It’s too bad Thomas Nast, the father of U.S. political cartooning, died a century ago, because we need his acid wit and sharp pencil to depict the blame game over the causes of the great financial fiasco of 2007-2010. One of Nast’s most famous cartoons depicted key members of the corrupt Tweed Ring that dominated New York City government in the late 1800s standing in a circle, each pointing at the accomplice to his right, saying, “‘Twas him!”
Similar blaming of the next guy is a venerated tradition on Wall Street and in Washington right now, but a recent article in Time magazine shows how it can be taken to a whole new level.
Stephen Gandel’s “Did Foreigners Cause America’s Financial Crisis?” describes how some pundits absolve U.S. financial institutions of responsibility for constructing a house of cards based on complex mortgage-backed securities and on complicated financial derivatives like credit default swaps.
The fault, these pundits argue, lies with foreigners who were so hungry to buy U.S. investments that Wall Street financial institutions were forced to devise ever more complex securities just to satisfy their voracious customers.
That is sort of like a dishonest sausage maker saying, “So many people were clamoring to buy our sausages that we had to start putting sawdust, floor sweepings and a few dead mice into the mixer just to meet demand.”
This “foreigners forced us to do it” argument is not entirely original.
A few years before taking over as Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke argued that increasing U.S. borrowing abroad was not evidence of too little saving by Americans. It was instead “over-saving” by the rest of the world that was fueling capital inflows.
Yes, foreigners have wanted to invest in the United States. That is not a bad thing. It makes capital more available for our households and businesses. But neither does it justify creating risky financial instruments just because someone will buy them.
At American Economic Association meetings earlier this month, Bernanke tried pleading guilty to a lesser change, a variation of blame shifting. Yes, he admitted, the Fed and other financial sector regulators, like the FDIC and SEC, had erred in not regulating new practices and products as they should have. But the Fed had acted prudently in managing the money supply. It was not its fault that housing prices had doubled more in the last decade than in the preceding century.
Bernanke’s position is understandable. The entire Fed system seems permeated with guilty defensiveness right now and for good reason. The debacle stemmed from what history eventually will recognize as one of central banking’s greatest failures, one in which the Fed failed both in managing the money supply and regulating financial institutions.
But Bernanke does not have the audacity or shamelessness of some leading Wall Street CEOs who refuse to take responsibility for their role in the fiasco. Their story is that they were just doing their jobs, allocating capital and managing risk to make our nation a better, more prosperous place.
They are right to the extent that many of the complex financial instruments their financial voodoo artists dreamed up could be used to reduce risk or allow it to be borne by those most willing and able to.
But at the height of the mania, there were around $60 trillion worth of credit default swaps, just one of these complex instruments. That is over four times the value of everything produced in our country in a year. It was enough to hedge all the debt in the nation, public and private, business, household or government multiple times. This was not risk-management, it was risk-taking on an enormous scale.
Nor was it simply prudent capital allocation to scale up the degree of leverage in key financial institutions to unprecedented levels. It was instead a desire to earn fatter bonuses by taking on more risk with other people’s capital.
Investment CEOs also avail themselves of the classic “I didn’t know the gun was loaded” plea. Yes, they admit, in retrospect they collectively did not understand the risk inherent in “sophisticated” new investments. But who could have known? Yes, they did not appreciate the fact that housing prices, for one, could fall as well as rise. But didn’t everyone think they could not fall, including important Fed officials?
This shifting blame and offering lame excuses is a natural human reaction to spectacular failure. It is important, however, that society as a whole and voters, in particular, ignore it and listen to more objective observers.
The Fed is keeping financial institutions afloat, and the stock market up, by supplying unprecedented liquidity. It says it can drain this off again skillfully and painlessly, and at just the right time to avoid either inflation or deflation. Moreover, despite their failures, the Fed maintains it should be given a more central role in financial regulation. And Wall Street CEOs warn us of how innovation will be stifled and the efficient flows of capital dammed up if there are required to end their free-wheeling ways.
Don’t believe any of this.
© 2010 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.