The Banks’ Consultants: Guarding the Hen House

Leaving it to consultants hired by mortgage servicers to right the wrongs that the services inflicted on foreclosed homeowners was the unhappy consequence of bank regulators giving ambiguous guidance and failing to install viable oversight mechanisms. According to the Government Accounting Office, “regulators risked not achieving the intended goals of identifying as many harmed borrowers as possible.” Even if the reviews had been completed, there was on guarantee that wronged mortgage borrowers would have received any compensation. On the other side of the ledger, the banks had received billions from the U.S. Treasury with no strings attached. Whether intentional or not, the banking regulators put too much stock in the consultants, who, after all, had been hired by the mortgage servicers."
The report confirms that the Independent Foreclosure Review process was poorly designed and executed," Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) said. The "report confirms what I had long suspected -– that the OCC’s oversight of the supposedly independent consultants hired by the servicers was severely deficient. The report should serve as a wake-up call.” By referring to the consultants as supposedly independent, Rep. Waters implies in her statement that the flawed review process put the consultants in the position of being able to exploit a conflict of interest.
On the one hand, the flawed oversight means that the consultants were the ones to protect the public interest. The public had to rely on them to correct the wrongs in the interest of the foreclosed. We can label this the consultants’ “public interest” role. The consultants’ other role  was in working for the servicers. As Benjamin Lawsky, the superintendent of New York's Financial Services Department, pointed out, "The monitors are hired by the banks, they're embedded physically at the banks, they are paid by the banks and they depend on the banks for future business." This is the consultants' other role, which can compromise the first role. 
In a conflict of interest, one role can circumvent another, more legitimate role. Even if the conflict is not exploited with the more legitimate role taking the hit, a person or institution in such a position can be reckoned as unethical, according to some scholars. Other scholars argue that only the actual exploitation of the more legitimate role by the other is unethical.
In my view, if exploitation can be seen as a possibility in the relation between two roles, the relation itself is unethical. Put another way, it is unethical to put a person or organization in such a position, even if actual exploitation does not occur. In my view, to create or perpetuate the condition wherein a person or organization can exploit a conflict of interest is unethical.
It follows that the government has a moral responsibility to eliminate the conflicting roles even if they are not being exploited. Furthermore, the person or organization having two such conflicting roles  as can be counted as a conflict of interest is also ethically obliged to pick one role or the other. Often this is not convenient from a short-term financial standpoint, so business practitioners tend to look the other way, rationalized that since no actual exploitation of the conflict of interest has occurred, there are no ethical issues. They are wrong. The mortgage servicers should never have hired consultants to monitor the servicers. This circle itself is problematic, ethically speaking.
The regulators rather than the consultants should have been the key enforcers, and thus protectors of the public interest. The regulators can be faulted not only for their lack of competence, but also ethically in having allowed the conflict of interest to exist.  A business should not be allowed by the regulators to guard the hen house. To permit this to happen is unethical even if no hens are eaten.  


For more on institutional conflicts of interest, see my book, Institutional Conflicts of Interest: Business & Public Policy, available at Amazon.

Sources:

Ben Hallman and Eleazar Melendez, “GAO Foreclosure Report Finds Bank Regulators Failed to Provide ‘Key Oversight’,” The Huffington Post, April 3, 2013.

 Dan Fitzpatrick, "'A Dose of Healthy Competition' For Banking Regulators," The Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2013.

On the Presumptuousness of Power: Does Wall Street Own Congress?

At the end of April, 2009, U.S. Senator Richard Durbin blamed the powerful banking lobby for the defeat of legislation that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to modify some troubled mortgages.  Even as mortgage servers were claiming to be overwhelmed with requests from distressed borrowers for readjustments to the adjustable-rate mortgages (ARM), the banks and mortgage companies felt the need to stop the US Senate from enabling judges to relieve the backlog. Durban later said in an interview, “And the banks — hard to believe in a time when we’re facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created — are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place,” he said on WJJG 1530 AM radio's  “Mornings with Ray Hanania.” On October 30, 2009,  James K. Galbraith spoke on the Bill Moyers Journal on the bank lobby changing the financial system regulation reforms now being discussed in Congress.  That that lobby feels itself to be in a position to advise the Congress on a matter in which the banks were part of the problem is something that blows Galbraith away.   They should realize among themselves, or at the very least BE TOLD that their involvement is not helpful or appropriate.   Galbraith pointed out that we have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done governmentally to stave off another financial crisis—such as separating the commerical banking and investment trading (on the bank’s equity even!) functions and reducing the scale of the banks too big to fail.  However, there are a hundred reasons why the governing class will not follow through. 

