The U.S. Department of Justice: Big Banks May Legitimately Be above the Law

The Financial Times reported in 2013 that lawmakers in the U.S. Congress were claiming that the Department of Justice had been “too soft on big banks and their executives by failing to bring criminal cases related to the financial crisis.”[1] In the five years following the financial crisis of 2008, no Wall Street executive was criminally charged with fraud. The U.S. Justice Department chose not to go after the bankers for their lack of due diligence regarding their purchases of sub-prime mortgages from mortgage originators. This in spite of the fact that at Citibank, for example, a manager in the bank’s due diligence department estimated that 50% to 80% of the approved mortgages did not meet the bank’s credit policy, and yet Robert Rubin, the CEO at the time, did not act on the manager’s email. This suggests that a criminal complaint could have been lodged against the bank itself, but then what would be the implications for the financial system should Citibank had gone under after being found criminally guilty? Does it even hold that a guilty verdict would mean bankruptcy? Simply stated, a company can be so large that its failure due to a guilty verdict could harm innocent third parties, including stockholders, employees, suppliers, and even the general public if the bankruptcy triggers a systemic collapse of the financial system. Such concerns are called collateral consequences. 

After the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, systemic risk became a particularly salient concern for criminal prosecutors at the U.S. Department of Justice. Swayed by a desire to minimize the potential disproportionate harm to innocent parties from a verdict-triggered major bankruptcy, the prosecutors believed they were obligated to consider collateral consequences even if that meant that the really big banks would be immune from criminal prosecution. To such banks, this could be used as a competitive advantage because keeping within the constraints of law in making money would not apply. I contend, therefore, that the U.S. Government should not have taken collateral consequences into consideration. 

 Mythili Raman testifying before Congress. mainjustice.com

Mythili Raman, Acting Assistant Attorney General in the Criminal Division, argued that collateral factors as a group should be considered. Testifying before Congress on May 22, 2013, she cited “the disproportionate impact on innocent third parties, including the public at large,” as being entirely appropriate for prosecutors to consider.[2] Her reference to the general public means that systemic risk was among the legitimate factors in her view, and yet she also said, “the size of a corporation will never be a factor in and of itself and that no institution is too big to prosecute.”[3] Crucially, her position was that one particular consequence should never be the only factor. “A single collateral consequence cannot be the reason.” However, she added that “collateral consequences are issues that we must and do consider.”[4] Because banks too big to fail tend to have more than one significant collateral consequence (e.g., many stockholders and employees, as well as systemic risk), such banks may be too big to jail.

In testimony before Congress in March 2013, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder had admitted that the lawyers in his department were wary of the “negative impact” on the economy from prosecuting a large financial institution. “(I)t is a function of the fact that some of these institutions have become too large.” Differing from Raman, he thought the size of large banks “has an inhibiting influence – impact on our ability to bring resolutions that I think would be more appropriate. . . . (a)nd I think that is something that we – you all – need to consider.”[5] I want to unpack this rather robust admission, for it is significant.

Firstly, the Attorney General was hinting at what Sen. Kaufman had observed while in office. Namely, it should not have been the F.B.I.’s concern whether the Wall Street banks continued as viable concerns. In other words, systemic risk or even collateral consequences more generally had no business being considered by prosecutors whose job it was to enforce the law. Including systemic risk among the collateral consequences thus further compromised the rule of law. As Sen. Charles Grassley put it, “It was stunning to hear the nation’s top prosecutor acknowledge that, from the justice department’s perspective, the big banks are too big to jail. This is worrisome for the fair application of justice in our country.”[6]

Secondly, the Attorney General was suggesting that Congress should reduce the size of the biggest banks—those with over $1 trillion in assets. This would have removed the specter of banks being too big to jail. Also, by implication, Holder had concluded that the Dodd-Frank Act would not be sufficient to solve the "too big to fail" problem. That law was premised in part on the theoretically beautiful but practically insufficient assumption that imposing disproportionate capital reserve requirements on the biggest banks would not only be enough to keep them sound even in a financial crisis, but would also prompt the banks' boards to reduce the size of their banks. Besides of cost-advantages in being so large, and getting even larger as the five biggest banks have since done, the psychology of empire-building, which had gripped Lehman's Dick Fuld so, can easily dismiss the disproportionate costs of retaining or enlarging size. 

Regarding the implications for the U.S. Department of Justice should the biggest banks have taken the bait and voluntarily reduced their respective sizes, it is clear that if no systemic risk (i.e., of being too big to fail without taking the whole financial system down) were to exist, then third-party collateral damage would not be disproportionate so the banks (and bankers) could be prosecuted. Accordingly, the Huffington Post observed at the time that lawmakers “may be encouraged to apply even more public pressure on efforts to crack down on big banks.” [7] Lawmakers having received campaign contributions from those banks, however, would hardly do so. In fact, those members of Congress would even defend the large sizes of the biggest banks. 

Exceptions admittedly existed. Rep. Sherman, the chair of the full committee, noted while Raman was testifying that the fact that the Department of Justice considered collateral consequences rather than simply enforced the law was enough justification to break up the big banks. Putting aside the issue of size for the conduct of banking (e.g., whether a gigantic sized bank is necessary to make huge loans or would a syndicate of banks do as good of a job and spread the risk), having powerful people and organizations de facto above the law is something that just cannot be permitted in a republic. So on this basis alone, the rationale goes, society had an overwhelming interest in braking up the largest U.S. banks. 

Unfortunately, being too big to fail has carried (and still carries) with it tremendous political power—muscle that could have been used all too easily to resist legislative proposals (or even public debate) oriented to seriously downsizing the mammoth banks. This has the real problem since economic power became so concentrated in large corporations and banks: can a republic resist the power of its most powerful for the good even of the economy, and the public societal good more generally? Were the big banks pulling the strings that led to Raman’s assertion that collateral consequences “must and should” be considered in deciding whether to prosecute? Whether Raman realized it or not at the time, the implication that the rule of law applied impartially should be compromised by the magnitude of the predicted collateral consequences from a corporate conviction is, euphemistically speaking, troubling.

