[Marxism] The End of the Financial World as We Know It

[Walter Lippmann <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(I like the idea of breaking up any institution which becomes Âtoo big to 
failÂ.
It SEEMS that the people of the United States are getting something in the way
of an education about capitalism in a way they never have before, but whether
or not that education will translate itself into another political direction
for the country, that remains to be seen.)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 4, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors
The End of the Financial World as We Know It
By MICHAEL LEWIS and DAVID EINHORN

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04lewiseinhorn.html

AMERICANS enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. Weâve
been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters,
but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to
believe that we knew what we were doing. They watched our investment bankers
and emulated them: for a long time now half the planetâs college graduates
seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street.

This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired not
merely a national but a global crisis of confidence. Good God, the world
seems to be saying, if they donât know what they are doing with money, who
does?

Incredibly, intelligent people the world over remain willing to lend us
money and even listen to our advice; they appear not to have realized the
full extent of our madness. We have at least a brief chance to cure
ourselves. But first we need to ask: of what?

To that end consider the strange story of Harry Markopolos. Mr. Markopolos
is the former investment officer with Rampart Investment Management in
Boston who, for nine years, tried to explain to the Securities and Exchange
Commission that Bernard L. Madoff couldnât be anything other than a fraud.
Mr. Madoffâs investment performance, given his stated strategy, was not
merely improbable but mathematically impossible. And so, Mr. Markopolos
reasoned, Bernard Madoff must be doing something other than what he said he
was doing.

In his devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the S.E.C., Mr. Markopolos
saw two possible scenarios. In the âUnlikelyâ scenario: Mr. Madoff, who
acted as a broker as well as an investor, was âfront-runningâ his brokerage
customers. A customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy
shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities
instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the
customer order. If I.B.M.âs shares rose, Mr. Madoff kept them; if they fell
he fobbed them off onto the poor customer.

In the âHighly Likelyâ scenario, wrote Mr. Markopolos, âMadoff Securities 
is
the worldâs largest Ponzi Scheme.â Which, as we now know, it was.

Harry Markopolos sent his report to the S.E.C. on Nov. 7, 2005 â more than
three years before Mr. Madoff was finally exposed â but he had been trying
to explain the fraud to them since 1999. He had no direct financial interest
in exposing Mr. Madoff â he wasnât an unhappy investor or a disgruntled
employee. There was no way to short shares in Madoff Securities, and so Mr.
Markopolos could not have made money directly from Mr. Madoffâs failure. To
judge from his letter, Harry Markopolos anticipated mainly downsides for
himself: he declined to put his name on it for fear of what might happen to
him and his family if anyone found out he had written it. And yet the S.E.C.âs
cursory investigation of Mr. Madoff pronounced him free of fraud.

Whatâs interesting about the Madoff scandal, in retrospect, is how little
interest anyone inside the financial system had in exposing it. It wasnât
just Harry Markopolos who smelled a rat. As Mr. Markopolos explained in his
letter, Goldman Sachs was refusing to do business with Mr. Madoff; many
others doubted Mr. Madoffâs profits or assumed he was front-running his
customers and steered clear of him. Between the lines, Mr. Markopolos hinted
that even some of Mr. Madoffâs investors may have suspected that they were
the beneficiaries of a scam. After all, it wasnât all that hard to see that
the profits were too good to be true. Some of Mr. Madoffâs investors may
have reasoned that the worst that could happen to them, if the authorities
put a stop to the front-running, was that a good thing would come to an end.

The Madoff scandal echoes a deeper absence inside our financial system,
which has been undermined not merely by bad behavior but by the lack of
checks and balances to discourage it. âGreedâ doesnât cut it as a 
satisfying
explanation for the current financial crisis. Greed was necessary but
insufficient; in any case, we are as likely to eliminate greed from our
national character as we are lust and envy. The fixable problem isnât the
greed of the few but the misaligned interests of the many.

A lot has been said and written, for instance, about the corrupting effects
on Wall Street of gigantic bonuses. What happened inside the major Wall
Street firms, though, was more deeply unsettling than greedy people lusting
for big checks: leaders of public corporations, especially financial
corporations, are as good as required to lead for the short term.

