[The following is the text of Senior Scholar Randall Wray’s presentation, delivered October 28, 2011, at the annual conference of the Research Network Macroeconomics and Macroeconomic Policies (IMK) in Berlin. This year’s conference was titled “From crisis to growth? The challenge of imbalances, debt, and limited resources.”]

It is commonplace to link Neoclassical economics to 18th or 19th century physics with its notion of equilibrium, of a pendulum once disturbed eventually coming to rest. Likewise, an economy subjected to an exogenous shock seeks equilibrium through the stabilizing market forces unleashed by the invisible hand. The metaphor can be applied to virtually every sphere of economics: from micro markets for fish that are traded spot, to macro markets for something called labor, and on to complex financial markets in synthetic CDOs. Guided by invisible hands, supplies balance demands and all markets clear.

Armed with metaphors from physics, the economist has no problem at all extending the analysis across international borders to traded commodities, to what are euphemistically called capital flows, and on to currencies, themselves. Certainly there is a price, somewhere, someplace, somehow, that will balance supply and demand—for the stuff we can drop on our feet to break a toe, and on to the mental and physical efforts of our brethren, and finally to notional derivatives that occupy neither time nor space. It all must balance, and if it does not, invisible but powerful forces will accomplish the inevitable.

The orthodox economist is sure that if we just get the government out of the way, the market will do the dirty work. Balance. The market will restore it and all will be right with the world. The heterodox economist? Well, she is less sure. The market might not work. It needs a bit of coaxing. Imbalances can persist. Market forces can be rather impotent. The visible hand of government can hasten the move to balance. continue reading…

Today in the New Yorker John Cassidy asks “where is the new Keynes”?  Where, in other words, are the new ideas that have emerged from this historic economic crisis?  While there is nothing, he insists, comparable to a new Keynesianism, there has been a rediscovery of some “important ideas.”  The first:

1. Finance matters. This lesson might seem obvious to the man in the street, but many economists somehow managed to forget it. Two who didn’t were Hyman Minsky and Wynne Godley, both of who were associated with the Levy Institute for Economics at Bard College. Minksy’s now-famous “Financial Instability Hypothesis” can be found here, and one of Godley’s warnings about excessive household debt can be found here. (It is from 1999!)

(cross posted at EconoMonitor)

Government Sachs posted its second quarterly loss since it went public in 1999. No doubt that has sent Washington scrambling to try to plug the leak. (Wouldn’t it be fun to listen in on Timothy Geithner’s incoming phone calls from 200 West Street, NYC, today?)

Lloyd “doing God’s work” Blankfein blamed the “uncertain macroeconomic and market conditions”—conditions created, of course, by Wall Street. And since Wall Street refuses to let Washington do anything to improve those conditions, expect much more hemorrhaging among Wall Street’s finest.

The big banks are toast, as I’ve been saying for quite some time. There is no plausible path to real profits with the economy tanking. Only jobs—millions and millions of them, as well as comprehensive debt relief will stop that.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

“US and European banks probably are already insolvent. When Greece defaults and the crisis spreads to the periphery that will become more obvious. The smaller US banks are in trouble because of the economic crisis. However, the biggest banks that caused the crisis are still reeling from their mistakes during the run-up to the crisis. They were already insolvent when the GFC hit, and are still insolvent. Policy makers have pursued an “extend and pretend” approach to hide the insolvencies, however, the sorry state of these banks will be exposed when the next crisis begins to spread. It is looking increasingly likely that the opening salvo will come from Europe, although it is certainly possible that it could come … The economy is tanking. Real estate prices are not recovering, indeed, they continue to fall on trend. Few jobs are being created. Defaults and delinquencies are not improving. GDP growth is falling. Household debt as a percent of GDP is only down from 100% to 90%. While declining debt ratios are good, it is still too much to service. Consumer debt fell from $12.5 trillion in 2008 to $11.4 trillion now. Total US debt is about five times GDP and while household borrowing has gone negative, debt loads remain high. Financial institutions are still heavily indebted—mostly to one another. At the level of the economy as a whole, it is still a massive Ponzi scheme—that will collapse sooner or later… No real economic recovery can begin without job growth in the neighborhood of 300,000 new jobs per month and no one is predicting that for years to come.
Isn’t it strange that Wall Street has managed to remain largely unaffected? continue reading…

Add central banker Mark Carney (governor of the Bank of Canada—and former vampire squidite) to the list of class traitors unlikely supporters of the Occupy Wall Street movement, calling it “entirely constructive“:

In a television interview, Mr. Carney acknowledged that the movement is an understandable product of the “increase in inequality” – particularly in the United States – that started with globalization and was thrust into sharp relief by the worst downturn since the Great Depression, which hit the less well-educated and blue-collar segments of the population hardest.