See “The Untouchables,” Frontline, January 22, 2013 and Essays on the Financial Crisis: Systemic Greed and Arrogant Stupidity, available at Amazon.

1. Shahien Nasiripour and Kara Schannell, “Holder Says Some Banks Are ‘Too Large’,” The Financial Times, March 7, 2013.
2 Congressional Hearing, “Who Is Too Big to Fail: Are Large Financial Institutions Immune from Federal Prosecution?” Financial Services Committee, Oversight and Investigations Sub-Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, May 22, 2013. See also the letter to sub-committee members; Shahien Nasiripour, “Too-Big-To-Jail Dogs Obama’s Justice Department As Government Documents Raise Questions,” The Huffington Post, May 22, 2013.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Nasiripour and Schannell,  “Holder Says Some Banks Are ‘Too Large’,”
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.

Decreasing Bank Size by Increasing Capital-Reserve Requirements: Plutocracy in Action?

Although the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act was passed in 2010 with some reforms, such as liquidity standards, stress tests, a consumer-protection bureau, and resolution plans, the emphasis on additional capital requirements (i.e., the SIFI surcharges) could be considered as weak because they may not be sufficient should another financial crisis trigger a shutdown in the commercial paperr market (i.e., banks lending to each other). A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that even the additional capital requirements in Dodd-Frank would not have been enough for eight of the 26 banks with the largest capital loss during the financial crisis of 2008. As overvalued assets, such as subprime mortgage-backed derivatives, plummet in value, banks can burn through their capital reserves very quickly. A frenzy of short-sellers can quicken the downward cycle even more. This raises the question of whether additional capital resources would quickly be "burnt through" rather than being able to stand for long as a bulwark. The financial crisis showed the cascading effect that can quickly run through a banking sector as fear even between banks widens as one damaged bank impacts another, and another. 
With the $6.2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan Chase in the hindsight, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Sen. David Vitter (R-La) in the U.S. Senate proposed a bill that would require banks with more than $400 billion in assets to hold at least 15 percent of those assets in hard capital. The two senators meant this requirement to encourage the multi-trillion-dollar banks to split up into smaller banks. Although it had been argued that gigantic banks are necessary given the size of the loans wanted by the largest corporations, banks had of course been able to form syndicates to finance such mammoth deals. 
The Senate had recently voted 99-0 on a nonbinding resolution to end taxpayer subsidies to too-big-to-fail banks, so the U.S. Senate had Wall Street’s attention. Considering that the U.S. House of Representatives was working on legislation to deregulate derivatives, the chances that the U.S. Government would stand up to Wall Street even to the too-big-to-fail systemic risk were slim to nil. Indeed, the U.S. Department of Justice’s criminal division had been going easy in prosecuting the big banks for fraud out of fear that a conviction would cause a bank collapse (or because President Obama had received very large donations from Wall Street banks including notably Goldman Sachs).
The two senators’ strategy of going about breaking up the biggest banks indirectly by increasing their reserve requirements disproportionately didn't work, at least as of 2019. Advantages of size, including the human desire to empire-build (witness Dick Fuld at Lehman Brothers), could have been expected to outweigh the economic preference for a lower, more proportionate, reserve requirement. With anti-trust laws having been used to break up giants such as Standard Oil and ATT, the thought of breaking up the banks too big to fail even in the wake of the financial crisis was strangely viewed as radical and thus at odds with American incrementalism. The question was simply whether systemic risk should be added to monopoly (i.e., restraint of trade) as an additional rationale for breaking up huge concentrations of private property. This question could have been made explicit, rather than trying to manipulate the big banks to lose some weight.  
The approach of using disproportionately reserves can be critiqued on at least two grounds. First, should one or more of those banks decide to go with the 15% requirement rather than break up into smaller firms, even the additional capital might not be enough to protect a bank during a financial crisis. The study discussed above suggested as much. Second, even if the additional requirements would turn out to be sufficient in a crisis, the approach would obviate a decision by the government on whether systemic risk justifies a cap on how large banks can get. 
I suspect that the U.S. Congress and president backed off in really reforming Wall Street because of its money in campaign finance. In short, the big banks in Wall Street didn't want to shrink. In a system of political economy wherein the economy is regulated by government, rather than vice versa, backing off just because large concentrations of wealth (and thus power--even political) don't like the plans is unacceptable. Moreover, it is a sign of encroaching plutocracy wherein the regulated dictate behind closed doors to the regulators and politicians. Meanwhile, the public, including the economy itself, remains vulnerable. 

See Essays on the Financial Crisis: Systemic Greed and Arrogant Stupidity, available at Amazon.

Sources:

Eric Rosengren, “Bank Capital: Lessons from the U.S. Financial Crisis,” Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, February 25, 2013.
Zach Carter and Ryan Grim, “’Break Up the Banks’ Bill Gains Steam in Senate As Wall Street Lobbyists Cry Foul,” The Huffington Post, April 8, 2013.

Addressing Systemic Risk: Beyond the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010

After the U.S. financial crisis in September 2008, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, admitted to a Congressional committee that his free-market notion that a market will automatically self-correct itself had a major flaw. He had come to this realization because the financial market for mortgage-backed bonds had failed to correct in terms of price for the dramatic increase in risk. Instead, that market, and that of overnight commercial paper, had seized up rather than simply adjust price to the decreased demand. Fear had paralyzed what had hitherto been thought to be a self-correcting market. The failures of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers introduced us to the concept of systemic risk, wherein the failure of a bank (or company) causes a market to collapse. Such a bank is thus too big to fail. If actualized, such risk interferes with even the basic operation of a market, not to mention its self-correcting feature. One question is whether banks that are too big to fail should merely be more adequately regulated or broken up, as the U.S. Supreme Court broke up Standard Oil in 1911.