For one, we can look back to Durbin’s comment that the banking lobby owns Congress.   The conflict of interest in the owner of Congress keeping Congress from legislating on the industry is a suffiicent basis for worry; that the lobby presumes itself to be in a position to advise or pressure on banking regulatory reform and that the lobby still has the muscle to see that it is still invited to the table strikes me as emetic.  It shows the arrogance of the corporate world and the corruption of the governing class.   The housing bubble and sub-prime mortgages were in the interest of both, and yet reform strangely is not.   I would add that any voter who goes on, business as usual, in voting for an incombant is contributing to the perpetuation of the  squalid system that we are now enjoying.

Imagine, just for a moment, that a friend or neighbor insults you.  You invite some other friends over to figure out how to deal with that friend or neighbor.  You are shocked when he or she walks in your front doorway (no need to hide) and sits down in your living room with the others.  Not only that, he or she presumes to advise the group, adding pressure or outright threats that the group had better come up with something that is good for him or her. Here’s what I’m getting at: focus for a moment on the attitude of the friend or neighbor.  In our normal interpersonal relations, we would rationally conclude that the person is delusional and excessively self-absorbed.  We tend to let positions or organizations keep us from viewing their people as other (flawed) human beings.   Arrogance built on presumption concerning a matter on which the person has screwed up and others are hurt  is or ought to be a huge red flag for the rest of us (and our representatives!).   I find this attitude to be far more difficult to understand and accept than the fact that industry lobbies have an inordinate amount of power in Washington. 

I find myself thinking about the nature of presumption that can manifest as an illness where it is beyond the pale. That the person involved probably doesn’t even see this suggests to me that a rather dysfunctional lot has congregated in the upper rafters of American banking.   What kind of a person pushes for his or her advantage in the efforts by others to clean up one’s mess?   That they are allowed in the room is alone a sad testament; that our representatives are actually succumbing to them is sordid indeed.   Of course, it is in the interest of big business that the political power be concentrated among the governing class in Washington.   We are mere bystanders as the dance unfolds. 

See related: Essays on the Financial Crisis

Sources:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21962.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/29/dick-durbin-banks-frankly_n_193010.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/29/dick-durbin-banks-frankly_n_193010.html  (“own the place” quote)
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10302009/profile.html

Fannie and Freddie: A Lavish Corporate Lifestyle after the Financial Crisis

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac spent more than $640,000 to send 100 employees to a mortgage-industry conference in Chicago in the fall of 2011. According to a letter from the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, the spending included nearly $342,000 for travel, food, hotel and meeting-room space. Incredibly, $74,000 was spent on four invitation-only dinners for mortgage-lending companies that are regular customers of Fannie and Freddie. Because Fannie and Freddie at the time dominated the U.S. mortgage market, "purchasing and guaranteeing about 70% of new loans from mortgage lenders,” who in turn thus had few alternative potential buyers, managers at Fannie and Freddie still felt the need to wine and dine their customers under the subterfuge of valuing “face-to-face meetings with customers as a way to understand their needs,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Apparently the folks at Fannie and Freddie were not familiar with customer surveys or even the telephone. Instead, Freddie spokesman Doug Duvall bragged, “[We were able to meet] with our lender customers in a cost-efficient way. In just two days we held approximately 200 meetings.” Undoubtedly some of those “meetings” were held at the dinners, each of which cost the taxpayers $18, 500.

The $640,000 spent on the conference can be racked up to the lack of competitive pressure facing a government-owned organization that is close enough to the private sector to want to enjoy perks that are no doubt common on Wall Street. In other words, while it might be less bothersome to us to see stockholders’ money spend on corporate luxuries, it is not clear that Adam Smith would feel very comfortable amid modern corporate capitalism (and he did include a role for government in his economic theory).

