Applying Volcker's Lessons

Published in Law & Liberty:

The year 2022 has certainly been a tough one for the Federal Reserve. The Fed missed the emergence of the runaway inflation it helped create and continued for far too long to pump up the housing bubble and other asset price inflation. It manipulated short- and long-term interest rates, keeping them too low for too long. Now, confronted with obviously unacceptable inflation, it is belatedly correcting its mistake, a necessity that is already imposing a lot of financial pain. 

Sharing the pain of millions of investors who bought assets at the bloated prices of the Everything Bubble, the Fed now has a giant mark-to-market loss on its own investments—this fair value loss is currently about $1 trillion, by my estimation. It is also facing imminent operating losses in its own profit and loss statement, as it is forced to finance fixed-rate investments with more and more expensive floating rate liabilities, just like the 1980s savings and loans of Paul Volcker’s days as Fed Chairman.

In short, the Fed, along with other members of the international central banking club, sowed the wind and is now reaping the whirlwind. Comparing the current situation with the travails of the Volcker years grows ever more essential.

Samuel Gregg, Alexander Salter, and Andrew Stuttaford have provided highly informed observations about the past and present, and offer provocative recommendations for the future of the “incredibly powerful” (as Gregg says) Federal Reserve—the purveyor of paper money not only to the United States, but also to the dollar-dominated world financial system. 

Stuttaford considers the issue of “Restoring the Fed’s Credibility?” with a highly appropriate question mark included. He points out that Volcker did achieve such a restoration of credibility and ended up bestriding “the [wide] world like a colossus,” although, we must remember, not without a lot of conflict, doubt, and personal attacks on him along the way.

But is it good for the Fed to have too much credibility? Is it good for people to believe that the Fed always knows what it is doing, when in fact it doesn’t—when it manifestly does not and cannot know how to “manage the economy” or what longer-run effects its actions will have and when? Is it good for financial actors to believe in the “Greenspan Put,” having faith that the Fed will always take over the risk and bail out big financial market mistakes? It strikes me that it would be better for people not to believe such things—for the Fed not to have at least that kind of “credibility.”

Stuttaford elegantly and correctly, as it seems to me, suggests that “the price of a fiat currency is—or more accurately, ought to be—eternal vigilance against inflation.” Such eternal vigilance requires that we should never simply trust in the Fed and poses the central question of who is to exercise the eternal vigilance.

It is often argued, especially by economists and central bankers, that central banks should be “independent,” thus presumably practicing by themselves the vigilance against inflation, making them something like economic philosopher-kings. Indeed, inside most macro-economists and central bankers there is a philosopher-king trying to get out. But the theory of philosopher-kings does not fit well with the theory of the American constitutional republic.

Those who support central bank independence always argue that elected politicians are permanently eager for cheap loans and printing up money to give to their constituents, so can be depended on to induce high inflation and cannot be trusted with monetary power. But if the central bank also cannot be trusted, what then? Suppose the central bank purely on its own commits itself to perpetual inflation—as the Fed has! Should that be binding on the country? I would say No. The U.S. Constitution clearly assigns to the Congress, to the elected representatives, to the politicians, the power “to coin money [and] regulate the value thereof.”

We are left wondering, as always, who will guard the guardians. There has been no easy answer to that question since Juvenal posed it to the ancient Romans.

Salter suggests we should follow this constitutional logic. “The Fed should have a single mandate,” he recommends, that of price stability, and “Congress should pick a concrete inflation target.” The Fed wouldn’t get to set its own target: “Since the Fed can’t make credible commitments with a self-adopted rule, the target’s content and enforcement must be the prerogative of the legislature, not the central bank.” In sum, “As long as we’re stuck with a central bank, we should give it an unambiguous mandate and watch it like a hawk. Monetary policymakers answer to the people’s representatives, in Congress assembled.” 

Along similar lines, I have previously recommended that Congress should form a Joint Committee on the Federal Reserve to become highly knowledgeable about and to oversee the Fed in a way the present Banking committees are not and cannot. I argued:

“The money question,” as fiery historical debates called it, profoundly affects everything else and can put everything else at risk. It is far too critical to be left to a governmental fiefdom of alleged philosopher-kings. Let us hope Congress can achieve a truly accountable Fed.

This still seems right to me. As I picture it, however, neither the Federal Reserve nor the Congress by itself would set an inflation target. Rather, on the original “inflation target” model as invented in New Zealand, the target would be a formal agreement between the central bank and the elected representatives. New Zealand’s original target was a range of zero to 2% inflation—a much better target than the Fed’s 2% forever. Since an enterprising, innovative economy naturally produces falling prices through productivity, we should provide for the possibility of such “good deflation.” Hence my suggested inflation target is a range of -1% to 1%, on average about the same target Alan Greenspan suggested when he was the Fed Chairman, of “Zero, properly measured.”

In his insightful history of the Fed, Bernard Shull considered how the Fed is functionally a “fourth branch” of the U.S. government. The idea is to put this additional branch and the Congress into an effective checks-and-balances relationship.

Among other things, this might improve the admission of mistakes and failures by the Fed, and thus improve learning. As Gregg observes, “Admitting mistakes is never something that policymakers are especially interested in doing, not least because it raises questions about who should be held accountable for errors.” And “central bankers do not believe that now is the time for engaging in retrospectives about where they made errors.” Of course they don’t.  But are you more or less credible if you never admit to making the mistakes you so obviously made?

Gregg is skeptical of the ability to control central banks by defined mandates, since we are always faced with “the ability of very smart people to find creative ways around the strictest laws (especially during crises).” The politicians, he points out, often want the central banks to use creative rationales for stretching and expanding their limits, and this is especially true during crises. As a striking example, “the European Central Bank has engaged in several bailouts of insolvent states and operated as a de facto transfer union.” But “governments…say as little as possible about such ECB interventions (and never question their legality),” and this “has everything to do with European governments wanting the ECB to engage in such activities.”

We are left wondering, as always, who will guard the guardians. There has been no easy answer to that question since Juvenal posed it to the ancient Romans.

Another Roman, Velleius Paterculus, expressed another fundamental central banking problem: “The most common beginning of disaster was a sense of security.” It is most dangerous when the public and the central bankers become convinced of the permanent success of the latest central banking fashion, especially, as Volcker pointed out in his autobiography, if that involves accommodating ever-increasing inflation.

We can conclude our review by stressing that the price of having fiat money is indeed eternal vigilance against inflation. But we don’t know very well how to carry out that vigilance and we can’t count on a new Volcker appearing in time to prevent the problems, or belatedly to address them, or appearing at all.

The government is not only spending trillions — it’s losing trillions

Published in The Hill with Paul Kupiec. Also in RealClear Markets.

Lately, no matter if the federal government is spending taxpayer dollars or losing them, it doesn’t mess around with small change.  

The government allocated $4.6 trillion just in COVID relief spending, tens of billions of which have been siphoned off by fraud. And when it comes to losing taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars, we’ve calculated that losses tallied at the Federal Reserve and Department of Education together will top $2 trillion. No telling how much it will cost when the government losses accumulate on the $370 billion green energy loan and loan guarantee programs included in the Inflation Reduction Act, but if Obama-era green energy loan guarantee costs are any guide, they will be large. 

Let’s start with Fed. By the end of May of this year, we estimated that the Fed’s mark-to-market loss on its huge portfolio of Treasury bonds and mortgage securities had grown to the staggering sum of $540 billion. The Fed’s losses have continued to build and today are, we now estimate, quickly approaching $1 trillion. Thus the Fed’s investing losses match the estimated loss the Department of Education is about to foist on U.S. taxpayers should President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan survive legal challenges.

The government spends trillions of taxpayer dollars here and loses trillions more there, but it hardly seems to make the news. Congress has passed so many new giant spending bills in the past three years, much of it financed on the Fed’s balance sheet, that the public has become desensitized to the magnitude of the taxpayer dollars involved. 

Consider this: One million seconds is about 11.5 days; a billion seconds is about 32 years; a trillion seconds is 32,000 years!

In the footnotes of the Fed’s recently released financial statement of the combined Federal Reserve Banks for the second quarter of 2022, you can find this startling disclosure: The mark-to-market loss on the Fed’s system open market account portfolio on June 30 reached $720 billion, $180 billion more than our end-of-May estimate.

Since June 30, interest rates have continued rising and the market value of the Fed’s massive investment portfolio has shrunk even more. Using the interest rate sensitivity that the market value of the Fed’s portfolio displayed over the first six months of 2022, we estimate that the market value loss since June 30 has increased by $275 billion, bringing the Fed’s total investment portfolio mark-to-market loss to about $995 billion, which is 17 times the Federal Reserve System total capital. 

If interest rates continue to rise, as we expect they will, Fed market value losses will easily exceed $1 trillion. The irony, of course, is that the Fed was buying heavily to build its $8.8 trillion portfolio at top-of-the-market prices the Fed itself created with its extended near zero-interest rate monetary policy. In addition, the Fed is moving toward generating large operating losses, even if it never sells any of its underwater bonds and mortgage securities, because it must finance its long-term fixed rate assets with floating rate liabilities at ever-higher interest rates. The federal budget deficit will be bigger still, and possibly for a very long time because it will be short the billions of dollars of revenue the Treasury has been receiving from the Federal Reserve System’s remitted profits.

In the very same eventful quarter that Fed losses reached almost $1 trillion, President Biden issued an executive order (of dubious legality) that ordered the government to fully forgive, at taxpayer expense, hundreds of billions of dollars of defaulted student loans it had made, and to partially forgive over time billions more in unpaid student loan balances at taxpayer expense. Estimates of the cost to the taxpayer of writing off these loans run up to $1 trillion. 

Considered as a lending program, as it was enacted to be, the federal student loan program is nothing if not an utter and egregious failure. The loss is especially ironic since a decade ago it was claimed that student loans would be a big source of profits for the government and help to offset the cost of Obamacare subsidies.

According to a Congressional Budget Office report in March 2010, the federal government takeover of the student loan program would save $68 billion. These savings, it was claimed, would provide funding for an additional $39 billion of grants and make available the remainder to theoretically pay for Obamacare subsidies. A dozen years after the CBO produced this wildly overoptimistic estimate, the federal government student loan program is costing taxpayers $1 trillion, not generating $68 billion in additional revenues.

Considering the federal government’s propensity for producing unreliable forecasts, simultaneously authorizing trillions in new spending, and losing trillions of taxpayer dollars in off-budget government loans and investments, it certainly makes one doubt the acumen of the federal government as a financial manager.

The Fed’s Mark to Market Loss Approaches $1 trillion, while the write-off of student loans hits $420 billion

Published in the Federalist Society:

In May of this year, Paul Kupiec and I estimated that the Federal Reserve’s mark to market loss on its unprecedented portfolio of Treasury bonds and mortgage securities had grown to the staggering amount of $540 billion. Now we have the Fed’s official numbers for the end of June, which by then, it turns out, were much worse than that.

Down in the footnotes of the recently released financial statements of the combined Federal Reserve Banks for the second quarter of 2022, we find this startling disclosure: the mark to market loss on June 30 had increased to $720 billion. That’s a number to get your attention, even in these days of counting in billions, especially when compared to the Fed’s reported total capital on the same date of only $42 billion. The Fed’s mark to market or economic loss at the end of the second quarter was thus 17 times its total capital, making it deeply insolvent on a mark to market basis. (Woe to any bank supervised by the Fed which gets itself in the same situation! Oh yes, we know the Fed will earnestly insist that it is different, but that doesn’t change the fact of the market value losses.)

Since the reporting date at the end of June, interest rates have gone higher, the market value of the Fed’s massive investment portfolio has shrunk even more, and the mark to market loss has gotten even more huge. Using the price sensitivity the Fed’s portfolio displayed in the first six months of 2022, we estimate that the market value loss has during the third quarter increased by $275 billion, bringing it to about $995 billion.

The loss is $995 billion now, we guess, but if interest rates rise further toward more normal levels from their previously suppressed lows, the Fed’s mark to market loss will easily reach and exceed $1 trillion. The irony of course is that the Fed was buying heavily to build its $8.8 trillion portfolio at a market top created by its own actions. In addition, the Fed is moving toward generating operating losses, even if it never sells any of its underwater bonds and mortgage securities, because it must finance its long-term fixed rate assets with floating rate liabilities at ever-higher interest rates. These operating losses will mean the federal budget deficit will be bigger since it will lack the normal contributions from Fed profits, possibly for a long time.

In the very same eventful quarter, President Biden ordered (with dubious legality) the government not to even try to collect on hundreds of billions of dollars of defaulted student loans it had made and instead to write them off. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost to the budget of writing off these bad debts to be $420 billion. One must conclude that, considered as a lending program, as it was enacted to be, the federal student loan program is an utter and egregious failure. It has its own deep irony, since a decade ago the CBO claimed the program would be a big source of profits to the government.

Consider these two losses together—one in the Fed’s investing and one in making government student loans. It certainly makes one doubt the acumen of the federal government as a financial manager.

Federal Reserve Operating Losses and the Federal Budget Deficit

Published in AIER and RealClear Markets by Alex J. Pollock Paul H. Kupiec.

The Federal Reserve remits most of its operating profits to the US Treasury. Federal Reserve remittances are government revenues that directly reduce the federal budget deficit. But what is the budgetary impact of Federal Reserve System losses? The Federal Reserve System has not had an operating loss since 1915, so history provides no guidance as to how these losses will impact the official federal government deficit.

In 2023, the Fed will likely report tens of billions of dollars in operating losses as it raises interest rates to combat raging inflation. Will Fed losses increase the budget deficit as logic dictates they should, or will they be treated as an off-budget expenditure? Given the “transparency” of federal budgetary accounting standards, it is not surprising that a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report suggests Federal Reserve operating losses will be excluded when tallying the official federal budget deficit.

The Federal Reserve earns interest on its portfolio of Treasury and federal government agency securities and receives revenues for the payments system services it provides.  Offsetting Fed revenues are the interest the Fed pays on bank reserve balances and reverse repurchase agreements, dividend payments to Fed member banks, contributions (if any) to the Fed surplus account, and the operating expenses of the Board of Governors, the 12 Federal Reserve district banks and their branches. Since 2012,  expenses also include the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Any remaining earnings are transferred to the US Treasury and counted as federal government receipts for federal budget purposes. 

The annual amount of Federal Reserve operating income remitted to the Treasury since 2001 is plotted in Figure 1. Also shown are estimates of the reductions in the reported federal deficits attributable to the remittances. (The Fed reports remittances on a calendar-year basis, while the federal deficit is calculated for a fiscal year ending September 30. The deficit reduction estimates in Figure 1 do not correct for this timing difference.)

Source: Various US Treasury monthly statements, Federal Reserve Annual Board Reports, and the authors’ calculations

In crisis years (2009-2011, 2020-2021) the federal budget deficit is bloated by congressionally appropriated stimulus outlays and reduced tax receipts. In these years, even very large Fed remittances offset only a fraction of the combined federal budget deficit. In years unburdened by massive federal stimulus expenditures, however, Fed remittances offset a substantial portion of the reported deficit.

By the FOMC’s own estimates, short-term policy interest rates will approach 3.5 percent by year-end 2022. As the Fed raises short term interest rates to fight inflation, its interest expense increases. The Fed’s interest expenses and operating expenditures, including about $630 million per year in off-budget funding it is required to provide to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will soon exceed its revenues.

Our back-of-the envelope estimates suggest that the Federal Reserve will begin reporting net operating losses once short-term interest rates reach 2.7 percent, assuming the Fed has no realized losses from selling its SOMA securities. If short-term rates reach 4 percent, our estimates suggest that annualized operating losses could exceed $62 billion. As discussed below, these loss estimates are consistent with the Fed Board of Governors’ own public estimates. 

In 2011, the Federal Reserve announced its official position regarding realized losses on its investment portfolio and system operating losses:

[I]n the unlikely [sic] scenario in which realized losses were sufficiently large enough to result in an overall net income loss for the Reserve Banks, the Federal Reserve would still meet its financial obligations to cover operating expenses. In that case, remittances to the Treasury would be suspended and a deferred asset would be recorded on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.

