Humphrey-Hawkins originalist

Published in Grant’s Interest Rate Observer.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh isn’t the only news-making student of original American texts. Alex J. Pollock, distinguished senior fellow at the R Street Institute in Washington, D.C., is fresh from a deep reading of the 1978 Humphrey- Hawkins Act. What it says may surprise you.

It may surprise Jerome H. Powell, who is expected to deliver his semiannual Humphrey-Hawkins testimony (on the 40th anniversary of that oft invoked legislation) on July 17. If past is prologue, the new Fed chairman will advert to the central bank’s so-called dual mandate, i.e., the promotion of “price stability,” which the Fed defines as a 2% rate of inflation, and “full employment,” which the Fed is pleased to leave undefined.

Pollock—and we—have long wondered how stable prices could be if they’re always rising. Congress is not, in fact, the source of a law to command a quintupling in the price level over the course of an 82-year lifespan, which is the clear arithmetic implication of a 2% per annum inflation target. The brain boxes at the Eccles Building and their counterparts at central banks as far away as New Zealand dreamt it up all by themselves.

Never mind by what process of reasoning the Fed settled on 2%. Pollock rather asks, What does the law say?

The Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977, for one, does not say “price stability,” as Pollock notes: “It does in particular not say ‘a stable rate of inflation.’ It says ‘stable prices.’ Does the term ‘stable prices’ mean perpetual inflation? What did Congress mean by ‘stable prices’ when it put that term into law?”

Who is the boss when it comes to Federal Reserve and Congress?

Published in The Hill.

In January 2008, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke made this memorable announcement: “The Federal Reserve is not currently forecasting a recession.” This was a poor forecast indeed, since as we now know, a very deep and painful recession had already started by the time of this prediction that there would not be one.

But this is only one of many such errors. If you have the unrealistic belief that the Fed should somehow manage the economy, banking system, stock market, financial stability, interest rates, employment, inflation and risks, you run into a granite wall of a knowledge problem. The Fed does not know and cannot know enough to do all this.

The simple fact is that the economic and financial future of this great nation is not only unknown, but unknowable, for the Fed as it is for everybody else. It is not that our central bank is any worse than anybody else at knowing the future, including what the results of its own actions will be, but the Fed is just not any better than anybody else.

Yet, the Fed keeps insisting and has enshrined as part of its own confession of faith that it ought to be “independent” as an immensely powerful fiefdom answerable only to its own theories. Should the Fed be independent of Congress? Given the inherent human will to power, naturally those leading the central bank would like to be.

This desire to act as independent economic philosopher kings could be justified by a claim to superior knowledge. But the Fed demonstrably does not have such superior knowledge. Still, we cannot avoid observing that there is a strange and quite common faith in the Fed. For example, it is endlessly repeated in the media that an inflation rate of 2 percent a year must be good because that is the Fed target, apparently without wondering whether this target is a good idea or not.

Of course, some people have more skeptically considered the 2 percent question. Olivier Blanchard, formerly the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, has stated, “There is no sound economic research that shows 2 percent to be the economically optimal inflation rate.” He was arguing for higher inflation. On the other hand, Alan Greenspan, when asked what the right inflation target was, said “zero” and added “if measured correctly,” a wonderfully famous hedge.

A remarkable thing about the current idea of a Fed inflation target is that it is a target in perpetuity at 2 percent a year forever. To commit for 2 percent a year forever means that in an expected lifetime of 82 years, average prices will quintuple. With a straight face, the Fed informs us that this is “price stability.” Should Congress have anything to say about whether it wants inflation of 2 percent a year forever?

The Fed often states that “price stability” is part of its statutory “dual mandate.” The reference is to the Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977. But this law does not say “price stability.” It says “stable prices.” It does in particular not say a “stable rate of inflation.” It says “stable prices.” Does the term “stable prices” mean perpetual inflation? What did Congress mean by “stable prices” when it put that term into law?

We learn from the minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee that in 1996, when the Fed was discussing whether it should have an inflation target, one member of the committee dared to ask what Congress meant by the statutory language. This question was quickly passed over and not pursued. But it was a good question, was it not?

In fact, we have a good indication of what Congress meant by “stable prices.” The very next year, in the Humphrey Hawkins Act of 1978, Congress provided the “goal of achieving by 1988 a rate of inflation of zero.” Obviously, this was not achieved and somehow, we never hear the Fed discussing this goal as expressed in statute.

Bernanke advised Janet Yellen, his successor as head of the central bank, to remember that “Congress is our boss.” But does the Fed and those who work there really believe that Congress should be the boss? That these mere politicians, elected by the American people, should be in charge of the powerful economic and financial experts of the Fed?

William Proxmire, a former senator from Wisconsin, once put the case for Congress pretty bluntly in a hearing. He stated, “You recognize, I take it, that the Federal Reserve Board is a creature of Congress?” and “Congress can create it, abolish it, and so forth?” While that is certainly true, but short of abolishing it, what steps can be taken for greater accountability and more effective legislative governance of the Fed?

It seems the best model might be to think of Congress as the board of directors and Federal Reserve officers as the management of government operations in money. With this model in mind, the relationship of the Fed and Congress should evolve into a grown up and real discussion of issues, alternatives, strategies and risks. That would be quite a contrast to the media event that Fed testimony now represents.

Such discussions might even include the Fed asking Congress what it means by “stable prices” as a goal. Of course, the Fed could lay out all its arguments for 2 percent inflation and its thoughts on alternatives for legislative consideration. Can you imagine that? Perhaps you cannot, but as the long history of the Fed demonstrates, many things that were previously unimaginable nevertheless came to pass.

North America update: A bubble and a boom both nearing their ends?

Published by the R Street Institute.

North America certainly presents an interesting housing-finance picture, with big house-price inflation in both Canada and the United States.

Canada’s house price inflation is bigger. Indeed, Canadian house prices surely qualify as a bubble. They have ascended to levels far higher than those at the very top of the U.S. bubble. The increases have been remarkable, and the many years of their run, with hardly a pause, has kept surprising observers (like me) who thought it would have to end before now. Canadian government officials have been worried about it for some time and have tried to slow it down by tightening mortgage credit standards and putting special taxes on foreign house buyers in Toronto and Vancouver. Meanwhile, in the United States, house prices since 2012 – for about six years, have again been booming, fueled by the cheap mortgage credit manufactured by the Federal Reserve. Average U.S. house prices are now over their bubble peak of 2006. However, they are nowhere near the records set in Canada.

