The authors’ criticisms of the Fed’s response to the crisis are no less trenchant. “In its rush to prop up the financial system,” they observe, the Fed rescued insolvent financial institutions, exposing taxpayers to losses on toxic assets while helping to “sow the seeds of bigger bubbles and even more destructive crises.”

But although Roubini and Mihm draw attention to some ways in which the government contributed to the crisis, they go seriously wrong in claiming that the boom “was primarily underwritten not by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac but by private mortgage lenders like Countrywide”: Although Fannie and Freddie didn’t originate any subprime loans, they bought and (implicitly) guaranteed plenty of them, including a very large share of Countrywide’s Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) “Best Practice” loans. What Fannie and Freddie didn’t buy other lenders did, to meet their own CRA requirements. Such facts undermine Roubini and Mihm’s conclusion that “the significance of government intervention was dwarfed by the significance of government inaction.”

Roubini and Mihm’s reform proposals also fail to properly weigh government policy’s contribution to the crisis. They start well again by insisting on the need to restore to financial services “the creative destruction that Schumpeter saw as essential for capitalism’s long-term health.” Although Lehman Brothers’ failure revealed the shortcomings of ordinary bankruptcy as a means for resolving large and heavily leveraged financial firms, Roubini and Mihm note how those shortcomings could be avoided by means of “living wills” or by splitting ailing firms into “good” and “bad” parts, so that the latter might be declared bankrupt without raising Cain.

But some of Roubini and Mihm’s other proposals appear useless at best, including their endorsement of a “beefed-up” Glass-Steagall that would forcibly break up enterprises that become too big to fail, with its implicit suggestion that Gramm-Leach-Bliley contributed to the crisis. In fact that 1999 “repeal” of Glass-Steagall merely allowed commercial banks to affiliate with investment banks and played no important part in the insolvency of Lehman Brothers and other independent broker-dealers that was at the heart of the crisis.

A beefed-up Glass-Steagall Act might of course spin a much tighter web of firewalls than the original did. But as Roubini and Mihm themselves suggest, many TBTF firms exist only thanks to “heavy helpings of government largess,” including guarantees and actual bailouts, and could be left to break up naturally once improved bankruptcy procedures are in place. Perversities in executive compensation might likewise vanish on their own once imprudent decisions lead to bankruptcy rather than bailouts.

The most disappointing part of Crisis Economics is the second chapter’s hackneyed history of thought. Here Adam Smith is portrayed as a Walras-Debreu manqué who blinked at capitalism’s “vulnerabilities,” while Marx is credited with the “hugely important insight” that crises are “part and parcel of capitalism”—as if he’d predicted occasional financial panics rather than a steady decline in firm profits. The incomprehensible parts of the General Theory are treated, per usual, as proof of Keynes’s genius rather than of his being, well, incomprehensible. Finally and most disappointingly, by confusing the Mises-Hayek view of the business cycle with Schumpeter’s notion of creative destruction, Roubini and Mihm overlook the one theory of crises that best fits the housing boom-bust story.

Crisis Economics’s occasional references to the Great Depression must also be taken with a pinch of salt. It wasn’t Hoover but FDR who, in February 1933, stood by while “thousands of banks” went under; and it was growth in the money stock rather than fiscal stimulus that fueled the post-1933 recovery. The deflation of 1937–38 was mainly caused not by FDR’s belated attempt to balance the federal budget but by the Fed’s doubling of bank reserve requirements. Finally, corrected statistics show that World War II brought further stagnation rather than sustained recovery.

In short this “crash course in the future of finance” has both strengths and weaknesses. Although it contains much useful information about the subprime debacle, it understates the government’s contribution to the crisis, and although it suggests some desirable reforms, it suggests others that could prove counterproductive. Readers looking for straight A’s are advised to cram with caution.

But is that so? Without denying the value of perseverance, and recognizing that the slogan “never give up” can be useful in overcoming certain obstacles, we must keep in mind that failure can act as a guide to more worthwhile activities. For example, in 1921 Walt Disney started a company called the Laugh-O-Gram Corporation, which went bankrupt two years later. If a friend of Disney or the government hadn’t let him fail and move on, he might never have become the Walt Disney we know today.

More important than this individual learning process is the irreplaceable role failure plays in the social learning process of the competitive market. When we refuse to allow failure to happen, or we cushion its blow, we ultimately harm not only the person who failed but also all of society by denying ourselves a key way to learn how best to allocate resources. Without failure there’s no economic growth or improved human well-being.

Economists, especially those of the Austrian school, often emphasize how entrepreneurs discover new knowledge and better ways of producing things. But entrepreneurial endeavors frequently fail and the profits thought to be in hand often don’t materialize. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over half of small businesses fail within the first five years. But failed entrepreneurial activity is just as important as successful entrepreneurial activity. Markets are desirable not because they lead smoothly to improved knowledge and better coordination, but because they provide a process for learning from our mistakes and the incentive to correct them. It’s not that entrepreneurs are just good at getting it right; it’s also that they (like all of us) can know when they’ve got it wrong and can obtain the information necessary to get it right next time.

On this view failure drives change. While success is the engine that accelerates us toward our goals, it is failure that steers us toward the most valuable goals possible. Once failure is recognized as being just as important as success in the market process, it should be clear that the goal of a society should be to create an environment that not only allows people to succeed freely but to fail freely as well.

The Knowledge Problem

Understanding this point requires a broader vision of the market process. For Austrian economists the fundamental economic problem is not the efficient allocation of given resources to our most valued ends at a given time, but rather how we overcome the “knowledge problem”—the division of knowledge that characterizes the social world. It is more important to figure this out than to master the problem of resource allocation because new knowledge drives economic growth and creates prosperity. If the main task of the market were merely to allocate known resources to their most efficient uses, economic growth would seem impossible, since we would be stuck in a primitive world. Where is there any room for the innovation or change that drives progress and improves our lives? If a plow is deemed the most efficient use of iron and all iron is constantly allocated to making plows, how could iron ever be allocated for a new invention such as a tractor? The answer is that entrepreneurs change the most efficient use of resources by discovering new uses. By understanding the economic problem posed by limited, unique, and dispersed knowledge, we can better understand the role failure plays in coping with this problem.