Among financial institutions, the Fed has the unique privilege of setting its own accounting standards, and the Fed has decided that, unlike for all its regulated banks, operating losses will not reduce the Federal Reserve’s reported capital and surplus. The Fed will maintain a positive reserve surplus account in the event it books operating losses by offsetting its operational losses, one-for-one, with an imaginary “deferred asset” account, no matter how large the loss. Unless Congress intervenes, the Fed will not remit any revenues to the US Treasury—even as it continues paying dividends to its member banks—as long as this deferred asset account has a positive balance. 

Instead of issuing a new marketable Treasury security, which would count towards the deficit, the Fed will cover its losses with a nonmarketable receivable called deferred assets recorded on the Fed’s balance sheet. The economic reality, of course, is that Fed losses increase the government’s deficit.

Federal Reserve Board estimates of the system’s potential cumulative operating losses are mirrored in estimates of its deferred asset balance pictured in Figure 2. The Federal Reserve Board’s own estimates suggest that its cumulative operating losses (in the estimated “90 percent interval” case) could approach $200 billion by 2026, Moreover, the Fed projects that it may not resume making any Treasury remittances until 2030 or later. Keep in mind that these projections assume the Fed can reduce inflation with fairly modest increases in short-term interest rates with the expected short-term rate path peaking at less than 4 percent in 2023, before slowly declining toward 2.5 percent in 2026. 

Figure 2: Federal Board of Governors Projection of Treasury Remittances and System Deferred Asset Account Balances 2023-2030

Source: FEDs Notes, 2022

While the Board of Governors fully anticipates operating losses beginning in 2023, the CBO did not get that memo. In its most recent forecast, the CBO projects that the Fed will continue making positive remittances to the Treasury every year between 2022 and 2032. While the CBO forecast anticipates a sharp decline in remittances in 2023 through 2025, it expects a recovery toward 2021 remittance levels thereafter, with the Fed reducing interest rates as inflation returns to targeted levels. 

While the CBO does not project any Fed operating losses, its explanation of budget accounting suggests any such losses would be excluded from budget deficit calculations: “Although it remits earnings to the Treasury (which are recorded as revenues in the federal budget), the Federal Reserve’s receipts and expenditures are not included directly in the federal budget…” Operating losses will be a Federal Reserve expenditure, so this CBO statement would appear to exclude Fed operating losses from the federal deficit calculation. It is strange not to count the Fed’s losses in the budget accounting, considering that the Fed’s profits are counted. Perhaps because the CBO does not anticipate Federal Reserve losses, it has failed to consider them explicitly in its description of deficit accounting. 

Simple accounting logic suggests that if the federal budget deficit is reduced when the Fed earns revenues in excess of expenses and remits these profits to the US Treasury, Fed losses should increase the reported federal budget deficit. This is especially true since Federal Reserve System losses now include the hundreds of millions of dollars of off-budget funding it is required to transfer to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. If the current accounting rules remain unchallenged, the Congress could pass new legislation requiring the Federal Reserve to fund any number of activities off-budget without any impact on the reported federal budget deficit.

Volcker and the Great Inflation: Reflections for 2022

Published in Law & Liberty and also in RealClear Markets.

The celebrated Paul Volcker (1927-2019) became Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board 43 years ago on August 6, 1979. The 20th-century Great Inflation, stoked by the Federal Reserve and the other central banks of the day, was in full gallop in the U.S and around the world. In the month he started as Chairman, U.S. inflation continued its double-digit run—that August suffered a year-over-year inflation rate of 11.8%. On August 15, the Federal Reserve raised its fed funds mid-target range to 11%, but that was less than the inflation rate, so a nominal 11% was still a negative real interest rate. How bad could it get? For the year 1979, the December year-over-year inflation was an even more awful 13.3%. At that compound rate, the cost of living would double in about five years.

Everybody knew they had an inflationary disaster on their hands, but what could be done? They had already tried “WIN” (“Whip Inflation Now”) buttons, but inflation was whipping them instead. In this setting, “The best professional judgment among leading economists was that Americans should view the problem of inflation as being…intractable,” wrote Volcker’s biographer, William Silber. Leading Wall Street forecaster Henry Kaufman, for example, was pessimistic in 1980, opining “that he had ‘considerable doubt’ that the Fed could accomplish its ultimate objective, which is to tame inflation. He added for good measure that the Fed no longer had ‘credibility in the real world.”

Those days are now most relevant. Although Silber could write in 2012, “Inflation is ancient history to most Americans,” today it is upon us once again. What can we re-learn?

From Burns to Volcker

In September 1979, Arthur Burns, who had been Fed Chairman from 1970 to 1978, gave a remarkable speech entitled “The Anguish of Central Banking.” Discussing “the reacceleration of inflation in the United States and in much of the rest of the word,” “the chronic inflation of our times,” and “the world wide disease of inflation,” he asked, “Why, in particular, have central bankers, whose main business one might suppose is to fight inflation, been so ineffective?”

We may observe to the contrary that they had been very effective—but in producing inflation instead of controlling it, just as their 21st-century successors were effective in producing first the asset price inflation of the Everything Bubble, which is now deflating, and then destructive goods and services inflation, much to their own surprise. In both centuries, inflation was not an outside force attacking them, as politicians and central bankers both then and now like to portray it, but an endogenous effect of government and central bank behavior.

In what one might imagine as a tragic dramatic soliloquy, Burns uttered this cri de coeur: “And yet, despite their antipathy to inflation and the powerful weapons they could wield against it, central bankers have failed so utterly in this mission in recent years. In this paradox lies the anguish of central banking.”

I suspect the central bankers of 2022 in their hearts are feeling a similar anguish. Their supporting cast of government economists should be, too. “Economists at both the Federal Reserve and the White House were blindsided,” as Greg Ip wrote. “Having failed to anticipate the steepest inflation in 40 years,” he mused, “you would think the economics profession would be knee-deep in postmortems”—or some confessions of responsibility. But no such agonizing reappraisals as Burns’ speech seem forthcoming.

Reflecting that “Economic life is subject to all sorts of surprises [which] could readily overwhelm and topple a gradualist timetable,” in 1979 Burns announced that “I have reluctantly come to believe that fairly drastic therapy will be needed to turn the inflationary psychology around.” This was correct except for the modifier “fairly.” But, Burns confessed, “I am not at all sure that many of the central bankers of the world…would be willing to risk the painful economic adjustments that I fear are ultimately unavoidable.”

In our imagined drama of the time, enter Volcker, who was willing. He proceeds with firm steps to center stage. Burns fades out.

“If Congress had doubts about Volcker’s intentions,” says Allan Meltzer’s A History of the Federal Reserve, “they should have been dispelled by his testimony of September 5 [1979]”—one month after he took office. “Unlike the Keynesians, he considered the costs [of inflation] higher than the costs of reducing inflation.” Said Volcker to Congress, “Our current economic difficulties…will not be resolved unless we deal convincingly with inflation.”

In a television interview later that month, he was equally clear: “I don’t think we can stop fighting inflation. That is the basic, continuing problem that we face in this economy, and I think until we straighten out the inflation problem, we’re going to have problems of economic instability. So it’s not a choice….”

But what would it take to put into reverse the effects of years of undisciplined money printing, which accompanied oil supply and price shocks and other bad luck? Under the cover of restricting the growth in the money supply, Volcker’s strategy involved letting interest rates rise in 1980-81 to levels unparalleled, then or since, and to become strongly positive in real terms. Fed funds rates rose to over 20%. Ten-year Treasury notes to over 15%. Thirty-year fixed rate mortgage rates rose to over 18%. The prime rate reached 21.5%.

It is not clear whether Volcker ever took seriously the monetarist doctrine of focusing on the money supply, which he later abandoned, or simply used it as a pragmatic way to do what he wanted, which was to stop the runaway inflation. It is clear that he firmly rejected the Keynesian Phillips Curve approach of trying to buy employment with inflation. That had led central banks into inflationary adventures and resulted in simultaneous high inflation and high unemployment—the “stagflation” of the late 1970s, to which many think we risk returning in 2022.

The Double Dip Recessions

The Volcker program triggered a sharp recession from January 1980, five months after he arrived, to July 1980, and then a very deep and painful recession from July 1981 to November 1982—“double dip recessions.” Both hit manufacturing, goods production, and housing particularly hard, and generated the hard times of the “rust belt.” In 1982, unemployment rose to 10.8%, worse than the “Great Recession” peak unemployment of 10.0% in 2009.

“The 1981-82 recession was the worst economic downturn in the United States since the Great Depression,” says the Federal Reserve History. “The nearly 11% unemployment reached in late 1982 remains the apex of the post-World War II era [until surpassed in the Covid crisis of 2020]…manufacturing, construction and the auto industries were particularly affected.”

There were thousands of business bankruptcies. “The business failure rate has accelerated rapidly,” wrote the New York Times in September 1982, “coming ever closer to levels not seen since the Great Depression.” The total of over 69,000 business bankruptcies in 1982 was again worse than in the “Great Recession” year of 2009, which had 61,000.

The extreme interest rates wiped out savings and loan institutions, formerly the backbone of American mortgage finance, by the hundreds. The savings and loan industry as a whole was insolvent on a mark-to-market basis. So, in 1981, was the government’s big mortgage lender, Fannie Mae. A friend of mine who had a senior position with the old Federal Home Loan Bank Board recalls a meeting with Volcker at the time: “He was telling us he was going to crush the savings and loans.” There were securities firm and bank failures and then the massive defaults on the sovereign debt of “less developed countries” (“LDCs” in the jargon of the time), starting in August 1982. These defaults put the solvency of the entire American banking system in question.

This was a really dark and serious downer, but Volcker was firm about what he was convinced was the long-run best interest of the country. Was it debatable? Certainly.

There was plenty of criticism. Volcker wrote: “There were, of course, many complaints. Farmers once surrounded the Fed’s Washington building with tractors. Home builders, forced to shut down, sent sawed-off two-by-fours with messages…. Economists predictably squabbled.… Community groups protested at our headquarters….My speeches were occasionally interrupted by screaming protestors, once by rats let loose in the audience….” And “the Fed insisted I agree to personal security escort protection.”

In the government, Congressman Henry Reuss “reminded Volcker that the Constitution gave the monetary power to Congress”—as it does. “Congressman Jack Kemp called for Volcker’s resignation.” At the U.S. Treasury, “Secretary Donald Regan, a frequent critic, considered legislation restoring the Treasury Secretary to the [Federal Reserve] Board.” “Senator [Robert] Byrd introduced his bill to restrict Federal Reserve independence by requiring it to lower interest rates.” Inside the Federal Reserve Board, Governor Nancy Teeters, citing failures, the economy, high long-term interest rates, and high unemployment, objected in May 1982, “We are in the process of pushing the economy not just into recession, but into depression…I think we’ve undertaken an experiment and we have succeeded in our attempt to bring down prices…But as far as I’m concerned, I’ve had it.”

The minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee consistently display the intense uncertainty which marked the entire disinflationary project. “Volcker expressed his uncertainty frequently,” Meltzer observes, as he told the FOMC, for example: “I don’t know what is going to happen in the weeks or months down the road, either to the economy or to the aggregates or these other things,” or as he told Congress, “How limited our ability is to project future developments.” To his perseverance, add honesty. The same deep uncertainty will mark the Fed’s debates and actions in 2022 and always.

The 1982 recession finally ended in November. Inflation in December 1982 was 3.8% year-over-year. The fed funds rate was 8.8%. The year 1982 also saw the start of the two-decade bull market in stocks, and the 40-year bull market in bonds.

Meltzer speculated that the recession was more costly and “probably lasted longer than necessary.” Could a less severe recession have achieved the same disinflation? About such counterfactuals we can never know, but the current Fed must certainly hope so.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan reappointed Volcker as Fed Chairman. In 1984, Reagan was re-elected in a landslide, the economy was booming, and inflation was 3.9%.

When Volcker left office in August 1987, inflation was still running at 4%, far from zero, but far below the 13% of 1979 when he had arrived as Fed Chairman. Real GDP growth was strong; fed funds were 6.6%. “The Great Inflation was over, and markets recognized that it was over.” Endemic inflation, however, was not over.

Volcker’s victory over runaway inflation was not permanent, because the temptation to governments and their central banks of excessive printing, monetization of government deficits, and levying inflation taxes is permanent.

Volcker’s Legacy

On top of the pervasive uncertainty, the Federal Reserve worried constantly during the Volcker years, as it must now, about its own credibility. Meltzer believed Volcker’s lasting influence was to “restore [the Federal Reserve] System credibility for controlling inflation.” But a generation after Volcker, the Fed committed itself to perpetual inflation at the rate of 2% forever. At the 2% target rate, prices would quintuple in an average lifetime. That is obviously not the “stable prices” called for in the Federal Reserve Act, but the Fed kept assuring everybody it was “price stability.” Volcker made clear his disagreement with this 2% target, writing of it in 2018, “I know of no theoretical justification. … The real danger comes from encouraging or inadvertently tolerating rising inflation.”

The classic monetary theorist Irving Fisher had warned, as have many others, that “Irredeemable paper money has almost invariably proved a curse to the country employing it.” Silber reflects that “The 1970s nearly confirmed Irving Fisher’s worst fears.” I would delete the word “nearly” from that last sentence.

The inflationary problems of Volcker’s days and ours are fundamentally linked to the demise of the Bretton Woods system in 1971, when the United States reneged on its international commitment to redeem dollars in gold. This put the whole world on pure fiat money instead, with fateful results. According to Brendan Brown, “Volcker considered the suspension of gold convertibility…’the single most important event of his career.’”  Indeed, it created the situation which put him on the road to future greatness. Ironically, Volcker began as a strong supporter of the Bretton Woods system, but then helped dismantle it. Of course, he was always an ardent anti-inflationist. “Nothing is more urgent than the United States getting its inflation under control,” he had already written in a formal Treasury presentation in 1969.

“Inflation undermines trust in government,” Volcker said. That it does, and such loss of trust is justified, then and now. Putting the thought another way, Volcker deeply believed that “Trust in our currency is fundamental to good government.” Throughout his life, he did his best to make the U.S. dollar trustworthy.

In retrospect, Volcker became “an American financial icon.” He elicits comments such as this one: “I knew Paul Volcker (who slew the Great Inflation). Volcker stopped inflation in the 1980s….” Or: “Volcker was the Federal Reserve knight who killed inflation.” Or: “Volcker and his FOMC…did what they thought was necessary, generating enormous pain but finally stamping out inflation. I hope Jerome Powell will find his inner Volcker.” As we have seen, Volcker didn’t actually stop or kill or stamp out inflation, but he brought it down from runaway to endemic.

His successor as Fed Chairman, Alan Greenspan, said “We owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Chairman Volcker and the Federal Open Market Committee for…restoring the public’s faith in our nation’s currency.”

In 1990, Volcker spoke in the same Per Jacobsson Lecture series which had been the site of Arthur Burn’s anguish eleven years before. A similar audience of central bankers and finance ministers this time was treated to “The Triumph of Central Banking?” This included “my impression that central banks are in exceptionally good repute these days.”

However, he pointed out the question mark. “I might dream of a day of final triumph of central banking, when central banks are so successful in achieving and maintaining price and financial stability that currencies will be freely interchangeable at stable exchange rates” (shades of his earlier commitment to Bretton-Woods). “But that is not for my lifetime—nor for any of yours.” About that he was right, and also right about a more important point: “I think we are forced to conclude that even the partial victory over inflation is not secure.” There he was wiser than his many eulogists, as is obvious in 2022.

In discussions of the current inflation, including similarities to the 1970s, references to Volcker are frequent and laudatory. For example, “Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has taken of late to praising legendary Paul Volcker, as a signal of his new inflation-fighting determination.” Or “Powell tried to engage in some plain speaking, by telling the American people that inflation was creating ‘significant hardship’ and that rates would need to rise ‘expeditiously’ to crush this. He also declared ‘tremendous admiration’ for his predecessor Paul Volcker, who hiked rates to tackle inflation five decades ago, even at the cost of a recession.”