Graph 1 shows the paths of average Canadian versus U.S. house prices in the 21st century, with the price indexes set to the year 2000 = 100.

Read the rest here.

Fixing capitalism

Published in Barron’s.

In “A Radical Proposal for Improving Capitalism” (Other Voices, June 16), Eric A. Posner and E. Glen Weyl repeat the venerable observation of Adolph Berle and Gardiner Means (in The Modern Corporation and Private Property, published in 1932) that in corporations, “ownership was separated from control,” where the shareholders are seen as principals and the management as hired agents. But this is old news.

The fundamental structure of corporations has changed little since 1932, but the structure of capital markets has changed a lot. In addition to the concentration of voting power that Posner and Weyl reasonably worry about, a more fundamental problem is that we now have an additional, dominating layer of agents: the investment managers. The result is a further separation: that of ownership from voting. The hired employees of the investment-management firms control the votes, and claim to be stockholders, but in fact they are merely agents with other people’s money.

What do those other people, the real owners, have to say in contrast to whatever their hired agents may think? Those may not be at all the same. If you don’t like agents being in control in the one case of separation, why would you like them being in control in the other?

Have financial follies changed since Walter Bagehot’s day?

Published by the R Street Institute.

Among everything you might read in the realm of finance, there is nothing more enjoyable than reading Jim Grant, with his sparkling mixture of ideas, research and wit—except perhaps reading the great Walter Bagehot himself, with his wonderful Victorian rhetoric. Now we have Jim Grant writing on Walter Bagehot—a terrific combination. I have had the pleasure of reading several chapters from this new book in process.

Of course, Jim finds striking quotations from Bagehot, sometimes from surprising sources. For example, in a letter to his fiancée, Eliza Wilson, written during the financial panic of 1857, Jim has found what Bagehot observed about the “nature of financial faith.”

All banking rests on credit and credit is rather a superstition. At any rate it is adopted not from distinct evidence but from habit, usage and local custom.

That is why it is true that, as Bagehot later wrote in Lombard Street, “(e)very banker knows that if he has to prove he is worthy of credit … in fact his credit is gone.”

When the 1857 panic was over, Bagehot wrote Eliza from London:

The last few times I have been here everybody was on their knees asking for money, now you have to go on your knees to ask people to take it.

“Few better observations of the cycles of bankerly feast and famine have ever been written,” says Jim, continuing: “Historians of economic thought may make of it what they will that the passages formed part of Bagehot’s love letters” to Eliza!

I’m not sure what to make of that, either.

Credit expansion replaced panic, and proceeding to the 1860s, Jim relates, “Financiers reconsidered the field of opportunity. They found it to be bigger and more alluring than before,” just as their successors did in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. Continuing Jim’s text:

The British government borrowed at 3% with the assurance of absolute safety. The Turkish government, with no such assurance, willingly paid 12% to 15%; the Egyptian government, 8% to 9%; the government of the Confederate States of America [this is in the 1860s, remember] 7% along with an option on the price of cotton.

This international credit expansion, like others, led ultimately to defaults and losses. Need we add that today we are once again experiencing stresses in emerging market debts?

The mention of the bonds of the Confederate States of America should remind us of Pollock’s Law of War Finance, which is: Do not lend to the side that is going to lose. By 1865, it was clear that the holders of Confederate bonds were out of luck. The next year, 1866, brought the infamous collapse of the previously prestigious and unquestioned financial firm of Overend, Gurney & Co. in London. As Overend was going down, we learn from Jim’s text:

Their only recourse was to the Bank of England. Would the Old Lady Bank extend a helping hand? The Bank dispatched a three-man team to inspect the supplicant’s books. The verdict was negative—[Overend] was insolvent—and the Bank declined to assist. The heretofore unimaginable occurred. Overend, Gurney closed its doors. The ensuing panic exhausted the descriptive powers of the financial press.

The formerly famous insolvent bank as supplicant to the central bank; this may sound too familiar.

“In the aftermath of the failure of Overend, Gurney,” Jim writes, “investors in foreign bonds arrived in force … In the dull, post-panic British economy, savers strained to earn more than the 3 ¼% available on British government bonds. Risky borrowers, arm-in-arm with their opportunistic bankers, stepped forward to fill the void.” But “Bagehot anticipated the consequences of the coming overseas bond bubble.”

In the 1870s, Jim continues:

Egypt, then a semi-autonomous province of the Turkish, or Ottoman, Empire, was one such seeker of funds. In the case of Egypt, not even the Egyptian government had the [financial] figures.

We may instructively note, much more recently, that neither did, nor does, the government of Puerto Rico, the largest municipal insolvency in history, have its financial figures straight. Nor did the biggest municipal insolvency of its time, the government of New York City, a generation ago and a century after Bagehot was writing on Egypt. But in none of these cases did it stop the investors from sending in their money on faith.

So Bagehot acutely described the financial adventures, mistakes, and foibles of his day, which were a lot like those of our day. Jim draws a further key conclusion about his subject’s character:

Bagehot stood up for the ideal of personal responsibility in financial dealings.

May we all.

We are certainly looking forward to reading the whole of Jim’s new book on Bagehot’s life, ideas, controversies and times.

We won’t know the final lessons of QE until it’s over

Published in Real Clear Markets.

A justly famous line of John Maynard Keynes is:  “Soon or late, it is ideas…which are dangerous for good or evil.”

The first lesson from ten years of Quantitative Easing (QE) is that the ideas of those who run fiat currency central banks, as these ideas change over time and go in and out of central bank fashion, are extremely important for good or evil, on a very large scale.

Contrasting the ideas of QE to earlier governing ideas of the Federal Reserve is instructive.  In the 1950s under Chairman William McChesney Martin, the Fed adopted the “bills only” policy.  That meant the only investment assets from the Fed’s open-market operations were short-term Treasury bills.  The theory was that the Fed’s open market interventions should not operate directly on long-term interest rates and should never try to allocate credit among economic sectors.

