Many people accept Winston Churchill’s assertion that, ‘In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.’ To win a war, a government not only must conceal certain facts from its enemy but must even try to convince the enemy to believe things that are deliberately false. Often, this means deceiving a nation’s own citizens as well and perhaps some of its own elected officials.
Should a government do the same during a financial crisis? A recent report by Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general monitoring the Troubled Asset Relief Program, raises the issue. Barofsky criticized Bush Administration Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s decision a year ago for dissembling about the true financial condition of nine of the nation’s largest banks. Paulson claimed all were sound when, in fact, several had serious problems, and two, Bank of America and Citigroup, were teetering on the brink of insolvency.
There was no hint of untruth in the testimony given Tuesday by Minnesota bank regulators before a state senate committee. But there were limits to what Kevin Murphy, deputy commissioner of the Minnesota Commerce Department, could publicly disclose. Murphy explained the process regulators use to deal with troubled banks and revealed there now were 71 banks on the department’s internal watch list, but he did not identify the banks.
The argument for absolute truth and broad disclosure is that people have a right to information that may affect the safety of their assets. If people knew a particular institution or class of investments posed a danger, they could re-order their finances accordingly.
The argument for lying during a generalized financial crisis is one of the “lesser evil.” It is bad to deceive the public. It would be incalculably worse, however, to throw our nation or even the whole world into a catastrophic depression by panicking depositors and investors at a time when generalized fears about the soundness of financial institutions could bring the whole system crashing down.
Credit is essential to prosperity in modern economies. A complex array of institutions and markets facilitates the flow of capital to where it is most needed. This fosters growth, raising incomes, increasing employment and giving people higher returns on their savings and investment.
It is no coincidence that the word “credit” comes from “credere,” a Latin word meaning “to believe or trust.” Loss of trust in a nation’s financial markets certainly can cause economic collapse and enormous loss of wealth and income.
This is not a theoretical danger. History is replete with examples, most recently in Argentina in 2002.
It is a classic fallacy of composition. What is beneficial to any single individual — being warned of financial danger — causes great harm to society as a whole.
In the specific case of bank regulators, deposit insurance may protect small depositors. De facto policies of fostering bank takeovers that cover all depositors minimize danger to most of the public. But there are recent cases where uninsured depositors lost at least some money and where the emergency need to find another lender during a credit crisis did great harm to businesses and households.
Again, greater disclosure of information about failing banks would benefit individual households or businesses. But it also could make potential bank failures into self-fulfilling prophecies as truthful information prompted bank runs. In a situation like the present, where fears about financial markets as a whole prevail, a series of runs on individual banks can become a chain reaction that undermines the whole system.
The irony in the specific case cited by Barofsky is that anyone with any sense about financial markets knew very well Paulson was lying. It’s like how Japanese culture traditionally has dealt with cancer: Doctors would conspire with family members to avoid telling the patient he had a terminal cancer. The patient usually would know it full well, and the doctor and family would know the patient knew, ad infinitum, but the prevailing mores dictated that no one ever explicitly stated the obvious.
Irony and hypocrisy aside, however, think about what might have happened if Paulson had instead identified the banks at the edge of failure. My guess is we would now be in a worse spot than the nation was in early 1933. Financial truth may not need a full bodyguard of lies, but at least one beefy security guy may be essential.
© 2009 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.