No Permanent Victories

With the model of Volcker in mind, will we now experience parallels to the 1981-82 recession, as well? This is the debate about whether a “soft landing” is possible from where the central banks have gotten us now. If we repeat the pattern of the 1980s, it will not be a soft landing and the cost of suppressing inflation will again be high, but worth it in the longer run. It should rightly be thought of as the cost of the previous central bank and government actions that brought the present inflation upon us.

Silber concluded that in the 1980s, “Volcker rescued the experiment in fiat currency from failure.” But experimentation with fiat currency possibilities has continued, including the creation of a giant portfolio of mortgage securities on the Fed’s own balance sheet, for example. When politicians and central bankers are hearing the siren song of “just print up some more money”—a very old idea recently called modern in “modern” monetary theory— in whatever guise it may take, who will provide the needed discipline, as Volcker did? Under various versions of the gold standard, it might be a matter of “what” provides monetary discipline, but in the fiat currency world of Volcker’s time and now, it is always and only a question of “who.”

Volcker wrote that “Bill Martin [William McChesney Martin, Fed Chairman 1951-70]… is famous for his remark that the job of the central bank is to take away the punch bowl just when the party gets going.” Unfortunately, Volcker continued, “the hard fact of life is that few hosts want to end the party prematurely. They wait too long and when the risks are evident, the real damage is done”—then it is already too late and the problem has become a lot harder. Like now.

As has been truly said, “In Washington, there are no permanent victories.” Volcker’s victory over runaway inflation was not permanent, because the temptation to governments and their central banks of excessive printing, monetization of government deficits, and levying inflation taxes is permanent. In 2021-22, we are back to disastrously high inflation, recognize the need to address it, and feel the costs of doing so. And Chairman Powell is citing Chairman Volcker.

But are there factors, four decades later, making the parallels less close? For example, international investor Felix Zulauf “thinks the Powell Fed is quite different from the Volcker Fed, and not just because of the personalities. It’s in a different situation and a different financial zeitgeist [and different political zeitgeist]. He doesn’t think the Fed, or any other central bank can get away with imposing the kind of pain Volcker did and will stop as soon as this year.” (italics added)

Suppose that is right—what then? Then the pain will come from continued inflation instead. There is now no avoiding pain, which will come in one way or the other.

A similar, though more strident, argument from June 2022 is this: “It will be politically impossible to raise rates enough to stop inflation. … Volcker raised rates to 19%. There is no way the Fed is going anywhere near that.…You may recall the Fed not long ago said they…were just talking about raising rates.” And echoing Henry Kaufman in 1980, “None of them has any credibility anymore.”

We must admit that the current fed funds rate of 1.75% with an inflation of 8.5%, for a real fed funds rate of negative 6.75%, is hardly Volckeresque. Indeed, there is nothing Volkeresque yet. Interest rates in 1980-81 went far higher than most people imagined possible—perhaps they will again go higher than now thought possible and maybe we will even see positive real interest rates again.

Chairman Powell was a Fed Governor and Chairman while the wind of the present inflation was being sown, and he is there to reap the whirlwind. Will the Fed under his leadership tame it and at what cost, as all the maladjustments and the financial dependence of both the government and private actors on negative real rates and cheap leverage during the last decade must now be corrected?

We might imagine a hypothetical case in which Paul Volcker was 40 years younger, and with his unyielding commitment to trustworthy money and his insistence that achieving it is worth the cost, had become the new Fed Chairman in 2022. We can speculate about what he would be and could be doing now.

But in the real case, just as Volcker did beginning in 1979, Chairman Powell has now stepped to center stage in the current drama. We cannot yet say whether his future valedictory lecture will be about the Anguish or the Triumph of central banking.

The Fed’s Tough Year

Published in Law & Liberty and republished in RealClear Markets.

The powerful and prestigious Federal Reserve is having a tough year in 2022 in at least three ways:

• It has failed with inflation forecasting and performance;

• It has giant mark-to-market losses in its own investments and looming operating losses;

• It is under political pressure to do things it should not be doing and that should not be done at all.

Forecasting Inflation

As everybody knows, the Fed’s overoptimistic inflation forecasts for the runaway inflation year of 2021 were deeply embarrassing. Then the Fed did it again for 2022, with another wide miss. In December 2021, it projected 2022 Personal Consumption Expenditures inflation at 2.6%, while the reality through June was 6.8%, with Consumer Price Index inflation much higher than that. It would be hard to give the Fed anything other than a failing grade in its supposed area of expertise.

The Fed’s interest rate forecast for 2022 was three federal funds target rate increases of 0.25%, so that its target rate would reach 0.9% by the end of 2022. It forecast the rate at 2% by the end of 2024. Instead, by July 2022, it already reached 2.5%.

In short, the Federal Reserve cannot reliably forecast economic outcomes, or what the results of its own actions will be, or even what its own actions will be. Of course, neither can anybody else.

It is essential to understand that we cannot expect any special economic or financial insight from the Federal Reserve. This is not because of any lack of intelligence or diligence, or not having enough computers or PhDs on the payroll, but of the fundamental and inevitable uncertainty of the economic and financial future. Like everybody else, the Fed has to make decisions in spite of this, so it will unavoidably make mistakes.

We should recall how Ben Bernanke, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve, accurately described his extended “QE” strategy in 2012 as “a shot in the proverbial dark.” That was an honest admission, although unfortunately he admitted it only within the Fed, not to the public.

The Governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia (their central bank) described the bank’s recent inflation forecasting errors as “embarrassing.” Such a confession would also be becoming in the Federal Reserve, especially when the mistakes have been so obvious. The current fed funds rate of 2.5% may sound high today, if you have become used to short-term rates near zero and you have no financial memory. But it is historically low, and as many have pointed out, it is extremely low in real terms. Compared to CPI inflation of 8.5%, it is a real interest rate of negative 6%.

Savers will be glad to be able to have the available interest rates on their savings rise from 0.1% to over 2%, but they are still rapidly losing purchasing power and having their savings effectively expropriated by the government’s inflation.

Although in July and August 2022 (as I write), securities prices have rallied from their lows, the 2022 increases in interest rates have let substantial air out of the Everything Bubble in stocks, speculative stocks in particular, SPACs, bonds, houses, mortgages, and cryptocurrencies that the Fed and its fellow central banks so assiduously and so recklessly inflated.

A Mark-to-Market Insolvent Fed

Nowhere are shrunken asset prices more apparent than in the Fed’s own hyper-leveraged balance sheet, which runs at a ratio of assets to equity of more than 200. As of March 31, 2022, the Fed disclosed, deep in its financial statement footnotes, a net mark-to-market (MTM) loss of $330 billion on its investments. Since then, the interest rates on 5 and 10-year Treasury notes are up about an additional one-half percent. With an estimated duration of 5 years on the Fed’s $8 trillion of long-term fixed rate investments in Treasury and mortgage securities, this implies an additional loss of about $200 billion in round numbers, bringing the Fed’s total MTM loss to over $500 billion.

Compare this $500 billion loss to the Fed’s total capital of $41 billion. The loss is 12 times the Fed’s total capital, rendering the Fed technically insolvent on a mark-to-market basis. Does a MTM insolvency matter for a fiat currency-printing central bank? An interesting question—most economists argue such insolvency is not important, no matter how large. What do you think, candid Reader?

The Fed’s first defense of its huge MTM loss is that the loss is unrealized, so if it hangs on to the securities long enough it will eventually be paid at par. This would be a stronger argument in an unleveraged balance sheet, which did not have the Fed’s $5 trillion of floating rate liabilities. With the Fed’s leverage, however, the unrealized losses suggest that it has operating losses to come, if the higher short-term interest rates implied by current market prices come to pass.

The Fed’s second defense is that it has changed its accounting so that realized losses on securities or operating losses will not affect its reported retained earnings or capital. Instead, the resulting debits will be hidden in a dubious “deferred asset” account. Just change the accounting! (This is exactly what the insolvent savings and loans did in the 1980s, with terrible consequences.)

What fun it is to imagine what any senior Federal Reserve examiner would tell a bank holding company whose MTM losses were 12 times its capital. And what any such examiner would say if the bank proposed to hide realized losses in a “deferred asset” account instead of reducing its capital!

Here is a shorthand way to think about the dynamics of how Fed operating losses would arise from their balance sheet: The Fed has about $8 trillion in long-term, fixed-rate assets. It has about $3 trillion in non-interest-bearing liabilities and capital. Thus, it has a net position of $5 trillion of fixed rate assets funded by floating rate liabilities. (In other words, inside the Fed is the financial equivalent of a giant 1980s savings and loan.)

Given this position, it is easy to see that pro forma, for each 1% rise in short-term interest rates, the Fed’s annual earnings will be reduced by about $50 billion. What short-term interest rate would it take to wipe out the Fed’s profits? The answer is 2.7%. If their deposits and repo borrowings cost 2.7%, the Fed’s profits and its contribution to the U.S. Treasury will be zero. If they cost more than 2.7%, as is called for in the Fed’s own projections, the Fed starts making operating losses.

How big might these losses be? In the Fed staff’s own recent projections, in its most likely case, the projected operating losses add up to $60 billion. This is 150% of the Fed’s total capital. In the pessimistic case, losses total $180 billion, over 4 times its capital, and the Fed makes no payments to the Treasury until 2030.

In such cases, should the Fed’s shareholders, who are the commercial banks, be treated like normal shareholders and have their dividends cut? Or might, as is clearly provided in the Federal Reserve Act, the shareholders be assessed for a share of the losses? These outcomes would certainly be embarrassing for the Fed and would be resisted.

The central bank of Switzerland, the Swiss National Bank (SNB), did pass on its dividends in 2013, after suffering losses. The SNB Chairman gave a speech at the time, saying in effect, “Sorry! But that’s the way it is.” Under its chartering act, the SNB—completely unlike the Fed—must mark its investment portfolio to market in its official profit and loss statement. Accordingly, in 2022 so far, the SNB has reported a net loss of $31 billion for the first quarter and a net loss of $91 billion for the first six months of this year.

The Swiss are a serious people, and also serious, it seems, when it comes to central bank accounting and dividends.

In the U.S., the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta did pass its dividend once, in 1915. As we learn from the Bank’s own history, “Like many a struggling business, it suspended its dividend that year.” Could it happen again? If the losses are big and continuing, should it?

A third Fed defense is that its “mandate is neither to make profits nor to avoid losses.” On the contrary, the Fed is clearly structured to make seigniorage profits for the government from its currency monopoly. While not intended by the Federal Reserve Act to be a profit maximizer, it was also not intended to run large losses or to run with negative capital. Should we worry about the Fed’s financial issues, or should we say, “Pay no attention to the negative capital behind the curtain!”

The Fed is obviously unable to guarantee financial stability. No one can do that. Moreover, by trying to promote stability, it can cause instability.

What the Fed Can and Can’t Do Well

The Federal Reserve is also suffering from a push from the current administration and the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives to take on a politicized agenda, which it probably can’t do well and more importantly, should not do at all.

This would include having the Fed practice racial preferences, that is, racial discrimination, and as the Wall Street Journal editors wrote, “Such racial favoritism almost certainly violates the Constitution. So does the [House] bill’s requirement that public companies disclose the racial, gender identity and sexual orientation of directors and executives.” The bill would “politicize monetary policy and financial regulation.” A lot of bad ideas.

Moreover, the Federal Reserve already has more mandates than it can accomplish, and its mandates should be reduced, not increased.

As has been so vividly demonstrated in 2021 and 2022, the Fed cannot accurately forecast economic outcomes, and cannot know what the results of its own actions, or its “shots in the proverbial dark,” will be.

Meanwhile, it is painfully failing to provide its statutory mandate of stable prices. Note that the statute directs the goal of “stable prices,” not the much more waffly term the Fed has adopted, “price stability.” It has defined for itself that “price stability” means perpetual inflation at 2% per year.

The Fed cannot “manage the economy.” No one can.

And the Fed is obviously unable to guarantee financial stability. No one can do that, either. Moreover, by trying to promote stability, it can cause instability, an ironic Minskian result—Hyman Minsky was the insightful theorist of financial fragility who inspired the slogan, “stability creates instability.”

There are two things the Fed demonstrably does very well.

The first is financing the government. Financing the government of which it is a part is the real first mandate of all central banks, especially, but not only, during wars, going back to the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694. As the history of the Atlanta Fed puts it so clearly:

During the war [World War I], the Fed was introduced to a role that would become familiar…as the captive finance company of a U.S. Treasury with huge financing needs and a compelling desire for low rates.

This statement is remarkably candid: “the captive finance company of [the] U.S. Treasury.” True historically, true now, and why central banks are so valuable to governments.

The second thing the Fed does well is emergency funding in a crisis by creating new money as needed. This was its original principal purpose as expressed by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913: “to furnish an elastic currency,” as they called it then. This it can do with great success in financial crises, as shown most recently in 2020, and of course during wars, although not without subsequent costs.

However, the Fed is less good at turning off the emergency actions when the crisis is over. Its most egregious blunder in this respect in recent years was its continuing to stoke runaway house price inflation by buying hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage securities, continuing up to the first quarter of 2022. This has severe inflationary consequences as the cost of shelter drives up the CPI and erodes the purchasing power of households. Moreover, it now appears the piper of house price inflation is exacting its payment, as higher mortgage rates are resulting in falling sales and by some accounts, the beginning of a housing recession.

Among the notions for expanding the Fed’s mandates, the worst of all is to turn the Fed into a government lending bank, which would allocate credit and make loans to constituencies favored by various politicians. As William McChesney Martin, the Fed Chairman 1951-1970, so rightly said when this perpetual bad idea was pushed by politicians in his day, it would “violate a fundamental principle of sound monetary policy, in that it would attempt to use the credit-creating powers of the central bank to subsidize programs benefitting special sectors of the economy.”

It is a natural and permanent temptation of politicians to want to do just that—to use the money printing power of the central bank to give money to their political supporters without the need for legislative approval or appropriation, and to surreptitiously finance it by imposing an inflation tax without legislation.

One way to achieve this worst outcome would be to have the Fed issue a “central bank digital currency” (CBDC) that allows everybody to have a deposit account with the Fed, which might then become a deposit monopolist as well as a currency monopolist.

Should that happen, the Fed would by definition have to have assets to employ its vastly expanded deposit liabilities. What assets would those be? Well, loans and securities. The Fed would become a government lending bank.

The global experience with such government banks is that they naturally lend based on politics, which is exactly what the politicians want, with an inevitable bad ending.

On top of that, with a CBDC in our times of Big Data, the Fed could and probably in time would choose to know everybody’s personal financial business. This could and perhaps would be used to create an oppressive “social credit system” on the model of China which could control credit allocation, loans, and payments. Given the urge to power of any government and of its bureaucratic agencies, that outcome is certainly not beyond imagining, and is, in my view, likely.

The current push to expand the Fed’s mandates is consistent with Shull’s Paradox, which states that the more blunders the Fed makes, the more powers and prestige it gets. But we should be reducing the Fed’s powers and mandates, not increasing them. Specifically:

• The Fed should not hold mortgage securities or mortgages of any kind. It should take its mortgage portfolio not just to a smaller size, but to zero. Zero was just where it was from 1914 to 2008 and where it should return.

• The Fed should not engage in subsidizing political constituencies and the proposed politicized agenda should be scrapped.

• Congress should definitively take away the Fed’s odd notion that the Fed can by itself, without Congressional approval, set a national inflation target and thereby commit the country and the world to perpetual inflation.

• Congress should repeat its instruction to the Fed to pursue stable prices. As Paul Volcker wrote in his autobiography, “In the United States, we have had decades of good growth without inflation,” and “The real danger comes from encouraging or inadvertently tolerating rising inflation and its close cousin of extreme speculation and risk taking.”

• The Fed should be required to have sound accounting for its own financial statements, with no hiding losses in the former savings and loan style allowed. This requires taking away from the Fed the power to set its own accounting standards, which nobody else has.

