street Institute, Alex Pollock, slammed the idea of CBDC at the hearing on Wednesday when he said it is “a terrible idea – one of the worst financial ideas of recent times.”

The Parallel Democratic Dilemmas of the Court and the Fed

Published by Law & Liberty.

As a result, critics like Alex Pollock have argued: “When a crisis hits, their own interventions usually, if not typically, create the conditions for future crises.” One interesting result of comparing the Supreme Court to the Fed is to wonder whether this criticism should apply to the Court as well. That is, one might question the institutional capacity of the Court to predict the long-term constitutional needs of the republic and use their discretion to update the law accordingly.

Too big to fail or bail

From Peacefare:

On June 4 the American Enterprise Institute hosted a panel discussion titled “Europe’s Populist and Brexit Economic Challenge” moderated by Alex J. Pollock of the R Street Institute and featuring Lorenzi Forni (Prometeia Associazione), Vitor Gaspar (International Monetary Fund), Desmond Lachman (AEI) and Athanasios Orphanides (MIT). The panel discussion was centered around Italy’s rising populism and economic woes, with a short discussion about the possibility of a no-deal Brexit causing damage to the European economy.

PRO: Taxpayers shouldn’t get stuck with a $1.5 trillion loan default tab

From Richmond Times-Dispatch, Austin American-Statesman, Chicago Tribune, and The Guam Daily Post.

As the noted financial scholar Alex J. Pollock, former president and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago, suggests: Make the schools pay 20% of the debt obligations of former students facing loan delinquency or default.

Treasury’s Phillips Says GSEs Have Paid Back Taxpayers

Published in Seeking Alpha.

In the video above he’s responding to a question from Alex Pollock, who put together an article on the 10% moment. The theory behind the 10% moment is to ignore the accounting fraud and the net worth sweep and to calculate the cash ROI on taxpayer dollars invested into Fannie and Freddie. Alex suggests that the current cash on cash ROI is 11.5%. His logic is that because this exceeds the original 10%, the government can say it’s been paid back. Craig Phillips calls Alex his hero for coming up with this concept and says that taxpayers have been paid back.