This was clearly the opposite of the theory of QE.  It was not a policy directed at financial crisis, as QE originally was.  But the last crisis has now been over for a long time, and QE still amounts to $4.2 trillion on the balance sheet of the Fed.

How many Treasury bills does the Fed own today?  The answer is zero.

So over 50 years, the Fed has gone from believing in all Treasury bills to no Treasury bills.

Another lesson of QE:  Do not look for the ideas of central bankers to be eternal verities—they aren’t.  The times call forth the ideas, for better or for worse.

The Credit Crunch of 1966 was created by the Fed’s regulatory ceilings for interest rates—the Fed used to believe in those, too.  In that year, mortgage lending funds dried up, the savings and loan industry (then politically powerful, believe it or not) was unhappy, and many in Congress wanted the Fed to buy the bonds of Fannie Mae and the Federal Home Loan Banks in order to support housing and housing finance.

Chairman Martin did not agree.  Correctly pointing out that this would be credit allocation by the Fed, he found it a bad idea “to divert open market operations from general economic objectives to the support of specific markets for credit.”  This 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.”

In my judgment, Martin was right about this, but Congress loves nothing better than to subsidize and overleverage real estate.  Here was the consequent threatening message to the Fed sent by a future Banking Committee chairman, Senator Proxmire, in a 1968 hearing:

“You recognize, I take it, that the Federal Reserve Board is a creature of Congress?

The Congress can create it, abolish it, and so forth?

What would Congress have to do to indicate that it wishes the Board to change its policy and give      greater support to the housing market?”

If Proxmire were still alive, he would presumably be a fan of QE forever.

The new Fed Chairman, Arthur Burns, who arrived in 1970, decided that the Fed should “demonstrate a more cooperative attitude.”  So by the 1980s, the Fed’s bond portfolio came to include the debt of Fannie Mae, the Federal Home Loan Banks, the Farm Credit Banks, the Federal Land Banks, the Federal Intermediate Credit Banks, the Banks for Cooperatives, the United States Postal Service, Ginnie Mae, the General Services Administration, the Farmers Home Administration, the Export-Import Bank, and even the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority.  In other words, the Fed was helping fund the Washington DC Metro system!  That was along with funding Fannie Mae when it was insolvent on a mark-to-market basis, as well as the Farm Credit System when it was broke.

Still, at their peak, all these totaled about $9 billion—or about 0.2% of the current size of QE.

Let’s review where the Fed’s QE-dominated balance sheet is now.  As of May 30, 2018, it includes:

Treasury bills:                                                     zero

Longer term Treasury securities:               $2.4 trillion

Long-term mortgage-backed securities:   $1.8 trillion.

These MBS are funded with floating-rate deposits, which makes the Fed in effect the biggest savings and loan in the world.  Even if we needed the world’s biggest S&L in the crisis—do we now?

Total assets:                                                   $4.3 trillion

Total capital:                                                   $39 billion

This means the Fed is leveraged 110 to 1.

As we know, the immense QE portfolios are very slowly running off—not being sold.   Among the reasons for not selling is that the Fed does not want to face the very large losses in its super-leveraged balance sheet that it would probably realize when selling any meaningful part of its huge, unhedged QE position.

Another lesson: It is easier for a central bank to get into a QE portfolio than to get out.

Thus, the exit strategy is constrained to being very gradual, accompanied by the Fed’s intense hope that the ultimate adjustment in inflated house prices, and inflated stock and bond prices, will also be gradual.  This is especially true for house prices, which affect 64% of American households.

Here is a further QE lesson, this one fundamental:  In principle, a fiat currency central bank can make unlimited investments in anything, financed by monetization.

The Federal Reserve is the champion investor in mortgages.  The European Central Bank has invested in corporate bonds, government agencies, regional and local government debt, asset-backed securities, and covered bonds (which include mortgages). The Bank of Japan has bought asset-backed securities and equities, in addition to vast amounts of government debt.  The Swiss central bank has a huge portfolio of foreign currency bonds, a big position in U.S. equities, and also makes loans to domestic mortgage companies.

The Swiss central bank, by the way, is required by law to mark its investment securities to market, a discipline the Fed sedulously avoids.

All of these versions of QE involve credit allocation.  In the case of the Fed, its two favored allocations are housing and long-term financing of the government deficit.

The only limits to what a fiat currency central bank can finance and subsidize are: the law, politics, and the ideas of central bankers.  There are no intrinsic financial constraints.

Whether there will be new legal and political constraints in the future depends, I believe, on how the end of the QE experiments ultimately turn out.  In other words, will the correction of the QE-induced asset price inflations be a soft landing or a hard landing?  If the latter, you can easily imagine a legislature wanting to enact future constraints.

Ten years into QE, what should the Fed be doing now?  The distinguished expert on central banking, Charles Goodhart, recently wrote that it is “generally agreed” that “Where the QE involved directional elements, to support credit flows through critical but weak markets, e.g. the mortgage market in the USA, such assets should be entirely run off, and the assets left in the central bank’s balance sheet should be entirely in the form of government debt.”

With all due respect to Senator Proxmire, this seems correct to me.

But, as Goodhart continues, it does not answer a further question QE makes us ask: What is the optimal size of central bank balance sheets in normal times?  They have become so large—how much smaller should they get?

Other related questions include:  Will the central banks’ credit allocations become viewed in retrospect as misallocations?  And how should we understand the respective roles of the Treasury and the central bank?   Are they essentially one thing masquerading as two, as QE tends to suggest?

I conclude with a final lesson:  We won’t know what the final lessons are until after the exit from QE has been completed.  It ain’t over till it’s over.

Fed continues negative real interest rates

Published by the R Street Institute.

The Federal Reserve yesterday raised its target fed funds rate to a range of between 1.75 percent and 2 percent; let’s just call it 2 percent. That feels a lot higher than the nearly 0 percent it was from the end of 2008 to 2015, but it is still very low and still less than the current rate of inflation. The Consumer Price Index rose over the last 12 months by 2.8 percent, so to do the simple arithmetic:

New Federal Reserve target interest rate: 2%

Less: Inflation rate: 2.8%

Equals: Real short-term interest rate: (0.8%)

In short, nine years after the end of the last recession, nine years into the bull stock market and six years after house prices bottomed and began a new ascent, the Fed is still forcing negative real short-term interest rates on the economy, the financial system and savers.