• The Fed should be prohibited from buying TIPS (Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities), because this allows it to manipulate apparent market inflation expectations.

• The funding of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau expenses out of Fed profits should be terminated. This is an indefensible use of the Fed to take away the power of the purse from Congress and to subsidize a political constituency. It would be especially appropriate to end this payment if the Fed is making big losses.

• Finally, and most important of all, we must understand the inherent limitations of what the Federal Reserve can know and do. There is no mystique. We must expect it to make mistakes, and sometimes blunders, just like everybody else.

Knowing this, perhaps the 2020s will give us the opportunity to reverse Shull’s Paradox.

This paper is based on the author’s remarks at the American Enterprise Institute conference, “Is It Time to Rethink the Federal Reserve?” July 26, 2022.

Biden’s Pension Bailout Is a Giveaway to Unions

Most plans were insolvent long before the pandemic.

Published in The Wall Street Journal.

By Howard B. Adler and Alex J. Pollock

President Biden boasted last week about his administration’s bailout of union multiemployer pension plans, enacted in the American Rescue Plan supposedly to address pandemic-related problems. “Millions of workers will have the dignified retirement they earned and they deserve,” he said July 6 in Cleveland. In fact, the American taxpayer will bear the cost of union plans that were insolvent long before the pandemic. The bailout all but guarantees future insolvency or another bailout and constitutes a massive giveaway to labor unions.

Multiemployer pension plans are a creation of unions. They are defined-benefit retirement plans, maintained under collective-bargaining agreements, in which more than one employer contributes to the plan. These plans are typically found in industries such as trucking, transportation and mining, in which union members do work for multiple companies.

As of 2019, there were 2,450 multiemployer plans with 15 million participants and beneficiaries. Many were insolvent well before the Covid pandemic. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. estimated total unfunded liabilities of PBGC-guaranteed multiemployer plans at $757 billion for 2018. According to 2019 projections, 124 multiemployer pension plans declared that they would likely run out of money over the next 20 years.

Read the rest here.

Who owns the Fed’s massive losses?

Published in The Hill and RealClear Markets.

By Paul H. Kupiec and Alex J. Pollock

We estimate that at the end of May, the Federal Reserve had an unrecognized mark-to-market loss of about $540 billion on its $8.8 trillion portfolio of Treasury bonds and mortgage securities. This loss, which will only get larger as interest rates increase, is more than 13 times the Federal Reserve System’s consolidated capital of $41 billion.

Unlike regulated financial institutions, no matter how big the losses it may face, the Federal Reserve will not fail. It can continue to print money even if it is deeply insolvent. But, according to the Federal Reserve Act, Fed losses should impact its shareholders, who are the commercial bank members of the 12 district Federal Reserve banks.

Among Federal Reserve officials and many economists, it is fashionable to argue that any losses the Federal Reserve should suffer, no matter how large, will have no operational consequence. Now that the Fed has already experienced mark-to-market losses of epic proportions and will soon face large operating losses, something it has never seen in its 108-year history, we are about to see if this is true.

Member banks must purchase shares issued by their Federal Reserve district bank. Member banks only pay for half the par value of their required share purchases “while the remaining half of the subscription is subject to call by the Board.”

In addition to potential calls to buy more Federal Reserve bank stock, under the Federal Reserve Act member banks are also required to contribute funds to cover any district reserve bank’s annual operating losses in an amount not to exceed twice the par value of their district bank stock subscription. Note especially the use of the term “shall” and not “may” in the Federal Reserve Act:

“The  shareholders  of every  Federal  reserve  bank shall  be  held  individually responsible,  equally  and  ratably,  and  not  one  for  another,  for  all  contracts, debts,  and  engagements  of  such  bank  to  the  extent  of  the  amount subscriptions  to  such  stock  at  the  par  value  thereof  in  addition  to  the  amount subscribed.” (bold italics added).

Despite congressional revisions to the Federal Reserve Act over more than a century, the current Act still contains this exact passage.

By the Federal Open Market Committee’s own estimates, short-term policy rates will approach 3.5 percent by year-end 2022. Many think policy rates will go higher, maybe much higher, before the Fed successfully contains surging inflation. Our estimates suggest that the Federal Reserve will begin reporting net operating losses once short-term interest rates reach 2.7 percent. This estimate assumes the Fed has no realized losses from selling securities. If short-term rates reach 4 percent, we estimate an annualized operating loss of $62 billion, or a loss of 150 percent of the Fed’s total capital.

This unenviable financial situation — huge mark-to-market investment losses and looming negative operating income — is the predictable consequence of the balance sheet the Fed has created. The Fed is paying rising rates of interest on bank reserves and reverse repurchase transactions while its balance sheet is stuffed with low-yielding long-term fixed rate securities. In short, the Fed’s income dynamics resemble those of a typical 1980s savings and loan.

In 2011, the Federal Reserve announced its official position regarding realized losses on its investment portfolio and system operating losses:

“In the unlikely scenario in which realized losses were sufficiently large enough to result in an overall net income loss for the Reserve Banks, the Federal Reserve would still meet its financial obligations to cover operating expenses. In that case, remittances to the Treasury would be suspended and a deferred asset would be recorded on the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet.”

Under this unique accounting policy, operating losses do not reduce the Federal Reserve’s reported capital and surplus. A positive reserve bank surplus account is ensured by increasing an imaginary “deferred asset” account district reserve banks will book to offset an operating loss, no matter how large the loss. Among other things, this accounting “innovation” ensures that the Fed can keep paying dividends on its stock. Similar creative “regulatory accounting” has not been utilized since the 1980s when it was used to prop up failing savings institutions.

The Fed’s stated intention is to monetize operating losses and back any newly created currency with an imaginary “deferred asset.” It is impossible to imagine that the authors of the Federal Reserve Act would have approved of allowing the Fed to create an imaginary “deferred asset” as a mechanism to hide the fact that the Fed is depleting its cushion of loss-absorbing assets while paying banks dividends and interest on their reserve balances, when the act itself makes member banks as stockholders liable for Federal Reserve district bank operating losses.

Clearly, if the Fed is required to comply with the language in the Federal Reserve Act and assess member banks for its operating losses it could impact monetary policy. The prospect of passing Fed operating losses on to member banks could create pressure to avoid losses by limiting the interest rate paid to member banks or discouraging asset sales needed to shrink the Fed’s bloated balance sheet. Moreover, if the Fed’s losses were passed on, some member banks may face potential capital issues themselves.  

Will the Fed ignore the law, monetize its losses, and create a new source of inflationary pressure? Or will it pass its losses on to its shareholders? Stay tuned.

The INDEX Act Is a Major Step Forward In Corporate Governance

Published in RealClear Markets. Also published in the Federalist Society.

An unsolved problem in American corporate governance is that a few big asset management firms have through their index funds grabbed dominating voting power in hundreds of corporations by voting shares which represent not a penny of their own money at risk. They have in effect said to the real investors whose own money is at risk, “I’ll just vote your shares.  I’ll vote them according to my agenda.  I don’t want to bother with what you think.”

This obviously opens the door for the exercise of hubris, as has perhaps notably been the case with BlackRock, but more importantly, it violates the essential principle that the principals, not the agents, should govern corporations. This principle is well-established and unquestioned when it comes to broker-dealers voting shares held in street name. The brokers can vote on significant matters only with instructions from the economic owners of the shares. Exactly the same clear logic and rule should apply to the managers of the passive funds which have grown so influential using other people’s money.

Now Senators Pat Toomey (R-PA), the Ranking Member of the Senate Banking Committee, and Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), with eleven co-sponsors, have addressed the problem directly by introducing an excellent bill: The INDEX (Investor Democracy Is Expected) Act. This bill would apply the longstanding logic for broker-dealer voting to passive fund asset manager voting, which makes perfect sense. As Senator Toomey said in announcing the bill, “The INDEX Act returns voting power to the real shareholders…diminishing the consolidation of corporate voting power.” You couldn’t have a goal more basic than that.

This bill ought to be approved by overwhelming bipartisan majorities. To oppose it, any legislator would have to sign up to the following pledge: “I believe Wall Street titans should be able to vote other people’s shares without getting instructions from the real owners.” That does not sound like a political winner.

The asset management firms themselves seem to be feeling the force of the INDEX Act logic. BlackRock said it looks forward “to working with members of Congress and others on ways to help every investor—including individual investors—participate in proxy voting.” Vanguard said it “believes it is important to give investors more of a voice in how their proxies are voted.”

If enacted, as it should be, the INDEX Act will require these nice words to be put into action.

Are Cryptocurrencies the Great Hayekian Escape?

Published in Law & Liberty. Also republished in RealClear Markets.

Practically all governments of history have used their exclusive power to issue money in order to defraud and plunder the people,” wrote the great economist Friedrich Hayek. He meant that when governments want to run big deficits, they can take the people’s money through currency depreciation and inflation, without having to pass any tax legislation. For governments to do this, having a central bank is very handy.

To finance government deficits, central banks with a fiat currency monopoly create as much money as desired, whether by literal printing or metaphorical printing by accounting entries, thus, as it is called, monetizing government debt. Since the 1960s, this has led to endemic inflation and continuous depreciation of the currency, sometimes fairly slowly (what used to be called “creeping inflation”), and sometimes very rapidly—like now. This is in sharp contrast to honest or sound money, which would have a stable value on average over time. 

In response, can the people escape the government’s currency monopoly with cryptocurrencies? Cryptocurrencies try to create competitive alternatives to depreciating central bank fiat money. Their development has set off an instructive dialectic between money as a government monopoly and possible private forms of money. 

A fundamental text for the concept of domestic monetary competition is Hayek’s notable essay, “Choice in Currency: a Way to Stop Inflation.” Published in 1976, in the wake of the collapse of the Bretton-Woods monetary system and during the great 1970s inflation, Hayek’s discussion included these provocative thoughts:

What is so dangerous and ought to be done away with is not governments’ right to issue money but the exclusive right to do so and their power to force people to use it.…Why should we not let the people choose freely what money they want to use? … If governments and other issuers of money have to compete in inducing people to hold their money…they will have to create confidence in its long-term stability… I hope it will not be too long before complete freedom to deal in any money one likes will be regarded as the essential mark of a free country.

These ideas or similar ones are echoed by supporters of all the cryptocurrencies that have appeared since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009, which have had their own truly remarkable bull market. However, are today’s cryptocurrencies true alternatives to government fiat currency of the sort Hayek envisioned?

In 1976, Hayek was not thinking of the cryptocurrencies that have appeared in the last decade. He was thinking about gold. He wondered whether there might still be a rebirth for gold as money, although the last vestiges of the gold standard had just disappeared with the death of Bretton-Woods. This is apparent from the following section of his essay:

Where I am not sure is whether in such a competition for reliability any government-issued currency would prevail, or whether the predominant preference would not be in favor of some such units as ounces of gold. It seems not unlikely that gold would ultimately re-assert its place as ‘the universal prize in all countries’…if people were given complete freedom to decide what to use as their standard.

 One of the great marketing and public relations triumphs of recent years was Bitcoin’s success in convincing people, especially the media, to refer to it as a “coin,” and to publish articles about Bitcoin constantly accompanied by pictures of gold coins with a “B” in the form of a dollar sign stamped on them–just like the picture at the top of this essay. This was PR genius, a psychological reminder of the preference Hayek had expected. But obviously, a nonredeemable electronic entry in a computerized ledger bears no resemblance to an actual gold coin, with or without a ‘B’ stamped on it. The essential fact about Bitcoins is that there is no promise to redeem them with anything—in that sense, they are just like Federal Reserve dollars.

The price of Bitcoins has reached astronomical levels, accompanied in its flight by the idea of trying to escape from the Federal Reserve dollar (and all other central bank fiat currencies). In this way, buyers of Bitcoins and gold are similar. The well-known billionaire investor and speculator Stanley Druckenmiller was reported as explaining that “he finally realized what problem Bitcoin aims to solve—and that problem was called ‘central banks.’” Said Druckenmiller, without excess diplomacy:

The problem was Jay Powell and the world’s central bankers going nuts and making fiat money even more questionable than it already has been when I used to own gold.

Bitcoin, or any other cryptocurrency modeled on it, is equally a fiat currency. In these cryptocurrencies we see the radical attempt to create a private fiat currency. They are tied to no asset and no cash flow, and by definition, have no tie to government power. This is what makes them so intriguing. 

In contrast, the U.S. national bank notes of the 19th and early 20th centuries were tied to U.S. Treasury bonds as collateral, and state bank notes to the general assets of the issuing bank. It seems dubious that with no tie at all to any assets or cash flow, you can get a private currency reliably useful for ordinary exchange and as store of value. (Even with the infamous tulip bubble, there was a real tulip bulb involved. Although you might have lost a lot of money, at least you could still grow a tulip.) 

Nonetheless, the Bitcoin model has, without doubt, created a fascinating intangible object of speculation which displays extreme price volatility, with startling ascents and free-fall drops. It is often said, which seems right to me, that this volatility makes it unsuitable or unusable for ordinary, legal, everyday payments and exchange, since you have no idea from day to day what its value will be. Therefore, cryptocurrencies on the Bitcoin model create, as the Bank for International Settlements put it in 2021, “speculative assets rather than money.” While notably successful at becoming speculative assets, they thus fail to be a Hayekian competitor to central bank fiat money as money.

Trying to solve the problem of price volatility led to the development of a variety of stablecoins, which target a constant value in terms of the U.S. dollar (or other national currency), are backed by a “reserve” of dollar-denominated assets held by the issuer to support the value, and promise to various extents redemption in dollars. It is apparent, as many financial regulators have observed, that such a stablecoin looks very much indeed like a deposit in a bank, backed by the assets of the bank, and is equally dependent on the quality, riskiness, and liquidity of those assets for the ability to redeem it at par value.

But in terms of the grand objective of creating a Hayekian competitor to central bank fiat currency, there is a much more fundamental problem. A moment’s thought makes the deeper issue obvious: if the stablecoin gives itself stability and currency by linking itself to the U.S. dollar (or any other national currency), it has completely failed to escape the government’s central bank, and is instead entirely dependent on it.

If the Federal Reserve steadily depreciates the purchasing power of the dollar, the purchasing power of the stablecoin automatically goes down accordingly. If the dollar suffers rapid inflation, so will the stablecoin. If the dollar succumbs to hyper-inflation, so will the stablecoin. Thus, the stablecoin may represent a variation or perhaps an improvement on payments technology, but it does not, and cannot by design, represent a new currency. As long as it is linked to a national currency, it is part of the central bank fiat currency system, just as a bank deposit is, and fails to be a Hayekian competitive currency.

In a striking historical irony, the libertarian idea to free people from central bank monopoly money through cryptocurrencies has dialectically given rise to the idea of a central bank issuing its own cryptocurrency, with the more dignified name of “central bank digital currency.” If this should happen the central bank could become the bank for everyone, with the potential to be the monopolist of deposits, loans, and personal financial information, as well as the monopolist of money. This highly undesirable dialectical reversal would make the monetary system vastly more centralized and the central bank vastly more powerful than before. China, and more recently Canada, have shown us the direction that political control of your personal account can take. This would certainly be a non-Hayekian outcome!

Can there be a true alternative in Hayek’s sense to central bank fiat currencies, other than currency redeemable in gold? One of my friends has suggested a digital currency in which the unit is a real dollar—that is, a dollar adjusted for changes in the Consumer Price Index, so that the central bank cannot dilute its purchasing power (at least as captured by the CPI). It would resemble in this sense the Series I U.S. savings bond, which today pays its holders whatever the increase in the CPI turns out to be. But unlike the savings bond, the real dollar currency would need to be freely exchangeable, and available in large amounts. It would be an echo of the 1920s proposal of Irving Fisher, a famous economist in his day, to have a “compensated dollar,” which would automatically increase in value to offset inflation.

With today’s financial technology, would it be possible to create such a collateralized private currency, redeemable in inflation-adjusted dollars of steady purchasing power? Could an asset portfolio to back it be designed? Perhaps not, but it is an interesting thought experiment, in the spirit of Hayek, while we keep looking for a form of money to compete with the constantly depreciating, and now rapidly depreciating, Federal Reserve dollar and other central bank fiat currencies.

