Many additional authors colored my worldview, and much of what you read is due to the prior work of Roger Lowenstein, Richard Bookstaber, Tom Metz, Paul Desmond, Stephan Mihm, Satyajit Das, Robert J. Shiller, Robert F. Bruner and Sean D. Carr, Reginald Stuart, and Ed Gramlich. Their writings influenced what you now hold in your hands, and if it’s any good, it’s because I stole only from the very best.
Introduction
Bailout Nation
Owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. Owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.
—J. P. Getty
We like to think of the United States as a rugged country of determined, self-reliant individuals. The iconic image is the American cowboy. You can picture him on a cattle drive, watching warily over his herd. All he needed to get by were his wits, his horse—and his trusty Winchester.
This idealized vision of America is fading fast, rendered moot by present-day cattle rustlers. The new gauchos ride not on the range, but on the financial vistas. Instead of herding cattle, they rope derivatives, wrangle financial instruments, and round up paper wealth. The differences between the modern-day cowboy/bankers and the ranch hands of the old West are many, not the least of which is monetary—today’s banker/rustler makes a whole lot more money than the frontiersmen did in the past.
But there is another crucial difference between the two—the “individualist” part. The newfangled herdsman may look rugged, but he sure as hell ain’t independent. The modern cowpoke has become way too reliant on a different sort of cavalry: Uncle Sam—and all the taxpayers that support him.
How did we go from being a nation that revered the idea of the self-reliant broncobuster into something else entirely? What turned us into a nanny state for well-paid bankers?
How did the good ole U.S. of A. turn into a Bailout Nation? That is what this book is about.
It’s easy to understand why bailout is such a dirty word in the American financial vernacular. There are many reasons, but I want to focus on the three biggest ones.
First, there is something inherently unjust about some people getting a free ride when everyone else has to pay his or her own way. We Americans are always willing to lend a hand to someone down on their luck, but that is not what the current crop of bailouts is about. This is the government financially rescuing people despite—or perhaps because of—their own enormous recklessness and incompetence.
This inequity is especially galling to those of us who work in the financial markets. Wall Street has long been a brutal meritocracy. Success is based on skills and smarts and the relentless ability to identify opportunity while simultaneously managing risk. All of the people I know who work on the Street—whether in stocks, bonds, options, or commodities—have a strong sense of fair play. “Eat what you kill” is the classic Wall Street attitude toward risk and reward, profit and loss.
There are, however, those market players who fail to live or die by their own swords—but then expect to be rescued by others from their own folly. They embody a fair-weather belief in the free market system, somehow thinking it applies only during the good times. This is a high form of moral cowardice, and it is rightly despised by those who play fairly and by the rules.
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, well-connected, moneyed interests have managed to keep all of their profits and bonuses during good times, but have somehow thrown off their risk and the results of their own bad decision making onto the public taxpayers. “Privatized gains and socialized losses” is hardly what capitalism is supposed to be.
Second, the process of how some groups get rescued by the government, while others are left to flounder, is in and of itself suspect. The cliché that “no one should see how laws or sausages get made” is especially true when it comes to bailouts. The political mechanisms—and the dollar amounts involved—are especially egregious. Why? In all modern cases, they are done quickly, on an emergency footing. There is often little or no debate. Transparency has been nonexistent. Many observers not only object philosophically to the concept of bailouts, but are particularly offended by the ham-fisted way they are foisted upon the public. Nearly everything has been done on an ad hoc basis, with little thought and less planning. Who has time for strategy or long-term thinking when we have trillions of dollars to spend?
Third, and finally, there are the costs. If we have learned anything about bailouts over the past hundred years, it is that each rescue attempt is more costly than the one that preceded it. This is usually true in terms of the immediate expenditure, but even more so in terms of the long-term damage done to the financial system. As of February 2009, the costs have raced past $14 trillion. That is an unprecedented sum of money, greater than any other single government expenditure in the nation’s history (see Table I.1).
Table I.1 Cheaper to Clean Up After?
SOURCE: Data courtesy of Bianco Research
Beyond the actual out-of-pocket expenses lies the dangerous hazard of corporate bailouts. The government’s largesse encourages greater and greater reckless speculation. The ordinary liability and risk that is supposed to go with investing and business ventures seem to have disappeared. A grotesque distortion of normal capitalist incentives is formed. When a sector of the economy expects to be rescued by the government, it loses the healthy fear of financial failure. This leads directly to excessive speculation and reckless behavior—a condition known as moral hazard.