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank

In March 2013, Alan Greenspan said in a TV interview that banks like JPMorgan that are too big to fail should be allowed to fail. “[What] we ought to do is to allow banks to fail, go through the standard Chapter 11 type of process of liquidation, and allow the markets to adjust accordingly,” said the 87-year-old Greenspan. “That has worked for a very long time.” Had he forgotten his own Congressional testimony in which he had admitted that markets may not “adjust accordingly” to irrational exuberance and systemic risk? Decades of the central banker’s experience had not prepared him for the “financial cliff” that the financial system nearly went over in the fall of 2008. Apparently for Greenspan at least, old habits (of thinking) die hard.

Greenspan said that the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which was oriented to saving the banks from their own risky excesses and providing such banks with an orderly liquidation process should they declare bankruptcy, had been a failure. He said the “too big to fail” problem was getting worse, not better. Banks such as JPMorgan had been “gaming” the new regulations, attracted by the high profits gained from risky trades outlawed by the Volcker Rule. That FDIC deposits were used at JPMorgan to make the trades suggests that the taxpayers have been underwriting the continued high risk, at least in part. In other words, free-market capitalism does not completely account for the risk that banks willfully assume even though it can cause the financial sector to suddenly seize up as a big bank goes under.

Greenspan’s answer to the failure of Dodd-Frank involves a return to his faith in the free market, as if the freezing of commercial paper had not occurred in September 2008 after Lehman failed. A year after that crisis, the former central banker had urged the break-up of the big banks too big to fail. “If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big,” Bloomberg News reports Greenspan said in October of 2009. “In 1911 we broke up Standard Oil -- so what happened? The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that’s what we need to do.” One might add that the sheer existence of a bank with over $1 trillion in assets is too big for not only the financial markets, but also the republic as well. Even after the banks’ culpability had been made transparent in the financial crisis, Wall Street still had considerable lobbying pull over Congress—enough to get lawmakers to scrap Sen. Dick Durbin’s amendment that would have allowed judges merely to adjust mortgages that are in foreclosure. The allure of large contributions is simply too overpowering to a candidate or elected official for such concentrations of private wealth to be compatible with representative democracy. One or the other must inevitably give way. Relying on chapter 11 bankruptcy and market re-adjustment does not even begin to touch such ramifications.

In short, Dodd-Frank can be viewed as a piece of legislation that did not go far enough. This is perhaps no coincidence, given the power of the banks in Congress. Furthermore, as the $6.2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan demonstrates, bankers are able to evade and obstruct whatever incremental strengthening of financial regulation that lawmakers and regulators are able to enact over the objections of the bankers. The Volcker Rule, which bars the risky proprietary trading of banks, is no match for the wizzes on Wall Street. Systemic risk demands public policy beyond some additional regulation, or even a return to New Deal regulation. Going back to the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had separated investment from commercial banking, would be insufficient, as banks had been gaming that law for decades before it was repealed in 1998 by Bill Clinton and Sen. Phil Gramm. Systemic risk and risks to democracy warrant public policy that changes the economic map, rather than merely giving the existing players some additional instructions or letting them fail and hoping the market will not collapse as a result. Addressing systemic risk warrants a systemic rather than an incremental or laissez-faire approach. I suspect that in addition to the obvious vested powerful interests, an aversion to substantive change and an associated preference for incrementalism account societally for much of the aversion to breaking up the big banks, as they had become ensconced in the system as part of the status quo.

Caroline Fairchild, “Greenspan Says Too Big To Fail Problem ‘Is Getting Worse, Not Better’,” The Huffington Post, March 15, 2013.

For more essays on that financial crisis, see Essays on the Financial Crisis: Systemic Greed and Arrogant Stupidity, available at Amazon.

Unnecessary Systemic Risk: Banks' Price-Fixing and Racketeering in Side Businesses

A lawsuit filed in a Florida district-court in 2013 alleged that JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and the London Metal Exchange (LME) artificially inflated aluminum prices.  The plaintiffs accused the companies of anti-trust practices and racketeering, including the “manipulation of the aluminum market through supply price fixing.”[1] This sounds like what had led to the forced break-up of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, though in that case exactly a century before, the restraint of trade had to do with the company’s main line of business (i.e., oil). In the case of the banks, however, owning commodity assets such as storage facilities and trading in raw materials do not constitute banking. This point triggers a larger question involving the repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act.

Should we allow banks to expand even beyond these functions to owning commodities and related real-estate? What does this do to the banks' systemic risk?    Image Source: salisburyareafoundation.org. 

Under Glass-Steagal, commercial banks were not permitted to engage in investment-banking activities, such as proprietary trading and market-making. The law’s repeal in the late 1990's is ironic, for in just a decade the notion of systemic risk would flash into the public’s consciousness under the label of banks being “too big to fail.”
Rather than confront systemic risk directly, U.S. lawmakers and regulators have consistently preferred focusing on incremental change in particular areas. For example, when the lawsuit was filed in Florida, regulators were “scrutinizing ownership of commodity storage facilities by major U.S. banks.”[2] Unfortunately, the scrutiny was limited to price-fixing and racketeering, and those regulators probably were not talking to regulators at the SEC who were still promulgating regulations as part of the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which was ostensibly geared to reducing systemic risk through providing for the “orderly liquidation” of banks and other financial institutions too big to fail.
Were the various government regulators to compare notes, they might ask each other whether branching off into trading commodities and owning storage facilities increase the banks’ systemic risk. By taking on market risk (i.e., of commodity and commercial real-estate markets) that is higher than the risks in commercial banking, the banks increase their systemic risk. Factor in the legal and reputational liabilities associated with price-fixing and racketeering and the systemic risk increases even more.
Therefore, beyond the question of collusion and restraint of trade in a side business, it can and should be asked whether banks should go into side businesses at all, given the matter of systemic risk. Focusing narrowly on whether lines formed at warehouses, and, moreover, debating secondary issues more generally, are at the very least distractions from the fundamental matter of systemic risk. To the extent that Dodd-Frank fails to curb such risk, we as a society put the economy and financial system at a higher risk of collapsing if we follow the government and the media in focusing too narrowly on just the possible wrong-doing of the bankers. Ironically, sustaining such a focus may be in the banks’ own financial interest.