Federal Housing Regulators Have Learned and Forgotten Everything

Published in Law & Liberty and in Real Clear Markets.

Should the government subsidize buying houses that cost $1.2 million? The answer is obviously no. But the government is going to do it anyway through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA) has just increased the size of mortgage loans Fannie and Freddie can buy (the “conforming loan limit”) to $970,080 in “high cost areas.” With a 20% down payment, that means loans for the purchase of houses with a price up to $1,212,600.

Similarly, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) will be subsidizing houses costing up to $1,011,250. That’s the house price with a FHA mortgage at its increased “high cost” limit of $970,800 and a 4% down payment.

The regular Fannie and Freddie loan limit will become $647,200, which with a 20% down payment means a house costing $809,000. The median U.S. price sold in June 2021 was $310,000. A house selling for $809,000 is in the top 7% in the country. One selling for $1,212,600 is in the top 3%. To take North Carolina for example, where house prices are less exaggerated, an $809,000 house is in the top 2%. For FHA loans, the regular limit will become $420,680, or a house costing over $438,000 with a 4% down payment—41% above the national median sales price.

Average citizens who own ordinary houses may think it makes no sense for the government to support people who buy, lenders that lend on, and builders that build such high-priced houses, not to mention the Wall Street firms that deal in the resulting government-backed mortgage securities. They’re right.

Fannie and Freddie, which continue to enjoy an effective guarantee from the U.S. Treasury, will now be putting the taxpayers on the hook for the risks of financing these houses. Through clever financial lawyering, it’s not legally a guarantee, but everyone involved knows it really is a guarantee, and the taxpayers really are on the hook for Fannie and Freddie, whose massive $7 trillion in assets have only 1% capital to back them. FHA, which is fully guaranteed by the Treasury, has in addition well over a trillion dollars in loans it has insured.

By pushing more government-sponsored loans, Fannie, Freddie, its government conservator, the FHFA, and sister agency, the FHA, are feeding the already runaway house price inflation. House prices are now 48% over their 2006 Housing Bubble peak. In October, they were up 15.8% from the year before. As the government helps push house prices up, houses grow less and less affordable for new families, and low-income families in particular, who are trying to climb onto the rungs of the homeownership ladder.

As distinguished housing economist Ernest Fisher pointed out in 1975:

[T]he tendency for costs and prices to absorb the amounts made available to prospective purchasers or renters has plagued government programs since…1934. Close examination of these tendencies indicates that promises of extending the loan-to-value ratio of the mortgage and extending its term so as to make home purchase ‘possible for lower income prospective purchasers’ may bring greater profits and wages to builders, building suppliers, and building labor rather than assisting lower-income households.

The reason the FHFA is raising the Fannie and Freddie loan-size limits by 18%, is that its House Price Index is up 18% over the last year. FHA’s limit automatically goes up in lock step with these changes. These increases are procyclical acts. They feed the house price increases, rather than acting to moderate them, as a countercyclical policy would do. Procyclical government policies by definition make financial cycles worse and hurt low-income families, the originally intended beneficiaries.

The contrasting countercyclical objective was memorably expressed by William McChesney Martin, the longest-serving Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. In office from 1951 to 1970, under five U.S. presidents, Martin gave us the most famous of all central banking metaphors. The Federal Reserve, he said in 1955, “is in the position of the chaperone who has ordered the punch bowl removed just when the party was really warming up.”

Long after the current housing price party has gotten not only warmed up, but positively tipsy, the Federal Reserve of 2021 has, instead of removing the punch bowl, been spiking the punch. It has done this by, in addition to keeping short term rates at historically low levels, buying hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage securities, thus keeping mortgage rates abnormally low, and continuing to heat up the party further.

In general, what a robust housing finance system needs is less government subsidy and distortion, not more.

In fact, the government has been spiking the housing party punch in three ways. First is the Federal Reserve’s purchases of mortgage securities, which have bloated its mortgage portfolio to a massive $2.6 trillion, or about 24% of all U.S. residential mortgages outstanding.

Second, the government through Fannie and Freddie runs up the leverage in the housing finance system, making it riskier. This is true of both leverage of income and leverage of the asset price. It is also true of FHA lending. Graph 1 shows how Fannie and Freddie’s large loans have a much higher proportion of high debt-to-income (DTI) ratios than large private sector loans do. In other words, Fannie and Freddie tend to lend more against income, a key risk factor.

Graph 1: Percent of loans over 43% DTI ratio

Source: Fisher, Lynn M., et al. “Jumbo rates below conforming rates: When did this happen and why?.” Real Estate Economics 49.S2 (2021): 461-489.

Fannie and Freddie also make a greater proportion of large loans with low down payments, or high loan-to-value (LTV) ratios, than do corresponding private markets. Graph 2 shows the percent of their large loans with LTVs of 90% or more—that is, with down payments of 10% or less—another key risk factor.

Graph 2:  Share of loans with LTV ratios over 90%

Source: Fisher, Lynn M., et al. “Jumbo rates below conforming rates: When did this happen and why?.” Real Estate Economics 49.S2 (2021): 461-489.

Now—on top of all that– the FHFA, by upping the loan sizes for Fannie and Freddie, is bringing to the party a bigger punch bowl. That the size limit for Fannie and Freddie is very important in mortgage loan behavior, we can see from how their large loans bunch right at the limit, as shown by Graph 3.

The third spiking of the house price punch bowl consists of the government’s huge payments and subsidies in reaction to the pandemic. A portion of this poorly targeted deficit spending money made its way into housing markets to bid up prices.

A key housing finance issue is the differential impact of house price inflation on lower-income households. AEI Housing Center research has demonstrated how the spiked punch bowl has inflated the cost of lower-priced houses more than others. This research shows that rapid price increases crowd out low-income potential home buyers in housing markets. Thus, as Ernest Fisher observed nearly 50 years ago, government policies that make for rapid house price inflation constrain the ability to become homeowners of the very group the government professes to help.

In general, what a robust housing finance system needs is less government subsidy and distortion, not more. The question of upping the size of Fannie and Freddie loans, and correspondingly those of the FHA, is part of a larger picture of what the overall policy for them should be. Should we favor making their subsidized, market distorting, taxpayer guaranteed activities even bigger than the combined $8 trillion they are already?  Should they become even more dominant than they are now?  Or should the government’s dominance of the sector and its risk be systematically reduced?  That would be a movement toward a mortgage sector that is more like a market and less like a political machine.

In short, what about the future of the government mortgage complex, especially Fannie and Freddie: Should they be even bigger or smaller?  We vote for smaller.

How might this be done? As a good example, Senator Patrick Toomey, the Ranking Member of the Senate Banking Committee, has introduced a bill that would eliminate Fannie and Freddie’s ability to subsidize loans on investment properties, a very apt proposal. It will not advance with the current configuration of the Congress, but it’s the right idea. Similarly, it would make sense to stop Fannie and Freddie from subsidizing cash-out refis, mortgages that increase the debt on the house. Another basic idea, often proposed historically, but of course never implemented, would be to reduce, not increase, the maximum size of the loans Fannie and Freddie can buy, and by extension, FHA can insure.

In the meantime, the house price party rolls on. How will it end after all the spiked punch?  Doubtless with a hangover.

Alex J. Pollock is a senior fellow at the Mises Institute and the author of Finance and Philosophy: Why We're Always Surprised. His five decades of financial experience include being the Principal Deputy Director of the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Financial Research and the president and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago.

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Edward J. Pinto is an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) senior fellow and director of AEI’s Housing Center. The Center monitors the US markets using a unique set of Housing Market Indicators. Active in housing finance for over 40 years, he was an executive vice president and chief credit officer for Fannie Mae until the late 1980s.

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Risk, Uncertainty and Profit 100 Years Later

Published in Law & Liberty. Also appears in AIER.

The year 2021 marks the 100th anniversary of Frank Knight’s great book, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (RU&P), which established uncertainty as a fundamental idea in economics and finance, and as a key to understanding enterprise, entrepreneurship, cycles of booms and busts, and economic growth. Viewed from the present, it also explains why faith in economic management by central banks will be disappointed, and why any idea that economies or financial markets are governed by “mechanisms” is deluded. Its ideas open the way to seeing that economies and financial markets are a different kind of reality than are machines, and thus why the econometric equations that seem so plausible in some times, at other times fail.

Knight lived from 1885 to 1972; RU&P was published in 1921 when he was 35. Although he subsequently had a long and distinguished career at the University of Chicago, where he influenced numerous future economists including Milton Friedman, RU&P is far and away his magnum opus, a book that “ended up changing the course of economic theory” and established Knight “in the pantheon of economic thinkers.” It might also be called “the most cited economics book you have never read.” Indeed, it is long, complex, and often difficult, but contains brilliant insights which do not go out of date. We may enjoy the irony that it arose from a contest by the publishers in 1917 in which its original text won second, not first, prize.

RU&P is most and justifiably famous for its critical distinction between Uncertainty and Risk, with the term “Knightian Uncertainty” immortalizing the author, at least among those of us who have thought about it. Although in common language, then and now, “It’s uncertain” or “It’s risky” might be taken to mean more or less the same thing, in Knight’s clarified concepts, they are not only not the same, but are utterly different, with vast consequences.

Knight set out to address, as he wrote in RU&P, “a confusion of ideas which goes down deep into the foundations of our thinking. The key to the whole tangle will be found to lie in the notion of risk or uncertainty and the ambiguities concealed therein.” So “the answer is to be found in a thorough examination and criticism of the concept of uncertainty, and its bearings upon economic processes.”

“But,” Knight continued, “Uncertainty must be taken in a sense radically distinct from the familiar notion of Risk, from which it has never been properly separated”—until RU&P in 1921, of course. They are “two things which, functionally at least, in their causal relations to the phenomena of economic organization, are categorically different.”

Specifically, risk means “a quantity susceptible of measurement,” but uncertainty is “unmeasurable,” and “a measurable uncertainty is so far different from an unmeasurable one that it is not in effect an uncertainty at all.” It is only a risk.

Another way of saying this is that for a measurable risk, you can know the odds of outcomes, although you don’t know exactly what will happen in any given case. With uncertainty, you do not even know the odds, and more importantly, you cannot know the odds.

When facing risk, since you can know the odds, you can know in a large number of repeated events what the distribution of the outcomes will be. You can know the mean of the distribution of outcomes, its variation, and the probability of extreme outcomes. With fair pair of dice, you know that rolling snake eyes (one spot on each die) has a reliable probability of 1/36. We know that the extreme outcome of rolling snake eyes three times in a row has a probability of about 0.00002—roughly the same probability of flipping a fair coin and getting tails 16 times in a row. Of course, even that remote probability is not zero.

With risk, by knowing the odds in this fashion, and knowing how much money is being risked, you can rationally write insurance for bearing the risk when it is spread over a large number of participants. It may take specialized skill and a lot of data, but you can always in principle calculate a fair price for insuring the risk over time, and the ones taking the risk can accordingly buy insurance from you at a fair price, solving their risk problem.

Faced with uncertainty, however, you cannot rationally write the insurance, and the uncertainty bearers cannot buy sound insurance from you, because nobody knows or can know the odds. Therefore, they do not and cannot know the fair price for bearing the uncertainty.

In short, an essential result of Knight’s logic is that risk is in principle insurable, but uncertainty is not.

Of course, you might convince yourself that the uncertainty is really risk and then estimate the odds from the past and make calculations, including complicated and sophisticated calculations, manipulating your guesses about the odds. There is often a strong temptation to do this. It helps a lot in selling securities, for example, or in making subprime loans. You can build models using the estimated odds, creating complicated series of linked probabilities for surviving various stress tests and for calculating the required prices.

It is the special function of the entrepreneur to generate unpredictable change and the economic profit or loss, progress or mistakes, that result from it.

Your analysts will certainly solve the mathematical equations in the models properly; however, under uncertainty, the question is not doing the math correctly, but the relationship of the math to the unknown and unknowable future reality. In the uncertainty case, your models will one day fail, because in fact you cannot know the odds, no matter how many models you run. The same is true of a central bank, say the Federal Reserve, running a complex model of the whole economy and employing scores of economists. Under uncertainty, it may, for example, in spite of all its sophisticated efforts, forecast low inflation when what really is about to happen is very high inflation—just as in 2021.

There is no one to ensure against the mistake of thinking Uncertainty is Risk.

Let us come to the P in RU&P: Profit. Every time Knight writes “profit,” as in the following quotations, and also as used in the following discussion, it does not mean accounting profit, as we are accustomed to seeing in a profit and loss statement, but “economic profit.” Economic profit is profit in excess of the economy’s cost of capital. When economic profit is zero, then the firm’s revenues equal its costs, including the cost of capital and the cost of Risk, so the firm has earned exactly its cost of capital.

In a theoretical world of perfect competition, prices, including the price for insuring Risk, would adjust so that revenues always would equal cost. That means in a competitive world in which the future risks are insurable, there should be no profit. We obviously observe large profits in many cases, especially those earned by successful entrepreneurs. Knight concludes that in a competitive economy, Uncertainty, but not Risk, can give rise to Profit.

It is “vital to contrast profit with payment for risk-taking,” he wrote. “The ‘risk’ which gives rise to profit is an uncertainty which cannot be evaluated, connected with a situation such that there is no possibility of grouping on any objective basis,” and “the only ‘risk’ which leads to a profit is a unique uncertainty resulting from an exercise of ultimate responsibility which in its very nature cannot be insured.” Thus, “profit arises out of the inherent, absolute unpredictability of things, out of the sheer brute fact that the results of human activity cannot be anticipated…a probability calculation in regard to them is impossible and meaningless.” Loss also arises from the same brute fact, of course. We are again reminded that human activity is a different kind of reality than that of predictable physical systems.

Economic progress, or a rising standard of living for ordinary people, depends on creating and bearing Uncertainty, but this obviously also makes possible many mistakes. These include, we may add, the group mistakes which result in financial cycles. We don’t get the progress without the uncertainty or without mistakes. “The problem of management or control, being a correlate or implication of uncertainty, is in correspondingly large measure the problem of progress.” The paradox of economic progress is that there is no progress without Uncertainty, and no Uncertainty without mistakes.

To have Uncertainty, there must be change, for “in an absolutely unchanging world the future would be accurately foreknown.” But change per se does not create an unknowable future and Uncertainty. Change which follows a known law would be insurable; so “if the law of change is known…no profits can arise.” Profits in a competitive system can arise “only in so far as the changes and their consequences are unpredictable.”

It is the special function of the entrepreneur to generate unpredictable change and the economic profit or loss, progress or mistakes, that result from it. He takes the “ultimate responsibility” of bearing uncertainty in business.

Knight clearly enjoyed summing up “the main facts in the psychology of the case” of the entrepreneurs, when the uncertainties “do not relate to objective external probabilities, but to the value of the judgment and executive powers of the person taking the chance.” The entrepreneurs may have “an irrational confidence in their own good fortune, and that is doubly true when their personal prowess comes into the reckoning, when they are betting on themselves.” They are “the class of men of whom these things are most strikingly true; they are not the critical and hesitant individuals, but rather those with restless energy, buoyant optimism, and large faith in things generally and themselves in particular.” This suggests that a kind of irrational faith is required for progress.

A former student of philosophy, Knight always was a very philosophical economist. On the last page of RU&P comes this true perspective on it all: “The fundamental fact about society as a going concern is that it is made of individuals who are born and die and give place to others; and the fundamental fact about modern civilization is that it is dependent upon the utilization of three great accumulating funds of inheritance from the past, material goods and appliances, knowledge and skill, and morale. . . . Life must in some manner be carried forward to new individuals born devoid of all these things as older individuals pass out.” We need to be reminded of this as we in our turn strive to increase the great funds of inheritance for those who will carry on into the ever-uncertain future.

For it is as true now and going forward as when RU&P was published one hundred years ago that, as Knight wrote, “Uncertainty is one of the fundamental facts of life.”