Richard Fuld, the former chief executive of Lehman Brothers, E. Stanley 
OâNeal,
the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, and Charles O. Prince III,
Citigroupâs chief executive, may have paid themselves humongous sums of
money at the end of each year, as a result of the bond market bonanza. But
if any one of them had set himself up as a whistleblower â had stood up and
said âthis business is irresponsible and we are not going to participate in
itâ â he would probably have been fired. Not immediately, perhaps. But a few
quarters of earnings that lagged behind those of every other Wall Street
firm would invite outrage from subordinates, who would flee for other, less
responsible firms, and from shareholders, who would call for his
resignation. Eventually heâd be replaced by someone willing to make money
from the credit bubble.

OUR financial catastrophe, like Bernard Madoffâs pyramid scheme, required
all sorts of important, plugged-in people to sacrifice our collective
long-term interests for short-term gain. The pressure to do this in todayâs
financial markets is immense. Obviously the greater the market pressure to
excel in the short term, the greater the need for pressure from outside the
market to consider the longer term. But thatâs the problem: there is no
longer any serious pressure from outside the market. The tyranny of the
short term has extended itself with frightening ease into the entities that
were meant to, one way or another, discipline Wall Street, and force it to
consider its enlightened self-interest.

The credit-rating agencies, for instance.

Everyone now knows that Moodyâs and Standard & Poorâs botched their analyses
of bonds backed by home mortgages. But their most costly mistake â one that
deserves a lot more attention than it has received â lies in their area of
putative expertise: measuring corporate risk.

Over the last 20 years American financial institutions have taken on more
and more risk, with the blessing of regulators, with hardly a word from the
rating agencies, which, incidentally, are paid by the issuers of the bonds
they rate. Seldom if ever did Moodyâs or Standard & Poorâs say, âIf you 
put
one more risky asset on your balance sheet, you will face a serious
downgrade.â

The American International Group, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, General Electric
and the municipal bond guarantors Ambac Financial and MBIA all had triple-A
ratings. (G.E. still does!) Large investment banks like Lehman and Merrill
Lynch all had solid investment grade ratings. Itâs almost as if the higher
the rating of a financial institution, the more likely it was to contribute
to financial catastrophe. But of course all these big financial companies
fueled the creation of the credit products that in turn fueled the revenues
of Moodyâs and Standard & Poorâs.

These oligopolies, which are actually sanctioned by the S.E.C., didnât
merely do their jobs badly. They didnât simply miss a few calls here and
there. In pursuit of their own short-term earnings, they did exactly the
opposite of what they were meant to do: rather than expose financial risk
they systematically disguised it.

This is a subject that might be profitably explored in Washington. There are
many questions an enterprising United States senator might want to ask the
credit-rating agencies. Here is one: Why did you allow MBIA to keep its
triple-A rating for so long? In 1990 MBIA was in the relatively simple
business of insuring municipal bonds. It had $931 million in equity and only
$200 million of debt â and a plausible triple-A rating.

By 2006 MBIA had plunged into the much riskier business of guaranteeing
collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.âs. But by then it had $7.2
billion in equity against an astounding $26.2 billion in debt. That is, even
as it insured ever-greater risks in its business, it also took greater risks
on its balance sheet.

Yet the rating agencies didnât so much as blink. On Wall Street the problem
was hardly a secret: many people understood that MBIA didnât deserve to be
rated triple-A. As far back as 2002, a hedge fund called Gotham Partners
published a persuasive report, widely circulated, entitled: âIs MBIA Triple
A?â (The answer was obviously no.)

At the same time, almost everyone believed that the rating agencies would
never downgrade MBIA, because doing so was not in their short-term financial
interest. A downgrade of MBIA would force the rating agencies to go through
the costly and cumbersome process of re-rating tens of thousands of credits
that bore triple-A ratings simply by virtue of MBIAâs guarantee. It would
stick a wrench in the machine that enriched them. (In June, finally, the
rating agencies downgraded MBIA, after MBIAâs failure became such an open
secret that nobody any longer cared about its formal credit rating.)

