But what was the alternative to the bailouts? Another depression? I feel we made it across fairly well.
It is well known and documented that the financial crisis was no accident; everybody who headed the financial services industry to the state it was in did so knowingly, knowing full well the inevitable consequences, but not giving a damn because the arrangement let them to become handsomely wealthy, beyond our imagination. They masked everything with a mixture of stacking the regulators with their ilk, stacking the universities with their ilk (economics as a field has zero credibility to me since I discovered how many theses "greenlighting" CDOs were written in clear conflict of interest), stacking the government with their ilk.
Then while we (working class) were dealing with the fallout, tithing part of our work to reimburse their losses, not ONE of those criminals (with the blood of millions across the globe on their hands, make no mistake) was prosecuted or in any way made to answer for their actions. Much to the contrary, they went on enjoying the same mind-boggling luxurious elite lifestyle they always did.
It's feudalism with extra steps.
On the ground, parts of the financial services and the "working class" were responsible.
This story that it was simply a bunch of innocent people trying to fulfill the American Dream of owning a home is hogwash. People were knowingly buying property beyond what they could afford because prices would "always go up" and they could flip it to a greater fool. Greed, pure and simple, and both parties were complicit.
Don't believe me? Go watch one of the multitude of flipping shows from the era.
>Much to the contrary, they went on enjoying the same mind-boggling luxurious elite lifestyle they always did.
Let me guess, you don't work in the financial industry? Would it surprise you to learn that not everyone in it (and responsible) is a CEO? The industry was gutted, and many in it paid the price with their jobs. Why do you desire a pound of flesh?
I suppose it would be logically consistent to then say that people with pensions are "asking for it", too, but you get to a certain point where we cannot blame the layman for not looking at a field where all the experts are saying the same thing and not believing them.
In financial markets, the idea that "prices will always go up" is not just reasonable, but one of the founding principles of our economy. Everything must grow, all of the time. If prices _aren't_ going up, then something is wrong, and if prices are going _down_ we call it a recession, give it a grand name with capital letters, and try to make it not happen again.
that said, there's really no reason to assume that a specific type of asset will continue to appreciate indefinitely, even if it has done so for a very long time.
but we're not even talking about betting hard on a particular asset class. we are talking about massively levered loans whose viability depends on the value of a single building. literally zero diversification. I honestly don't know how anyone could see this as anything but wishful thinking.
Lenders were giving NINJA loans left and right, and stacked credit rating agencies to give them fake scores to sell off bad mortgages before the grenade went off.
Whataboutism is not a proper argument or defense.
The Inside Job documentary showcased a few economists that had conflict of interest, but haven't mentioned anything concrete about CDOs.
> Much to the contrary, they went on enjoying the same mind-boggling luxurious elite lifestyle they always did.
The culprits had money and they will have money. They own the banks, and of course they opposed regulation.
But they are not the same as those who know what's going on.
"It is well known and documented that the financial crisis was no accident; everybody who headed the financial services industry to the state it was in did so knowingly, knowing full well the inevitable consequences, but not giving a damn because the arrangement let them to become handsomely wealthy, beyond our imagination."
This is incorrect. Some knew and bet on it. (See the Big Short for example.) Some knew and exploited it. (See Goldman Sachs selling shit to clients, for which it paid 550M USD, and the guy got charged with fraud, etc.)
It was an emergent phenomenon. It's not an accident as a car accident, where you look away for a sec and you rear end someone because someone stepped before the car before you, but it's very much not a conspiracy.
It was a systemic breakdown, fueled by the very much gutted oversight and misaligned incentives created by money in politics. And that's something very hard to escape.
The lack of jail-time verdicts is not surprising, after all the laws are very much set by those who have the most money, and they usually don't like to go to jail if caught.
So we're left with DPAs ( https://www.penningtons.co.uk/news-publications/latest-news/... ) and they are pretty effective from time to time ( https://www.osler.com/en/blogs/risk/december-2017/the-long-a... ) but it needs investigators, staffing, and cooperating legislators.
Banks (and the financial industry) listen to incentives. Jail time is meaningless if all you can get is some middle manager. For that the reporting and compliance regulations help - as higher ups have to sign off on certain stuff, so they can't deny knowing this or that - but this means that really shady things will turn into compliance issues, and into fines. (Which is a lot better than remaining in the dark without any consequences, as it was before compliance regulations.)
> It's feudalism with extra steps.
Agreed.
>"Let's hope we're all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters."