Historically, excessive greed, recklessness, and foolish speculation were punished by the market. Speculators lost their capital, their reputation, and their influence. (Back in the day when skyscrapers had windows that opened, some even lost their lives.) Their pools of cash migrated to people who handled risk in a more intelligent fashion. This is—or perhaps was—the great virtue of capitalism: Money finds its way to where it is treated best. Capital gravitates to those who can balance risk and reward, and who can obtain positive investment results, without blowing up. It’s no coincidence that the largest venture capital firms, the biggest hedge funds, and the longest-lasting private trusts know how to manage risk. They preserve their capital. They have a healthy respect for losses, and strive to keep them manageable. They do not, as so many have done recently, put all their money on a single number, spin the roulette wheel, and hope for the best.
The present system has lost its auto-correcting mechanism. As economist Allan Meltzer noted, “Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin—it just doesn’t work.” While the profit motive is alive and well, with rewards potentially in the billions of dollars for some, there is no corresponding and offsetting risk of enormous loss. Any system that allows profits to be kept by a select few but expects the loss to be borne by the public is neither capitalism nor socialism: It is the worst of both worlds.
Government intervention thwarts this migration of capital. Instead of the relentless efficiency of the marketplace—I call it the back of Adam Smith’s invisible hand—we have instead politically expedient shortcuts that bypass this process. In the end, this results in a misallocation of capital, and an embracing of risk and short-term motives that leads to utter recklessness. Hence, the mortgage broker who fudges the loan application, the bank that looks the other way to process it, and the fund manager that ultimately buys this crappy paper are all focused not on sustainable, long-term returns, but on the quick buck. As we will see, the implications for the broader economy have been dire.
The modern era of finance is now defined by the bailout. Systemic risk has become the buzzword du jour. History teaches us that these bouts of intervention to save the system occur far more regularly than an honest definition of that phrase would require. Indeed, systemic risk has become the rallying cry of those who patrol the corridors of Washington, D.C., hats in hand, looking for a handout. As we too often learn after the fact, what is described as systemic risk is more often than not an issue of political connections and politics. Perhaps a more accurate phrase is economic expediency.
The past gen
eration has seen increasing dependence on government intervention into the affairs of finance. Industrial companies, banks, markets, and now financial firms have all become less independent and more reliant upon Uncle Sam. This is no longer a question of philosophical purity, but rather a regular occurrence of politically connected corporations—and their well-greased politicians—throwing off the responsibility for their failures onto the public. Any sort of guiding philosophy or ideology regarding free markets, competition, success, and failure seems to have simply faded away as inconvenient. No worries, the taxpayer will cover it.
Some people—most notably current Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and former chairman Alan Greenspan—seem to feel that it is the responsibility of governmental entities such as the Federal Reserve or Congress to intervene only when the entire system is at risk. The events since August 2007 have made it clear that this is a terribly expensive approach. Perhaps what the government should be doing is acting to prevent systemic risk before it threatens to destabilize the world’s economy, rather than merely cleaning up and bailing out afterward. An ounce of regulatory prevention may save trillions in cleanup cures.
The United States finds itself in the midst of an unprecedented cleanup of toxic financial waste. As of this writing, the response to the credit crunch, housing collapse, and recession by various and sundry government agencies had rung up over $14 trillion in taxpayer liabilities, including bailouts for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, General Motors and Chrysler (twice, and soon to be three times), American International Group (AIG) (four times), Bank of America (three times), and Citigroup (three times). It has forced capital injections into other major banks, and government-engineered mergers involving once-vaunted firms Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, and Washington Mutual (see Table I.1). It has led to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) receivership, nationalization and sale of Washington Mutual (now in the hands of JPMorgan Chase), and Wachovia, flipped over the course of a weekend to Wells Fargo.
Yes, that’s $14 trillion (plus)—about equal to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States in 2007. And as 2008 came to a close, even more industries caught the scent of easy money: Automakers, home builders, insurers, and even state and local governments were clamoring for a piece of the bailout pie.
The implications of this are significant. The current bout of bailouts—the banks and brokers, airlines and automakers, lenders and borrowers in the housing industry—will have significant, long-lasting repercussions.
So far, they have turned the United States into a Bailout Nation.
And that’s just the beginning.
Part I
A BRIEF HISTORY OF BAILOUTS
Source: By permission of John Sherffius and Creators Syndicate, Inc.
Chapter 1
A Brief History of Bailouts
“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.”
—Herbert Spencer, English philosopher
America’s relationship with bailouts has been a complex and nuanced affair. It has evolved gradually, morphing through var ious phases over time. The United States has had several distinct bailout eras, and each has seen an incremental shift in the attitudes toward government rescues. Philosophically, the country has moved from finding the mere idea of a government intervention to any corporation abhorrent, to begrudgingly accepting interventions as a rare but necessary evil. Since the late 1990s, bailouts have been embraced around the world as a near-normal responsibility of government to save the financial markets from themselves. Most recently, a backlash has been building against bailouts as a reward for dumb and irresponsible behavior.
Let us consider an earlier period in U.S. history—the nineteenth century to the pre-Great Depression era. The popular attitude toward both governments and corporations was very different at that time from today. Government was much smaller, and was not seen as a lender of last resort to either banks or industry. A general suspicion of corporate entities was commonplace among the populace, and there was a near-adversarial relationship between the government and the larger corporate interests.