The S.E.C. now promises modest new measures to contain the damage that the
rating agencies can do â measures that fail to address the central problem:
that the raters are paid by the issuers.

But this should come as no surprise, for the S.E.C. itself is plagued by
similarly wacky incentives. Indeed, one of the great social benefits of the
Madoff scandal may be to finally reveal the S.E.C. for what it has become.

Created to protect investors from financial predators, the commission has
somehow evolved into a mechanism for protecting financial predators with
political clout from investors. (The task it has performed most diligently
during this crisis has been to question, intimidate and impose rules on
short-sellers â the only market players who have a financial incentive to
expose fraud and abuse.)

The instinct to avoid short-term political heat is part of the problem;
anything the S.E.C. does to roil the markets, or reduce the share price of
any given company, also roils the careers of the people who run the S.E.C.
Thus it seldom penalizes serious corporate and management malfeasance â out
of some misguided notion that to do so would cause stock prices to fall,
shareholders to suffer and confidence to be undermined. Preserving
confidence, even when that confidence is false, has been near the top of the
S.E.C.âs agenda.

ITâS not hard to see why the S.E.C. behaves as it does. If you work for the
enforcement division of the S.E.C. you probably know in the back of your
mind, and in the front too, that if you maintain good relations with Wall
Street you might soon be paid huge sums of money to be employed by it.

The commissionâs most recent director of enforcement is the general counsel
at JPMorgan Chase; the enforcement chief before him became general counsel
at Deutsche Bank; and one of his predecessors became a managing director for
Credit Suisse before moving on to Morgan Stanley. A casual observer could be
forgiven for thinking that the whole point of landing the job as the S.E.C.âs
director of enforcement is to position oneself for the better paying one on
Wall Street.

At the back of the version of Harry Markopolosâs brave paper currently
making the rounds is a copy of an e-mail message, dated April 2, 2008, from
Mr. Markopolos to Jonathan S. Sokobin. Mr. Sokobin was then the new head of
the commissionâs office of risk assessment, a job that had been vacant for
more than a year after its previous occupant had left to â you guessed it â
take a higher-paying job on Wall Street.

At any rate, Mr. Markopolos clearly hoped that a new face might mean a new
ear â one that might be receptive to the truth. He phoned Mr. Sokobin and
then sent him his paper. âAttached is a submission Iâve made to the S.E.C.
three times in Boston,â he wrote. âEach time Boston sent this to New York.
Meagan Cheung, branch chief, in New York actually investigated this but with
no result that I am aware of. In my conversations with her, I did not
believe that she had the derivatives or mathematical background to
understand the violations.â

How does this happen? How can the person in charge of assessing Wall Street
firms not have the tools to understand them? Is the S.E.C. that inept?
Perhaps, but the problem inside the commission is far worse â because inept
people can be replaced. The problem is systemic. The new director of risk
assessment was no more likely to grasp the risk of Bernard Madoff than the
old director of risk assessment because the new guyâs thoughts and beliefs
were guided by the same incentives: the need to curry favor with the
politically influential and the desire to keep sweet the Wall Street elite.

And hereâs the most incredible thing of all: 18 months into the most
spectacular man-made financial calamity in modern experience, nothing has
been done to change that, or any of the other bad incentives that led us
here in the first place.

SAY what you will about our governmentâs approach to the financial crisis,
you cannot accuse it of wasting its energy being consistent or trying to win
over the masses. In the past year there have been at least seven different
bailouts, and six different strategies. And none of them seem to have
pleased anyone except a handful of financiers.

When Bear Stearns failed, the government induced JPMorgan Chase to buy it by
offering a knockdown price and guaranteeing Bear Stearnsâs shakiest assets.
Bear Stearns bondholders were made whole and its stockholders lost most of
their money.

Then came the collapse of the government-sponsored entities, Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac, both promptly nationalized. Management was replaced,
shareholders badly diluted, creditors left intact but with some uncertainty.
Next came Lehman Brothers, which was, of course, allowed to go bankrupt. At
first, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve claimed they had allowed Lehman
to fail in order to signal that recklessly managed Wall Street firms did not
all come with government guarantees; but then, when chaos ensued, and people
started saying that letting Lehman fail was a dumb thing to have done, they
changed their story and claimed they lacked the legal authority to rescue
the firm.