Thats just what people put in email. Given that being told to not talk about certain topics via any recorded medium is not unheard of in companies, there is likely far more than this one notable example.
Even if there's not, the fact that even this person, who outright stated that this was going to collapse and kept at it anyway, has not gone to jail is just an extreme breakdown of the rule of law.
When you start making rules for thee and different rules for me, then people start wondering why they follow the law to begin with. It's a basic tenant of political science
Frontline did a great piece on this, which I watched years ago. Not sure if this is it: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/meltdown/
I believe it also explains why the election hacking of 2016 wasn't and isn't being addressed fully. If the US were to admit actual votes were changed it would create panic and instability. It also doesn't help that one side literally invited the hacking, and refused to investigate because it helped them. I'm sure there were tons of people who made good money in 2008, who weren't eager for investigation or actual reform.
The problem is, there are no "other guys".
Maybe they don't have as much experience as the current guys, but does that matter when those people use their experience to rush after profit for themselves when they know it will cause problems like this?
Since the confidence in the markets only exists because people believe the laws governing it will be enforced, not punishing anyone degrades the confidence in the market.
If you think Russian "election interference" (does that term make you feel better?) was limited to "Facebook ads" you either haven't been paying attention, or are just trolling. I'm going to guess the latter.
This is what gets me- and they were even given relative anonymity in the press so they could duck some social repercussions of their horrid behavior. I want Brad Pitt to carve a dollar sign on their foreheads.
tithing part of our work to reimburse their losses
I'm stealing this.
In fact, marrying investment and commercial banks during the crisis was a key part of stopping a banking collapse.
And the whole crash started by investment only banks failing.
So, as banking gets complex, the laws get complex. Once we decide fraudulent (fractional reserve) banking is legal, most of the rest can be whitewashed with enough handwaving.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional-reserve_banking [1] https://www.mises.ca/the-economic-benefits-of-ending-the-fra...
I know the assertion that fractional reserve banking == fraud is extremely contentions, and most disagree with me. Feel free to explain why you disagree!
Banks are very up-front about the fact that they're doing fractional reserve banking. You set up accounts in full knowledge of the fact that some of your deposit will be used for investments and that - if too many people try to withdraw the full value of their account at once - the bank may run out of reserves and you will be unable to withdraw.
Even an outright Ponzi scheme wouldn't be fraud in any moral sense if it specifically and openly said you would be investing in a Ponzi scheme and that any returns entirely depended on the extremely unlikely gamble that you would be among the first, rather than last, people to invest. (In fact, there are quite a lot of Ponzi schemes like this in cryptocurrency; at one point they made up a fairly significant proportion of all Ethereum transactions. They were treated - correctly, I think - as basically just a form of gambling for entertainment.)
And whatever your opinion of fractional reserve banking, even if you do think it's fraud you have to admit that it's clearly much less fraudulent than an outright Ponzi scheme.
World has changed and narrow money under fractional reserve is less relevant today. Crypto or gold coin can't change the system when the system does not run on narrow money. That's why federal banks have less control today than ever before.
Capital ratio requirements limit banking more than reserve requirements. Do you agree or disagree?
Swiss people had a change to quit fractional reserve banking few months ago using popular vote. When the facts were presented, many people were surprised to learn that only 20% of the money assets in Swiss banks were under fractional reserve banking system and only thing abandoning it would do is that normal people would have to have to keep more cash in their account. Massive financial industry in Switzerland is not running on narrow money.
Financial crises don't start with narrow money. There are more and more assets that are almost as liquid as money under normal circumstances[1] but they are not money. Within just few hours you can turn them into cash [1].
----
[1]: Normally very money-like liquid assets separate from broad and narrow only during crisis. Other asset types stop being liquid but central banks provide money so that shops can stack their shelves and people can buy food and gas and not to loot to survive.
When banking was "I'll store your money for you in a safe place for a small fee", fractional reserve banking was fraud, because it was not doing what you told people you were doing, and in a way that could cost them their money. Once fractional reserve banking became the normal way banks operated (that is, became both legal and expected), it's no longer fraud. It may still be immoral and/or unwise, but it's not fraud.
Now, there was plenty of fraud in the run-up to the 2008 crisis. ("Liar loans", anyone?) But that's distinct from fractional reserve banking itself being fraud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...
[Edited to add] also perjury:
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-peop...
I found this yesterday and it shows there were many convictions in Europe and North America: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-how-many-b...