No wonder that it continues to preside over a massive asset price inflation.

Gold: An especially bad prediction

Published by the R Street Institute.

The history of finance and economics is full of utterly wrong predictions. This should, but doesn’t, teach us intellectual humility when it comes to pontificating about the future. Here is a memorable one, worthy of special mention in the all-time worst financial predictions list:

When the U.S. government stops wasting our resources by trying to maintain the price of gold, its price will sink…to $6 an ounce rather than the current $35 an ounce.

–Henry Ruess, chairman of the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, 1967*

In the 1960s, pace Chairman Ruess, the U.S. government was not trying to hold up the price of gold, but to hold up the price of its dollar; that is, to hold down the price of gold. In this effort, it admitted complete defeat in 1971 by reneging on its Bretton-Woods commitments.

The price of gold today is $1,291 an ounce. It is equally true to say that the price of the dollar is 1/1,291 of an ounce of gold, as compared to the official price in Ruess’ day of 1/35 of an ounce.

__________________

*Thanks to investor-philosopher David Kotok of Cumberland Advisors for this instructive quotation.

The great waves of industrial innovation

Published in Law & Liberty.

How did the world of lord and serf, horse and carriage, superstition and disease, turn into the world of boss and worker, steam and steel, science and medicine?

Jonathan Steinberg asks us to ponder this in his lecture series “European History and European Lives: 1715 to 1914.” We can add to his question, among countless other things previously unimaginable, “and the world of jets and space probes, computers and Google searches, antibiotics and automatic washing machines, and sustained long-term economic growth per capita?” Relative to all previous human life, this new world, the one we live in, is truly astonishing. As Steinberg asks us to wonder, “How and why did what we call the modern world come about?”

The answer at the most fundamental level is through the creation and harnessing of scientific knowledge. Far and away the most important event in all of history was the invention of science based on mathematics by the geniuses of the seventeenth century. This is symbolized above all by Isaac Newton, whose masterwork, Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, we may freely render into English as “Understanding Nature on Mathematical Principles.” The invention of mathematicized science was the sine qua non of the modern world. Other important modernizing developments in government, law and philosophy are handmaidens to it.

As Alexander Pope versified the impact:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night:

God said, Let Newton be! And all was light.

Of course, the translation to the modern world was not quite that direct. The new and multiplying scientific knowledge had to be transferred into technical inventions, those into economically useful innovations, those expanded into business ventures by entrepreneurial enterprise, and with the development of management processes for large-scale organizations, those spread around the world in great waves of industrial innovation.

We may picture these great waves over the last two and a half centuries like this:

Waves of Innovation

The result of these sweeping creations by the advantaged heirs of the Newtonian age is the amazing improvement in the quality of life of ordinary people like you and me. As measured by real GDP per capita, average Americans are about eight times better off than their ancestors of 100 years ago. (They in turn were far better off than their predecessors of the 18th century, when the modern world began to emerge.)

In 1897, average industrial wages per week have been estimated at $8.88. That was for a work week of about 60 hours (say six ten-hour days—and housewives had to work 70 hours a week to keep home life going). The industrial wages translate to 15 cents an hour. Correcting for inflation takes a factor of about 25, so 15 cents then is equivalent to $3.75 today. Current U.S. average hourly manufacturing wages are $21.49, adding benefits gives total hourly pay of over $30. In other words, real industrial hourly pay has multiplied about eight times. While this was happening, over the course of a century a lifetime’s average working time per day fell in half, while average leisure time tripled, according to estimates by Robert Fogel.

Along the way, of course, there were economic cycles, wars, recessions, depressions, revolutions, turmoil, crises, banking panics, muddling through and making mistakes. But the great waves of industrial innovation continued, and so did the improving standard of living on the trend.

Joseph Schumpeter memorably summarized the point of economic growth as not consisting in “providing more silk stockings for queens, but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.” The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas demonstrated how more goods for less effort indeed happened—showing how prices measured in hours and minutes of work at average pay dropped dramatically during the twentieth century. Their study, “Time Well Spent—The Declining Real Cost of Living in America,” is full of interesting details—here are a few notable examples. The time required to earn the price of milk fell 82%; of a market basket of food, 83%; of home electricity, 99%; of a dishwashing machine, 94%; of a new car, 71%; and of coast-to-coast airfare, 96%. Of course, no amount of work in the early twentieth century could have bought you an iPhone, a penicillin shot, a microwave oven, a ride on a jet across the Atlantic Ocean, or a myriad of other innovations.

These advances in the economic well-being of ordinary people are consistent with a famous prediction made by John Maynard Keynes in 1930.  In the midst of the great global depression, which might have led to despair about the future, Keynes instead prognosticated that the people of 2030, of 100 years from then, would be on average four to eight times better off due to innovation and economic growth. As 2030 approaches, we can see that his forecast will be triumphantly fulfilled near the top of its range.

How much can the standard of living continue to improve? In 1900, according to Stanley Lebergott, the proportion of Americans who had flush toilets was only 15%. Only 24% had running water, 1% had central heating, 3% had electricity, and 1% owned an automobile. The people of that time could not imagine ordinary life as it is now. Correspondingly, it is exceptionally difficult for us to imagine how hard, risky and toilsome the average life was then.

And if we try to imagine the ordinary life of 100 years into the future, can we think that people will once again be eight times better off than we are? Can the great waves of innovation continue? Julian Simon maintained that since human minds and knowledge constitute “the ultimate resource,” they can. “The past two hundred years brought a great deal of new knowledge relative to all the centuries before that time,” he wrote, “the past one hundred years or even fifty years brought forth more than the preceding one hundred years,” and we can confidently expect the future to continue to “bring forth knowledge that will greatly enhance human life.”

June brings to mind weddings, homeownership and their paradoxical relationship

Published by the R Street Institute.

June, we learn from the National Association of Realtors, is “National Homeownership Month.” Since June is also a traditional month for weddings, it is a good time to address an important and logical, but little understood and virtually never-discussed connection: that between homeownership and marriage.

