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America has experienced a classic economic boom and bust, which I first chronicled in “Subprime Monetary Policy,” The Freeman, November 2007, and then updated in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere throughout 2008 and 2009. Stanford Professor John B. Taylor has now written a short, accessible book on the Fed’s easy-money policy: Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged and Worsened the Financial Crisis.

Ill-conceived policies to encourage home ownership channeled cheap credit into housing markets.  Land-use and zoning policies restricted the supply of housing in key desirable markets.  In The Housing Boom and Bust, Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institution has shown how these policies brought about a crisis in housing and finance.

Others have told the story from a number of perspectives and with varying emphasis on different factors.  My purpose here is to focus on the policy responses to the crisis and ask whether they have been helpful or harmful.

TARP

On October 3, 2008, Congress enacted the law creating the TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program).  That law authorized the expenditure of up to $700 billion to purchase troubled assets from financial institutions. A little more than a month later, then-Treasury Secretary Paulson announced a shift in the use for TARP money.  Rather than buying troubled assets, the Treasury would use the funds for capital injections into banks in return for preferred shares.

Regardless of one’s attitude toward bailouts generally, Paulson’s original plan was a recipe for disaster. To help the banks he would have needed to overpay for them to the detriment of the taxpayers.  If he had paid then-current prices, accounting rules would have forced all firms holding such assets to write them down (not just those selling the assets).  Financial institutions holding dubious mortgage-backed assets were desperately trying not to write them down because that might have threatened their depleted capital base.  It is fair to say that Paulson failed to grasp the underlying problems at these institutions when he first proposed TARP.

TARP became a capital-relief plan.  It harkened back to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) of the Great Depression. Under Jesse Jones and in conjunction with Roosevelt’s Bank Holiday, all the nation’s banks were examined and divided into the good, the bad, and the ugly.  Call it his version of a “stress test.”  Those deemed beyond hope were never reopened.  Those troubled but salvageable were eligible for RFC capital injections.  Jones also extracted resignation letters from senior management of institutions being bailed out.  If he deemed existing management best suited to run the bank, they could stay.  If not, they were replaced.

In comparison, Paulson’s strategy was “ready-shoot-aim.”  Banks received government injections of money to replace depleted capital, with nothing explicit extracted in return.  There were vague promises that banks would resume lending, but nothing enforceable.  The banks were stress-tested only after having received government funds.  There were second and even third rounds of bailout for some banks, indicating they had been weaker than thought.  We know that, in at least one case, CIT, a financial institution that received $2.3 billion in TARP money should have been allowed to close. Instead it eventually filed for bankruptcy and the taxpayer funds were lost.

Moreover, in what has become a national disgrace, existing management at bailed-out banks was permitted to remain in place.  The Bush administration failed to impose even the level of control exercised under FDR.

On the one-year anniversary of the announcement of Paulson’s reversal on TARP, I was asked by Newsweek for my assessment.  As reported, I said that “it hasn’t done what [Paulson] said it would. Yes, it saved some banks from going under, but did it restore the health of the banking system? Absolutely not.”   I stand by that assessment today.

What Does Government Stimulate?

The fiscal response to the crisis of the Bush/Obama administrations has been to spend their way out of the recession.  In the process the nation’s debt has skyrocketed. There are deficits and debt as far as the eye can see, and our children’s future has been mortgaged. The 2009 fiscal deficit was double that of 2008.  It is running at 10 percent of GDP, and former Fed governor and Bush adviser Larry Lindsey estimates they will run at 7 percent of GDP for a decade.

Because of the work of Milton Friedman and his monetarist followers, countercyclical fiscal policy fell under a cloud. First, they argued that recessions are difficult to forecast and we only typically know we have entered one after the fact.  The monetarists also argued that fiscal policy was subject to the cumbersome legislative process and thus could not be quickly implemented.   Once spending began, its effects were only felt slowly.  All of this wisdom was forgotten in the panic of the Bush administration and then more so in the Obama administration.

The Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, passed in February of that year, mainly sent $100 billion in checks to households in early summer to stimulate consumption and jumpstart the economy.  As Taylor has shown, the money did nothing and the economy slid into recession later that year. Any economist worth his salt knows that temporary government cash infusions will likely be saved and at best have transitory effects on spending.

Undaunted by that failure, the Obama administration decided to up the ante on the theory that there had just not been enough fiscal stimulus.  They replaced billions in spending with trillions in spending: the stimulus package added on to the TARP.  In the next section I also discuss spending by the Fed that is masquerading as monetary policy.