Carney, whom the Harper government is pushing as the next head of the Financial Stability Board, was also the proximate instigator of Jamie Dimon’s well-publicized tirade last month about “anti-American” financial regulation.

Nouriel Roubini argues at Project Syndicate that widening inequality lends itself to both economic and political instability.  In his latest policy brief, “Waiting for the Next Crash,” Randall Wray connects some of these same dots, tying the rise of “financialization” and soaring household debt levels to stagnating median incomes in the US:

…as finance metastasized, the “real” economy was withering—with the latter phenomenon feeding into the former. High inequality and stagnant wage growth tends to promote “living beyond one’s means,” as consumers try to keep up with the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Combine this with lax regulation and supervision of banking, and you have a debt-fueled consumption boom. Add a fraud-fueled real estate boom, and you have the fragile financial environment that made the [global financial crisis] possible.

Partly inspired by the work of Hyman Minsky (the Minsky Archives here at the Levy Institute, incidentally, are in the process of being digitized), Wray recommends a set of policy changes that are aimed at righting this imbalance between finance and the “real” economy.  These include restructuring (shrinking) and re-regulating (with strict limits on securitization) the financial sector, and an “employer of last resort” policy that would offer a guaranteed job to everyone willing and able to work (federally funded, with decentralized administration).  The ELR would not just be aimed at addressing the catastrophic unemployment problems associated with a cyclical downturn like the one we’re in now, but at creating a force pushing toward full employment at all phases of the business cycle.  (You can read the brief here.)

Update:  Read the IMF’s recent contribution to the inequality debate here and here.

In the case of a major reform like the Dodd-Frank Act, the attention spans of most journalists and opinion-mongers inevitably peak around the legislative battle, pronouncements are made in the aftermath, and then everyone moves on.  But as articles like this remind us, so much of the action still remains to be played out, in the nitty-gritty of the rule-making process.  To wit, a draft proposal that fleshes out the “Volcker rule” prohibitions on proprietary trading was recently released.  The rule was intended to restrict banks’ ability to make bets with their own capital, but the draft language in question suggests those restrictions could end up being fairly weak (due in part to a broader interpretation of the sort of “hedging” that will be deemed permissible).

This is just the beginning of the beginning for Dodd-Frank.  Looking beyond these initial rule-writing stages, there is the further question of how the law and its provisions will hold up over time.  Rules are only as good as the regulatory and enforcement structures that shape and govern them.  That’s not much of a catchy slogan (worst-selling bumper sticker of all time?), but it contains some critical truth.

Jan Kregel (recently elected to the Lincean Academy) highlighted these dynamics in his investigation of the origins and eventual erosion of Glass-Steagall, the New Deal-era legislation that separated commercial and investment banking (some regard the Volcker rule as a kind of tame, second-best alternative to a return to Glass-Steagall).   In addition to tracing the history of the collapse of the 1933 law, Kregel argues that we cannot simply go back to a Glass-Steagall-style regime.  (Read the policy brief here; highlights here.)

While so much attention is paid to Gramm-Leach-Bliley (the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999), Kregel demonstrates that the “end” of Glass-Steagall and of its restrictions on securities trading was a fait accompli well before the much-maligned 1999 law had passed.  All of the action had already taken place through a series of rulings and interpretations by the Fed, the SEC, the Supreme Court, and lesser known bodies like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (see Kregel, on pp. 9-11 of the brief, for a crisp summary of the key provisions that were weakened and effectively dismantled over time; particularly with reference to Section 16 of the 1933 law, the “incidental powers” clause; which Kregel refers to as the “Achilles heel” of Glass-Steagall).