---

[1] Melanie Burton, “Glencore, JPMorgan Sued Over Warehouse Aluminium Prices,” Reuters, August 7, 2013.

[2] Ibid.

Paul Volcker on the Market and Regulation

Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, may strike the conventional "wisdom" as an oxymoron regarding the market mechanism and government regulation. I contend that he could  have taught that "wisdom" a lesson or two.

Regarding systemic risk, Volcker has called the perils of institutions that are too large or interconnected to be allowed to fail the greatest structural challenge facing the financial system. In 2011, he said we must shrink the risks these companies pose, “whether by reducing their size, curtailing their interconnections or limiting their activities.” This goes beyond what The New York Times refers to as his “addressing capital requirements (make them tough and enforceable), derivatives (make them more standardized and transparent) and auditors (ensure that they are truly independent by rotating them periodically).” To reduce a large corporation’s size, interconnections, and/or business activities is essentially to say that a company that is too big to fail should not be permitted to continue to exist unless it is downsized. It is not enough, in this view, to increase the capital requirements of a large, $1 trillion plus bank that is too big to fail; the bank itself must shrink. Even though market pressure could lead a bank such as Bank of America to downsize, the market mechanism is not enough; government, according to Volker, should have stepped in after the financial crisis of '08 to make sure the downsizing was adequate even if the market and the banks' CEOs were just fine with the status quo. Essentially, the message at the time was that the market mechanism itself is insufficient to obviate systemic risk. At the same time, Volcker wanted to bolster that mechanism by riding of it of the effects of large players that are guaranteed by government even as they are not controlled by it. 

Regarding Fannie and Freddie, Volcker, who was once a presidential appointee to Fannie’s board said, “A public agency intervening in the mortgage market in a limited way doesn’t bother me. But if you want to subsidize the mortgage market, do it more directly than hiding it in a quasi-private institution.” The very nature of a “quasi-private institution” was abhorrent to him because the profit motive does not go well with being protected on the downside by a government. “You ought to be either public or private; don’t mix up private profit-making opportunities with an institution that is going to be protected by the government but not controlled by it.” Such a mix can be expected to result in distorted incentives, such as unduly risky behavior. Furthermore, the mix enables government officials to hide the government’s potential liability from the guarantee. Referring presumably to Treasury officials, Volcker said, “They didn’t want the mortgage to be a government expenditure. It was a volatile thing to put on the budget. They made the wrong choice.” The choice can be explained by the fact that it followed the path of most convenience, or least resistance, from the standpoint of democratic accountability. Therefore, from both the standpoint of economics and political theory, the private sphere should be clearly distinguished from the public sphere as regards institutions. Volcker was not saying, however, that government ought to stay out of the housing market—only that such involvement should not be mixed with the profit motive.

To be sure, Fannie and Freddie had powerful defenders on Capitol Hill and at the White House in 2011. Extracting the two mortgage guarantors from the housing market would have been an up-hill battle. Concentrated private power of American banks can make use of the U.S. Government's many access-points, moreover, in order to stave off unwanted proposed change. This is also true regarding proposals to regulate mutual funds. “Because they are not subject to reserve requirements and capital requirements,” Volcker observed, “they are a point of vulnerability in the system.” Yet in a letter to the Financial Stability Board, an international organization charged with developing strong regulatory and supervisory policies for financial institutions, the Investment Company Institute said, “We do not believe banklike regulation is appropriate, necessary or workable for funds registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940.” Strangely, Americans have tended to take the rather-obvious positions of such vested interests at face value and accord them validity. Well ok, the conventional wisdom probably concluded, then I guess we shouldn’t regulate mutual funds then. The conflict of interest in the mutual fund industry’s own position regarding regulation ought to have had an immediate effect in relegating the banks' position in the public debate as well as in Congressional offices.

Interestingly, Volcker simultaneously disavowed relying exclusively on the market mechanism (e.g., regulating to minimize systemic risk) and advocated keeping any government involvement in the market from mixing with the profit motive. In other words, he opposed distortions on that motive even as he was not laissez-faire. Because he was fine with a role for the government in the housing market as long as the public sector involvement would not work through an institution’s profit motive, I view him as being closer to the "government regulation" position than the "free market" position. Even so, he should not be pigeon-holed as “free market” or as “big government” because he did not line up with the "purists" on either side. Even as he was for financial regulation, such as the Volcker Rule, he wanted to stress the importance of an "arm’s length distance" between business and government in a market, even that of banking. Theoretically, government can act in its unique way to protect the market itself (i.e., minimize systemic risk by breaking up firms too big to fail and regulating shadow banking) even as the profit motive is protected from government-backed distortion. The rest of us can take a lesson from Volcker’s wisdom. Accordingly, we might want to avoid easy slogans being bandied about on either “side” of the ideological aisle, such as "socialism," "deregulation," and the "free market."

Source:

Gretchen Morgenson, “How Mr. Volcker Would Fix It,” The New York Times, October 22, 2011. 

Is Modern Banking Fundamentally Flawed?

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase and board member of the New York Federal Reserve (a banking regulatory body), advocates not only that financial regulation reform is not necessary, but also that deregulation is the best course for the American financial sector. Meanwhile, JP Morgan lost $2 billion in an effort to reduce risk. President Obama quickly pointed out that if one of the smartest bankers in the room can preside over such a massive loss, then a deregulated financial sector would likely present us with an unacceptably high level of risk to the entire financial system (and economy). Elizabeth Warren suggested that relying on bankers to regulate themselves would not reduce the systemic risk. The alternative would seem to be strengthening financial regulation, even though—according to Sen. Dick Durbin—“the banks own Congress.”