What is the record?  It appears that the recession may have ended in the third quarter of 2009.  That would make it less than one year in duration–not atypical in that sense.  Most of the Obama stimulus money has yet to be spent.  (Recall Friedman’s arguments on fiscal policy.)  It may be good electoral politics to claim credit for a still-nascent recovery.  But it is poor economics.  More likely, the self-adjusting forces of the market have been at work.

Clearly nothing the government has done has been able to halt the upward march in the unemployment rate.  GDP is an abstraction; being out of work is a reality.  In October the unemployment rate exceeded 10 percent.  A broader measure of unemployment exceeded 17 percent.  These numbers put the flesh on the skeleton of policy debates.  More ominously we now are seeing indications that wage rates are falling.  As the Wall Street Journal reported, Professor Kenneth Couch of the University of Connecticut estimates that displaced workers returning to work will on average take a 40 percent pay cut.

Double-digit unemployment rates and double-digit wage cuts are depression statistics.  In what way is government spending “stimulating”?  In a recent editorial the Wall Street Journal concluded that “no matter how hard  or imaginatively the Administration spins, the reality is that the stimulus has been the economic bust that critics predicted it would be.”

Indeed, the labor story helps us to see the dark side of stimulus spending. A good chunk of it has gone to state governments to support bloated budgets in the face of collapsing revenues.  Those fiscal transfers are being done, at least in part, to placate public-sector unions, which want to protect the incomes and pensions of their members.

To the degree that unionized government workers can resist cuts in wages and benefits, the needed adjustments are born by others.  New hires, contract workers, and outside vendors suffer.  Non-unionized workers in the private sector generally bear a disproportionate share of the adjustment costs in the form of lower wages and unemployment.

Fiscal stimulus has failed.  What about the monetary variant?

Monetary Stimulus

The Fed’s response to the crisis has drawn mixed reviews among free-market economists.  Some approve of the Fed’s easing in 2008-09 as a response to an increased demand for money (falling velocity). Nearly all market-oriented economists are disquieted by the explosion of the Fed’s balance sheet as it takes on more and more assets of dubious quality.  It will be extremely difficult for the central bank to dispose of such assets when it inevitably comes time for it to tighten.  The Fed will likely suffer losses, and such losses impact the taxpayer.  (The Fed’s surplus is paid to the Treasury.)

Many economists have been critical of the Fed for its targeted-credit policies, which amount to credit allocation.  They favor one sector at the expense of others, and constitute fiscal policy rather than monetary policy.  The Fed’s leadership is dismayed in the turnaround of its approval by the general public, and they fear calls for greater political oversight.  But the backlash against the Fed is of its own making.

In the end the Fed’s fortunes are tied to the economy’s.  Most Americans do not know the technicalities of monetary policy.  But Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has taken an active and public role in defending the policy response to the crisis (under both Bush and Obama).  Under Chairman Bernanke the Fed has promised much and delivered little.

Just as Americans fear the spending and budget deficits, many understand that easy money helped get us into the crisis. Now Dr. Bernanke has prescribed the strongest dose of cheap money ever administered.  How can the elixir that caused the boom cure the bust?

The Bernanke Fed is engaged in a policy of reflating (re-inflating) the economy: stimulating money demand to restart economic growth.  It justifies the policy on the basis of Professor Bernanke’s own research that shows the evils of deflation.  But what prices is he trying to prop up? All prices?  Even in hyperinflations, some prices fall.  Is he trying to prevent downward adjustment in wages?  As suggested above, wage rates in hard-hit sectors may be falling at double-digit rates.  Is he preparing for double-digit price inflation? If so, gold is underpriced at $1,000 an ounce.

Astute observers increasingly fear that what is being reflated is another asset bubble. At present, the asset bubble is concentrated in commodities (such as gold, copper, and oil) and Asian real estate. In what is known as a carry trade, global investors are borrowing dollars at low interest rates to invest in property in cities like Hong Kong and Singapore. Instead of bringing prosperity to Americans, the Fed’s policy is fueling speculation. Instead of production in the United States, the Fed’s easy money is creating paper wealth for Asian property owners.

The rise in commodity prices is perhaps most ominous.  The U.S. economy remains weak and unemployment elevated.  Yet Americans are already paying higher prices for gasoline.  They are facing the prospect of renewed inflation and economic weakness: stagflation.  That would be an updated version of the economy of the 1970s.  The Fed is thereby impoverishing Americans.  Is it any wonder many are calling for a reconsideration of its role?