Competition figures prominently in this system. Competition promotes entrepreneurial activity and the discovery of knowledge by empowering a variety of decision-makers to try to find new and better ways of using resources as well as new ends to achieve. This decentralization ensures that what F. A. Hayek called the local knowledge of time and place will be best used. Centralized planning, like other forms of government allocation, necessarily relies on the knowledge of fewer people, limiting discovery and restricting knowledge-dissemination to fewer channels. Competition is a better way to overcome the knowledge problem.

Failure and Opportunity

We can understand the role of failure if we recognize, as Ludwig von Mises did, that all human action intends to “remove felt uneasiness.” We are always striving to improve ourselves by achieving our highest valued ends as often as we can. On these terms, failure is all around us because no human ever achieves a complete lack of felt uneasiness. We always have unsatisfied ends. Israel Kirzner uses the term “alertness” to describe how the entrepreneurial element of human action identifies which ends to strive for and which means are available. Kirzner says that for market action to occur, entrepreneurs must first be alert to opportunities for profit. The possibility of profit keeps entrepreneurs alert to the ways people strive for ends or make use of means that fail to remove felt uneasiness. Once they’ve noticed this failure in human knowledge, the same opportunity for profit spurs entrepreneurial activity to find a new way to achieve those ends, or to find better ends themselves. So a failure in human knowledge becomes the catalyst for producing new knowledge via the entrepreneurial process.

When entrepreneurs attempt to correct a particular failure in knowledge, they often fail themselves and incur losses because of competition. Although bankruptcy is painful in the short term, such failure is an integral part of how entrepreneurial activity and the market function. Failure in a competitive society informs market participants about which activities or jobs to strive for and which to avoid, lest they waste time and money. Jobs that add value to society should be pursued, while those that fail to add value should be eliminated. Markets help guide market participants far better than any bureaucracy can because bureaucracies lack the market’s key components of competition, profit, and loss, which reveal failures and allow for their correction.

Because competition is a voyage into the unknown, we can only know after the fact what works and what does not. Thus economic failure is not “waste.” Calling entrepreneurial failure a “waste” implicitly assumes that one knew ahead of time what the best use of resources was. Such knowledge is not available to anyone, which is why failure is necessary to provide the needed signals.

The subsidies, bailouts, stimulus packages, and other interventions that now increasingly characterize the U.S. economy disrupt this process. Farm subsidies (including cheap water out west), for example, prevent entrepreneurs from finding and capitalizing on failures of knowledge in farming. While there may be new and better ways to grow food, it is difficult for entrepreneurs to find this out if farmers are kept afloat by the government. Perhaps decentralized, local farming would be discovered as more profitable if larger monoculture farms that are possibly damaging the environment were allowed to fail. By preventing inefficient methods of production from suffering losses, subsidies reduce the degree of failure in agricultural markets and make it harder to know that misallocation has taken place and to correct it.

Not letting Chrysler and General Motors fail during the Great Recession prevented an entrepreneurial response to this misuse of resources. The bailouts created two types of negative incentives. First, the companies were encouraged to keep making cars when their losses showed the resources and labor could better be used elsewhere. Second, the government deterred any new entrepreneur from entering the industry and doing things better. Many politicians defended the bailout because they did not want the hundreds of thousands of autoworkers to become unemployed. But when hundreds of thousands of workers become unemployed they do not disappear. They find different jobs that would contribute to society in a better way than working for a bankrupt auto company. The physical assets of bankrupt companies also get reallocated to alert entrepreneurs looking for bargains. Failure is necessary for learning and for success.

The Keynesian argument for government jobs programs is that any sort of work will restart spending in a recession, even hiring people to dig ditches and fill them up. But do a higher GDP and a job by themselves make society better off? Would it be better to have a 2 percent unemployment rate with 8 percent of the employed population doing jobs that don’t add real value (so around 10 percent of the labor force is not adding real value) or more unemployment with everyone who is working really adding value?

Unemployment

Unemployment is a form of failure, and it involves the same considerations as when businesses fail. If a job no longer contributes value this needs to be made clear so that those workers can find jobs that actually do. Imagine if the disemployment of farmers had been prevented during the transition to an industrial economy. In 1941, 41 percent of the U.S. workforce was in agriculture. In 2011 the portion was 3 percent. Where would industry be today if we had prevented the majority of the 41 percent from losing their jobs and finding new ones? It is right that this sort of “failure” was allowed to occur because the displaced farmers found new jobs in the cities and elsewhere. Those new jobs helped society transition from agriculture to industry to services, creating even newer jobs all along the way. This is strong evidence that learning from failure takes place in labor markets.

Autopoiesis (life’s continuous production of itself) is one of the principal characteristics of life, and constant change is its essence. This applies to the economy as well. For us to maintain or increase a high standard of living we must constantly change how we do things. This change won’t be fueled by lucky guesses or by bureaucratic decrees, but instead often by entrepreneurial activity in the face of failure in the market. Since that activity drives the train of progress, it is in society’s interest that the tracks be cleared of governmental obstacles.

The book is somewhat bloated, but the tale is compelling. It starts as Bear Stearns, the smallest of the five Wall Street investment houses, wobbles on the edge of bankruptcy. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and the Federal Reserve facilitate JP Morgan’s takeover of Bear, leaving Lehman the smallest of the remaining investment banks. Its stock drops precipitously.

From a huge cast of characters, one man emerges as a tragic figure—Lehman chief executive Richard Fuld. He became obsessed with short sellers (traders who borrow and sell shares to profit from a future price decline), blaming them for spreading malicious rumors about Lehman instead of confronting the bank’s real weakness. That was one in a series of dreadful mistakes. With Fuld’s backing, Lehman president Joseph Gregory had pushed the bank into mortgages, commercial real estate, and leveraged loans. He put inexperienced managers in charge of those activities and got rid of specialists who warned of danger. Catastrophic losses from the real-estate slump were killing Lehman by 2008. Short selling the stock was a symptom rather than a cause of the disease.