Perhaps the problem with systemic risk in modern banking goes deeper—beyond how it can be effectively regulated—meaning made regular in line with the public good—and, moreover, beyond what our reigning modern perspective will permit us to acknowledge, let alone see. In ecclesiastical terms historically, lending was classified as a kind of charity, specifically to the poor, as the rich presumably are not in need of lent funds (by definition). In other words, the leverage assumed by the wealthy and corporations is unnecessary. Starbucks needs the funds to build four hundred more stores in China. Wal-Mart needs additional money to buy land for new stores in major American cities. Capital from stockholders is presumably not good enough. The capped cost of leverage relative to a lack of limit on profit attracts greed to favor borrowing over raising capital through stock. The vested interests of existing stockholders (often including the executives who control their corporate boards) seals the deal on leverage as the drug of choice, even if it is not in the long-term best interests of the respective companies. Such a view of borrowing and paying (and earning) interest is worlds away from the original purpose of lending.

Viewing a loan as alms to the poor, lending with interest was originally thought to be unjust. At the very least, it was viewed as unseemly to profit in the giving of charity (although modern corporations do it all the time and get tax deductions for it, besides good public relations). Furthermore, the property (i.e., the substance of the money) lent was viewed as being inseparable from its use (i.e., as a means of exchange). The substance of money is its use, according to that view, so charging more than the money itself (i.e., the principal) is undeserved surplus. Such profit was historically reckoned as being theft. It is not good form to steal from the poor to whom one is giving alms. It is like biting someone while handing him a $20, which he needs to buy lunch (and will return later).  “Hey, I forgot my wallet today and I didn’t bring my lunch. Can you help me out? I’ll pay you back tomorrow.” If of charitable good-will, the acquaintance would reply, "Sure, here you go." If of ever greater (i.e., self-less) good-will, the lender would add, "and don't worry about paying it back." This is lending at its finest. Demanding that the borrower pay more than simply returning the $20 would represent far less than accepting the principal back. Beyond unfairness, taking interest regardless of the borrower's circumstance evinces self-idolatry.

Specifically, for a lender to receive surplus (above the principal) without labor or uncertainty (having transferred the risk to the borrower by requiring repayment) is not only unjust because it violates the risk/return relationship (i.e., a higher return is justified by assuming more risk), the certainly assumed (artifiically) by refusing to accommodate or share in any losses incurred by the borrower is rightfully only that of God. That is to say, it is self-idolatry to assume a divine quality like certainty. Furthermore, the power that some lenders presume to have over delinquent borrowers can be interpreted as an attempt to claim God's power (omnipotence) for oneself. Altogether, arrogance and the infliction of harm come from making oneself an idol (i.e., as if divine).

That which usury risks in terms of morals and self-idolatry is utterly foreign to us moderns. The original charitable purpose of lending is also lost to us in part because we are so used to our own view of lending being the default and the necessary of commercial lending in our economy. Moreover, we assume our assumptions cannot be wrong, and so we do not question whether merely charging interest is inherently unjust and a sin against God. We assume we know the purpose of lending as if it had no history.

In 1612—exactly 400 years before this writing yet late enough that commercial lending was already well-ensconced in the economy—Roger Fenton, a Puritan divine in England, opined strenuously that the sin of usury is inherently unjust. “Where we finde no iustice, what hope can there be of charitie?” Salomon puts mercy as the opposite of usury. “Wherefore vsurie may well be termed a biting . . . it eateth out the very bowels of compassion.” Usury perverts the act of charity, “turning it into an act of selflove.” Usury is against “the Canon of that Charitie which seeketh not her owne, to respect the good of others; [usury] is turned to his owne proper lucre and gaine.” (Fenton, 1612, p. 106)

Injustice does not admit of mercy manifesting as charity. We moderns are so wrapped up in our self-love that we can scarcely imagine lending as an act of compassion. The Canon of Charity to which Fenton refers is the Golden Rule, whose equity guides the Calvinist view of justice as love and benevolence to all. Such benevolence is fueled by selfless love (agape), rather than higher self-love (caritas) directed to God. We moderns can scarcely recognize this theory of justice, so used are we to strict legal justice which limits one’s duty to paying for one’s crime. That the other theory of justice might be applicable to lending is apt to strike us as odd at best.

Nevertheless, the problem behind even the best bankers of today being reckless even as they advocate for deregulation may extend beyond the antiquated debate on regulation to include the making of something borne of something natural (compassion) into something artificial. That lending was designed to be a species of charity may mean that problems are necessarily entailed in using banking for leverage.

By analogy, a person might have been brought up one way and therefore have considerable trouble in adjusting to a way of life that is at odds with that upbringing. The problem facing the person would go beyond simply regulating the new life because a basic inconsistency is in such a drastic change. Were the person to know only the new life, having forgotten one’s upbringing, she would have no clue as to why she feels fundamentally ill at ease. She would look for things in her new life to assuage the difficulties, which nonetheless transcend that environment and therefore require a more basic solution.

Besides relying too much on debt for personal and business use, we as a society are cut off from the original (i.e., designed) use of lending as a means of mercy rather than to profit. Perhaps our perspective is more limited than we think, and the problem much deeper than we realize. Given that “cloudie conceits do hang in the braines of men, which cast a dye and tincture vpon the vnderstanding,” seeing usury “so much practiced of all sorts . . . men are euen thereby without further examination much moued to thinke it lawfull.” (Fenton, pp. 108-9). Yet further examination demonstrates just how limited our tiny window in modernity is—even in spite of our lauded technological development. Our “advancement,” in other words, may blind us to being so wrong about lending even as it is ubiquitous in our world.