Homeownership is much higher for married than for not-married households. This makes intuitive sense. But the difference in homeownership rates is pretty remarkable: for the United States as a whole, more than 78 percent of married households own their home, nearly double the 43 percent for those not married. Thus, the overall homeownership rate of 63.5 percent is composed of two very different parts by marital status. This difference holds for all major demographic groups. The married versus not-married dynamic, in turn, gives rise to an intriguing homeownership paradox that we explore below.

We examine homeownership in this context over 30 years, from 1987 to 2017. This makes the homeownership effects of the housing bubble-and-bust into a temporary anomaly in the course of the three decades. That U.S. homeownership was artificially pumped up and then fell back to its trend now looks like a blip in the midst of the longer-term pattern. The artificial homeownership inflation was, of course, heavily promoted by the U.S. government, notably by the Clinton administration’s unwise “National Homeownership Strategy.” This strategy may be summarized as: pump up homeownership by making bad mortgage loans. Naturally, they didn’t say it that way—what they said was by making “innovative” mortgage loans. But it turned out the same.

Looking at the longer term, in 1987, the U.S. homeownership rate was 64 percent. Thirty years later, in 2017, it was 63.5 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey.

But the homeownership rate for married households went up significantly over the same period: from 76.2 percent to 78.4 percent. And the homeownership rate for not-married households also went up a lot, indeed by a lot more than the married rate did: from 35.3 percent to 43 percent.

The sum of married plus not-married households are all the households there are. Their homeownership rates both went up from 1987 to 2017. So how is it possible that the overall homeownership rate went down?  That is the paradox. It is summarized in Table 1.

The explanation of the paradox is that the mix of married versus not-married households in the U.S. population changed a lot over these years. The proportion of married households, with their much higher homeownership, fell dramatically from 70.2 percent to 57.8 percent of U.S. households. The proportion of not-married households, with their much lower homeownership rate, correspondingly increased. This is shown in Table 2.

Adjusting out the effect of this shift in household mix, U.S. homeownership rates fundamentally rose over these three decades, as many of us would have hoped.

In sum, to understand trends in homeownership, we must include, as is seldom done, its interaction with marriage.

Letter to Editor Barron’s: Listen up, Uncle Sam

Published in Barron’s.

Governments “should take particular care to prevent real estate bubbles,” writes Michael Heise (“Global Debt Is Heading Toward Dangerous Levels, Again,” Other Voices, May 19).

He’s right, of course. But the U.S. government does the opposite. As it has for decades, it promotes real estate debt and inflates real estate prices through government credit, subsidies, guarantees, and regulation—not to mention the massive monetization of mortgages by the Federal Reserve. When will they ever learn? The best bet is never.

Governments could take bitcoin out of circulation

Published in the Financial Times.

Nima Tabatabai asks about bitcoin, “can financial regulators control this emerging digital monetary asset?” ( Letters, May 18). The answer is they can. If a government sets its mind on it, it can tax, punish and regulate any monetary asset out of circulation. In the 1860s, Congress put a 10 percent tax on state bank notes to prevent their competing with the new U.S. national bank notes. State banks survived by expanding deposits, but state bank notes as a currency were gone. In the 1930s, the U.S. government, formerly on the gold standard itself, made it illegal for its citizens to own gold or denominate payments in it. Violating the prohibition was made a crime punishable by a fine of $10,000 or 10 years in prison. In the 1960s, the U.S. government simply refused to honor its explicit promise to redeem paper silver certificates with the silver dollars which were certified as “payable to the bearer on demand.” Thus U.S. dollar bills convertible to silver ceased to exist as a currency.

What might governments do to bitcoin or its holders or users? That depends on how threatened by it they feel.

S. 2155 won’t end finreg debate, but it’s an important first step

Published in Real Clear Markets.

S. 2155 won’t end finreg debate, but it’s an important first step

The U.S. House reportedly will move next week to take up and pass a modest financial regulatory reform bill already approved by the Senate – S. 2155, the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act.

This is not the fundamental reform of the bureaucracy-loving Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 one might once have hoped for, nor is it the much broader reforms proposed by the House Financial Services Committee in its Financial CHOICE Act. But everyone agrees the current political reality is that the latter bill cannot be enacted, while the current bill is a step forward that can actually be taken. A modest step forward is better than standing still.

Small banks and credit unions, defined in the bill as those with assets of less than $10 billion, will be the principal beneficiaries of its reforms, by reducing their compliance burdens with onerous regulations that were inspired by the political emotions of 2010 in the wake of the financial crisis. These lenders are less than 0.5 percent the size of JPMorgan Chase. The costs and burdens of complex and opaque regulation are disproportionately heavy for them.

Community banks and credit unions are enthusiastic supporters of the bill and its expected enactment will be an important victory for them. Small banks represent the vast majority of all banks. There are 5,670 federally insured depository institutions in the United States. Of these, 5,547 or 98 percent, have assets of less than $10 billion. On a still smaller scale, 4,920, or 87 percent of all banks, have assets of less than $1 billion, which makes them less than 0.05 percent the size of JPMorgan.

Among other regulatory de-complexification, the bill would provide small banks the option to have a high and simple leverage capital requirement (tangible equity as a percentage of total assets) replace the complicated risk-based capital calculations arising from the international negotiations known as the “Basel” rules (named after the city in Switzerland). It provides for this ratio to be set in a range of 8 percent to 10 percent. The similar idea of the CHOICE Act specified 10 percent. If combined with a simple liquidity requirement, this is an excellent idea.

A key improvement in the bill is that, for small banks, residential mortgage loans they make and keep for their own portfolio would be considered “qualified mortgages” for compliance with the Dodd-Frank Act. This recognition is essential; when a bank keeps the mortgage loan and all its risks, putting up its own capital as “skin in the game,” it is in a different financial world from those who make the loan and forthwith sell it, passing all the risk to somebody else. Much of the regulatory motivation of the Dodd-Frank Act was trying to deal with the moral hazard of the “originate and sell” mortgage model. That the “skin in the game” model is fundamentally different should have been obvious all along, but better late than never. A sad irony is that the “originate and sell model,” with the flaws that later became so evident, was strongly pushed by government policy, subsidies and regulation.