But then a few days later A.I.G. failed, or tried to, yet was given the gift
of life with enormous government loans. Washington Mutual and Wachovia
promptly followed: the first was unceremoniously seized by the Treasury,
wiping out both its creditors and shareholders; the second was batted around
for a bit. Initially, the Treasury tried to persuade Citigroup to buy it â
again at a knockdown price and with a guarantee of the bad assets. (The Bear
Stearns model.) Eventually, Wachovia went to Wells Fargo, after the Internal
Revenue Service jumped in and sweetened the pot with a tax subsidy.

In the middle of all this, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. persuaded
Congress that he needed $700 billion to buy distressed assets from banks â
telling the senators and representatives that if they didnât give him the
money the stock market would collapse. Once handed the money, he abandoned
his promised strategy, and instead of buying assets at market prices, began
to overpay for preferred stocks in the banks themselves. Which is to say
that he essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup,
Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and a few others unnaturally selected for
survival. The stock market fell anyway.

Itâs hard to know what Mr. Paulson was thinking as he never really had to
explain himself, at least not in public. But the general idea appears to be
that if you give the banks capital they will in turn use it to make loans in
order to stimulate the economy. Never mind that if you want banks to make
smart, prudent loans, you probably shouldnât give money to bankers who sunk
themselves by making a lot of stupid, imprudent ones. If you want banks to
re-lend the money, you need to provide them not with preferred stock, which
is essentially a loan, but with tangible common equity â so that they might
write off their losses, resolve their troubled assets and then begin to make
new loans, something they wonât be able to do until theyâre confident in
their own balance sheets. But as it happened, the banks took the taxpayer
money and just sat on it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/opinion/04lewiseinhornb.html

January 4, 2009
Op-Ed Contributors
How to Repair a Broken Financial World
By MICHAEL LEWIS and DAVID EINHORN
Continued from "The End of the Financial World As We Know It"

Mr. Paulson must have had some reason for doing what he did. No doubt he
still believes that without all this frantic activity weâd be far worse off
than we are now. All we know for sure, however, is that the Treasuryâs
heroic deal-making has had little effect on what it claims is the problem at
hand: the collapse of confidence in the companies atop our financial system.

Weeks after receiving its first $25 billion taxpayer investment, Citigroup
returned to the Treasury to confess that â lo! â the markets still didnât
trust Citigroup to survive. In response, on Nov. 24, the Treasury handed
Citigroup another $20 billion from the Troubled Assets Relief Program, and
then simply guaranteed $306 billion of Citigroupâs assets. The Treasury 
didnât
ask for its fair share of the action, or management changes, or for that
matter anything much at all beyond a teaspoon of warrants and a sliver of
preferred stock. The $306 billion guarantee was an undisguised gift. The
Treasury didnât even bother to explain what the crisis was, just that the
action was taken in response to Citigroupâs âdeclining stock price.â

Three hundred billion dollars is still a lot of money. Itâs almost 2 percent
of gross domestic product, and about what we spend annually on the
departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Homeland Security, Housing
and Urban Development and Transportation combined. Had Mr. Paulson executed
his initial plan, and bought Citigroupâs pile of troubled assets at market
prices, there would have been a limit to our exposure, as the money would
have counted against the $700 billion Mr. Paulson had been given to
dispense. Instead, he in effect granted himself the power to dispense
unlimited sums of money without Congressional oversight. Now we donât even
know the nature of the assets that the Treasury is standing behind. Under
TARP, these would have been disclosed.

THERE are other things the Treasury might do when a major financial firm
assumed to be âtoo big to failâ comes knocking, asking for free money. 
Hereâs
one: Let it fail.

Not as chaotically as Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. If a failing firm
is deemed âtoo bigâ for that honor, then it should be explicitly
nationalized, both to limit its effect on other firms and to protect the
guts of the system. Its shareholders should be wiped out, and its management
replaced. Its valuable parts should be sold off as functioning businesses to
the highest bidders â perhaps to some bank that was not swept up in the
credit bubble. The rest should be liquidated, in calm markets. Do this and,
for everyone except the firms that invented the mess, the pain will likely
subside.