The particularly sad thing about the lavish spending by managers at Fannie and Freddie is that those agencies had been firmly opposed to refinancing the mortgages of borrowers “under water” since the collapse of the housing bubble. Over 3 million foreclosures had taken place in the three years since September 2008. The luxury amid harm bespeaks such inequity that even underlying societal values may be at issue—namely, I should be able to eat, drink and be merry while people I don’t know lose their homes. Beyond the ethical problems with this attitude, it evinces a pathology—that of malignant narcissism and perhaps even sociopathy. It is interesting (i.e., convenient) that no terms could be given up on even the questionable (i.e., the producers’ role) mortgages, while plenty of money was available to be spent on lavish dinners ostensibly for guaranteed customers. The managers at Fannie and Freddie could not very well say that they could not afford to relax some of the overly-stringent terms of the ARMs in the sub-primes (and Alts). In fact, given the roles of policy makers and mortgage producers in enabling the housing bubble with questionable mortgages, a moral obligation exists for the government (and the related agencies) to act so as to obviate the foreclosures (which would have obviated the need for TARP for the banks, as the toxic assets were based on the bad mortgages in default). Had the managers at Fannie and Freddie recognized this point rather than stood on sanctity of contract, the Obama administration might have found a way to compensate the two agencies for doing so—perhaps even throwing their managers a lavish dinner at the White House.

Source:

Alan Zebel, “Fannie, Freddie Spend $640,000 on Conference,” The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2011. 

TARP Paid Off: But What about the Foreclosures?

TARP, the "bailout" for banks rather than mortgage borrowers, was the first big issue facing the Obama administration before the roughly $800 billion stimulus plan and the health insurance overhaul that stoked the rise of the Tea Party movement. After supporting TARP, several Republicans lost in the elections of 2010 largely because of their votes. For many Americans, TARP is a symbol of big government at its worst, intervening in private markets with taxpayers’ billions to save Wall Street plutocrats while average Americans continued to struggle to make mortgage payments or lost their houses outright.  “This is the best federal program of any real size to be despised by the public like this,” said Douglas J. Elliott, a former investment banker now associated with the Brookings Institution. “It was probably the only effective method available to us to keep from having a financial meltdown much worse than we actually had. Had that happened, unemployment would be substantially higher than it is now, the deficit would have gone up even more than it has,” Mr. Elliott added. “But it really cuts against the grain for a public that is so angry at banks to think that something that so plainly helped the banks could also be good for the public.” TARP was good for the public not in that the funds enabled Wall Street bonuses; rather, the good was solely on the macro level, as the frozen credit markets eventually thawed such that the financial system meltdown was averted.  However, this does not mean that it was "the only effective method available."

Specifically, the TARP funds could have been used to subsidize mortgage borrowers demonstrating difficulty in making the payments. On a CBS news show May 15, 2011, Speaker Boehner was asked about the four foreclosure programs of the U.S. Government. "They have all failed," he told the journalist. However, the Speaker then refused to have the government get involved; the best we can do is wait for the market to solve the problem as more buyers enter. However, that would only spur foreclosures, as more buyers would make it easier for banks to sell their foreclosed houses. It is interesting that hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars could go the big banks, enabling record executive bonuses, whereas all we can do is rely on the market to mitigate the foreclosures. This squalid double-standard can be explained by simply looking at the bankers' interest, which is at odds with that of the mortgage borrowers. Considering the problematic way in which the sub-prime mortgages had been produced (e.g., liars' loans and no-document mortgages), I contend that the interests of the banks' customers ought to be given primacy here. The problem is that the borrowers are dispersed, whereas the bankers have concentrated leverage via their capital and lobby over government officials who would like to be re-elected. In a republic, the leverage ought to go in the opposite direction: elected representatives coming down on the bankers for their shaddy lending and related double commissions at the expense of the borrowers.

Laying the power reality aside, an alternative to TARP can be envisioned. This exercise, although inexorably futile, can tell us something about the opportunity costs involved in enabling the powers that be rather than holding them accountable. Along with a federal law limited the rate resets on the ARM sub-prime mortgages (resisting the pressure of the banking industry that recklessly had originated or bought the mortgages), subsidies could not only have removed a major toxic element from banks' balance sheets and thus opened up lending, but also perhaps fortified the housing markets in the U.S. such that homeowners duped into houses over their heads could have had some time to sell and find more suitable housing. In other words, the "two birds with one stone" could have applied, instead of the top-directed infusion. TARP did not come with requirements that lending reach a minimum level so even though the banks did not fail, it took even the TARP banks a long time to raise lending again; the return to lending should have been immediate.

It could be argued that the TARP funds put into banks gave the U.S. Government the corresponding benefit of bank stock. To be sure, selling the stock has made up a large part of the TARP funds already by 2011, but it was at that time uncertain whether the government would make a profit. In the fourth quarter of 2010, the U.S. Treasury projected that taxpayers wouuld lose less than $50 billion at worst, but at best could break even or even make money. Its best-case assumptions, however, assume that A.I.G., which had received $182 billion in TARP funds, and the auto companies would remain profitable and that Treasury would get a good price as it sells its corporate shares in coming years.