Sorkin recounts Lehman’s destruction, which occurred despite Fuld’s increasingly frantic efforts to raise capital or sell the company. Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch instead of Lehman, with the blessing of the Treasury and the Fed. A deal was worked out with Barclays Capital but scuttled at the last minute by British regulators, a debacle their American counterparts could almost certainly have prevented.

Timothy Geithner, then head of the New York Federal Reserve, was fixated on merging other banks. During a tense phone call, he effectively ordered Morgan Stanley chief John Mack to sell his company to JP Morgan for almost nothing. “I just won’t do it,” Mack said and hung up. There was no good business reason for the merger, and JP Morgan chief Jamie Dimon did not want it either.

Mack managed to save Morgan Stanley by getting capital from the Japanese bank Mitsubishi. Had Geithner succeeded in bulldozing Mack into selling, tens of thousands of employees would have lost their jobs and the too-big-to-fail problem would have been exacerbated. The incident does not inspire confidence in Geithner, currently Treasury secretary.

Another bad shotgun marriage was arranged by Sheila Bair, head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, who decided to sell Wachovia to Citigroup with a government guarantee for toxic assets. Fortunately, Wells Fargo chief Richard Kovacevich, who was interested in Wachovia all along, took action just in time. Wells Fargo was willing to pay a higher price without a taxpayer guarantee.

These events raise the question of why government agents can dispose of other people’s property. They certainly don’t seem to worry about preserving the value of businesses or reducing taxpayer liability.

What’s the lesson in this? Unfortunately, Sorkin doesn’t make the big picture clear. The boom-and-bust happened because the Fed opened the floodgates to easy money. That’s what got everybody, from the second-mortgaged homeowner to Lehman Brothers, to leverage up. Our supposedly expert government players apparently never realized this: Their conceit that they know how to manage the economy is the root of our trouble.

They might avoid fueling bubbles, but let’s leave that aside, since Sorkin doesn’t dig that deep. He describes interventions notable, among other things, for their sheer arbitrariness. The Fed and Treasury backstopped Bear Stearns debt in the acquisition by JP Morgan, but would not do the same for Lehman. The first action created expectations that the same support would be available for other banks and led to a false sense of security. There is no obvious reason why two sets of bond holders should be treated differently. It would be vastly better if government officials were deprived of the authority to bail out anyone.

Our financial system has suffered tremendously as a result of capricious interventions by government officials who themselves never bear any costs from the adverse effects of their decisions. If anything, they benefit. Though the entire boom-bust cycle provides evidence that government agencies, from the Fed on down, should have far less discretion, the massive financial regulation law passed this year rewards them with greater powers and wider room to do whatever they want. We should be afraid of the economic and social damage their arbitrary actions will wreak in the future.

But still not allowed to fail.

FEE Timely Classic:
“Too Big to Fail” by Michael Heberling

That’s a good analogy for the inflationary policies now pursued by Washington. These policies may temporarily “stimulate the economy,” but they also disguise and aggravate the underlying problems. We will all pay a serious price.

Policy makers have thrown caution to the wind. Twelve-digit dollar figures are tossed about casually. Late last year, after then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson changed course—yet again—and announced that the Federal Reserve would commit $800 billion more in “new loans and debt purchases,” the New York Times reported, “Fed and Treasury officials made it clear that the sky was the limit.”

The total federal commitment as of that date was over $7 trillion.

The Fed had given up trying to make it easier for banks to lend to each other. Now, the Times reported, it “is directly subsidizing lower mortgage rates . . . doing so by printing unprecedented amounts of money, which would eventually create inflationary pressures if it were to continue unabated.”

No kidding.

When we hear that the U.S. Treasury is doing this or the Federal Reserve is doing that, we should remember that these agencies are run by mere mortals, and as such, they cannot know how to “fix” something as complex as an economy. But they certainly are capable of wrecking one.

That’s what their inflationary policies will do.

In a free market, prices do more than tell us what we have to pay for things. They are messages emitted by an intricate communications system that inform us of the relative scarcity of resources, labor and consumer goods, and the relative intensity of consumer demand. Thanks to prices, we can tell producers how we rank our preferences, and they in turn can arrange production according to our priorities. Without prices, economic coordination is impossible, which is why attempts at state planning produce, in Ludwig von Mises’ words, “planned chaos.”

We associate inflation with a rising price level, but equally important, relative prices change when new money is created. That garbles the messages. As Mises writes, “The additional quantity of money does not find its way at first into the pockets of all individuals; . . . [P]rice changes which are the result of inflation start with some commodities and services only. . . . [T]here is a shift of wealth and income between different social groups.”

The Fed gives money to AIG or Citicorp, but not to Lehman Brothers, or you and me. The new bank reserves also push interest rates below what the market would have set, further distorting production by encouraging investment plans to be made on the basis of artificially low rates.

How can the economy straighten itself out if it is being systematically skewed by government interference with prices?

We are in the mess we’re in precisely because of earlier government interference. Easy mortgage terms and guarantees contrived a housing boom and irresponsible lending that could not be sustained. The consequences have shaken the foundation of the financial industry. But instead of freeing the market and allowing the errors to be corrected, the government is seducing the economy into a whole new set of errors. That will lead to the next bust.

“But doesn’t the government have to act?” people ask. “We can’t just let financial companies fail!”

I say, “Why not?”

Jim Rogers, the successful investor and author, puts it well: “Why are we bailing out Citibank? Why are 300 million Americans having to pay for Citibank’s mistakes? The way the system is supposed to work [is this]: People fail. And then the competent people take over the assets from the failed people, and then you start again with a new, stronger base. What we’re doing this time is . . . taking the assets from the competent people, giving them to the incompetent people, and saying, ‘OK, now you can compete with the competent people.’ So everybody’s weakened: The whole nation is weakened, the whole economy is weakened. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.”

“Once you lose your freedom to fail, you also lose your freedom to succeed and you cease to be a free society.” —U.S. Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas

In March 2008 the investment banking firm Bear Sterns failed and the federal government quickly stepped in. The public was inundated with the phrase “too big to fail” (TBTF) by the financial news media. You had to go back to 1998 for the last time it was used so often. In that year the troubled hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management had $4.6 billion in losses. The Federal Reserve stepped in to orchestrate a restructuring deal to avoid bankruptcy. With this government intervention, the precedent was established for future calls for help. In 1999 Kevin Dowd, writing for the Cato Institute, stated: “[T]he intervention implies a return to the discredited doctrine that the Fed should prevent the failure of large financial firms, which encourages irresponsible risk taking. . . .”