The federal government’s involvement in companies in the nineteenth century was more as an incubator than a rescuer. There wasn’t much in the way of venture capital funding then, and a few start-ups sought and received modest amounts of government assistance. Railroad and telegraph firms were given easements and rights of passage, facilitating the government’s desire for expansion into the West. Later on, telephone companies also enjoyed government largesse. Eminent domain was used to purchase properties for the benefit of companies as varied as mining, cattle ranches, railroads, and telegraph firms. In each of these early examples, the government’s cash outlays were quite modest, and often facilitated a broad public good.
Rather than betting on any single company, the government found it to be in its own interest to jump-start a sector and then allow a brutal Darwinian competition to take place. Ultimately, that left standing only a few survivors as the rest of the industry fell by the wayside. Automobiles, computers, electronics—history is replete with examples of the U.S. government staying out of the way of a competitively developing industry. The government left these companies to follow their own natural life cycle via the mechanics of the free market. In Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy, Dan Gross details the thousands of railroads, telegraph companies, automakers, and Internet companies that boomed and then eventually went bust.1 In most industries, this process leaves behind a valuable infrastructure for subsequent companies to build upon. This was Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” at work.
The groundwork for modern bailouts was laid in the early twentieth century, when in 1913, the Federal Reserve System was created. As we will see in a later chapter, this had major implications a century later. As originally envisioned, it was imbued with only modest monetary and fiscal powers. Eventually, these powers were expanded dramatically.
The next phase took place in the 1930s and 1940s, between the Great Depression and World War II. The widespread economic turmoil and political discontent forced the government to engage in a series of economic stimuli designed to generate jobs, income, and economic activity. While some political historians have described this as a bailout, it was not directed toward any specific corporation or economic sector. The public works programs of the Depression era were designed to impact the entire economy, stimulate growth, and reduce the 25 percent unemployment rate.
The latter years of this second era preceded World War II. The U.S. steel industry had previously enjoyed a booming decade in the 1920s, but had collapsed during the economic crisis. The United States, anticipating the possibility of its entry into World War II, recognized the importance of a viable industrial manufacturing sector. Without a healthy steel industry, the country would’ve been hamstrung in its attempts to build ships, tanks, planes, and other tools of warfare. The munitions industry also received much of Uncle Sam’s largesse, as did the metals companies and the rubber industry. Indeed, the ramp-up to World War II saw an enormous amount of government assistance to companies that were war-related.
Were these truly bailouts? It’s hard to call any nation’s national defense buildup in wartime a true bailout.
After World War II, the United States entered a long period of economic expansion. The building of suburbia, the automobile industry’s enormous growth, the expansion of major cities, and the entire postwar baby boom led to salad days for corporate America. There was no further government involvement in corporate America until the rescue of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in 1971.
What made the Lockheed bailout so pivotal was its status as the first public bailout of a major corporation—and only that corporation. The Lockheed rescue became the blueprint for most future bailouts over the next half century.
The rescue of Lockheed in 1971 ($250 million) led to loan guarantees for Penn Central in 1974 ($676.3 million in lo
an guarantees), which paved the way for the $1.5 billion rescue of Chrysler in 1980 and then Continental Illinois Bank in 1984 ($1.8 billion loss). This led to the original mother of all government insurance payouts—the savings and loan (S&L) crisis of the early 1990s (total taxpayer cost: $178.56 billion), which led to the stock market rescue of 2000, and so on. Each bailout has had negative consequences, and the repercussions have often led to the next bailout. Each negative impact seems to have the perverse effect of making future bailouts less surprising and more tolerable—and therefore more likely.
The Federal Reserve’s attempted rescue of the credit markets in August 2007 ultimately led to the $29 billion rescue of a single firm—the investment bank Bear Stearns in March 2008. The Fed not only was rescuing Bear Stearns but, indirectly, JPMorgan Chase, the largest derivatives counterparty of Bear Stearns. More important, the Fed was also protecting its original decision to rescue the credit markets. The housing bailout package of July 2008 rationalized the interest rate policies of the early 2000s, and led indirectly to the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which not only cost $200 billion, but put more than $5.5 trillion worth of debt back on the books of the U.S. government. Then came the takeover of AIG ($173 billion and counting), the $700 billion Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), which featured the forced injection of $250 billion into the nation’s largest banks. November 2008 brought another $20 billion capital injection into Citigroup (total $45 billion) and guarantees for $250 billion of its toxic assets. Bank of America also saw its cash injection upped to $45 billion and guarantees of $306 billion on its toxic assets. There was $30 billion for the automakers. 2009 saw a $75 billion rescue for homeowners, and a $770 billion dollar economic stimulus plan.
Bailout Nation Page 2