Here's a direct quote from that page for the U.S.: "The US: Hundreds of criminal and civil cases brought against people and banks, with over 200 leading to prison sentences"
Do you have alternative evidence that supports none of them were prosecuted?
The article does not show any US banker or US Bank was charged for MBS fraud done before the crisis.
I understand that you're angry, but this is several steps beyond "tinfoil hat" territory.
What it seems like from the outside is they screwed the world over and completely got away with it on our dime.
I don't know if my impression is right or what would convince me the fact that there seemed to be no repercussions for their actions is somehow the right thing. Just saying that's how it seems.
I don't believe for a second those people were irreplaceable as some have suggested. People are replaced at giant companies all the time and the companies keep on functioning. If we need one example Steve Jobs death certainly shows that. Could pick any other CEO that left or was shoved out or past away.
I would wonder what you'd say about a general who didn't know that using chemical warfare is a possible tribunal scenario.
We have a similar legal case in maritime law, where captains can be sued for anything that happens on their ships. If you can't take on that role and it's liability - then you shouldn't be the captain.
I don't think you read the article because it is based on a 700 page book about how it was revolutionary tech. It was just revolutionary finance tech. There was no ABCP before, there were no CDOs before, there were no central bank swaps before, there was no wholesale funding market, there were no offshore dollar banking market, etc.
It is hard to take seriously any arguments that the bankers were incompetent when you look at the sheer number of affected institutions -- you're left defending a claim that virtually every banker and most companies (look at the impacts on, say, Russian resource companies when they could no longer roll their dollar debt in wholesale funding markets in 2008) are incompetent. And that's always going to be difficult argument to make.
I don't need to defend that claim: most companies didn't care and neither they had enough resources to do their own, full due diligence into the state of America at the point of time. That's the job of the banks.
The fact that Russian companies held their debt in dollars has nothing to do with CDOs but rather their (false) belief in the stability of American economy.
What couldn't happen legally?
Problem is though, even if laws were passed, once 2008 fades far enough into the past you'll get someone with a really bright idea, "Hey there's too much regulation stifling our economy. If we just got rid of all those pesky laws the free market would create a utopia!" Because every tom, dick and harry wants their chance to repeat history after the last tom, dick and harry have died.
We have the laws. What we lack if the will and the power to apply them.
Economist had calculated a significant number of deaths (worldwide) resulted from the 2007 / 2008 crisis. I believe the number was approx 30,000 (but it may be higher).
Editorial: If we don't have laws for such things then the elected should be shackled for their neglect and failure.
Legislative neglect also isn’t a crime that lawmakers can be prosecuted under. You can, however, not vote for them during their reelection campaign. You can also vote for lawmakers that would bother to push for such laws.
For better or worse, western countries are generally strong rule of law ones. If this was a country like China that practiced rule by law instead, I’m sure they could find something to throw them in jail on, but it isn’t.
What does “effort” mean here? Even an investigation requires some kind of suspicion of foul play. They can’t just investigate someone because they are out to get them (well, at least they shouldn’t).
It's unclear whether you know what "precedent" means in a legal context.
You could have prosecuted and imprisoned all of MERS's officers for racketeering.
The first happened in teensy numbers, the second, not at all.
(copyedited)
Do you believe that the CEO of any company that fails should be jailed or just banks?
There was undoubtedly plenty of hubris, greed and incompetence to go round. I also believe that some of what occurred should, in hindsight, have been illegal. But having some sort of sacrifice to appease the gods is a little outdated.
Oh, and yes, all the CEOs were replaceable. Irreplaceability is a very silly argument.
Sorry, but it's simply not that simple.
That is the main issue. Nothing you can do against individuals that acted legally.
However hindsight happened very quickly, almost from day 1. There is no excuse that the bailouts didn't come with extremely punitive string attached only loosened after the law had been updated.
That did not happen. There is no moral to the story, no happy ending. Worse, hindsight works both ways. Maybe the current generation of financial company executives have learned their lesson, but the next one will have no such reserve.
We can punish them for actions deemed wrong even if legal. We do it to the poorest of criminals all the time, through creative legal maneuvers that judges have decided don't violate ex post facto. It is telling that we never do this for white collar crime.
So prevention is the name of the game. But that requires competent regulators and oversight. Compliance and reporting laws, and so on. Investigators with staff and time, prosecutors willing to chase a case, and of course independent judges.