An institution is deemed “too big to fail” if its collapse would be expected to create a devastating ripple effect throughout the economy, creating a “systemic risk.” When this occurs the government is expected to provide some form of assistance. This can vary from a guaranteed loan, where management and stockholders get off scot-free (as with Chrysler in 1979), to guaranteeing the assets of a failing bank, to facilitating an outside takeover (Bear Stearns). In the event of an outside takeover thousands of employees could be shown the door and stockholders left with pennies on the dollar. Since the public only notices that it is paying the bill, it has a hard time discerning these subtle differences. As a result, the term “bailout” is used broadly to describe any form of government financial intervention to assist a crashing TBTF company or its creditors.

Too Big to be Free-Market

There are no clear guidelines on who is (or what constitutes) TBTF. As a result the “systemic risk” scare is ad hoc and apparently meant to be taken on faith. Any large company can claim it is vital to the health of the economy because its failure would have a domino effect on suppliers. Other firms can pick up the slack and even acquire the assets of the failed firm, but this is usually ignored.

TBTF is problematic because it indirectly influences how companies are managed. If there is a real, or implied, government safety net should things “head south,” management might be inclined to take on more risk for greater profit. This illustrates the concept of “moral hazard,” an insurance term. If you are insured, you may be less cautious. TBTF is actually a state of mind that afflicts the senior management of our largest corporations. If they think they are TBTF, even if they aren’t, they still behave as if they are. This is the crux of our current financial problem.

In an ideal free-market environment, entrepreneurs would be willing to take on risk based on an expected return. Since returns are never guaranteed, the entrepreneur’s willingness to take on risk is tempered by the potential downside (a loss), if things don’t pan out. While the rewards for extremely risky investments may be great, so too are the penalties. In severe cases the company could go bankrupt. As a result, this risk/reward/loss relationship in the free market would force rational behavior into the business decision-making process.

TBTF companies are no longer on their own to succeed or fail. With TBTF we now have the government in the game—not so much as another player but as a non-neutral referee ready to step in if the game gets too rough. What’s more, TBTF companies operate under a different set of rules from merely mortal ones. In 2004 Gregory Mankiw, then chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, said, “Expecting a government bailout if things go wrong creates an incentive for a company to take on risk and enjoy the associated increase in return.”

So if you are (or think that you are) TBTF, there is little or no perceived penalty to counterbalance risky behavior. With a guaranteed—or at least an implied—government safety net, the sky is the limit when it comes to risk-taking. The siren song of big returns (with little or no risk) becomes irresistible—and you no longer operate in a free-market environment. According to Thomas Sowell, “The hybrid public-and-private nature of these activities amounts to ‘privatizing profit and socializing risk’ since taxpayers get stuck with the tab when high-risk finances don’t work out.” In other words, it is a travesty to say or imply that our current crisis stems from market failure.

Mixed Signals

What makes the TBTF phenomenon so difficult to follow (and understand) is that there is no official list of “too big” companies put out by the Treasury Department. The taxpayer only finds out that a company is on the list after the company fails.

The tab to the taxpayer for bailing out Bear Stearns is $29 billion and counting. What remained of Bear Sterns’ assets, along with government guarantees, were transferred to JPMorgan Chase. The next TBTF firm to run into trouble was the investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Although conventional wisdom held that Lehman, with $615 billion in debt, was TBTF, this time the Fed said no.

These mixed signals about what was and what was not TBTF sent the financial markets into a tailspin. Some federal policymakers and many in the financial news media saw this as the beginning of the credit “crunch.” (In fact, while credit standards have tightened, money is still being lent for all kinds of loans.) It was no longer prudent to do business with any “troubled” bank. Since no one knew which banks the government would or would not bail out, inhibition set in.

The next TBTF firm to ask for federal help was the world’s biggest insurance company, American International Group Inc. (AIG). Not wishing to mishandle another TBTF firm, the Fed quickly agreed to lend $85 billion to AIG in September to avert bankruptcy. The following month AIG came back to the Fed asking for an additional $37.8 billion, citing liquidity problems. The Fed’s response: No problem. But are you sure $123 billion will be enough? AIG is intricately involved in America’s money-market funds. In November AIG came back and said: “On second thought, could you make that an even $150 billion?” The government response: Fine, but only on one condition, and you may find this to be exceedingly harsh. We absolutely insist that your top 70 executives not get any bonuses this year. AIG’s response: “You drive a hard bargain, but we have a deal.”

As a result of this action, the government now owns 80 percent of the company’s assets.

In September the federal government took over two more TBTF firms. The quasi-governmental Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac own or guarantee about 40 percent of the nation’s mortgages. This bailout will cost the taxpayer $200 billion. Egged on by influential members of Congress, Freddie and Fannie blatantly abused their government-sponsored-enterprise (GSE) designations, and no two firms better exemplify the “moral hazard” argument. Since they were chartered by Congress, many believed their mortgage-backed securities were guaranteed by the federal government. Then-Fed chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress in 2004: “The Federal Reserve is concerned that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were using this implicit reliance on a government bailout in a crisis to take more risks, in order to multiply the profitability of subsidized debt.” When housing prices started to tank we found out that this was exactly what was going on.

Bad Medicine and a Hail Mary

One would think that with all of the government oversight these TBTF events would not keep popping up. Since the government doctor has utterly failed to prevent this disease, why should we think the same government doctor suddenly knows how to cure the disease now that it has metastasized throughout the economy?