Biden's radical Treasury nominee in her own words

Published in The Hill.

In an incomprehensible act, President Biden has nominated as comptroller of the currency Saule Omarova — a law school professor who thinks that banks should have their deposit business taken away and transferred to the government, the Federal Reserve should be the monopoly provider of retail and commercial deposits, the Fed should perform national credit allocation, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York should intervene in investment markets whenever it thinks prices are too high or too low (shorting or buying a wide range of investments accordingly), the government should sit on boards of directors of private banks with special powers and disproportionate voting power, new federal bureaucracies should be set up to regulate financial regulators and carry out national investment policy and in general, it seems, has never thought of a vast government bureaucracy or a statist power that she doesn’t like.

What follows is a collection of such particularly unwise proposals in Professor Omarova’s own words, which might be appropriately called “Omarova’s Little Book.” 

“On the liability side” of the banking system, Professor Omarova “envisions the ultimate ‘end-state’ whereby central bank accounts fully replace — rather than compete with — private bank accounts,” according to her 2020 paper, “The People’s Ledger: How to Democratize Money and Finance the Economy.”

“On the asset side,” she “lays out a proposal for restructuring the Fed’s investment portfolio and redirecting its credit-allocation power…leaving the asset side free to serve as the tool of the economy-wide credit allocation.”

In short, “the key is…eliminating private banks’ deposit-taking function and giving the Fed new asset-side tools of shaping economy-wide credit flows,” the proposed regulator of national banks writes.

At this point, it is already unnecessary to proceed any further, but we will.

In the paper, “The ‘Too Big To Fail’ Problem,” Omarova suggests “an expansion of the Federal Reserve’s so-called ‘open market operations’…to encompass trading in a wide range of financial assets. … If, for example,  a particular asset class — such as mortgage-backed securities or technology stocks — rises in market value at rates suggestive of a bubble trend, the FRBNY trading desk would short these securities.” 

“The FRBNY trading desk would go long on particular asset classes when they appear to be artificially undervalued.” 

Also, a “National Investment Authority” would be “charged with developing and implementing a comprehensive strategy of national economic development.” 

In “The Climate Case for a National Investment Authority,“ she said "The NIA will act directly within markets as a lender, guarantor, market-maker, venture capital investor and asset manager. … It will use these modalities of finance in a far more assertive and creative manner.”

These ideas will perhaps strike you, as they do me, as exceptionally naïve.

Meanwhile, in “Bankers, Bureaucrats, and Guardians: Toward Tripartism in Financial Services Regulation,” Omarova proposes creating a “Public Interest Council,” which “would have a special status … outside of the legislative and executive branches." The Council "would comprise…primarily academic experts [!]" and "it would have broad statutory authority to collect any information it deems necessary from any government agency or private market participant and to conduct targeted investigations.”

On top of that, in “Bank, Governance and Systemic Stability: The ‘Golden Share’ Approach,” she recommends a “new golden share mechanism” which would give “the government special, exclusive and nontransferable corporate-governance rights in privately owned enterprises.”

“As a holder of the golden share, the government could have disproportionate voting power with respect to the election of the company’s directors and various strategic decisions,” reads the paper.

“This ability to affect directly a private firm’s substantive business decisions — without holding a controlling economic equity stake — is a particularly promising feature of the golden share,” Omarova thinks. Do you?

While considering this quite remarkable nomination, any member of the Senate Banking Committee who personally supports these proposals of Omarova should boldly hold up their hand and then speak in their defense. It seems hard to believe there would be many hands.

The US has never defaulted on its debt — except the four times it did

Published in The Hill.

Every time the U.S. government’s debt gets close to the debt ceiling, and people start worrying about a possible default, the Treasury Department, under either party, says the same thing: “The U.S. government has never defaulted on its debt!” Every time, this claim is false.

Now Treasury Secretary Yellen has joined the unfailing chorus, writing that “The U.S. has always paid its bills on time” and “The U.S. has never defaulted. Not once,” and telling the Senate Banking Committee that if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling, “America would default for the first time in history.”  

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This is all simply wrong. If the United States government did default now, it would be the fifth time, not the first. There have been four explicit defaults on its debt before. These were:

1. The default on the U.S. government’s demand notes in early 1862, caused by the Treasury’s financial difficulties trying to pay for the Civil War. In response, the U. S. government took to printing pure paper money, or “greenbacks,” which during the war fell to significant discounts against gold, depending particularly on the military fortunes of the Union armies.

2. The overt default by the U.S. government on its gold bonds in 1933. The United States had in clear and entirely unambiguous terms promised the bondholders to redeem these bonds in gold coin. Then it refused to do so, offering depreciated paper currency instead. The case went ultimately to the Supreme Court, which on a 5-4 vote, upheld the sovereign power of the government to default if it chose to. “As much as I deplore this refusal to fulfill the solemn promise of bonds of the United States,” wrote Justice Harlan Stone, a member of the majority, “the government, through exercise of its sovereign power…has rendered itself immune from liability,” demonstrating the classic risk of lending to a sovereign. In “American Default,” his highly interesting political history of this event, Sebastian Edwards concludes that it was an “excusable default,” but clearly a default.

3. Then the U.S. government defaulted in 1968 by refusing to honor its explicit promise to redeem its silver certificate paper dollars for silver dollars. The silver certificates stated and still state on their face in language no one could misunderstand, “This certifies that there has been deposited in the Treasury of the United States of America one silver dollar, payable to the bearer on demand.” It would be hard to have a clearer promise than that. But when an embarrassingly large number of bearers of these certificates demanded the promised silver dollars, the U.S. government simply decided not to pay. For those who believed the certification which was and is printed on the face of the silver certificates: Tough luck.

4. The fourth default was the 1971 breaking of the U.S. government’s commitment to redeem dollars held by foreign governments for gold under the Bretton Woods Agreement. Since that commitment was the lynchpin of the entire Bretton Woods system, reneging on it was the end of the system. President Nixon announced this act as temporary: “I have directed [Treasury] Secretary Connally to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold.” The suspension of course became permanent, allowing the unlimited printing of dollars by the Federal Reserve today. Connally notoriously told his upset international counterparts, “The dollar is our currency but it’s your problem.”

To paraphrase Daniel Patrick Moynihan, you are entitled to your own opinion about the debt ceiling, but not to your own facts about the history of U.S. government defaults.

Seven Possible Causes of the Next Financial Crisis

Published in Law & Liberty.

The great financial historian, Charles Kindleberger, pointed out in the 1970s that over several centuries, history showed there was a financial crisis about once every ten years. His observation still holds. In every decade since his classic Manias, Panics and Crashes of 1978, such crises have indeed continued to erupt in their turn, in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and again in 2020. What could cause the next crisis in this long, recurring series? I suggest seven possibilities:

1. What Nobody Sees Coming

A notable headline from 2017 was “Yellen: I Don’t See a Financial Crisis Coming in Our Lifetimes.” The then-head of the Federal Reserve was right that she didn’t see it coming; nonetheless, well within her and our lifetimes, a new financial crisis arrived in 2020, from unexpected causes.

It has been well said that “The riskiest stuff is what you don’t see coming.” Especially risky is what you don’t think is possible, but happens anyway.

About the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-09, a former Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve candidly observed: “Not only didn’t we see it coming,” but in the midst of it, “had trouble understanding what was happening.” Similarly, “Central banks and regulators failed to see the bust coming, just as they failed to anticipate its potential magnitude,” as another top central banking expert wrote.

The next financial crisis could be the same—we may take another blindside hit for a big financial sack.

In his memoir of the 2007-09 crisis, former Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson wrote, “We had no choice but to fly by the seat of our pants, making it up as we went along.” If the next financial crisis is again triggered by what we don’t see coming, the government reactions will once again be flying by the seat of their pants, making it up as they go along.

2. A Purely Malicious Macro-Hack of the Financial System

We keep learning about how vulnerable to hacking, especially by state-sponsored hackers, even the most “secure” systems are. Here I am not considering a hack to make money or collect blackmail, or a hack for spying, but a purely malicious hack with the sole goal of creating destruction and panic, to cripple the United States by bringing down our amazingly complex and totally computer-dependent financial information systems.

Imagine macro-hackers attacking with the same destructive motivation as the 9/11 terrorists. Suppose when they strike, trading and payments systems can’t clear, there are no market prices, no one can find out the balances in their accounts or the value of their risk positions, and no one knows who is broke or solvent. That is my second next crisis scenario.

3. All the Central Banks Get It Wrong Together

We know that the major central banks operate as a tight international club. Their decisions are subject to vast uncertainty, and as a result, they display significant cognitive and behavioral herding.

I read somewhere the colorful line, “Central banks have become slaves of the bubbles they blow.” Whether or not we think that, there is no question that the principal central banks have all together managed to create a gigantic global asset price inflation.

Suppose they have also managed to set off a disastrous, runaway general price inflation. Then ultimately interest rates must rise, and asset prices fall. This will be in a setting of stretched asset prices and high debt. As asset prices fall, speculative leverage will be punished. “Every great crisis reveals the excessive speculations of many houses which no one before suspected,” as Walter Bagehot said. The Everything Bubble of our time would then implode and the crisis would be upon us. Huge government bailouts would ensue.

We have discovered that to combat a pandemic, governments can close down economies and cause massive unemployment and economic disruption. Would they do that again—or something else?

4. A Housing Collapse Again

A particularly notable asset price inflation is, once again, that in the price of houses, which are the biggest investment most households have and are the mortgage collateral for the biggest loan market in the world. House prices are now rising in the U.S. at the unsustainable rate of more than 18% a year, but this is also global problem. Many countries, about 20 by one reckoning, face extreme house price inflation. Said one financial commentator, “This is now a global property bubble of epic proportions, never before seen by man or beast, and it has entrapped more central banks than just the Fed.”

House prices depend on high leverage and are, as is well known, very interest rate sensitive. What would an actual market-determined mortgage rate look like, instead of the Federal Reserve-manipulated 3% mortgage rate the U.S. has now? A reasonable estimate would begin with a 3% general inflation, and therefore a 4.5% 10-year Treasury note. The long-term mortgage rate would be 1.5% over that, or 6%. That would more or less double the monthly payment for the same-sized mortgage, house prices would fall steeply, and our world record house price bubble implode. Faced with that possibility, so far the Federal Reserve’s choice has been to keep pumping up the bubble.

Overpriced, leveraged real estate is a frequent culprit in financial crises. Maybe once again.

5. An Electricity System Failure

Imagine a failure, similar to our financial system macro-hack scenario, resulting from an attack maliciously carried out to bring down the national electricity system, or from a huge solar flare, bigger than the one that took down the electric system of Quebec in 1989.

Physically speaking, the financial system, including of course all forms of electronic payments, is an electronic system, utterly dependent upon the supply of electricity. Should that fail, it would certainly be good to have some paper currency in your wallet, or actual gold coins. Bank accounts and cryptocurrencies will not be working so well.

6. The Next Pandemic

It feels like we have survived the Covid pandemic and the crisis is passing. Even with the ongoing problem of the Delta variant, we are certainly more relaxed than at the peak of the intense fear and the lockdowns of 2020. Instead of financial markets being in free fall as they were, they are booming.

But what about the next pandemic? We have discovered that to combat a pandemic, governments can close down economies and cause massive unemployment and economic disruption. Would they do that again—or something else?

How soon could a new pandemic happen? We don’t know.

Might that new pandemic be much more deadly than Covid? Consider Professor Adam Tooze: “One thing 2020 forces us to come to terms with is that this wasn’t a black swan [an unknown possibility]. This kind of pandemic was widely and insistently and repeatedly predicted.” What wasn’t predicted was the political response and the financial panic. “In fact,” Tooze continues, “what people had predicted was worse than the coronavirus.”

If the prediction of an even worse and more deadly new pandemic becomes right, perhaps sooner than we might think, that might trigger our next financial crisis.

7. A Major War

By far the most important financial events of all are big wars.

A sobering talk I heard a few years ago described China as “Germany in 1913.”

This of course brings our mind to 1914. The incredible destruction then unleashed included a financial panic, and the war created huge, intractable financial problems which lasted up to the numerous sovereign defaults of the 1930s.

What if a big war happened again in the 21st century? If you think that is not possible, recall the once-famous book, Norman Angel’s The Great Illusion, which argued that a 20th-century war among European powers would be so economically costly that it would not happen. In the event, it was unimaginably costly, but nonetheless happened.

One distinguished scholar, Graham Allison of Harvard, has written: “A disastrous war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than most of us are willing to allow.” A particular point of tension is the Chinese claim to sovereignty over Taiwan.  Might a Chinese decision to end Taiwan’s freedom by force be the equivalent of the German invasion of Belgium in 1914?

Would anyone be crazy enough to start a war between China and the United States? We all certainly hope not, but we should remember that such a war did already occur: most of the Korean War consisted of battles between the Chinese and American armies. In his history of the Korean War, David Halberstam wrote, “The Chinese viewed Korea as a great success,” and that Mao “had shrewdly understood the domestic benefits of having his county at war with the Americans.”

If it happened again it would be a terrific crisis, needless to say, with perhaps a global financial panic thrown in.

Overall, we can say there is plenty of risk and uncertainty to provide the possibility of the next financial crisis.

Based on remarks at an American Enterprise Institute teleconference, “What might cause the next financial crisis?” on June 29, 2021.

The Next Housing Bust

Published in Law & Liberty.

The Supreme Court has determined that the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)—the regulator and conservator of the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—was unconstitutionally structured because its director could only be removed from office for cause. The Court held in its June 23, 2021 decision that the constitutional issue could be resolved by striking the “for cause” language—leaving the FHFA in place, but headed by a director who could be removed from office at any time by the President.

Immediately upon the Court’s decision, the White House fired the FHFA director, Mark Calabria, and replaced him with a temporary appointment. Calabria had been following a policy of increasing the capital of the GSEs in preparation for privatizing them and reducing their risk to the taxpayers; his temporary replacement forthwith reversed course. Said Sandra Thompson, Calabria’s acting replacement, “It is FHFA’s duty through our regulated entities to ensure that all Americans have equal access to safe, decent, and affordable housing.”

This means a sharp change in marching orders for Fannie and Freddie—from a future as privatized companies to a future of being used to accumulate the risk of the government’s housing policies and increase the risk to taxpayers. 

This sets up the conditions for the next housing bust. We have seen this movie twice before and know the ending.

The first time began in 1968 when HUD developed a “10-year housing program to eliminate all substandard housing.” Since there were then, like now, very large budget deficits, this program was implemented off-budget. The answer was the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act, which had FHA insuring the 10-year plans’ subsidized single- and multifamily loans and Fannie funding them. Fannie was up to then a government agency with its debt on-budget. The 1968 Act converted it to an off-budget GSE. Now it was in a position to fund the largest expansion of newly built and rehabilitated subsidized housing in the nation’s history with up to 40-year fixed-rate loans. There have been only two years where privately owned single- and multifamily housing completions exceeded 2 million: 1972 (2.00 million) and 1973 (2.10 million)—when the population was 210 million and the number of households was 67 million, 36% and 48% respectively and smaller than today. As a reference, in 2006, at the peak of the Housing Bubble, there were 1.98 million completions.

In just a few years, HUD’s program turned into a disaster for cities and their residents, as described in the book Cities Destroyed for Cash: The FHA Scandal at HUD written in 1973.  Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, and many other cities never fully recovered from the effects of HUD’s scheme. By the early 1980s, Fannie’s investment in these loans had suffered huge interest rate risk losses that left it effectively insolvent. It was only able to continue in business given its GSE status and backing by the Treasury.   

The second time began in 1992. Over the following years, the government forced Fannie and Freddie to reduce their credit standards so as to acquire trillions in risky loans under the rubric of affordable housing. The first of many trillion-dollar commitments was announced by Jim Johnson, Fannie’s very politically connected CEO, in March 1994. He vowed to “transform the housing finance system.” He did, but not in the way he intended. In 1994, HUD followed with its National Homeownership Strategy, about which President Clinton claimed: “Our home ownership strategy will not cost the taxpayers one extra cent.” A poor prediction indeed!