In May 2011, AIG and the Treasury Department announced that they would sell $9 billion in stock altogether, but for less than half of the expected price. As of May 10th, the AIG stock pre-market price was thirty cents off from the government's breakeven point. AIG stock had slid from the mid 40s to the mid 20s. I submit that these considerations of U.S. profit-taking, although appealing from a capitalist standpoint, misses the bigger picture in terms of a government's mission. I contend that governments do not exist to make profits. Furthermore, a government's primary charge is to protect citizens, whether from foe or famine. Failing to mitigate or obviate foreclosures even as banks got funds to keep them afloat is thus a blight on the U.S. Government. To be sure, maintaining the viability of the financial system is legitimately part of the government's job, that function could have been accomplished by protecting citizens who otherwise lost their homes. This is not to say that the homeowners deserved to stay indefinitely in houses too big for them; rather, it is to say that homeowners could have been kept from being tossed onto the street. The U.S. Government could have helped two birds with one bag of birdfeed while meeting its own obligations as a government.

Sources:

Jackie Calmes, “TARP Bailout to Cost Less Than Once Anticipated,” The New York Times, September 30, 2010.

The Huffington Post, "AIG, U.S. Will Sell $9B in Stock -- But for Less than Half of Expected Price," May 11, 2011.

Dubai Bankers and Responsibility: A Question of Presumed Complicity

Reacting to the debt troubles of Dubai World (which was carrying $59 billion in debt in 2009), the director general of the Dubai Department of Finance, Abdulrahman al-Saleh, said  “Creditors need to take part of the responsibility for their decision to lend to the companies. They think Dubai World is part of the government, which is not correct.”  This sentence strikes me as odd.  Al-Saleh was suggesting that in deciding to make a loan to a company, a banker takes a risk, which entails the possibility of working with the company if it comes up short in cash.  Is such flexibility in the vocabulary of the typical loan officer, much less in the culture of major banks?  I doubt it.

On the same week that Dubai World’s problems were being made public, the Obama administration announced plans to pressure mortgage companies to reduce payments for many more troubled homeowners, as evidence was mounting that a $75 billion government-financed effort to stem foreclosures was foundering.  "The banks are not doing a good enough job,” Michael S. Barr, Treasury’s assistant secretary for financial institutions, said in an interview. “Some of the firms ought to be embarrassed, and they will be.”  Even as lenders had accelerated the pace at which they were reducing mortgage payments for borrowers, a vast majority of loans modified through the program remained in a trial stage lasting up to five months, and only a tiny fraction had been made permanent. Mr. Barr said that the government would try to use shame as a corrective, publicly naming those institutions that move too slowly to permanently lower mortgage payments.  However, shaming is not the only weapon in the government’s arsenal. 

The Treasury Department waited until reductions were permanent before paying cash incentives that it had promised to mortgage companies that lowered loan payments. “They’re not getting a penny from the federal government until they move forward,” Mr. Barr said.  A week after Barr’s statement, the Treasury Department said it would withhold payments from mortgage companies that weren't doing enough to make the changes permanent. ”We now must refocus our efforts on the conversion phase to ensure that borrowers and servicers know what their responsibilities are in converting trial modifications to permanent ones,” Phyllis Caldwell, who was named to lead the Treasury Department’s homeownership preservation office, said in a statement.  So here we find that dreaded word—responsibility—as if it applied to the mortgage issuers as well as the homeowners.  Considering Senator Dick Durbin’s statement that the banking industry owns Congress (which he said after the industry’s lobby effectively scuttled a bill to allow judges to adjust mortgage terms for homeowners in trouble—even as the banks played a role in the bad mortgages), it is not surprising that even two years later, little benefit had come to mortgage borrowers from the U.S. Government, even as the banks had been rescued by TARP funds.

The banking industry has been more powerful, even though it was at least partially complicit in the crisis. Of course, Wall Street bankers have instinctively resisted claims that they were part of the problem that led to the financial crisis in September of 2008. Al-Saleh’s admonition to lenders that the bankers in his country step up to the plate was ignored in favor of the mantra, “it's the other guy’s fault so why should I pay?  I'm not budging.”  This is the mentality of a spoiled child.  The rest of us don’t see it as such when it applies to people in expensive suits because we are too impressed with the trappings of money and power.  As long as bankers get away with making their own rules in the halls of governments, the power ties will remain as though undisciplined children.