The Treasury, with the help of Congress, has thrown a $700 billion “Hail Mary” called the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Whether or not this bailout “restore[s] confidence in our financial system” (Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson) remains to be seen. Judging by the stock market, the early results are not good. Ironically, the first step of the plan was to identify publicly the banks that are really TBTF by buying their preferred stock. Nine TBTF banks, which account for 50 percent of all U.S. deposits, will get half the $250 billion earmarked for banks and thrifts. These include JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Bank of America (plus Merrill Lynch, which is being acquired by BoA), Goldman Sachs, New York Mellon, Morgan Stanley, and State Street. The bailout bill also includes a provision for the FDIC to offer an unlimited guarantee on bank deposits in business accounts that do not bear interest. For individual depositors, the FDIC insurance limits will increase from $100,000 to $250,000. How do these actions reduce the “moral hazard” problem? The last time the individual deposit insurance limit was raised—from $40,000 to $100,000 in 1980—we had the S&L crisis, which ended up costing the taxpayer $150 billion.

Being on the official TBTF list has its pros and cons. On the positive side, you can’t fail. The government guarantee is no longer implied. It’s real. But being on the official TBTF list has a severe downside: additional regulation. The government will be very close at hand to make sure that our biggest banks become and remain stodgy. In other words: We’re from the government and we’re here to make sure that your risk level remains in the “safe zone.” In October New York Senator Charles Schumer, a member of both the finance and banking committees, wrote Paulson demanding that “banks receiving capital eliminate their dividends, restrict executive pay and stick to safe and sustainable, rather than exotic, financial activities.” Given the makeup of the new Congress and administration, expect even more intrusive micromanaging of our financial institutions—but that is only to be expected if the Treasury becomes a stockholder. From now on innovation will be discouraged, downplayed, or slow-rolled by the government. As a result of these rescue actions, our entire financial system has effectively become nationalized.

A Troubling Cultural Shift

The most troubling aspect of the ever-increasing number of government bailouts is the subtle change overtaking the entire country. The mindset of companies and individuals today is shifting away from self-responsibility. We blame everyone else for our mistakes and look to others (the taxpayer) to come to the rescue.

When it comes to handouts and bailouts the government is no longer simply on the slippery slope—it’s in free-fall. Every bailout makes it harder to say no when the next TBTF request comes forward. Aren’t the Big Three automakers too big to fail as well? In many people’s eyes the answer is yes. At the end of September Congress approved a $25 billion low-cost loan package to help the automakers and their suppliers modernize their facilities so as to be “more green.” But this wasn’t enough. General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner, whose company was hemorrhaging cash, sought another $10 billion in federal assistance the next month to help finance the merger of GM and Chrysler. However, this request was denied. Then in November the Big Three found sympathetic ears from the big two in Congress, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, for yet another $25 billion “bridge” loan for the Big Three. The Bush administration ultimately dished out $17.4 billion from the $700 billion TARP fund to assist GM and Chrysler. It also handed the problem of deciding the long-term future of the bailouts to the Obama administration, which had already expressed support for a bailout package. (Notably, the several profitable foreign-owned automakers with facilities in the United States weren’t looking for help.)

It shouldn’t need pointing out that the “too big to fail” doctrine fundamentally changes the nature of a market economy, which when free is a profit-and-loss system. Not only does the doctrine reward error, sloth, and inefficiency, it deprives other, more competent entrepreneurs of the scarce resources they need to serve consumers. Who knows what products and opportunities would arise if the free market, not politicians, determined who had access to capital?

They were set up—intentionally—to distort the housing and mortgage markets. Government planners were not content to let voluntary exchange and spontaneous market forces configure those industries unmolested. So—holding the taxpayers hostage—they intervened.

Make no mistake: The collapse of Fannie and Freddie is government social engineering predictably gone bad.

In a free society supply and demand would govern markets. The demand for houses would be determined by people’s preferences and the resources at their disposal. Supply would be determined by relative profit expectations—which is to say, by the demand for housing and the competing demand for the necessary inputs.

A distortion occurs when government planners and rent-seeking corporate allies, under cover of humanitarian social policy, engineer a deviation from natural market outcomes. Dressed up as promotion of the American Dream through home ownership, the planners used political means—ultimately, the threat to imprison uncooperative taxpayers—to channel wealth to the construction, real-estate, and financial industries. The primary instruments of this social engineering were Fannie Mae, created as a government agency during the New Deal and—cough—“privatized” in 1968 to get it off budget, and Freddie Mac, created as a “private” GSE in 1970.

The GSEs don’t make mortgage loans. Rather, using borrowed money, they buy mortgages from original lenders, encouraging banks to make more loans. Pooling lots of mortgages together, the GSEs create mortgage-backed securities (MBS). In fact, Freddie and Fannie created the secondary mortgage market that has come in for criticism since the subprime problem developed.

As economist Arnold Kling writes, “Whether it retains or sells the security, the GSE bears the default risk of the mortgages, which is the source of the recent crisis.”

Freddie’s and Fannie’s activities were designed to channel money to mortgage lenders so that they could loan widely, especially to people who might have been priced out of a fully private mortgage market. The system inevitably lowered lending standards and interest rates.

If these activities had been performed not by GSEs but by real private companies, they would have been subject to market checks. But they were not. They’re not called government-sponsored enterprises for nothing. As such they have special advantages over private companies, permitting them to do things on a scale larger than would have occurred in a free market.

They don’t pay local and state taxes like other companies do, and they can get government loans. Moreover, as Kling puts it, “In both the mortgage insurance business and the portfolio lending business, the GSEs have two important advantages . . . [:] a lower risk premium and lower capital requirements.” In brief, Fan and Fred could borrow money for less than private companies could because “investors believed that the GSEs would not be allowed to fail,” Kling writes. This is the “implicit guarantee.” (With the wink of an eye, the GSEs say their paper is not guaranteed. So why not hold their creditors to the letter of the contract?)

As for the lower capital requirements, Kling writes, “When banks engage in the mortgage insurance business or the portfolio lending business, they are required by their regulators to put more of their shareholders’ funds at risk than the GSEs are. This makes it difficult for banks to compete with GSEs.”

The result was a far more concentrated lending market and hence greater vulnerability to adverse changing conditions. Fan and Fred hold or insure $5.4 trillion in mortgage debt—half the national total—making the taxpayers ultimately responsible now that the GSEs are under federal conservatorship. Three-quarters of mortgages written these days are GSE-backed. So the government has just become the country’s major mortgagee. It’s ironic that after making the GSEs dominant, the government now wants to shrink their role in the mortgage industry beginning in 2010.