The SEC and DoJ could have tried to bring more charges, and they got billions in deferred prosecution agreements, maybe not enough though. (They - I mean DPAs - are not shiny like a jail time verdict, but they do work pretty well https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/soci-t-g-n-rale-sa-agrees-pay... see also https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?httpsred... )
If we want to make up for the money lost by the innocent, then we can chose to tax those we think benefited. But that's completely different than blind vengeance.
Watch Silicon Valley scramble to adjust their moral compass if Tesla fails in the same manner.
At a minimum they should have lost all their money and not walk away with hundreds of millions of dollars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...
Being greedy is not a crime. Taking advantage of lax regulations is not a crime. Being bailed out with tax dollars for risks that paid you off privately if they won is not a crime.
Maybe that's your point, but therein lies the problem. Doing all these things has an upside but no downside, therefore we're encouraging antisocial behaviour.
However, plenty of others aren't interested in that. What they seek is simply what we are told the republic promises us and the rest of the world.
That is, justice.
Instead, per the article, there was no justice and no closure. __And__ the voice(s) of the mob(s) - in the absence of justice - are raising louder and louder. The impact from 2008 is far from over.
But there are many behaviors which aren't "crimes" but which are morally repulsive.
The danger of not reacting, one way or another, to such inequities is that people lose faith in the system. Already, the election of Trump and rise of fascist sentiments everywhere are like a giant "fuck you" to politics as usual.
It can get much worse. At some point, as one billionaire said, "the pitchforks are coming". I don't think we'll be able to avoid it the way things are going.
> But there are many behaviors which aren't "crimes" but which are morally repulsive.
I don't agree with that concept. I don't think it's possible to legislate morality and the entire concept is downright scary. What's even more scary though is metering out justice based on perceived morality. Justice needs to be impartial, otherwise you're literally putting people in jail because your dislike them.
> The danger of not reacting, one way or another, to such inequities is that people lose faith in the system. Already, the election of Trump and rise of fascist sentiments everywhere are like a giant "fuck you" to politics as usual.
On the contrary, I see the election of Trump as a demonstration of people's faith in the system. It worked as intended and they got what they (electorally speaking) asked for.
> It can get much worse. At some point, as one billionaire said, "the pitchforks are coming". I don't think we'll be able to avoid it the way things are going.
I really doubt that. I've got significantly more faith in our shared humanity and the rule of law. I do find it disturbing how a lot of the politics on the left has shifted from policy disagreement to directly stoking violence. But it'll eventually pass.
Unemployment and immigration policy is at a tipping point where the only choice for employers is going to be rising wages. The left is going to have a hard time arguing that's a bad thing.
Why would the left argue that rising wages is a bad thing anyway? It seems that a significant subset of the left has been beating the “we need higher minimum wages and more wage growth overall" drum for a while.
Is it just because they strictly prefer a governmental rather than a natural market solution? Or something else?
What are laws if they are not an attempt to codify and enforce a group morality?
> I don't agree with that concept. I don't think it's possible to legislate morality...
If the government, or specifically the justice system, is going to be involved in that "_something_" then we need laws that can be enforced by prosecutors and interpreted by judges. If you want that to include actions that is currently legal but which you find morally reprehensible (ex: the actions of these finance executives) then that needs to be codified in law before you can go after them. And that's literally legislating morality.
> "Rule of law" means nothing if one class of people has subverted the law, enforcement and governance to their benefit at the expense of everyone else.
They haven't subverted anything. They've taken advantage of a system that is available to them. Ditto for veterans who get subsidized school or home loans, Tesla drivers who get $7,500 in EV credits, small business owners who get SBA loans, or anyone else that takes a dime from the pool of money we call public spending. You could argue that anyone of those programs is to the benefit of only the receiver and the detriment of the rest of us[1].
And there's already a system in place to change it. Elect politicians that will make the changes you want and understand the positions of the ones that are currently in power.
With all the demonizing of wall street in regards to the 2008 crisis, most fail to go back to the true cause of the crisis, i.e. the repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act[2] via the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act[3] signed by President Clinton in 1999. It took almost a decade but the entire "too big to fail" concept grew from that repeal.
[1]: I generally don't like qualifying my statements but for clarity, I'm saying you could argue it. I'm not saying that I would necessarily argue against those (well except the EV one which is asinine...).
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_steagall
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm%E2%80%93Leach%E2%80%93Bl...
As pointed out elsewhere, the repeal of Glass-Stegall was not the problem. Not only do most other countries not even have an equivalent law, but the crisis was triggered when a standalone investment bank failed.
Interestingly it was also involved in the solution as it allowed some of the mergers that softened the collapse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_rating_agencies_and_the...