Sources: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/business/global/30dubai.html?ref=world ; http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/business/economy/29modify.html?scp=1&sq=pressure%20mortgage%20companies&st=Search ; http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34204856/ns/business-real_estate/

The Banking Lobby: Writing Its Own Ticket in Washington

The Huffington Post observed in 2012: “Wall Street's campaign spending and lobbying power is so intimidating that banks have repeatedly stuck the public with the tab for their losses and no one in Washington stops them.” This was a significant change to be sure from President Jackson depriving the Second National Bank of the U.S. of funding in 1832.

For example, as proposed in early 2012, “(m)ortgage lenders would be encouraged to provide greater relief to borrowers who are in less need of help while offering scant assistance to the most troubled homeowners.” These were the terms of “a proposed $25 billion settlement between the nation's five largest banks, attorneys general in nearly every state and the Obama administration.” The banks “would receive greater credit toward satisfying the terms of the deal when they help borrowers who owe less than 175 percent of the value of their homes. Helping borrowers who owe more than 175 percent would qualify for less credit.” It is as if the homeowners most under water were being presumed to be at fault, even in the case of liar’s mortgages foisted by bankers.

The terms of the proposed settlement suggest that the elected representatives were less oriented solving the housing crisis than to collecting campaign contributions from the banks. “To really make a difference in the housing crisis, you have to assist high [loan-to-value] homeowners," said Diane Thompson, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. "Otherwise, at some point, they're all going to walk away from their homes.” The banks had long been resisting calls to forgive large portions of loan balances in order to avoid recognizing losses. According to the Huffington Post, the settlement’s terms “appear to satisfy the banks on this point, minimizing the pressure to hand out relief to severely underwater borrowers.” The unfairness can also be seen from the conflict of interest in the stipulation that “states whose residents appear to be victims of illegal foreclosures could take such cases to a committee headed by North Carolina's banking commissioner.” The mechanism reflects the banking lobby effectively heading the settlement between the banks and the government officials. In other words, the banks get to write their own settlement, even though they had been at least partially at fault, as in their liar loans and robo-signing mechanism.

Even giving bankruptcy judges “the legal authority to modify principal balances on mortgages in a way that is fair to both parties,” which “would have allowed more than a million ordinary Americans to keep their homes,” was too much for the banking lobby. It got the U.S. Senate to vote down the amendment in 2009 even as banks were foreclosing on millions of Americans. David Kittle, chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association, gleefully said, “We led the way on this, and we are clearly responsible for defeating this for the third time in the last year.” Meanwhile, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) told a radio host, “And the banks—hard to believe in a time when we're facing a banking crisis that many of the banks created—are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place.” This was a striking admission, as was the banks’ dominance a year after the financial crisis—a near-meltdown in which the banks played a significant role.

“The finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector combined to spend $6.8 billion on federal lobbying and campaign contributions . . . from 1998 through 2011. . . . That's $1 billion more than any other sector spent on Washington.” Lawmakers are under such pressure to amass campaign cash that the contributions buy the contributors access, and thus influence. The American Banker’s Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Business Roundtable multiply the bank’s influence even more. Additionally, the lobby can utilize the influence of community banks and credit unions, which goes far beyond their role in the economy. The fear voiced in the constitutional convention in 1787 that Congress would become an aristocracy based on wealth—being disproportionately oriented the moneyed interest—had come to pass well before the financial crisis of 2008.

So it should be no surprise that in May 2010, Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) sought to cap ATM fees--noting that “ATM fees average $2.50 and can run as high as $5 . . . while the real cost of processing a transaction is about 35 cents,” the banks “opposed the idea, arguing that capping fees would just lead to fewer cash machines, including those owned by banks.” As a result, there wasn’t even a floor vote. His own floor leader, Harry Reid, denied it because Republicans had not agreed to it. In short, banks get their way on both sides of the aisle. The republic itself serves the banks even when they have acted badly or unfairly. Even if this means that democracy is a sham in the U.S., even such a recognition would not be likely to make a difference—the electorate so dispersed and disoriented, even subtly manipulated against its own interest in democracy. 

Sources:

Loren Berlin and D. Levine, “Robo-Signing Settlement Might Not Provide Homeowners With Needed Help,” The Huffington Post, February 2, 2012. 

Dan Froomkin and Paul Blumenthal, “Auction 2012: How the Bank Lobby Owns Washington,” Huffington Post, January 30, 2012. 