By 2012, for example, $1 trillion in student loan debt had accumulated in the United States. Rather than the mercy of charity in waiving interest and even the principal in particular cases of dire need, such a load on poor students represented the hubris of a society run amuck on its own conceit and greed. Such a disparity exists between such selfishness and charity that the notion of debt forgiveness even for the poor is thought of as an unforgivable unfairness rather than as charitable equity that is essentially agape seu benevolentia universalis.

Source:

Fenton, Roger, A Treatise of Usurie (London, 1612). In The Usury Debate in the Seventeenth Century: Three Arguments (New York: Arno, 1972).

Market or Government: Which Should Reduce Systemic Risk in the Banking Industry?

If the five largest banks—JP Morgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley—are too big to fail and yet substandard operationally on account of their respective complexities (e.g., investment banking added to commercial banking), might it be that the market-based decisions of investors will relegate the giants, which by the way had price-to-book value ratios of between .37 to .77 in May 2012, thereby solving the problem of systemic risk?

Smaller banks may be favored by investors because such banks do not “suffer a conglomerate discount,” according to the Wall Street Journal. “They also don’t have big investment-banking or trading arms.” These “arms” are relatively volatile and opaque businesses, and they may be more susceptible to the E.U. debt crisis due to the trades in derivatives. Finally, being less complex means being easier to value, and this can give investors added confidence, particularly as risk management has not exactly been done well at the largest U.S. bank by assets (i.e., JP Morgan)—though Goldman did well in hedging against the bear housing market (and its derivatives).

Therefore, investors could swing the balance away from the biggest banks, though such a shift would take time—barring a herd-like mentality. Regardless of their numbers, the biggest banks can run on the sheer solidity of a well-known name. The shock at the $2 billion loss demonstrates just how much reputational capital had been in the name, “JP Morgan Chase.” Indeed, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of that bank when the huge loss took place, has argued nonetheless that being big allows the bank to compete globally, make large investments in technology and provide broad services to multinational companies. Even though his self-serving pitch omits the problem of risk (e.g., losing $2 billion trying to reduce risk), discounting the inefficiencies and risks that go with greater complexity can take a while, at least in terms of the market as a whole, because the big guys are not exactly going to lay down and give it up to the smaller guys without some pushback. Indeed, the big guys have considerable market and political power that can translate into hidden advantages written into regulations.

Even if the object is merely apparent, given the power of the big banks, it makes sense then that the U.S. Government sought to help at least “level the field” between the large and small by instituting capital surcharges for systemically important (i.e., large) banks. “We are creating incentives right now for institutions to get simpler, less complex and less volatile, and the market is going to be pushing people in that direction,” says William Isaac, FDIC chair during the 1980s thrift crisis and now head of Fifth Third. The question before us here is how much the market’s push can be relied on to get us to a place where systemic risk can be tolerated.

Even with a level playing-field, will investors favor smaller banks with higher price-to-book values sufficiently to cause the biggest banks to lose some lift and float closer to the ground? Even with the capital surcharges, is the playing-field level? Finally, is “level” enough for investors to favor smaller banks, which represent less systemic risk?

In the 1980s, the market-based approach to regulation, such as in the arrangement in which pollution permits could be bought and sold, sought to fuse public policy objectives with the efficiency of the market. I remember well having been steeped in that ideology in business school. Any objection to the approach in class quickly got a sarcastic, “Ok, Ted”—short for Ted Kennedy (or “you socialist!”). As an MBA student, I volunteered to assist a professor on a paper singing the praises of the efficiencies possible in self-regulation applied to securities dealers (NASD). In retrospect, I view my approach and that of the broader ideology as incredibly naïve, even if the efficiency aspect was well-intentioned. A solution allowing for efficiency “automatically” had a certain intellectual beauty to it, which I suspect some advocates experienced as akin to an unexpected good orgasm at a French whorehouse.

Rather than police bad boys, an industry will naturally seek the lowest common denominator if the government allows the industry to be regulated by self-regulation. The industry itself can then benefit by everyone cutting corners. In other words, short-term profit outweighs the long-term reputational capital to the industry itself from policing bad apples rather than joining them. Government is uniquely situated with regard to the common weal, or public good, to guard and protect it from short-sighted encroachments by aggrandizing players and even entire industries.

Therefore, it would be a mistake to think that systemic risk could be reduced by the biggest banks regulating themselves and their industry. It would be a case of wolves guarding the hen house. The question thus boils down to whether government regulation (uncaptured by the regulatees) or the market mechanism should be relied on to reduce systemic risk, or whether some combination of the two (i.e., government regulation "encouraging" the market) is optimal. If regulations unimpaired by bank lobbying are even possible in the U.S., it might be that the market has the final word anyway. The question then would be whether the market naturally seeks to reduce systemic risk, or is such risk an externality to the market and thus within the reach only of government.

Source:

David Reilly, “Bank Investors Bail onToo-Big-To-Fail,” The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2012. 

Obama Standing up to Wall Street: Fact or Fiction?

An interesting bit of news-reporting from the time of the Obama Administration sheds light on business and government: “What haunts the Obama administration is what still haunts the country: the stunning lack of accountability for the greed and misdeeds that brought America to its gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers. Nor have there been meaningful reforms that might prevent a repeat catastrophe. Time may heal most wounds, but not these. . . . After the 1929 crash, and thanks in part to the legendary Ferdinand Pecora’s fierce thirties Senate hearings, America gained a Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utility Holding Company Act, and the Glass-Steagall Act to forestall a rerun. After the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties, some 800 miscreants went to jail. But those who ran the central financial institutions of our fiasco escaped culpability (as did most of the institutions). . . . The weak Dodd-Frank financial-reform law that rose from the ruins remains largely inoperative, since the actual rule-writing was delegated to understaffed agencies now under siege by banking lobbyists and their well-greased congressional overlords. . . . Rather than purge the crash’s crimes, Wall Street’s leaders are sticking to their alibi: Everyone was guilty of fomenting this “perfect storm,” and so no one is. Too-big-to-fail banks are bigger than ever, and ­Masters of the Universe swagger is back.”