Editorial: In the context of such history, DJT is the least of my worries.
6 of those 8 years fighting a conservative Congress in both houses. Only 4 months of those other 2 years did he have enough Senate votes to bypass conservative filibusters. He spent that time/capital/effort squeezing ACA through.
The bottomline, zero effort was put into it. None. Given the magnitude that's not acceptable. I'm pretty sure DJT sent BHO a thank you card.
Even if the government had simply paid off everyones' mortgages, it would be better for the average person; but instead they transferred the approximate amount required to do exactly that to the banks directly in bailouts. Which means people got stuck with bill for the bailouts [from taxes] and the mortgages; which is rather unfair to the average Joe.
How so?
Bailouts saved the economy for the proverbial 1%, who are doing wonderfully. But no one else is. (I'm including many HN readers in the 1% because they work in a privileged and relatively highly paid part of the job market.)
When the mountain of debt finally implodes, it's going to be far worse than 2008.
This is very different to - say - the 50s and 60s - when ordinary working people could accumulate significant assets by working hard and saving.
We all can kumbayaa about how the Fed enriched the asset holders, and how unfair that is, but they did what they were able to, while Congress did nothing. (The Obama stimulus was too small, and no reform followed, the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act was a mere correction of something that should have been there all along.)
The mountain of debt imploded in 2008, and since then financial regulation is very much systemic stress test based. The next crisis will be at least different. Bankers can just sit back, relax, and watch as the world burns around them.
Note that the bailout money wasn't simply gifted with no strings, it was leant and paid back with a profit to the tax payer. Of course QE had it's costs and they were very high, there were other costs as well, but they're often exaggerated.
Paying off everyone's mortgages sounds lovely, how nice. In reality everyone would have rushed out and re-mortgaged their properties again, attempted to re-invest or spend their wind fall leading to massive house price inflation and a titanic credit binge the likes of which the world has never seen. The consequences would have been apocalyptic.
I can't comment if this is true in America but in the UK we've been selling off bailed out assets at a loss. Sales seem to be timed for political points not to maximize profit.
QE's long-term effect on housing prices will probably be terrible on many people wanting to purchase an appartment, possibly leaving many without one.
And on the other hand, QE created such a boom in startup investing, which will greatly increase the rate which jobs will be automated.
I can't see how this ends well over the long term.
Uh, what crash was delayed? 2008 was the worst since the Great Depression.
>Because of the bailouts however, it's now probably more lucrative than ever to work in finance
This is simply incorrect.
>so we probably have even more people working in finance today than in 2008
We have slightly more now than 12 years ago. Why would we not?
It's this mentality which is going to cost you in the long run. People have been saying "the next one is around the corner" for 10 years, and missed the biggest bull run in history. If you bought prior to the Lehman collapse you'd still be up 130%.
>Even if the government had simply paid off everyones' mortgages, it would be better for the average person
I disagree. I'm not going to pay the mortgage for someone else because someone decided they needed way more house than they could afford.
Unless you are talking about ultimate heat death of universe. but then if you truly are that fatalistic then why bother commenting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Economic_Stabilizati...
Especially I'd like to point out the one proposed by Paul Krugman. Instead of injecting money into the banks, the government invests the money in the banks, diluting the previous shares. After the crisis, the government starts selling their shares, getting at least part of the money back.
Personally I also made some smallish stock investments during that time. I only regret that I didn't invest just a little more... the profit is/was huge.
Wasn't TARP repaid?
You are basically describing TARP, which is what happened (and netted over $11 billion in returns).
But what was the alternative to the bailouts?
I mean, when your ship hits rocks you gotta patch the holes so you don't drown - but then you also gotta stop the captain navigating you into rocks. We did an OK job at the first, but did practically nothing about the second.
The Obama stimulus was too small, and it simply took too much time for the economy to recover.
Yes, absolutely, agreed. But this is the classic problem of not pricing in externalities, like every kind of pollution (climate change), delayed effect on human health, and various second- and higher order consequences.
Legislation should demand better goals (sustainability, health friendliness, inequality-decreasing). As long as tax incentives are broken, we'll continue to see the race for the quarterly profit.
Future generations will be paying the bill for mistakes of their parents.
My children will pay for the mess a few made by pushing unreasonable expectations and by not listening to people like me.
There are some fights that must be fought by others.
Now if you can provide me with decent alternatives, I'd be glad to here from them. But remember, I have to live in the system.