This is more plausible than it may sound. Sweden, of all places, did it
successfully in 1992. And remember, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury
have already accepted, on behalf of the taxpayer, just about all of the
downside risk of owning the bigger financial firms. The Treasury and the
Federal Reserve would both no doubt argue that if you donât prop up these
banks you risk an enormous credit contraction â if they arenât in business
who will be left to lend money? But something like the reverse seems more
true: propping up failed banks and extending them huge amounts of credit has
made business more difficult for the people and companies that had nothing
to do with creating the mess. Perfectly solvent companies are being squeezed
out of business by their creditors precisely because they are not in the
Treasuryâs fold. With so much lending effectively federally guaranteed,
lenders are fleeing anything that is not.

Rather than tackle the source of the problem, the people running the bailout
desperately want to reinflate the credit bubble, prop up the stock market
and head off a recession. Their efforts are clearly failing: 2008 was a
historically bad year for the stock market, and weâll be in recession for
some time to come. Our leaders have framed the problem as a âcrisis of
confidenceâ but what they actually seem to mean is âplease pay no attention
to the problems we are failing to address.â

In its latest push to compel confidence, for instance, the authorities are
placing enormous pressure on the Financial Accounting Standards Board to
suspend âmark-to-marketâ accounting. Basically, this means that the banks
will not have to account for the actual value of the assets on their books
but can claim instead that they are worth whatever they paid for them.

This will have the double effect of reducing transparency and increasing
self-delusion (gorge yourself for months, but refuse to step on a scale, and
maybe no one will realize you gained weight). And it will fool no one. When
you shout at people âbe confident,â you shouldnât expect them to be 
anything
but terrified.

If we are going to spend trillions of dollars of taxpayer money, it makes
more sense to focus less on the failed institutions at the top of the
financial system and more on the individuals at the bottom. Instead of
buying dodgy assets and guaranteeing deals that should never have been made
in the first place, we should use our money to A) repair the social safety
net, now badly rent in ways that cause perfectly rational people to be
terrified; and B) transform the bailout of the banks into a rescue of
homeowners.

We should begin by breaking the cycle of deteriorating housing values and
resulting foreclosures. Many homeowners realize that it doesnât make sense
to make payments on a mortgage that exceeds the value of their house. As
many as 20 million families face the decision of whether to make the
payments or turn in the keys. Congress seems to have understood this
problem, which is why last year it created a program under the Federal
Housing Authority to issue homeowners new government loans based on the
current appraised value of their homes.

And yet the program, called Hope Now, seems to have become one more
excellent example of the unhappy political influence of Wall Street. As it
now stands, banks must initiate any new loan; and they are loath to do so
because it requires them to recognize an immediate loss. They prefer to
âwork with borrowersâ through loan modifications and payment plans that
present fewer accounting and earnings problems but fail to resolve and,
thereby, prolong the underlying issues. It appears that the banking lobby
also somehow inserted into the law the dubious requirement that troubled
homeowners repay all home equity loans before qualifying. The result: very
few loans will be issued through this program.

THIS could be fixed. Congress might grant qualifying homeowners the ability
to get new government loans based on the current appraised values without
requiring their bankâs consent. When a corporation gets into trouble, its
lenders often accept a partial payment in return for some share in any
future recovery. Similarly, homeowners should be permitted to satisfy
current first mortgages with a combination of the proceeds of the new
government loan and a share in any future recovery from the future sale or
refinancing of their homes. Lenders who issued second mortgages should be
forced to release their claims on property. The important point is that
homeowners, not lenders, be granted the right to obtain new government
loans. To work, the program needs to be universal and should not require
homeowners to file for bankruptcy.