This regulatory reform bill is pretty complex. In draft form, it is 192 pages long, with many provisions devoted to particular constituency concerns, as you might expect from something that needed a bipartisan deal to get through the Senate. You might say it displays Madisonian balancing of competing concerns of interest groups (or as Madison would have put it, “factions”). Everybody cannot like everything in it.

A sampling of its various provisions includes:

• For big banks, increasing the level at which they are automatically considered “systemically important” from $50 billion to $250 billion in assets—subject to regulators’ ability to overrule in particular cases.

• A special deal on the leverage capital requirement for banks whose principal business is custody of assets (there are only a couple of them).

• More favorable treatment of investment grade municipal bonds for purposes of big bank liquidity requirements. In addition to helping big banks, this is naturally very popular with issuers of municipal securities.

• A regulatory simplification for closed-end mutual funds.

• A break on the treatment of certain brokered deposits, useful to some small banks.

• Easier treatment of some riskier commercial real estate loans. This is popular with real estate developers, of course. Since commercial real estate is often at the center of banking busts, this may be the most dubious of all the bill’s provisions.

• A choice for federal savings associations to have regulatory treatment just like national banks. This is a natural step in the gradual disappearance of a separate savings and loan industry. It is now hard to remember that a special savings and loan industry was in former days considered an important national financial priority.

• Not to be forgotten is an additional taking of the Federal Reserve Banks’ retained earnings, to help reduce the budget deficit.

And numerous other special provisions, displaying that the bill is indeed a product of a democratic legislative processes.

Taking the bill all in all, it should be enacted. But it should by no means be the end of regulatory reform. The House has a lot of ideas for additional steps, many with bipartisan support. We’ll see if anything else happens.

How does our ‘Great Recession’ compare to ones from the past?

Published in Real Clear Markets.

A prominent economist opened his book, The Great Recession, with this observation: “In the years ______, the world economy passed through its most dangerous adventure since the 1930s.”  This should sound familiar. “Its world-wide character and the associated bankruptcies and financial disturbances,” he added, “made this episode the long-awaited postwar economic crisis.”  But what years was Otto Eckstein in fact describing, so how do you fill in the blank in the first quotation?  The correct answer is the great recession of 1973-75. (How did you do on the quiz, esteemed Reader?)

“The capitalist process progressively raises the standard of life for the masses,” wrote the ever-provocative Joseph Schumpeter, but “It does so though a series of vicissitudes.”  Further, “Economic progress, in capitalist society, means turmoil.”  If Schumpeter is right that progressively raising the standard of living for ordinary people requires vicissitudes and turmoil, then cycles of booms and busts do not just happen, but are necessary in theory to economic progress.  They certainly do seem unavoidable so far.  Empirically, recessions are reasonably frequent.  In the last 100 years, there were 18 recessions in the United States, thus on average about once every 5 1/2 years. In the last 50 years, there have been seven recessions or on average once about every seven years.

Many recessions are shallower, but there are occasional great recessions.  How does “our” great recession—that of 2007-09– look relative to some of its predecessors?  Specifically, we compare it to the great recessions of 1981-82, 1973-75, and 1937-38.

The 2007-09 great recession led to a U.S. unemployment rate peak of 10.6%.  This was surely bad, but not as bad as the 11.4% which followed the 1981-82 bust.  The unemployment rate in 1973-75 got to 9.1%.  The great recession of 1937-38 was far worse, with unemployment peaking at about 20%.  (These unemployment rates are not seasonally adjusted.)

For 2007-09, 477 financial institutions failed in the five years from the onset of the great recession.  For 1981-82, the comparable number is 625 financial institution failures.  In the five years after 1973, there were 46 failures, but it is possible that the whole banking system was insolvent on a mark-to-market basis.  There were 262 failures in the five years after 1937.

In terms of peak-to-trough drop in real GDP, 2007-09 is the second worst of our examples.  In order of increasing severity the aggregate real GDP changes were:  1981-82, -2.8%; 1973-75, -3.1%; 2007-09, -4.2%; and estimated for 1937-38, -18%.

These great recessions had very different inflation experiences.  In 1973-75, in addition to the high unemployment, the U.S. suffered from painful double-digit inflation rates, with an annualized average of 10.9% on top of the other problems.  In 1981-82, the inflation rate was 5.2% along with recession, compared to 1.8% in 2007-09.  In 1937-38, they had deflation, or an inflation rate of -1.9%.

Then there is the cratering of the stock market in each case.  As measured by the peak to trough percentage drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, “our” great recession was the worst, with a 52% drop.  In 1937-38, the drop was 48%.   The DJIA fell 39% in 1973-75, and 20% 1981-82.  All painful, to be sure, especially if you were on margin.

Short-term interest rates fell dramatically in all four great recessions, but from very different levels.  Three-month Treasury bill yields started the 1981-82 great recession at the remarkable level of 15% and fell to 8.1%, the biggest change in number of percentage points.  The biggest drop measured as a percentage of the initial level was our 2007-09, in which three-month bill yields dropped from 3% to 0.18% or by 94%.  In 1973-75, these yields went from 7.8% to 5.5%, which sounds still very high to us now.  The lowest trough in rates was in 1937-38, when three-month bills went down to 0.05% from 0.41%.

In sum, the great recession of 2007-09 has predecessor great recessions.  These were worse in some ways, less bad in other ways, and present different combinations of painful problems.  All were severe downers.  But great recessions and ordinary recessions notwithstanding, on the trend the enterprising economy keeps taking income per capita ever higher, “progressively raising the standard of life for the masses” over time. If there is some way to do that without the cycles, it has yet to be discovered.

Let’s get rid of Puerto Rico’s triple-tax exemption

Published by the R Street Institute.

Let’s ask a simple and necessary question: Why in the world is the interest on Puerto Rican bonds triple-tax exempt all over the United States, when no U.S. state or municipality gets such favored treatment?

The municipal bond market got used to that disparity, but in fact, it makes no sense. It is an obvious market distortion, on top of being unfair to all the other municipal borrowers. It helped lure investors and savers, and mutual funds as intermediaries, into supporting years of overexpansion of Puerto Rican government debt, ultimately with disastrous results. It is yet another example of a failed government notion to push credit in some politically favored direction. Investors profited from their special exemption from state and local income taxes on interest paid by Puerto Rico; now, in exchange, they will have massive losses on their principal. Just how big the losses will be is still uncertain, but they are certainly big.