This government policy was pursued until 2008 through HUD’s authority to impose what were called “Affordable Housing Goals” on the GSEs. To meet ever more aggressive HUD goals, Fannie and Freddie had to continually reduce their mortgage credit standards, especially with respect to loan-to value and debt-to-income ratios. Instead of HUD’s strategy promoting homeownership, it resulted in some 10 million foreclosures and once again devastated our cities.

The full extent of the catastrophic credit risk expansion that took place has now been documented in a detailed analysis that researchers at FHFA and AEI released in May 2021. This is the first “comprehensive account of the changes in mortgage risk that produced the worst foreclosure wave since the Great Depression.” By analyzing over 200 million mortgage originations from 1990 onward, they showed “that mortgage risk had already risen in the 1990s, planting seeds of the financial crisis well before the actual event.” Average leverage and average DTI (the debt-payment to income ratio) on both home purchase and refinance loans increased significantly over the decade. Since Fannie and Freddie accounted for about 50% of the total mortgage market over the period 1994-2007, their complicity in the ensuing disaster is clear. The bubble’s inevitable collapse brought down many banks and other financial institutions, creating the 2008 financial crisis. In 2008 Fannie and Freddie were bailed out by the taxpayers and put into conservatorship, where they remain today, 13 years later.

The Democratic Congress elected in the wake of the crisis adopted the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010. It reflected the Democrats’ view that insufficient regulation caused the crisis. But the most important culprits—Fannie and Freddie—were left untouched, insolvent, and still functioning. Because it has become entirely clear that the US government is effectively the 100 percent guarantor of the GSEs, with the taxpayers fully on the hook, the financial markets provide unlimited funds for their operations. Thus the GSEs are allowed to operate profitably in their government conservatorship by using the U.S. Treasury’s global credit card. Today their off-budget, taxpayer-backed debt totals nearly $6 trillion, with the Federal Reserve funding more than $2 trillion of their mortgage-backed securities. 

As the saying goes, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and the U.S. has a history of catastrophic housing blunders to remember, also including the spectacular failure and bailout at taxpayer expense of the savings and loan industry in 1989. Three dramatic failures in four decades—not an enviable track record. 

Any president, thanks to the Supreme Court decision, now has direct control over most of the mortgage finance system. This includes Fannie and Freddie through FHFA; and the FHA and Ginnie Mae through HUD.

Government involvement not only creates moral hazard but also always generates political pressures for increasingly risky lending such as “affordable loans” to constituent groups, which in the end harms both these groups and the taxpayers. 

While the Supreme Court’s decision about the governance of FHFA is correct on its merits, the main problem is that we have a nationalized and socialized housing finance system. The American Jobs Plan proposes spending $318 billion to construct, restore, and modernize more than two million affordable homes. It is almost certain that the government will use its new control over the GSEs to once again make them the central elements of its plan with another weakening of credit standards. Thus we face the prospect of combining some of the worst features of HUD’s 1968 subsidized housing debacle with the GSEs’ disastrous foray into high-risk lending. Given this, can another mortgage debt crisis be far behind? 

However, the government does not have to follow the fatally flawed policies of the Johnson, Clinton, and Bush administrations. If instead the following four principles were implemented, the United States would have a robust, successful housing finance system it needs and its citizens deserve.

I. The housing finance market—like other US industries and housing finance systems in most other developed countries—can and should function principally as a private market, not a government-dominated one.

The foreclosures and financial losses associated with the 1968 Housing Act, the savings and loan (S&L) debacle of the 1980s, and the actions of Fannie, Freddie, and HUD did not come about in spite of government support for housing finance but because of that government backing. Government involvement not only creates moral hazard but also always generates political pressures for increasingly risky lending such as “affordable loans” to constituent groups, which in the end harms both these groups and the taxpayers. 

Although many schemes for government guarantees of housing finance in various forms have been circulating in Washington ever since the GSEs entered receivership, they are fundamentally the same as the policies that caused failures in the past. The flaw in all these ideas is the notion that the government can successfully guarantee increasing risk and will establish an accurate risk-based price for its guarantees. Many examples show that this is politically beyond the capacity of government.

First, the government’s guarantee eliminates an essential element of financial discipline—it removes credit risk from the investors. Second, the seemingly free-lunch nature of the off-budget guarantees creates the lure of the “affordable housing cookie jar”—cross-subsidies, “free money,” FHA and the GSEs competing for high-risk borrowers, and the perennial weakening of underwriting standards—all of which are backed by a government guarantee. So the outcome will be the same: underwriting standards will deteriorate, regulation of issuers will fail, and taxpayers will take losses once again.

II. Ensuring mortgage credit quality, and fostering the accumulation of adequate capital behind housing risk, can create a robust housing investment market without a government guarantee.

This principle is based on the fact that high-quality mortgages are good investments and have a long history of low losses. Instead of expanding government guarantees to reassure investors in MBS, we should simply ensure that the mortgages originated and distributed are predominantly of good quality. The characteristics of a good mortgage do not have to be invented; they are well known from many decades of experience. These are loan characteristics that, taken together, are highly predictive of loan performance. They include the borrower’s credit score, the debt-payment to income ratio (DTI), the combined loan-to-value ratio (CLTV), loan type (fixed or adjustable mortgage rate), loan term, loan purpose, whether the borrower’s income is fully documented, and whether the mortgage has a feature that modifies the amortization of loan principal. We know that mortgage lending must limit risk layering. We know how to apply a summary measure of default risk. The Stressed Mortgage Default Rate (MDR) is a simple, straightforward way to do this.

Regulation of credit quality could help prevent the deterioration in underwriting standards, although in previous cycles regulation promoted lower credit standards. The natural human tendency to believe that good times will continue—and that “this time is different”—will continue to create price booms in housing. Housing bubbles spawn risky lending; investors see high yields and few defaults, while other market participants come to believe that housing prices will continue to rise. Future bubbles and the losses suffered when they deflate can be minimized by focusing regulation on the maintenance of credit quality.

Stressed MDRs have demonstrated their efficacy. Calculated solely on the basis of loan characteristics present at origination, Stressed MDRs are highly predictive of default rates both in a non-stress delinquency environment (R-squared is 96%) and in a stress delinquency environment (R-squared is 99.9%) for all types of mortgage loans. By using MDR to risk rate loans at origination and regulate loan risk, we can control the accumulation of future losses which result from deteriorating underwriting standards.

III. All programs for assisting low-income families to become homeowners should be on-budget and should limit risks to both homeowners and taxpayers.

The third principle recognizes that there is an important place for social policies that assist low-income families to become homeowners, but these policies must explicitly balance the interest in low-income lending against the risks to the borrowers and to the taxpayers. In the past, implicit “affordable housing” subsidies through weak credit standards turned out to escalate the risks for both borrowers and taxpayers. The quality and budgetary trade-offs of riskier lending should be clear and on-budget.

The boom-bust cycle that low-income homebuyers have been subjected to for decades under the guise of making homes more affordable by escalating risk with weak lending standards should be broken. This result could be accomplished with the 20-Year Wealth Building Home Loan combined with an interest rate buy down provided by the federal government to an income-targeted group of first-time buyers. This would materially reduce defaults in low-income neighborhoods and sustainably foster generational wealth building. 

If the federal government wants to subsidize low and moderate income homebuyers effectively, it should use this and other on-budget, transparent and sustainable ways to do it. Fannie and Freddie have no role here, as the only way they can participate is through reducing their credit standards with the real cost hidden in the form of expanding risk.

IV. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be truly privatized, with their hidden subsidies and government-sponsored privileges eliminated over time.

Finally, Fannie and Freddie should be eliminated as GSEs and privatized—but gradually, so the private sector takes on more of the secondary market as the GSEs withdraw. The progressive withdrawal of GSE distortions from the housing finance market should lead to the sunset of the GSE charters at the end of the transition. This should include successive reductions in the GSEs’ conforming loan limits by 20 percent of the previous year’s limits each year, according to a published schedule, so the private sector can plan for the investment of the necessary capital and create the necessary operational capacity. The private mortgage market would include banks, S&Ls, insurance companies, pension funds, other portfolio lenders and investors, mortgage bankers, mortgage insurance (MI) companies, and private securitization. Congress should make sure that it facilitates opportunities for additional financing alternatives.

We know that none of this will happen in the near term, and the opposite of these principles will probably be followed by the current administration. Nonetheless, the principles define the housing finance direction that a future, market-oriented Congress and administration should take. In the meantime, all mortgage actors should try to protect themselves against the increased credit risk that Fannie and Freddie, under orders from the FHFA, will be generating.

The Rise (and Fall) of the Modern Bank of England

Published in Law & Liberty.

The notion of “an essentially contestable concept” means an issue which by its very nature can never be definitively settled, no matter how much brilliance is expended on it, and about which no logic or evidence can ever force disputing parties to agree. Thus, they are, in the words of Stuart Hampshire, “permanently and essentially subject to revision and question.” In short, the debate never ends. How many such essentially contestable propositions have we seen! Macroeconomics, like politics and philosophy, is full of them.

In macroeconomics, one essentially contestable issue is what the ideal nature and functions of a central bank should be. Given the immense financial and political importance of central banks in a world that runs entirely on the fiat currencies they create and inflate, these are critical questions. But no answer, though it may be in fashion for a time, turns out to be permanent. Crises occur, theories run up against surprising reality, the debates resume, and central bank evolution has no end, no ideal final state.

Harold James’ Making a Modern Central Bank is a very instructive book in this respect. It relates in great and often exhausting detail the lengthy debates concerning the functions and organization of that iconic central bank, the Bank of England, in the midst of the financial events of the years 1979-2003, with a brief but essential update at the end on what has happened since then. “The Bank of England seemed to be engaged in a constant quest to determine what its real function might be,” James observes. The quest involved lots of brilliant minds and colorful personalities, and they remind us that it is easier to be brilliant than right when dealing with the economic and financial future.

In the longer historical background of these debates, and important to their psychology, is that “the Bank,” as the book usually refers to it, had had a great run as the dominant central bank in the world under the gold standard. It had impressive traditions going back to its founding in 1694. Then, in the wake of the financial destruction (as well as all the other destruction) of the First World War, the role of the world’s leading central bank was taken over by the Federal Reserve representing the newly dominant U.S. dollar.

Still, the Bank of England “punches internationally above its weight,” James writes, “not because of the strength of the British economy, but because [quoting Paul Krugman] of its ‘intellectual adventurousness.’” This intellectual flair is well displayed in the book. Moreover, in its institutional history, the Bank calls on long experience in the grand sweep of economic and financial evolution. In 1979, it was approaching its 300th anniversary, while the Fed was less than 70 years old.

At that point, the Bank of England was facing severe stress. “The 1970s were years of crisis everywhere, but especially in the U.K.” There was “in particular the collapse of the fixed exchange rate world of Bretton Woods,” which was the final disappearance of the gold standard over which the Bank had once presided. There were the two oil price shocks, generating “substantial instability.” The global Great Inflation was roaring. The British pound sterling kept getting weaker

According to James, “The policy discussions of the U.K. in 1976 were dramatic and humiliating. They turned into an indictment of a Britain that had failed. Because of the foreign exchange crisis, the Governor of the Bank of England and the Chancellor of the Exchequer could not make their scheduled journeys to the IMF [International Monetary Fund] Annual Meetings.” The prime humiliation was that Britain, once a vast imperial and financial power, had been forced to ask the IMF for a loan which imposed heavy cuts in the government budget. “’Goodbye Great Britain” said a 1975 Wall Street Journal headline.

Of course, there were different ideas about what to do: “There was a struggle between differing parts of the British economic establishment, a clash [between] Treasury and Bank.” The discussions, debates, and political dialectic between the Treasury and the Bank are a central theme of the entire book. Can a central bank be truly independent, or is it instead just a subsidiary and a servant of the Treasury, or is it something in between—perhaps “independent within the government,” as the Federal Reserve used to incoherently but diplomatically say? For James, “The relationship between Treasury and Bank remained permanently haunted by potential or actual controversy.”

Always in the background in the Bank of England case, James points out, is this provision of the Bank of England Act of 1946:

The Treasury may from time to time give such directions to the Bank as, after consultation with the Governor of the Bank, they think necessary in the public interest.

That’s pretty clear. There is certainly nothing in the Federal Reserve Act about giving directions in that fashion, although the U.S. Treasury Department and the White House always do want to give directions to the Fed and sometimes succeed. As Donald Kettl observed in Leadership at the Fed, “The Fed’s power continues to rest on its political support,” and James shows how true this is of the Bank of England.

The Bank of England Act of 1998 is more nuanced, but does not change who the senior partner is:

The objectives of the Bank of England shall be—(a) to maintain price stability, and (b) subject to that, to support the economic policy of Her Majesty’s Government.

It is the Treasury (Her Majesty’s Government) that gets to determine what “price stability”—that is, the inflation target— will be, not the Bank. The Bank thus has “operational” independence, but not target independence. In contrast, the Federal Reserve has had the remarkable hubris to assert it can set an inflation target (define “price stability”) by itself. In most other countries it is given by or negotiated with the government.

Throughout these challenging events, the roles of the Bank of England as promoter of systemic financial stability, provider of financing to combat the panics and financial instability, coordinator and regulator of the banking firms, and creator of moral hazard by bailouts, are prominent—all in addition to its key monetary, inflation-controlling role.

As the book proceeds, the Bank moves from 1970s humiliation to what appears to be a successful “modern central bank” by 2003, although that afterwards turns out to be ephemeral. Along the way were many crises, all interestingly related for those with a taste for financial history.

There was another foreign exchange crisis, involving more humiliation. On “Black Wednesday”—September 16, 1992—the pound sank in spite of very costly “and ultimately futile” support by the Bank of England, breaking the European Exchange Rate Mechanism of fixed parities and famously making giant profits for George Soros and other speculators. “The experiment in European cooperation had ended in failure,” bringing “a progressive distancing of the U.K. from Europe,” and was “an earlier version of Brexit,” James suggests.

There were multiple credit and banking crises and bailouts. These included a deep real estate bust, when house prices fell from 1989 to 1993 and many banks fell along with them. A larger one, National Home Loans, had “two-fifths of its loan book over two months in arrears.” There was the scandalous collapse of BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, “popularly dubbed the Bank of Crooks and Cocaine International.” In 1991, “it looked as if there might be a panic and a run on the Midland Bank,” one of the largest banks. The Bank of England considered Midland “indeed too big to fail.”

The famous firm of Barings, “London’s oldest merchant bank,” collapsed in 1995 from the notorious losses of a rogue trader in Asia. Barings had also failed in 1890 from Argentine entanglements, when it was rescued by the Bank of England; this time it got sold to a Dutch bank for one pound. The 1995 Barings crisis involved a particularly British problem: “the worry that the Queen had very nearly lost some of her funds.”

Throughout these challenging events, the roles of the Bank of England as promoter of systemic financial stability, provider of financing to combat the panics and financial instability, coordinator and regulator of the banking firms, and creator of moral hazard by bailouts, are prominent—all in addition to its key monetary, inflation-controlling role. How many functions should the Bank of England have? This kept being debated.

“In the 1990s, the Bank began to specify essential or core purposes, in particular initially three: currency or price stability, financial stability, and the promotion of the U.K. financial service sector,” James points out. However, the Bank still had “fourteen high-level strategic objectives, twenty-seven area strategic aims, forty-nine business objectives and fifty-five management objectives.”

And then came the big redesign. Complex, intensely political, intellectually provocative negotiations among strong personalities in the government and the Bank, related in enjoyable journalistic detail, led to the 1998 Bank of England Act. This act sharply focused the Bank on the core function of maintaining price stability, which as defined turned out to be an inflation target. The Bank would get to choose the methods to achieve this, though it would be given the target. The act also took financial supervision away from the Bank and moved it all to a new, consolidated regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA).