Homelessness in the U.S.: A Reflection of American Values

According to a report by the National Center on Family Homelessness in 2014, nearly 2.5 million American children were homeless at some point in 2013.[1] The U.S. Department of Education had reported that 1.3 million homeless children were going to school. California, which accounted for one-eighth of the U.S. population at the time, had one-fifth of the 2.5 million, which comes out to nearly 527,000. The relatively high cost of living and shortage of low-income housing, along with a largely stagnant minimum wage, are the more visible factors behind the gap.

The full essay is at "Homelessness in the U.S."

---

1. David Crary and Lisa Leff, “Number of Homeless Children in America Surges to All-Time High: Report,” The Associated Press, November 17, 2014.

The Federal Reserve’s Housing Bubble

During one of his lectures to a class at George Washington University in March of 2012, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, claimed that the central bank’s lower interest rates did not trigger the housing bubble that began in the late 1990s and ended in 2006. For one thing, the Fed did not start cutting interest rates until a few years into the twenty-first century. Also, home prices rose after the Fed later began raising interest rates. Bernanke also cited Europe, where housing booms have not been associated with either tight or loose monetary policy.

                         Ben Bernanke lecturing at Washington University       European Pressphoto Agency

The full essay is at "Essays on the Financial Crisis".

The Federal Reserve’s Housing Bubble

During one of his lectures to a class at George Washington University in March of 2012, Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, claimed that the central bank’s lower interest rates did not trigger the housing bubble that began in the late 1990s and ended in 2006. For one thing, the Fed did not start cutting interest rates until a few years into the twenty-first century. Also, home prices rose after the Fed later began raising interest rates. Bernanke also cited Europe, where housing booms have not been associated with either tight or loose monetary policy.

The full essay is at "Essays on the Financial Crisis".

Moral Hazard in Mortgages

“The cherished American ideal of self-reliance has a flip side”[1]  Before getting to the implications, or flip side, I want to fill out what informs this ideal. One could add to it the ideological stance that came into its own in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan, who declared that government is the problem. This implies that government should be minimized, and otherwise corrected as much as possible. Government is hardly to be viewed as the solution. This is the legacy of the Kennedy assassinations of the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and Watergate as well as Ford’s pathetic “WIN” buttons and Carter’s micromanagement and failure in regard to the hostages in Iran. I was not old enough for the Kennedys’ truncated optimism (and that of Martin Luther King) to resonate; I knew the political (and economic) pessimism of the 1970s and the energizing “fix it” mentality of the early 1980s. Of course, Reagan’s “new federalism” failed, as did his aim to balance the federal budget, and the jury is still out on whether “peace through strength” pushed the USSR off the cliff.

The full essay is at "Moral Hazard in Mortgages."

1. Shaila Dewan, “Moral Hazard: A Tempest-Tossed Idea,” The New York Times, February 26, 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.

Foreclosing on Freddie and Fannie

Three years after the financial crisis of 2008, nearly half of the people in Arizona with mortgages owed more than their homes were worth; those people were “underwater.” Only three homeowners had been approved for debt reduction since the debt-reduction program in Arizona began in September 2010. “It is extremely difficult for the principal reduction program to be successful” when Fannie and Freddie opt out, according to Shaun Rieve of the Arizona Department of Housing.[1] Even though Arizona would pay up to half of the principal reduction, up to $50,000 of a $100,000 principal reduction, the two housing entities that were taken over by the U.S. Government have been obstructing taxpayers from re-emerging from “underwater.”

The full essay is at "Essays on the Financial Crisis."

1. Shaila Dewan, “Freddie and Fannie Reject Debt Relief,” The New York Times, October 6, 2011. 

Nietzsche on Bank of America

The positive correlation between incompetence and unethical conduct at companies is striking, for, theoretically at least, a person can be talented or smart and of questionable character. Of course, it could be that cutting corners is a survival strategy of people who are not competent. However, shirking seems to reflect a sordid character, which, like personality, is relatively constant throughout one’s life—though character flaws could manifest more when times are tough (as in when incompetence has eventuated in a dire balance sheet). One might investigate, moreover, whether a firm’s culture can become more tolerant of unethical conduct when the finances are going south—or do unethical cultures tend to be like fixtures in organizations irrespective of financial condition?

The full essay has been incorporated into On the Arrogance of False Entitlement: A Nietzschean Critique of Business Ethics and Management, available at Amazon.