Where did that triple-tax exemption come from?  In fact, from the Congress in 1917. The triple-tax exemption is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year by the entry of the government of Puerto Rico into effective bankruptcy. Said the 1917 Jones-Shafroth Act:

All bonds issued by the government of Porto Rico or of by its authority, shall be exempt from taxation by the Government of the United States, or by the government of Porto Rico or of any political or municipal subdivision thereof, or by any State, or by any county, municipality, or other municipal subdivision of any State or Territory of the United States, or by the District of Columbia.

That’s clear enough. But why?  Said U.S. Sen. James K. Vardaman, D-Miss., at the time: “Those people are underdeveloped, and it is for the purpose of enabling them to develop their country to make the securities attractive by extending that exemption.” All right, but 100 years of a special favor to encourage development is enough, especially when the result was instead to encourage massive overborrowing and insolvency.

It’s time to end Puerto Rico’s triple-tax exemption for any newly issued bonds (as there will be again someday). As we observe the unhappy 100th birthday of this financial distortion, it’s time to give it a definitive farewell.

Seven decades of the inflation-adjusted Dow Jones Industrial average

Published by the R Street Institute.

Everybody has observed the renewed volatility of stock prices during the last few months. But for all the volatility, so far, the stock market has moved basically sideways since the end of 2017. The Dow Jones industrial average closed at 24,787 yesterday (April 17), only 0.3 percent different from the 24,719 it was at the end of December—with a lot of storm and stress in between.

Of course, it has moved sideways at a high level. How high?  For perspective, the following graph shows the DJIA over seven decades on an inflation-adjusted basis, expressing the history in March 2018 constant dollars.

We see immediately how much real stock prices can move over time, and how long the basic directional moves can last. The chart falls into five sections. We observe the great bull market of 1949-1966, followed by the great bear market of 1966-1982. Then another great boom from 1982 to the 1990s, which morphs into the runaway bubble of the late 1990s. Then a truly volatile decade which ends up in the big bust bottoming in 2009. Since then, the real DJIA is three times as high as at the 2009 low. In a longer view, it is 14 times what it was in 1949, 12 times as high as at the 1982 bottom and more than three times as high as the 1966 peak—all after adjusting out the endemic inflation of the times.

How high are stock prices now?  Pretty high. The boom and its acceleration last year bears a worrisome resemblance to the shape of the 1990s. However, so far the bull market has lasted only about half as long as those of 1949-1966 or 1982-1999.

What’s next?  Alas, to paraphrase Fred Schwed in his classic 1940 book, “Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?,” the one thing we all want most to know is the one thing we never can know. That’s the future, of course, especially the future of financial markets.

EU could follow Lincoln’s model on dual banking

Published in the Financial Times.

Sir,

When looking at the difficulties of European banking union (“Eurozone banking union heads towards ‘critical phase’”, April 11), perhaps a model to explore is that created by the US during the administration of Abraham Lincoln.

The National Currency Act of 1863, now known as the National Banking Act, created banks chartered by the federal government. These new “national banks”, regulated by the national comptroller of the currency, existed and still exist alongside the “state banks” chartered by the individual US states. Thus we got the dual banking system.

Might the EU similarly think of a dual banking structure, with some banks chartered and regulated by the EU, and others remaining chartered by the individual member states?

What you would have made if you bought big lenders in 2006

Published in Real Clear Markets.

Lending money is a risky business. Lending money when the lender is itself highly leveraged is more risky yet. How bad can the result of this simple fact be for investors in common stock? And have such investors yet recovered from the crisis of 2007-2009?

Suppose you had decided at the end of 2006, when it looked like lending businesses were booming, to invest $10,000 equally divided among the common stock of the dozen biggest U.S. lending institutions. Those would have been eight bank holding companies, two thrift holding companies and two government-sponsored enterprises. Specifically, ranked by total assets, that would have been: Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Wachovia, Wells Fargo, Washington Mutual, U.S. Bancorp, Countrywide Financial, SunTrust and National City.

How would you have done? Your portfolio, bought for $10,000, would at the end of March 2018, eleven years later, been worth $5,960. You would be still be down more than 40 percent. Of course, you are now better off than at the bottom of the stock market in 2009, when it was worth $2,569, or down 74 percent. But the more than eight years since have not gotten you back to even, far from it. The unfortunate history of your big lender portfolio is shown in the following table.

S&P Global Intelligence

You are also in poor shape relative to the Standard & Poor’s 500 index. As of March 2018, you are about 68 percent behind the alternative of having put your $10,000 in the S&P. Your current $5,960 compares to the index’s current $18,620. The history of the relationship is shown in the following graph.

S&P Global

Of course, the performance over the whole period of the lenders’ individual stocks varies by a lot. From the virtually 100 percent loss in Washington Mutual, to the 98 percent losses in Fannie and Freddie, to the 88 percent loss in Citigroup and 44 percent loss in Bank of America, we find gains of 47 percent in Wells Fargo and 128 percent in JPMorgan. Overall, there are nine institutions with their value still down after more than 11 years and only three that are up versus 2006.

It is true that financial markets are always energetically looking forward with thousands of eyes, minds and computers. But despite the diligent efforts, they often don’t see forward very well. So indeed it was in 2006, with the stock prices of the biggest lending institutions at the top of the first (and assuredly not the last) great 21st century bubble.

Slick accounting at the Federal Reserve could prove disastrous

Published in The Hill.

“Mr. Chairman, on exhibit two, panel four, ‘deferred asset.’ This is kind of a nice term, ‘deferred asset.’ As far as I know, the committee has never used the deferred asset. It strikes me as a possible political firefight to bring that into play. All of the scenarios here, other than option one, if I’m reading this correctly, would bring the deferred asset into play, with possible repercussions, I think, for the Federal Reserve.”

This was James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, speaking at the September 2012 meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, according to the minutes. Said a staff member in reply, “It has never been the case that we have had, for the Federal Reserve System as a whole, a deferred asset.” But they knew that they might have one going forward. Earlier in the meeting, the staff had reported that all the options considered to reduce the Fed’s bond portfolio would cause the “creation of a deferred asset,” perhaps even a “substantial deferred asset.”