However, the biggest problem is the education of the wider public and garnering the democratic will of the people to make necessary changes.
Economics, for all its show of being empirical is really just politics, and politics is really just philosophy.
In the daily struggle, hustle and bustle of life, few have the time and desire to learn these subjects, let alone pay the price to apply themselves politically to make the necessary changes.
Are you willing to?
I'm not... at least for now, willing to do anything. Charity starts at home and before I contemplate doing anything political I must ensure my family is well off.
However if you are willing, and able to do something, I strongly encourage you to.
You're painfully right. I 100% agree. There lies the issue. I have the philosophy right, but the opportunity and skills to fight for it, well, it's much tougher. If only one could contribute to that like on open source projects ('cos there, I contribute, I find time and energy)
But I'm not guilty :-)
However the will to do it requires a good enough why... and if you have more pressing whys than you just won't start.
Best I can do for the time being is vote.
Could you elaborate on that please?
> Economics, for all its show of being empirical is really just politics, and politics is really just philosophy.
That's very-very incorrect. Economics is about models, and understanding the past, and maybe trying to peek at the future. But at its core, it's about modeling.
And it helps us understand what works and what doesn't. Politics should be about giving the parameters to those models. And philosophy (logic) is about finding the inconsistencies in our politics.
And as you say, nowadays people don't care about logic, they care about their beliefs. Even if they are inconsistent. They are too busy to notice that they are wrong.
The Fed is a privately owned bank that is given the monopoly to issue debt backed by the taxation of the State.
The U.S. could simply issue debt itself. Even though the President appoints the Fed Chairman and it has the word "Federal" in its name it is not a Government organization. If you don't believe me, try getting ownership information from the Fed via the Freedom of Information Act.
For further information see what happened when President Andrew Jackson abolished the precursor to the current Fed. America didn't implode it actually thrived. Also worth looking into is how the current Fed came about. President Woodrow Wilson lived long enough to regret bringing the Fed back.
Fun fact, the Bank of England started off as a private bank before it became nationalized. Nothing is stopping the U.S. from doing the same.
Re: Economics is modelling
If that were the case what is Communism? Is that a model or a political system? What is Capitalism? Is that a model too? No... they are 'societal beliefs in action' which is what politics is.
As for your assertions on philosophy... I would say philosophy is more than finding inconsistencies, it's a framework for thought itself that allows for reasoning.
What is a model anyway? At its essence it's an idea (or set of ideas) that may or may not be true. I think a big part of the problem with Economics today is the hubris modelling can confer by giving the illusion of accuracy.
It's worth looking into the works of Nobel Prize winner in Economics and the Turing Award winner Herbert A. Simon or more recently Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Simon's Nobel acceptance speech suns things up better than I can.
The Fed's own page on the FOIA indicates that the Fed thinks it's a federal agency covered by FOIA.
I know it sounds crazy but the Fed is simply not a Government organization if it is privately owned.
It has mandatory non-voting non-transferable shares. That is, when you fund a bank, you have to buy in at the regional Fed. Why? Who knows, it's a law on the books, and it's basically mindless administration. It does not make it "owned" in any sense.
The Fed is established by an Act of Congress, directly reports to Congress, and every aspect of the Fed's rights and duties is directly spelled out in laws.
If you do a FOIA request for ownership structure, you'll get nothing, because there's no such thing. The Fed is not owned by anyone, it's an independent-from-the-WhiteHouse US agency. It has a budget (and is self funded, from the interests of the securities/assets it holds), it has expenses for staff and for the cost of providing services, it then gets reimbursed from the Treasury for certain services, etc. ( https://www.federalreserve.gov/foia/files/2018ReserveBankBud... ) And it pays out 6% to the member banks, who are mandated by law to have equal to 3% of their capital in Fed Regional Bank "shares".
There's one instance where the regional fed banks can be thought of as "private": from the perspective of the FTCA [the Federal Tort Claims Act].
See also Scott v. Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, in which the distinction is made between Federal Reserve Banks, which are federally created instrumentalities, and the Fed Board of Governors, which is a federal agency.
That's generally the problem is that people can only ever see a solution that mirrors our society as is which means voting for the same politicians talking about the same neo-liberal capitalist economy, people need to be a bit braver ideologically if they don't want the wealth gap to increase and when the time for peaceful solutions has passed. We see the rise of the far right, it's slow but there's no denying those people are there in significant numbers and won't go away by calling them all sorts. It would be easy for me as a generally liberal middle-class white man to say everything is fine now but there are some issues which are still prevalent that can't be ignored.