Analysis:

 The hegemony of the moneyed interest in any republic renders the public weal subject to a plutocracy—rule by wealth. In the wake of the credit crisis of 2008, U.S. Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois observed that the banking lobby still owned Congress even as the public regarded the banks as at least partially culpable for the crisis. Durbin made his remark after the Senate defeated his amendment that would have allowed foreclosure judges to modify mortgages in trouble. Even though mortgage companies had written steep interest rate hikes into the subprime mortgages that the mortgage writers must surely have known the borrowers could not afford, the servicers stood by the vaunted sanctity of contract doctrine—a faithfulness conditioned, no doubt, by the article serving their interests. Financial influence over elected representatives enabled the U.S. Government to provide cover, or at least to refrain from going after the financial institutions that had been so culpable. That government also refused to break up the banks too big to fail, whose very concentrations of wealth, increased by the TARP program, stood even more as systemic risk.

 Historically, Americans have looked to independently-minded occupants of the U.S. Presidency to stand up to powers of the day to protect the viability of the states. Andrew Jackson, for example, stood up to the moneyed interest before his reelection in 1832 in depleting the Second National Bank of the United States of funding (the bank ended in 1836). Doubtless Jackson spent many nights before the election worried that standing up to money might cost him the election. Of course, he won and enjoyed distinct respect.

 I suspect that Barak Obama did not enjoy respect in the wake of the credit crisis precisely because he did not stand up to the banking lobby. Relatedly, he caved to the demands of the health insurance industry lobby that he no longer push for a public option and resist a mandate for guaranteed customers. I suspect that people sense a lack of political courage and recalibrate their respect accordingly. The political weight of such a collective judgment at the ballot box is an open question; the reward such as Jackson received in 1832 is likely more certain even as it is thought less. Herein occupies the political trap wherein the path of least resistance may gain the upper hand in a president’s political calculation. Faith in the people rewarding courage against concentrated interests can be difficult to embrace even as such reward is perhaps germane to the office as it was designed and intended. Americans seem to innately know this, even as their collective judgment is difficult for politicians to discern.

 In the want of a Jacksonian presider standing for the public weal against being overrun by the private moneyed interest, the historical answer would have been to look to normative, even religious, constraints. Frank Rich includes this type among the more contemporaneously popular legalistic and economic ones where he writes, “There has been no legal, moral, or financial reckoning for the most powerful wrongdoers.” Even so, he concentrates on government regulation as essentially the only means available to constrain the unrepentant greed of Wall Street. Historically, ethical constraint against greed was thought to depend on religious, and specifically Christian, auspices. Frank Rich’s focus alone may be read as rendering a verdict on the efficacy of Christian ethics in countering the fundamental desire for more. Yet how many Jackson’s have the States seen that we may rely on presidential leadership and any ensuing regulation to constrain the moneyed interest?  Moreover, what if greed is so entrenched in human nature that virtually any bulwark must ultimately be found wanting?  

 Source:

 Frank Rich, “Obama’s Original Sin,” The New Yorker, July 3, 2011.

Related essay: “Godliness and Greed”

Too Big to Fail: The Trillion Dollar Club

Banks with assets over $50 billion are considered “systemically important” according to the Dodd-Frank law of 2010. The act is geared to shoring up protection against systemic risk. The U.S. Government deems certain banks (and companies) systemically important if they are big enough to threaten the entire financial system should they fail. Such enterprises are subject to higher capital standards and stricter rules. Roughly three dozen banks in the U.S. had been classified as systemically important by mid-May 2011.

A major flaw in the law is its failure to sufficiently distinguish the banks having assets at just over $50 billion (the floor of systemically important) from the banks with assets over $1 trillion. For example, Bank of America ($2.28 trillion), J.P. Morgan Chase ($2.2 trillion), Citigroup ($1.95 trillion), and Wells Fargo ($1.24 trillion) can be clustered and distinguished from Huntington Bancshares ($52.95 billion), CIT Group ($50.85 billion), Zions Bancorp ($50.81 billion), and Marshall & Ilsley ($49.68 billion). If just one of the institutions in the over $1 trillion club fails, the financial system worldwide could be toast. In contrast, the system would be more likely to remain viable if just one of the banks with assets of around $50 billion were to fail.

Of the $50 billion club, Stephen Steinour, chair and CEO of Huntington, stresses, “We are not vital to the economic system of the U.S.” The chair and CEO of Bank of America could not make the same claim. However, Steinour is ignoring the possibility that Huntington could be a domino in a line of similar banks whose failures altogether could challenge the viability of the financial system; yet even this risk can and should be distinguished from the inherent systemic risk in just one of the banks in the $1 trillion plus club.  Furthermore, those big banks have grown even larger since before the financial crisis—meaning that their systemic risk is higher rather than lower after the crisis. At the end of 2010, the top ten banks in U.S. had 77% of the banking assets in the U.S.

In 2007, Bank of America had assets of $1.54 trillion; by 2011 that number had moved to $2.28 trillion. J.P. Morgan Chase had gone from $1.46 trillion to $2.20 trillion, and Wells Fargo went from $539 billion to $1.24 trillion. Citigroup bucks this trend, moving from $2.22 trillion down to $1.95 trillion. Generally speaking, this cluster of banks represents more rather than less systemic risk after the crisis of 2008.  Were one of these banks to founder, a government-arranged orderly liquidation as per the Dodd-Frank law might not be sufficient to keep credit markets from freezing up. The very existence of a bank with more than $1 trillion in assets should be questioned. Ironically, efforts to evade financial catastrophe in the fall of 2008 contributed to the increase in size. That is to say, staving off the crisis may have made another more likely in the future.