What in the world were they talking about? In this context, what did this, as Bullard ironically said, “nice” term mean? In fact, they were discussing how, if they ever tried to reduce their huge portfolio of long-term Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, they were liable to take big losses. They were pondering the effect which the losses arising from any attempt to normalize their balance sheet would have on their financial condition.

What the Fed meant by “deferred asset” in clear language is the “net losses we would take.” What would be deferred is the recognition of the losses in retained earnings. The losses under consideration might occur by selling some of the Fed’s vast investment in long-term securities for less than it paid for them. Could this happen? Of course. Buy at the top for $100 and sell later for $95 means a loss of $5 for anybody.

Already in 2012, the Federal Open Market Committee was struggling with the clear possibility that such losses could be very large, indeed much larger than the Fed’s net worth. Thus, such losses had the potential to render the central bank insolvent on a balance sheet basis, as well as making it it so that the Fed would be sending no money to the Treasury to reduce the budget deficit, perhaps for several years.

In one scenario presented to the Federal Open Market Committee at that 2012 meeting, the “deferred asset” would get to about $175 billion. At the time of the meeting, the Fed’s net worth was only $55 billion, so its leaders were contemplating the possibility of losing up to three times its capital. This was happening while running a long-term securities portfolio of $2.6 trillion.

If negative net worth did arrive, the Fed could still print any money needed to pay its bills, but the balance sheet wouldn’t look so good. And might not publishing a balance sheet with negative net worth mean a “possible political firefight” in Bullard’s phrase? What might Congress say or do? The Fed didn’t want to find out. So it invented having a “deferred asset,” if necessary, rather than reporting a negative net worth.

In short, this “deferred asset” would be an imaginary asset. It would be booked in this fashion to avoid recognizing the effect of net losses on capital. In accounting terms, it would be a big debit looking for someplace to go. The proper destination of the debit for everybody in the world, including the Fed, is to retained earnings, where it would reduce capital, or even make it negative. But the Fed does not choose to allow this, and the central bank defines its own accounting rules.

So the Fed would send the debit to an accounting “deferred asset” instead, which hides the loss and overstates capital. Harshly described, for ordinary banks, this would be called accounting fraud. So more than five years ago, the Fed understood very well the big losses that might result from its massive “quantitative easing” investments, and how such losses might dwarf the Fed’s capital. It knew it could prevent showing a negative net worth by a slick accounting move. Hence the extensive discussion of the “deferred asset,” which does indeed sound a lot better in the minutes than “negative capital.”

Since then, the Fed’s portfolio is much bigger, up to $4.2 trillion, so the potential losses are much bigger now, while the Fed’s capital is much smaller, down to $39 billion because the Congress expropriated a lot of its retained earnings. Interest rates have gone up. Selling down the Fed’s portfolio could now cause an even bigger negative net worth, or “deferred asset.” As we know, the Fed has concluded not to make any sales, only move extremely slowly toward balance sheet normalization by holding all its long-term portfolio to maturity.

Should the Federal Reserve, in the circumstances of 2012 or now, reveal the projected losses from any portfolio sales and resulting “deferred asset” to the public? Should it discuss candidly with its boss, the Congress, how big the losses and negative net worth might turn out to be? Or should it just prepare the accounting gimmick for use, if necessary, worry in private, put on a good face in public, and hope for the best? What would you do, thoughtful reader, in their place?

What’s in a name of a Banking Committee?

Published by the R Street Institute.

Adair Turner, whose insights into finance among other contributions got him promoted to Lord Turner, has concluded that lending on housing and other real estate is by far the largest creator of systemic financial risk and banking busts. This conclusion is clearly correct. Among the principal recommendations of his highly interesting 2016 book, Between Debt and the Devil, is that governments must therefore work to constrain banks’ real estate loans and act to limit their recurring tendency to expand into booms and bubbles.

This is precisely the opposite of the historical policy of the American government, which has usually been to enthusiastically promote the inflation of housing credit and denounce the ensuing busts.  Currently, the U.S. government guarantees about 60% of all outstanding mortgage loans and its central bank has created money to the tune of $1.8 trillion to inject into housing finance.

In this context, we reflect on the highly suggestive symbolic shifts in the names of the Congressional committees with jurisdiction over banking.

From 1913, when it was formed, to 1971, the relevant committee of the U.S. Senate was named the Committee on Banking and Currency—a logical and consistent name.  In 1971, the name was changed to the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs—a very different combination of ideas, displaying interest in very different political constituencies. Shortly before, the Congress had restructured Fannie Mae into a government-sponsored housing finance enterprise, and created another one in Freddie Mac, both actions with momentous but unintended future results.

The Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs the Senate committee remains.  This displays, as Lord Turner’s view suggests, an overemphasis on housing.  And “Urban Affairs”? The name change is strikingly supportive of Charles Calomiris’ theory that the dominant coalition in U.S. banking politics shifted in the latter 20th century from an alliance of small banks and rural populists, to one of big banks and urban populists.

The relevant committee in the U.S. House of Representatives for 110 years, starting in 1865, had the same historical name: the Committee on Banking and Currency.  In 1975, this was changed to the Committee on Banking, Currency, and Housing.  Promoting housing finance was gaining focus.  Then in 1977, the name became the Committee on Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs.  “Currency” had lost out.  This was during the 1970s, a decade of runaway consumer price inflation, in which an emphasis on controlling the currency might have been useful.  As in the Senate, “Urban Affairs” represented important Democratic Party constituencies and accompanied the government promotion of expanding housing finance.

The House committee’s name changed in the opposite direction in 1995, with a Republican Party majority in the House for the first time in four decades, mostly maintained since then.  It became the Committee on Banking and Financial Services, then in 2001, simply the Committee on Financial Services.  The new name reflected the committee’s greatly expanded jurisdiction, most notably to include the securities industry.  In recent years, this committee has been the Congressional center of trying to reform housing finance along market lines, and in particular, to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  These efforts have yet to succeed, unfortunately.

“What’s in a name?”  Nothing, as Shakespeare makes Juliet argue?  Or, over the last several decades, would committees which focused on “banking and currency” have behaved differently from ones diligently expanding their banking interventions to include “housing and urban affairs”?