Not Greed But Incentives

We can see, then, that the GSEs’ privileged status, which was intended to distort the housing and mortgage markets, did exactly that. The whole shaky structure was vulnerable to a deterioration in home values, to which the GSE system itself contributed. (Other things contributed to the run-up and collapse of home values in particular parts of the country, such as a broad social policy of encouraging banks to lend to un-creditworthy borrowers.) As of September, the GSEs had lost well over $10 billion since the mortgage meltdown occurred, and they were getting close to being unable to borrow enough money to roll over their debt. This and fear of a more general economic meltdown are what prompted the government to step in, exposing the taxpayers dramatically. The bailout was to begin with a billion-dollar infusion. Up to $200 billion has been promised. It will no doubt be more. Of course, the treasury secretary now has the authority to buy $700 billion worth of dubious mortgage-backed securities from struggling banks. Rev up those printing presses.

It’s really an anticlimactic chapter in this story of putrid rent-seeking and political opportunism. The bailout of the GSEs’ creditors creates a new round of the same moral hazard—encouraging recklessness by insuring it—that brought on the calamity in the first place. No one believed it would be the last bailout of those who are “too big to fail.”
The current problems are commonly attributed to greed and irresponsibility. But this won’t do. As Lawrence H. White notes, “Greed is a constant.” Why did the consequences take so long to show up?

There was irresponsibility—but only because the government for decades has pursued a policy of relieving big companies of the responsibility that otherwise would have been imposed by market discipline and competition. Any promise to bail out companies, and any regulatory, tax, or trade policy that raises the barriers to entry for new competitors, sews the seeds of crisis.

Focusing on greed and irresponsibility misses the most basic point: incentives. In a truly free market—when business people know they must face the consequences of their actions—“greed” (whatever that may be) tends to create general benefits. (“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”) In a government-regulated and government-guaranteed environment, “greed” can inflict harm on innocents. Institutions determine whether self-serving action benefits or damages others. Institutions that respect freedom, property, and self-responsibility promote the general welfare. Institutions that forcibly transfer risk to the taxpayers, punish responsibility, and reward irresponsibility promote social and economic catastrophe.

The New York Times was wrong. This was not “an extraordinary federal intervention in private enterprise.” It is the state bailing out statism. As Oliver Hardy might have said, “Well, government, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.” Let’s hear no more about the “laissez-faire” Republicans. That myth serves only to protect advocates of state intervention regardless of party.

What? Does that mean that until last fall the Bush administration embraced the free market? Nonsense. Governments at all levels have regulated and subsidized the housing and financial industries for years. Nothing changed under President Bush.

The government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created precisely to interfere with the housing and mortgage markets. In effect, Freddie and Fannie diverted money to people who wouldn’t have qualified for mortgages in a real private market.

Had actual private companies performed these activities, they would have been subject to market checks. But they were not. The results were predictable.

Now that it’s all tumbling down, the politicians and pundits blame the free market.

It’s not simply misunderstanding. It’s demagoguery by people who will never admit that their “progressive” social policies have spawned a taxpayer bill that boggles the mind.

This is a story not of private enterprise but of cynical political opportunism. Moral hazard—the poisonous mix of private profits and taxpayer-covered losses—is what you get when politicians indulge their hubris to redesign society. The bailout of those companies holding bad mortgages—big-business socialism—sets us up for the next crisis.

Could we count on the Republican presidential candidate to dissent? Not a chance.

John McCain said, “We are going to fight the greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street. These actions [leading to crisis] stem from failed regulation, reckless management and a casino culture on Wall Street. . . . We need strong and effective regulation. . . .”

He proposed a new bureaucracy, the Mortgage and Financial Institutions Trust (MFI), which he said would “provide troubled institutions with an orderly process to identify bad loans, provide funding and eventually sell them at a profit. . . . The MFI will supervise the sale of loan assets at market prices and purchase them as necessary” (emphasis added).

A government agency is going to buy bad loans and make a profit selling them. Give me a break!

Perverse Incentives

Irresponsibility induced by government-created perverse incentives is the culprit. For decades politicians of both parties have relieved big companies of the responsibility that market discipline would have imposed. The promise—explicit or implicit—to bail out companies “too big to fail” weakens market discipline. That invites recklessness.

What if the government cut Freddie, Fannie, Bear, AIG, and the others loose and let them do what other businesses do in hard times: renegotiate with creditors and revalue assets? Would there have been another Great Depression? Not likely. What turned a recession into the Great Depression was the Federal Reserve’s contraction of the money supply. I doubt they’d make that mistake twice.

Public officials say the big companies must be saved to prevent a devastating credit “lock.” Really? Without a federal bailout, lending wouldn’t have resumed? The market wouldn’t have sorted it out? Prices wouldn’t have found a more solid floor? We’ll never know.

We do know that the taxpayer will buy—probably for too much money, because the private sellers will fool the government managers—at least $700 billion in “illiquid” assets. Where will this money come from: taxation, borrowing or the printing press? What will that do to our economic well-being?

Crisis is the friend of the State. The politicians are desperate to be seen as “showing leadership,” so we’re surely in for a new round of government interventions. Watch for the equivalent of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. There’ll be much posturing about how the new regulations “will keep this from ever happening again,” but that’s more nonsense because the root problem is not lack of regulation. It’s government social engineering of the housing market, which will be unchanged.

This is the path to stagnation and poverty. As Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek taught, markets are too complicated for planners to know enough to plan them. The relevant information, scattered unspoken among billions of market participants, is beyond the bureaucrats’ reach.

We do need protection from reckless businessmen. But there is only one way to provide that: market discipline. That means no privileges and no bailouts.

What is especially noteworthy is the process through which the American public has been desensitized to the explicit expansion of state power in eight short years. It is a virtue that humans adapt quickly to new environments, but this strength can be turned into a weakness by clever politicians.