There are also a handful of other perfectly obvious changes in the financial
system to be made, to prevent some version of what has happened from
happening all over again. A short list:

Stop making big regulatory decisions with long-term consequences based on
their short-term effect on stock prices. Stock prices go up and down: let
them. An absurd number of the official crises have been negotiated and
resolved over weekends so that they may be presented as a fait accompli
âbefore the Asian markets open.â The hasty crisis-to-crisis policy
decision-making lacks coherence for the obvious reason that it is more or
less driven by a desire to please the stock market. The Treasury, the
Federal Reserve and the S.E.C. all seem to view propping up stock prices as
a critical part of their mission â indeed, the Federal Reserve sometimes
seems more concerned than the average Wall Street trader with the marketâs
day-to-day movements. If the policies are sound, the stock market will
eventually learn to take care of itself.

End the official status of the rating agencies. Given their performance itâs
hard to believe credit rating agencies are still around. Thereâs no question
that the world is worse off for the existence of companies like Moodyâs and
Standard & Poorâs. There should be a rule against issuers paying for
ratings. Either investors should pay for them privately or, if public
ratings are deemed essential, they should be publicly provided.

Regulate credit-default swaps. There are now tens of trillions of dollars in
these contracts between big financial firms. An awful lot of the bad stuff
that has happened to our financial system has happened because it was never
explained in plain, simple language. Financial innovators were able to
create new products and markets without anyone thinking too much about their
broader financial consequences â and without regulators knowing very much
about them at all. It doesnât matter how transparent financial markets are
if no one can understand whatâs inside them. Until very recently, companies
havenât had to provide even cursory disclosure of credit-default swaps in
their financial statements.

Credit-default swaps may not be Exhibit No. 1 in the case against financial
complexity, but they are useful evidence. Whatever credit defaults are in
theory, in practice they have become mainly side bets on whether some
company, or some subprime mortgage-backed bond, some municipality, or even
the United States government will go bust. In the extreme case, subprime
mortgage bonds were created so that smart investors, using credit-default
swaps, could bet against them. Call it insurance if you like, but itâs not
the insurance most people know. Itâs more like buying fire insurance on your
neighborâs house, possibly for many times the value of that house â from a
company that probably doesnât have any real ability to pay you if someone
sets fire to the whole neighborhood. The most critical role for regulation
is to make sure that the sellers of risk have the capital to support their
bets.

Impose new capital requirements on banks. The new international standard now
being adopted by American banks is known in the trade as Basel II. Basel II
is premised on the belief that banks do a better job than regulators of
measuring their own risks â because the banks have the greater interest in
not failing. Back in 2004, the S.E.C. put in place its own version of this
standard for investment banks. We know how that turned out. A better idea
would be to require banks to hold less capital in bad times and more capital
in good times. Now that we have seen how too-big-to-fail financial
institutions behave, it is clear that relieving them of stringent
requirements is not the way to go.

Another good solution to the too-big-to-fail problem is to break up any
institution that becomes too big to fail.

Close the revolving door between the S.E.C. and Wall Street. At every turn
we keep coming back to an enormous barrier to reform: Wall Streetâs
political influence. Its influence over the S.E.C. is further compromised by
its ability to enrich the people who work for it. Realistically, there is
only so much that can be done to fix the problem, but one measure is
obvious: forbid regulators, for some meaningful amount of time after they
have left the S.E.C., from accepting high-paying jobs with Wall Street
firms.

But keep the door open the other way. If the S.E.C. is to restore its
credibility as an investor protection agency, it should have some
experienced, respected investors (which is not the same thing as investment
bankers) as commissioners. President-elect Barack Obama should nominate at
least one with a notable career investing capital, and another with
experience uncovering corporate misconduct. As it happens, the most critical
job, chief of enforcement, now has a perfect candidate, a civic-minded
former investor with firsthand experience of the S.E.C.âs ineptitude: Harry
Markopolos.

The funny thing is, thereâs nothing all that radical about most of these
changes. A disinterested person would probably wonder why many of them had
not been made long ago. A committee of people whose financial interests are
somehow bound up with Wall Street is a different matter.
 


=========================================
     WALTER LIPPMANN
     Havana, Cuba
     Editor-in-Chief, CubaNews
     http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
     "Cuba - Un ParaÃso bajo el bloqueo"
=========================================

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