So especially after the scare in 2008, it is incumbant on us to question the sheer existence of the banks that have been allowed and in fact encouraged to get bigger. If a bank having more than $1 trillion in assets is deemed necessary for corporate capitalism to function in spite of such a bank's inherent systemic risk, one might ask how the system got along without them before they had grown so big. After all, it is not unheard of for a syndicate of banks to package financing on a mega-LBO (leveraged buy-out); one mega-bank is not necessary. Indeed, mega-LBOs themselves may result in unacceptable systemic risk. Finance itself, and particularly the increasing role of leverage, can also be subjected to question. 

Although distasteful from the vantage-point of the financial interests vested in the status quo, the trillion-dollar-plus club of banks could be treated differently than the banks of around $50 billion. Whereas the latter could be more strictly regulated, the former could be broken up not only in terms of management, but also in ownership (rather than the spin-offs having the same fractional owners, as was the case with Standard Oil after its “break-up”).  Considering that obviating financial collapse in 2008 included the byproduct of even larger banks, a second systemic-risk law delimiting a maximum size could complement existing anti-trust laws. Unfortunately, the Dodd-Frank law does not address this point, and is thus insufficient from the standpoint of obviating the systemic risk of firms being too big to fail.

Sources:

Robin Sidel and Jean Eaglesham, “Vital? Not Us, Say Small Banks,” The Wall Street Journal, May 13, 2011, p. C1.

2007 Bank Assets, ForbesAdvice.com.

Banks Coopting the Consumer Protection Agency

According to the Credit Card Act, which took effect in February 2010, credit-card issuers cannot charge fees equal to more than 25% of the borrower’s credit limit in the first year after the account is opened. A question confronting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was whether up-front fees charged before the account is open count toward the limit. The new agency decided against subjecting such fees to the limit. The question is why.

Bankers at First Premier bank, which issues credit cards to people with low credit-ratings, claimed that the bank’s “very existence” would be threatened on account of “the loss of millions of dollars in profits.”[1] That the threat was self-serving should at the very least make it questionable. However, if true, it could mean that the bank was depending on taking advantage of customers for its own survival—in which case it should not continue to exist. The bank was charging a $95 processing fee before an account is opened, plus a $75 annual fee. The annual fee itself is questionable, given the credit limit was $300. It is highly doubtful that the cost to the bank of processing a credit card application was $95. It can thus be argued that the bank was taking advantage of people who needed a credit card in order to rebuild their credit history. Depending on such a business model is not viable, at least ethically-speaking.

For an agency whose entire raison d’etre is to protect consumers to enable such charges by exempting them from the law’s limits for first year charges raises the question of whether “regulatory capture” had occurred.  Hardly unknown among regulatory agencies, the phenomenon occurs when the industry being regulated “captures” its regulators. Whether through the power of information that the agency needs or outright political pressure, industries can coopt or subvert their respective regulatory agencies from their formal missions. That the banks objected to Elizabeth Warren and she was replaced as the proposed director by Richard Cordray may suggest that his loyalties were not entirely behind the consumer. That is to say, the banks may have had too much influence on the selection of the director tasked with protecting consumers.

1. Tara Bernard, “Consumer Bureau Declines to Resist Upfront Credit Card Fees,” The New York Times, April 13, 2012.

Conflicts of Interest at the Federal Reserve

In 2011, “(m)ore than a dozen members of the regional Federal Reserve boards have had ties to banks or companies that received emergency funds during the [2008 financial] crisis, according to [a GAO report]. The report highlights a close relationship between the Fed's regional banks and many of the institutions they were lending to, adding credence to concerns that the financial sector enjoyed a largely consequence-free rescue in the wake of the crisis, thanks to its connections with the federal government.”[1] Meanwhile, mortgage borrowers with houses “under water” got hammered. From the crisis to the release of the GAO report in October 2011, there were millions foreclosures in the United States, with very little in the way of mortgage modifications or refinancing for those homeowners who needed relief. In other words, the bankers had connections in the banking regulatory agency while Congress left the troubled homeowners—constituents—at the mercy of the bankers. Their agency having their backs, the bankers could afford to take a hard line on the mortgages. The playing field, in other words, is not at all level. 


Material from this essay has been incorporated into "The Federal Reserve" in  Institutional Conflicts of Interest, which is available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.  

1. Alexander Eichler, “Conflicts of Interest Abound at the Federal Reserve, Report Finds,” The Huffington Post, October 19, 2011.

Goldman's Ethical Conflict of Interest: Obviated or Enabled?

According to U.S. Senator Carl Levin, Goldman Sachs “profited by taking advantage of its clients’ reasonable expection[s] that it would not sell products that it did not want to succeed and that there was no conflict of economic interest between the firm and the customers that it had pledged to serve.”[1] Not only was the bank secretly betting against housing-related securities while selling them to clients, in at least one case a client shorting such a security was allowed to have a hand in picking the bonds. What is perhaps most striking, however, is how little Goldman Sachs has had to pay for acting at the expense of some of its clients. One might predict on this basis that the unethical culture at the bank is ongoing.


The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available at Amazon.

1. William D. Cohan, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World (NY: Doubleday, 2011), p. 19.

Goldman's Ethical Conflict of Interest: Obviated or Enabled?

According to U.S. Senator Carl Levin, Goldman Sachs “profited by taking advantage of its clients’ reasonable expection[s] that it would not sell products that it did not want to succeed and that there was no conflict of economic interest between the firm and the customers that it had pledged to serve.”[1] Not only was the bank secretly betting against housing-related securities while selling them to clients, in at least one case a client shorting such a security was allowed to have a hand in picking the bonds. What is perhaps most striking, however, is how little Goldman Sachs has had to pay for acting at the expense of some of its clients. One might predict on this basis that the unethical culture at the bank is ongoing.


The full essay is at Institutional Conflicts of Interest, available at Amazon.

1. William D. Cohan, Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came to Rule the World (NY: Doubleday, 2011), p. 19.