The housing boom and bust was a product of interventionist monetary policy, namely Alan Greenspan’s decision to slash interest rates after the dot-com crash. The crash in real-estate prices has in turn led to large defaults on mortgage payments, inflicting billions in losses for investment banks and other large institutions that had bet heavily on mortgage-backed assets. The heavily regulated financial sector was vulnerable to these unexpected events. What should have been a large hit to real estate and a few institutional investors has now spread and is currently threatening the global financial system itself. (We should keep this episode in mind whenever someone claims that the free market is too unstable and requires wise government oversight to promote stability.)

Villains and Saints

A panicked citizenry looks about for villains and saints, and the government is only too happy to dispense the labels. The villains are predatory lenders, short-selling speculators, and “do nothing” officeholders and regulators allegedly blinded by their laissez-faire faith, while the heroes (naturally) are the populist politicians who promise to clean up the greed and irresponsibility of the nefarious financial industry. If citizens would just suspend their abstract aversion to nationalization of large sectors of the economy, the government could keep them safe from further economic harm.

The Federal National Mortgage Association—FNMA or Fannie Mae—was founded as an agency of the federal government as part of the New Deal in 1938. Its function was to create a secondary market for mortgages, meaning that Fannie Mae, rather than originating loans to homebuyers, would buy mortgages (and their expected payment streams) from community banks and thrifts. In 1968 Fannie Mae was transformed into a private-sector company with shareholders, and its official connection with the government was transferred to the Government National Mortgage Association (GNMA or Ginnie Mae). The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) was chartered in 1970 as another government-sponsored enterprise in the secondary mortgage market; it too is owned by shareholders.

The ostensible purpose of Fannie and Freddie is to promote homeownership. The two GSEs buy mortgages and bundle them into mortgage-backed securities, which are sophisticated derivatives that slice and dice the incoming monthly mortgage payments such that outside investors can (in theory) limit the risk of their real-estate investments. By providing a huge and liquid secondary market for mortgages, Fannie and Freddie make it more lucrative for others to originate mortgages. Make no mistake about it: The official mission of Fannie and Freddie is to cause banks to lend to applicants who would be rejected in the absence of government meddling. This point needs to be stressed as analysts wonder, “Why did banks make so many bad loans?”

All of this raises an obvious question. How exactly do Fannie and Freddie achieve their goal of promoting more mortgage origination than would have occurred in a free market? The answer is that these GSEs enjoyed implicit—and now explicit—government backing. Until quite recently, the official position of the federal government has been that Fannie and Freddie were private companies, earning private profits to be distributed to private shareholders. No taxpayer money stood behind them. However, investors suspected the GSEs were too big and too symbolic to be allowed to fail. Consequently, investors were willing to lend money to Fannie and Freddie—by buying bonds issued by these two GSEs—at lower interest rates than these same investors would have charged a truly private firm that performed Fannie’s and Freddie’s operations. Because their bonds were presumably guaranteed by the “full faith and credit” of the U.S. government—meaning the IRS and printing press—Fannie and Freddie were able to gain a huge share of their market; they directly owned or guaranteed roughly $6 trillion in mortgages. To repeat an earlier observation: The vulnerability of the overall system to a few giant firms is itself a product of intervention in these markets. If the government suddenly promised that it would use tax dollars to make creditors whole if Apple defaulted on its bonds, then we would expect it to become more “profitable,” cut prices, and gain market share from Microsoft.

It is worth pointing out that plenty of insiders got rich during the good times. Former Fannie chairman Franklin Raines earned some $90 million in compensation from 1998 to 2003. Even during the “bad times,” things weren’t so tough for the people running the two politically connected firms. As part of its takeover, the government ousted CEOs Daniel Mudd (Fannie) and Richard Syron (Freddie), yet they are entitled to compensation packages that could be worth up to a combined $24 million.

A Culture of Recklessness

Besides the implicit backing of their debt, the GSEs also enjoyed less regulation than their purely private counterparts. This bred a culture of recklessness and short-term thinking. To hit targets and trigger bonus payments to top executives, Fannie Mae manipulated its earnings over the period 1998–2004. Yet even when it was “caught,” Fannie was only fined $400 million in what was an $11 billion accounting scandal. Furthermore, one suspects that the full $400 million penalty did not fall entirely on the executives who defrauded their own investors, meaning the gamble was well worth it from their narrow point of view. Students of political economy know that regardless of the official motivation for a new government agency or program, once it is up and running, politicians, bureaucrats, and corrupt businesspeople will find ways to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense.

What is particularly insidious about government debt guarantees and rescue loans—whether the implicit backing given to Fannie and Freddie for decades or the explicit guarantee given to the Mexican government during its own credit crisis in 1995—is that they can often seem costless. Indeed, the U.S. Treasury actually made money on its “bailout” of Mexico because the Mexican government didn’t default on the bonds it had sold to investors around the world. In similar fashion, it didn’t cost the government anything for its implicit protection of the GSEs when housing prices were booming in the mid-2000s.

All of this changed, however, once house prices began sharply falling. Speculative buyers and those who had planned to refinance out of ARMs were now caught with mortgage payments they couldn’t afford, and so they began walking away. The stream of monthly payments into the bundled securities created by Fannie and Freddie was now drying up, and so the giants began losing money because as part of their normal operations they had guaranteed some of these payments. From the fourth quarter of 2007 through the second quarter of 2008, the two reported combined losses of $11.7 billion. Now the cost of the government’s backing would be evident.

Parsing Paulson

It will be instructive to parse the actual announcement of the Fannie and Freddie seizure. Right out of the chute, Paulson explained:

Note that the Congress didn’t send a bill to President Bush asking to nationalize the two corporations. On the contrary, it merely gave the relevant agencies the legal permission to take such actions if deemed “necessary.” This latter strategy is far harder to contain, because who could possibly object to giving the executive branch options? That seems to be a different issue from the question of which options were good ones. Thus members of Congress can truthfully say that they merely voted in the interest of preparedness for a takeover. The president and his minions can take the blame or praise for the specific exercise of the powers so delegated.

Paulson went on to say:

Since this difficult period for the GSEs began, I have clearly stated three critical objectives: providing stability to financial markets, supporting the availability of mortgage finance, and protecting taxpayers—both by minimizing the near-term costs to the taxpayer and by setting policymakers on a course to resolve the systemic risk created by the inherent conflict in the GSE structure.