Debt is the smart way to keep them in the hamster wheel.
Edit: fixed contempt to content
You can (especially in US) lose a looooot more.
the only real fix is getting out of the tyranny of a two party system, however each new finance reform bill does its best to prevent that possibility under the guise of protecting democracy from outside influence
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-03-31/welcome-t...
But the bailout should have had a lot more "never again" in it, rather than "how can we get back to the old normal of bubble finance as quickly as possible".
What do you have in mind? Could you explain this?
Part of the explicit aim of the bailout was to preserve the finance industry status quo, one of very unequal incomes and widespread effects on people by forces outside their control. In the long run this has turned into a sort of formless populist anger that's been successfully transmuted into racial hatred, but there is a real and persistent sense of injustice that needs to be addressed.
Turning this into specific plans is too big a question for me. All that has really been done to prevent it happening again has been a raising of European regulatory capital requirements.
Sure, but financial services oversight is not that far from air safety (NTSB, FAA). The SEC, FDIC, CFTC, FSOC (established in 2010 via the Dodd-Frank Act), the Fed, and a few others are rather technical agencies. If they have enough power to request certain kinds of data from financial institutions and fine them if they are deemed not secure/stable/compliant enough, they can and will prevent any similar upcoming crisis.
The problem is, of course, that rules are gradually rolled back due to politics, and the oversight agencies understaffed and underbudgeted. Thus they are not proactive, they are reactive, and there was nothing they could have done in 2008 when it was already too late. (So the Fed stepped in with QE, and Congress with TARP, and with ARRA - but that was too small, so recovery took too long.)
That said, yes, absolutely the incentives aligned toward preserving the status quo. Which is not necessarily wrong, as doing something radical was likely unhelpful. What needs to be done is clear (better effective proactive expert oversight) but it's politicized. Just like the FCC regulation with the TelComms industry. And so on.
We basically gave them a big sack of cash and asked them not to do it again. No one went to prison and GS went back to paying out bonuses.
> We basically gave them a big sack of cash
We had no other choice, really. They paid it back.
> and asked them not to do it again.
There is a long list of new regulation overseeing systemic risk related concerns. (We shall see their effectiveness and longevity.)
> No one went to prison and GS went back to paying out bonuses.
Intent is key for successful criminal prosecution, and it's very hard to prove.
The solution is known, and old. A competent proactive expert non-understaffed and non-underbudgeted oversight agency that can react to the changes in the market/industry (eg new products [investment vehicles, etc.] appearing) without Congress.
And serious compliance regulation that creates a paper trail for proving intent. (To deter people from stupid shit.)
Aaand [corporate] whistleblower protection.
Sure, Congress could have created an Uncle Sam bank, but that wouldn't have solved anything.
Stocks, investors, bondholders are important, because they underlie much of US pension plans, social security account, and so on.
And even if the day to day operations could have been somehow continued, someone would had to arbitrate what is okay to save, and what is okay to let it perish. And that would have been a much harder and basically impossible task.
Are you unaware that TARP happened?
"purchasing the illiquid MBS, and through that, reducing the potential losses of the institutions that owned them. Later, it was modified slightly to allow the government to buy equity stakes in banks and other financial institutions"
Why would any rational investor purchase dog crap knowingly for the good of society, by spending that society's money on dog crap. Instead, buy the dog, discounted by the amount of dog crap it has, and squeezed by how desperate the seller is of what is left. No financial mercy should be shown to the institutions that put themselves in that position. Nobody has ever shed a tear for anybody else financially squeezed, and in this case it would have been good for society and fitting capitalistic justice.
Instead, we pumped their bags, regained the value of equity and then had the debts repaid from the equity that was saved. Its a nice story, we got paid back, but the reality is, the Gov/ people should have made out like bandits while those bankers were kicked to the curb. This is how capitalism is supposed to work.
I don't think you understand how TARP worked if you think that's even remotely applicable as an analogy
> This is how capitalism is supposed to work.
Maybe you should learn a little more about the system you claim to be critiquing, so your criticisms don't fall so completely flat.
This is supposed to be a forum for intelligent discussion.
I literally quoted investopedia for how TARP works - so don't pretend that isn't how it worked. "Purchasing illiquid Mortgage Backed Securities" aka "Toxic Assets" aka "Dog Crap".
And yet you began with a sarcastic quip, followed by comparing TARP - a program that has generally been considered a successful part of mitigating the 2008 financial crisis by all mainstream economists, to different degrees - to passing around a bag of "dog crap".