The result was an “independent,” “modern” central bank in line with the international central banking theories and fashion of the new 21st century. As James explains: “A modern central bank has a much narrower and more limited set of tasks or functions than the often historic institution from which it developed. The objective is the provision of monetary stability, nothing more and nothing less.” For the Bank of England, “By the early 2000s . . . that task looked like it had been achieved with stunning success.”

It takes the book 450 scholarly pages to reach this outcome. The remaining 11 pages relate how it didn’t work. The “modern” central bank turned out to be far from the end of central banking history or the end of the related debates:

“The monetary and financial governance . . . which appeared to have been functioning so smoothly and satisfactorily, was severely tested after 2007-2008.”

“The crisis . . . required central banks to multi-task feverishly.”

“A new wave of institutional upheaval set in.”

“The 2012 Financial Services Act abolished the FSA.”

“By 2017 . . . Something that looked rather more like the old Bank . . . was being recreated.”

“The old theme of the Bank as provider or guarantor of financial stability came back.”

And so in central banking, the great evolution and cycling of ideas and of fashions continues. The essentially contestable concepts keep being contested.

Fifty Years Without Gold

Published in Law & Liberty.

Fifty years ago, on Sunday evening, August 15, 1971, after crisis meetings with close advisers at Camp David, President Richard Nixon announced an historic decision in his “Address to the Nation Outlining a New Economic Policy.” It was by then clear that the United States might not have enough gold to meet its international commitment to redeem dollars. It was experiencing “the start of a run on the dollar.” Paul Volcker, then with the Treasury Department, reported to the President on gold losses. “Dollar dumping accelerated. France sent a battleship to take home French gold from the New York Fed’s vaults.” The French not unreasonably believed that the special status of the dollar gave it an “exorbitant privilege,” making it “monumentally over-privileged.” Already in the 1960s, French President Charles de Gaulle had ordered the Bank of France to increase the amount of payments in gold from the United States.

Said Nixon to the nation, “The speculators have been waging an all-out war on the American dollar,” and that to “protect the dollar from the attacks of the international money speculators” would take “bold action.” “Accordingly,” he announced, “I have directed [Treasury] Secretary Connolly to suspend temporarily the convertibility of the dollar into gold.” The suspension of course turned out to be permanent. Today everybody considers it normal and almost nobody even imagines the slightest possibility of reversing it.

Nixon had thereby put the economic and financial world into a new era. By his decision to “close the gold window” and have the American government renege on its Bretton Woods commitment to redeem dollars for gold for foreign governments, he fundamentally changed the international monetary system. In this new system, still the system of today, the whole world always runs on pure fiat currencies, none of which is redeemable in gold or anything else, except more paper currency or more accounting entries. Instead of having fixed exchange rates, or “parities,” with respect to each other, the exchange rates among currencies can constantly change according to the international market and the interventions and manipulations of central banks. The central banks are free to print as much of their own money as they and the government of which they are a part like.

This was a very big change and highly controversial at the time. The Bretton Woods agreement was a jewel of the post-World War II economic order, negotiated in 1944 and overwhelmingly voted in by the Congress and signed into law by President Truman in 1945. Its central idea was that all currencies were linked by fixed exchange rates to the dollar and the dollar was permanently linked to gold. Now that was over. Sic transit gloria.

Economist Benn Steil nicely summed up the global transition:  “The Bretton Woods monetary system was finished. Though the bond between money and gold had been fraying for nearly sixty years, it had throughout most of the world and two and a half millennia of history been one that had only been severed as a temporary expedient in times of crisis. This time was different. The dollar was, in essence, the last ship moored to gold, with all the rest of the world’s currencies on board, and the United States was cutting the anchor and sailing off for good.” It was sailing, we might say, from a Newtonian into an Einsteinian monetary world, from a fixed frame of reference into many frames of reference moving with respect to each other. Nobody knew how it would turn out.

Fifty years later, we are completely used to this post-Bretton Woods monetary world. We take a pure fiat money system entirely for granted as the normal state of things. In this sense, in this country and around the world, we are all Nixonians now.

How very different our prevailing monetary system is from the ideas of Bretton Woods. The principal U.S. designer of the Bretton Woods system, Harry Dexter White insisted, strange to our ears, that “the United States dollar and gold are synonymous.” Moreover, he opined that “there is no likelihood that . . . the United States will, at any time, be faced with the difficulty of buying and selling gold at a fixed price.”

This was a truly bad forecast. It may have been arguable in 1944, but by the 1960s, let alone 1971, it was obviously false. (White’s misjudgment here was exceeded by his bad judgment in being, in addition to an officer of the U.S. Treasury, a spy for the Soviet Union.)

A better forecast was made by Nixon’s Treasury Secretary, John Connally. Meeting with the President two weeks before the August 15, 1971 announcement, he said, “We may never go back to it [convertibility]. I suspect we never will.”  He’s been right so far for fifty years.

In the early years of the Nixonian system, Friedrich Hayek wrote: “A very intelligent and wholly independent national or international monetary authority might do better than an international gold standard. . . . But I see not the slightest hope that any government, or any institution subject to political pressure, will ever be able to act in such a manner.”

Running low on gold and facing the inability to meet its Bretton Woods obligations, the American government had to do something. Instead of cutting off gold redemption, it could have devalued the dollar in terms of gold. A decade before, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had suggested to President John Kennedy that the already-apparent problems could be addressed if the dollar were devalued to $70 per ounce of gold, from the official $35. Whether you have enough gold or not depends on the price. But announcing a formal devaluation was politically very unattractive and no one could really know what the right number was going forward. Today, after fifty years of inflation, it takes about $1,800 to buy an ounce of gold, which is a 98% devaluation of the dollar relative to the old $35 an ounce.

How shall we judge the momentous Nixon decision? Was it good to break the fetters of the “barbarous relic” of gold and voyage into uncharted seas of central bank discretion? Most economists say definitely yes. At the time, the public response to Nixon’s speech was very positive. The stock market went up strongly.

But wasn’t it dangerous to remove the discipline Bretton Woods provided against wanton money creation and inflationary credit expansion? The end of Bretton Woods was followed by the international Great Inflation of the 1970s, and later by our times in which central banks, including the Federal Reserve, with a clear conscience, commit themselves to perpetual inflation instead of stable prices, and promise to depreciate the value of the currency they issue. They speak of “price stability,” but mean by that a stable rate of everlasting inflation. As we observe the renewed unstable and very high rate of inflation of 2021, we may reasonably ask whether discretionary central banks can ever know what they are really doing. Personally, I doubt it.

In the early years of the Nixonian system, Friedrich Hayek wrote: “A very intelligent and wholly independent national or international monetary authority might do better than an international gold standard….But I see not the slightest hope that any government, or any institution subject to political pressure, will ever be able to act in such a manner.” Central banks, including the Federal Reserve, are indeed subject to political pressure and depend on political support. Politicians, Hayek added, are governed by the “modified Keynesian maxim that in the long run we are all out of office.” If Hayek is watching today from economic Valhalla as the Federal Reserve buys hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgages, and thus stokes the housing market’s runaway price inflation, he will be murmuring, “As I said.”

The distinguished economist and scholar of financial crises, Robert Aliber, pointedly observed that the Nixonian system of pure fiat money and floating exchange rates has been marked by a recurring series of financial crises around the world. Such crises erupted in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s. The fiat currency system was born to solve the 1971 crisis, but it certainly cannot be given a gold medal for financial stability since then. Aliber wrote to me recently: “I used to think that the failure to ‘save Lehman’ was the biggest mistake that the U.S. Treasury ever made, now I realize 1971 was the bigger mistake.”

Professor Guido Hülsmann, speaking in 2021, described the results of the end of Bretton Woods in these colorful terms: “All central banks were suddenly free to print and lend as many dollars and pounds and francs and marks as they wished. . . . Nixon’s decision led to an explosion of debt public and private; to an unprecedented boom of real estate and financial markets;…to a mind-boggling redistribution of incomes and wealth in favor of governments and the financial sector;…and to a pathetic dependence of the so-called financial industry on every whim of the central banks.”

As always in economics, you cannot run the history twice. What would have happened had there been a different decision in 1971, and whether it would have been better or worse than it has been under the Nixonian system, is a matter for pure speculation. Another speculation, good for our humility, is to wonder what we ourselves would usefully have said or done, had we been at Camp David among the counselors of the President, or even been the President, in that crucial August of fifty years ago.

The Bretton Woods system had developed by then a severe, and as it turned out, fatal problem. Our Nixonian system is seriously imperfect. But given the deep, fundamental uncertainty of the economic and financial future at all times; the inescapable limitations of human minds, even the best of them; and the inevitable politics that shape government behavior, including central bank behavior, we are not likely ever to achieve an ideal international monetary system. We are well-advised not to entertain either foolish hopes or foolish faith in central banks.

In any case, there is no denying that August 15, 1971 was a fateful date.

‘Biden Inflation’ made simple: Borrow from the Fed, take away from the rest of us

Published in The Hill and MSN.

“What is the difference between banking and politics?” a pointed old witticism goes. “Banking is borrowing money from the public and lending it to your friends. Politics is taking money from the public and giving it to your friends.”

The current American government has a new twist on this, however: Politics is borrowing money from the Federal Reserve and giving it to your friends. Clever, eh? The Fed can print up all the money it wants and the government can borrow it and pass it out. Except that, eventually, you find out that this depreciates the nation’s currency and brings high inflation.

So now we have the ‘Biden Inflation’, which I calculated as running at an annualized rate of more than 7 percent from the end of 2020 through June.

Let us state the obvious facts which everybody knows about a 7 percent rate of inflation. It means that if you are a worker who got a pay raise of 3 percent, the government has made your actual pay go down by 4 percent — that is, plus 3 percent minus 7 percent = minus 4 percent.  If you got a raise of 2 percent, the government cut your real pay by 5 percent.

If you are a saver earning, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s policies, the average interest rate on savings accounts of 0.1 percent, then with a 7 percent rate of inflation, the government has taken away 6.9 percent of your savings account.

If you are a pensioner on a fixed pension or annuity, the government has cut your pension by 7 percent.

In a sound money regime, in order to spend a lot, the politicians have to tax a lot. They then have to worry about whether workers, savers and pensioners will vote for those who escalated their taxes.

With the borrowing from the Federal Reserve ploy, the politicians avoid the pain of having to vote for increased taxes but they still savor the pleasure of voting for their favorite spending. Nonetheless, all the money for the politicians to give their friends has, in fact, been taken from the workers, the savers and the pensioners. It has just been taken in a tricky way by using the Fed.

In a previous generation, when the Federal Reserve was led by William McChesney Martin, for example, the public discourse was clear about this. Martin, who was Fed chairman from 1951 to 1970, called inflation “a thief in the night.” He also said, “We can never recapture the purchasing power of the dollar that has been lost.”  This was long before the Fed newspeak of today, which pretends that inflation at 2 percent forever is “price stability.”

But not even today’s Fed can languidly face a 7 percent rate of inflation. So while still planning to create perpetual inflation, it keeps repeating, and hoping against hope, that the very high inflation is “transitory.”

However transitory the current high inflation may be, the money of the workers, the savers and the pensioners has still been taken and won’t be given back. If the rate of inflation falls, their money will still be being taken, just at a lower rate. If inflation speeds up further, as it may, their money will be taken faster.

Why a Fed Digital Dollar is a Bad Idea

Published in Real Clear Markets with co-author Howard Adler.

On July 19, the top-level President’s Working Group on Financial Markets met to address “the need to act quickly to ensure there is an appropriate U.S. regulatory framework in place” for stablecoins,  a form of cryptocurrency backed by assets, often denominated in dollars. The meeting cited “the risks to end-users, the financial system and national security.”  This is a pretty clear message from a group composed of the Secretary of the Treasury, the Chairs of the Federal Reserve, SEC, CFTC, and FDIC and the Comptroller of the Currency.

Another element of federal policy on this issue was telegraphed by Fed Chair Jerome Powell when he recently discussed the Federal Reserve’s research on issuing its own digital dollar stablecoin.  “You wouldn’t need stablecoins, you wouldn’t need cryptocurrencies if you had a digital U.S. currency– I think that’s one of the stronger arguments in its favor,” he said.  The impetus towards such central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) in many other countries, coupled with the thought that this might weaken the dollar’s global role, added to regulatory concerns about private stablecoins, appear to be pushing the Fed towards the issuance of its own CBDC.  The motivation is understandable, but we still think it would be a bad idea.

There are now a number of private stablecoins circulating that are backed in some fashion by U.S. dollar-denominated assets, such as Tether and USD coin.  Facebook has announced its intention to launch its own U.S. dollar-backed stablecoin, the “diem,” later this year.  If used by a meaningful proportion of Facebook’s several billion subscribers, this could enormously increase the stablecoin universe.  Government officials, unsurprisingly, are focusing on the lack of any regime for their regulation and the need for one.

At the same time, central banks worldwide are considering their own CBDCs.  As of April 2021, more than 60 countries were in some stage of exploring an official digital currency, including many highly developed countries. But it is China’s digital yuan, now being tested in a dozen Chinese cities, that causes the most concern.

China seems to have two goals in establishing a CBDC. The first is more control over its citizens. If the digital yuan became ubiquitous, the Chinese government would have instant knowledge and control over its citizens’ money, potentially allowing it, for example, to confiscate the funds of political dissidents or block their payments and receipts.

The second goal is to challenge the dominance of the U.S. dollar in international transactions. The dollar is the currency used in 88 percent of foreign exchange transactions, while the renminbi was used in only four percent, according to the Bank for International Settlements. Who, located outside of China, would choose to give the Chinese Communist Party control over their money? The answer is those potentially subject to U.S. sanctions. As the issuer of dollars that the world’s banks need to transact business, the United States government has long demanded and received access from banks to information related to international transactions, which it has used to impose sanctions on hostile states and those it considers terrorists and criminals. Some countries (perhaps Iran, Cuba and Venezuela) may choose to use the digital yuan to avoid U.S. sanctions, as may countries participating in China’s Belt and Road program whose large debts to China may provide the Chinese with leverage over their choices.

If the digital yuan and other CBDCs are widely implemented, as seems almost inevitable, proponents of the Fed digital dollar may argue that there would be erosion in the dominance of the U.S. dollar in international trade and less demand for U.S. dollar-denominated assets including U.S. Treasury securities, pushing interest rates on Treasuries up, making it more costly for the United States to fund its historic deficits. The Federal Reserve might also believe it is in the public interest to issue its own stablecoin because it would be safer and less prone to fraud than private cryptocurrencies.  In order to preserve the dollar’s dominance and to constrain the use of private cryptocurrencies, it appears likely that the Federal Reserve will decide this fall, when it is scheduled to report on its consideration of a digital dollar, to move forward with its own CBDC.  Is this desirable?

Regulation of private stablecoins is on the way in any case, regardless of whether the Fed issues a stablecoin.  More importantly, a digital dollar would further centralize and provide vastly more authority to the already powerful Federal Reserve.  The negative impact of a Fed CBDC, both on citizens’ privacy rights and by shifting the power to allocate credit from the private sector to the government, would be enormous.

A Fed CBDC would make it hard for private citizens to avoid financial snooping by the government in every aspect of their financial lives. Moreover, suppose, as one would expect, that that the Fed’s CBDC siphoned large deposit volumes from private banks. The Fed would have to invest in financial assets to match these deposit liabilities, which would centralize credit allocation in the Federal Reserve, politicizing credit decisions and turning the Fed into a government lending bank. The global record of government banks with politicized lending has been dismal. A digital dollar could therefore undo more than a century of central bank evolution, which has usefully divided the issuer of money from private credit decisions. In the process, a digital dollar would subject private banks to vastly unequal and inevitably losing competition with the government’s central bank.  Finally, a CBDC would make it easier for the central bank to expropriate the people’s savings through negative interest rates.  For these reasons, a CBDC may fit an authoritarian country like China, but not the United States.

The delicious irony in the CBDC saga is that cryptocurrency was created because people were afraid of government control and wished to insulate their financial lives from monetary manipulation by central banks. With CBDCs, their ideas would be used to increase exactly the type of government interference and control that the crypto-creators sought to escape.