The problem here is that the “critical objectives” are incompatible. When Paulson talks of “supporting the availability of mortgage finance,” this means making mortgages more available than they would be in a purely free market. To achieve that objective, then, the government must expose taxpayers, and the skewed incentives will necessarily distort the financial markets. Again, there is no way around this. If the government induces lenders to make loans that they originally thought were too risky, then the government has obviously made the overall system more volatile.

After Paulson’s opening remarks, he turned the podium over to James Lockhart, director of the new regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Lockhart explained that the GSE structure was inherently flawed because private shareholders pocketed gains while the taxpayers were ultimately on the hook for massive losses. Even so, Lockhart further explained that as part of the takeover, Fannie and Freddie would expand their portfolios of mortgage-backed securities before reducing them steadily starting in 2010. As usual with government, when something isn’t working, the solution is to make the problem grow—call it a “surge” in mortgage portfolios. No doubt future administrations will continually revisit whether conditions “on the ground” warrant a reduction in the monstrous agencies.

Lockhart also revealed that in exchange for its guarantee, the Treasury received senior preferred equity shares and warrants (similar to call options) that entitle the Treasury to purchase up to 79.9 percent of the common stock of the two companies under certain conditions. (To the best of my knowledge, those “certain conditions” were not revealed to the public—it’s not merely that reporters have omitted the precise details out of laziness.)

It is significant to point out that the preferred and arguably even the common shareholders were robbed in this procedure. The Treasury’s “senior preferred equity shares” bump the original preferred shareholders down a peg, forcing them to absorb losses before the Treasury takes a hit. On the other hand, if things turn around and Fannie and Freddie stocks recover, then the Treasury would find it profitable to exercise its warrants and thereby dilute the values of the other shareholders. For these reasons, the term seizure is far more accurate than rescue to describe the government’s actions with respect to Fannie and Freddie.

The government cannot create wealth. Although he is very smart and understands financial markets, Henry Paulson cannot centrally plan the mortgage market to improve on the spontaneous outcome of voluntary interactions among millions of professionals in the private sector. The fundamental causes of our current financial crisis were mortgages granted to unqualified applicants, as well as investors making very risky bets on assets derived from these mortgages. The bailout of those who lent to Freddie and Fannie, and the easing of the GSEs’ regulatory limits, will only sow the seeds for a potentially worse crisis down the road.

The Trend Toward State Socialism

Beyond the harmful effects on the real-estate and mortgage markets, the seizures of Fannie and Freddie—as well as the bailout of AIG the following week—reinforce the trend toward outright state socialism. Investors are looking less at fundamentals and more at government announcements. The idea that these moves are encouraging “stability” is ludicrous, as the once-mighty Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail in between the two massive bailouts.

During normal economic times, if the government began seizing firms and disbursing hundreds of billions of dollars to particular institutions, and furthermore if each action were discretionary and impossible to predict even one week in advance, then everyone would recognize these policies as incredibly destabilizing. Yet this destabilizing effect still exists when laid over a backdrop of massive losses, and in fact hurts even more because of the victim’s initial weakness.

Hard as it is to believe, the best course of action would have been for the government to allow these troubled firms to fail. This would be akin to pulling the Band-Aid off quickly, which is temporarily painful but soon forgotten. But with the possibility of federal bailouts and other novel techniques to revive the housing sector, troubled firms have been postponing the inevitable, hoping for a reversal of misfortune. As the financial crisis has now entered its second year, Bernanke and Paulson are pulling off the Band-Aid very slowly indeed.

As government-sponsored entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac allowed their private executives to profit greatly from implicit taxpayer support over a period of decades. However, now that their excessive risk-taking has finally caught up with them, the GSEs’ shaky balance sheets have been absorbed by the federal government, which at the same time has announced that the two failing giants will take on even more obligations. Besides the further bilking of the taxpayer, the seizure is an ominous sign of just how much power the executive branch has accumulated. The takeover of Fannie and Freddie will do nothing to promote stability in the financial markets in the long run, but it will serve as a precedent for further “necessary” expansions of government control of the economy.

The federal government unveiled $800 billion in new loans and debt purchases on Tuesday, hoping another infusion of cash can help unfreeze troubled credit markets and make borrowing easier for homebuyers, small businesses and students.The Federal Reserve said that it would buy up to $600 billion in mortgage-backed assets from the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The agency would also buy up to $100 billion in debt directly from the companies and up to $500 billion in mortgage-backed securities….Separately, the Fed and Treasury Department announced a $200 billion program to ease commercial lending on debts like student loans, car loans or business loans. The Fed would lend up to $200 billion to holders of asset-backed securities supported by car loans, credit card loans, student loans, and business loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration.

I don’t think that math is right, but Is there anything more dangerous these days than a desperate treasury secretary? Right now I can’t think of anything. What happens when the consequences of all this borrowing, re-lending, and money creation hit? Are we to believe that people in the financial markets are not looking to that day already and taking precautionary action?More from the Times:

The action by the Federal Reserve on buying mortgage-backed securities brings the full force of monetary policy to bear on the credit markets. Having already reduced the benchmark federal funds rate to just 1 percent, the central bank is now effectively using what economists call “quantitative easing” to reduce the costs of money.

Instead of trying to reduce overnight lending rates in the hope of influencing longer-term interest rates for things like mortgages, the Fed is directly subsidizing lower mortgage rates. It is doing so by printing unprecedented amounts of money, which would eventually create inflationary pressures if it were to continue unabated. [There's an understatement. -SR]

For the moment, Fed and Treasury officials made it clear that the sky was the limit. [Emphasis added.]

Have these people gone crazy?P.S. I made one of my periodic calls to a local car dealer to see if the car-loan market is frozen or in meltdown. (Oddly, that works out to the same thing.) Unless Honda World in Conway, Arkansas, is somehow exempt from general economic conditions, this market is decidedly unfrozen, unmelted-down, or whatever. “We’re making loans every day,” my friendly salesman Hans Chandler said. And I see that Ditech is still hawking mortgages on televsion for under 6 percent.