That's not what a good-faith intellectual discussion looks like, so don't expect replies to exceed the level of effort and discourse that you yourself are presenting.
I'm going to stop here because you have set this discussion on a path towards unhelpful negativity. I hope any moderator/ reader reading this can see that you side railed this and not me. None of my discussion was about you, but was about the issue. Your response might as well breach the name calling rules of this forum.
The net effect would have been to cripple most of the national banks to the point where they would have to be liquidated and purchased piecemeal by smaller banks and local credit unions that managed to behave responsibly during the crisis.
The FDIC already exists and has a mandate to draw unlimited funds to make customers whole up to the limits. This is already priced in.
As to what would happen as companies failed to make payroll as their banking arrangements failed, it's likely that there would have been problems along the way, but the existing credit markets, especially short-term consumer credit (i.e. credit cards) would have allowed most households to stay solvent while the banks reorganized around the new reality.
I'm far from convinced that there would have been a depression -- for the most part I believe that it would have self-corrected on an individual or company basis except for the finance sector, which created the crisis in the first place.
For example:
Even if there was no alternative, that doesn't mean a clear understanding of the costs & downstream consequences is a bad thing.
Even if some kind of bailout was necessary, bailouts can take many forms. Do you think the bailout chosen was the best form?
There wasn't, actually, one bailout. There were many ad hoc choices made along the way. Why was Lehman allowed to fail? It was purely an ideological choice; the Fed clearly had the ability to save it, they just underestimated the pain it would. Why were swaps extended to some countries but not others? Why didn't the ECB help out Hungary or even Austria?
For that matter, why was the Federal Reserve acting as a global lender of last resort without telling anyone, not even Congress. (It required a Freedom of Information lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court for the Federal Reserve to turn over details on the full scope of their swaps with other central banks.)
Maybe the bailouts should have happened exactly as they did but the optics & politics should have been done in a more transparent fashion?
But taking such a non-nuanced, instrumental view I feel like you make the discussion less interesting than it could otherwise have been. And because it was a "first comment", it then warped much of the entire discussion on the topic. This thread has 80 replies and 55 of them are to you.
You are entirely correct, but unfortunately, I suspect that this is inevitable. Discussions of economic policy on Hacker News almost always end up in this same place.
Additionally, the fact that people in the street got screwed while hedge funds got their profit margins protected by tax payers is something that shouldn't have been allowed to happen. Much of the pain for the top 1% from the crash was socialized away and absorbed by tax payers and the working class. There should have been much more financial assistance to the working class.
Wiping out the shareholders when bailing out would have incentivized the next set of shareholders to police their investment. Now the only disincentives are executive compensation and some additional express limits on dividends.
People who were paying their mortgages were effected by the general economic downturn, collapse of home values, and credit crunch, for some parts of which the bank bailouts were an ineffective remedy. (Bailing out troubled homeowners probably would have been more effective.)
> The bank needs money now so it will have to sell some of it's assets such as the house you're living in
Unless you are renting from a bank, it's not going to sell your house, because it doesn't own it; particularly, that's not how most mortgages work (there are some that are callable early where that would be a theoretical possibility, but they are almost never used for owner-occupied residential property.)
> The government effectively acts as a very large insurance company by giving the bank a loan.
No, it was acting as a very large bank. An insurance company would have recieved premiums in advance and not given loans, but just paid out money.
Instead, they were made whole again at the cost of years worth of future demand pulled forward by easy money policies. Worse, the sense that "we made it across" has caused way too many people to jump back on the risk/debt wagon with gleeful abandon.
The crisis wasn't resolved, but merely postponed.
Nothing.
> Another depression?
Recession/depression/whatever, that's exactly what we had. At that stage of things, it was essentially unavoidable.
> I feel we made it across fairly well.
The billions and billions and billions spent by the federal government didn't come from nowhere. They came from taxes (which didn't increase) or deficit financing (which did increase), thus crowding out the investment market and making the recovery much longer.
I feel like, jail or no, the financial executives who got us into the mess - and who haven't really gotten us out yet - ought to be former financial executives that are working as, e.g., baristas.
Instead, a decision was made that the bloated mortgages that had been issued, would be turned from bad collateral into 'sound collateral', keeping asset prices high. It's like resolving Ford's problems with exploding gas tanks back in the 70's by arranging to buy all the bad cars.
[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/madigan2009...
Take lessons from their failures? Yes. Not what the GP was saying.