At a deeper level, and of great policy relevance to current discussions (as well as post-mortems) of financial reform, Kregel goes on to argue that there are serious challenges to reinstating Glass-Steagall-type separations between banking and securitization. continue reading…

It’s a time-honored tradition, and something of a mug’s game, to pick quotations from Adam Smith that clash with contemporary free market doctrine.  But uses and misuses of Smith aside, this one happens to hit the conceptual nail on the head.  Jared Bernstein, who is evidently working on a longer piece on debt, pulls this quotation from Adam Smith on the regulation of financial institutions:

Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respects a violation of natural liberty.  But these exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments…[T]he obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty, exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed.

The final report from the Independent Banking Commission (IBC), otherwise known as “the Vickers report,” was published yesterday. There are no big surprises here, and the share prices of UK banks actually increased somewhat. The report supports and strengthens the Basel proposals already underway, and maintains its previous proposal to “ring-fence” the retail part of the larger UK banks. This will “narrow” the banks, although it remains to be seen how much narrower they will be (e.g. the banks can decide whether to keep banking services for large corporations inside or outside the ring-fence).

According to the proposal, UK banks will have to put their retail operations in legally separate entities that are well capitalized and can run independently of the rest of the financial group. Investment banking will be conducted outside the fence and should—in principle—be allowed to fail without government intervention (not so likely, according to the Economist).

As usual, however, “the devil is in the details,” as the US Treasury has discovered as it tries to implement its own ring-fence proposal—the “Volcker rule.” The WSJ reported yesterday that efforts to flesh out the Volcker rule, to define what is proprietary trading, have been delayed beyond the October deadline. Interestingly, the US approach is to give a positive definition to non-permissible trading activities, whereas the UK is trying to achieve the same objectives by defining the permissible retail part of the bank. Neither is easy.

A more radical proposal would be to narrow the retail bank 100%, e.g. to limit the investments of the retail bank to only government securities. This is the well-known Chicago plan from the ‘30s proposed by Henry Simons and Irving Fisher, among others (for an excellent overview of the proposal and its history, see the Levy Public Policy Brief no. 17, 1995 “Narrow Banking Reconsidered” by Ronnie Phillips). This would insulate vital banking services (an important objective for the IBC) but perhaps compromise the underwriting function of the banking system. As Hy Minsky wrote in 1992: “The 100% money proposal is losing sight of the main object: The capital development of the economy” (Levy WP no. 69, p. 36).

Recognizing that the role of banks is not primarily the intermediation of funds between savers and investors, but providing essential working capital for production stretched out in time, Minsky would rather see the widespread use of small “universal banks”—Community Development Banks—that could combine retail payment services with extending loans to small and medium-sized businesses.

Whether the UK proposal can pave the way for more community banking remains to be seen. There is a definite risk that the proposals will have been forgotten by the time of implementation—i.e. 2019.

Editor’s Note:  continue reading…

According to wsj.com, the S&P 500 stock price index stood at 1,218.89 at the close of the trading day on Wednesday afternoon, after a month that saw much turmoil in the financial markets. Combining monthly data from the website for Robert Shiller’s book Irrational Exuberance with the average unadjusted closing value for August (closes from Yahoo! Finance), last month’s percentage drop of –10.6 percent was the 26^th largest in the 1,687-month period from February 1871 to August 2011.  Shiller’s dataset includes some very large drops, including –26.5 percent for November 1929, the worst in the sample.

Some basic theories in finance rest upon the assumption that returns and/or changes in prices can be modeled as random draws from a normal distribution, the familiar bell-shaped curve used by statisticians. The late scientist and mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot showed that many financial data series had so many large increases and decreases that they could not be modeled in this way. (For a posthumous appreciation of Mandelbrot’s work, see science writer James Gleick’s article in the New York Times Magazine.) Mandelbrot hypothesized that many data sets could instead be modeled with the “heavy-tailed” distributions referred to as alpha-stable or stable-Paretian. These distributions allow for many “outliers,” or extreme observations. continue reading…

With all the recent coverage of the federal government’s debt-limit impasse, it has been some time since the private sector’s financial picture has received much attention in the popular press. Nonetheless, there seems to be little news, as the most recent flow-of-funds data release from the Fed depicts a continuation of trends that have held for at least the past two years or so. Specifically, for the business sector, the figure below shows declining ratios of debt to GDP and increasing ratios of cash-like assets to GDP. (You may need to click on the image to make it large enough.)

(Liquid assets include checking and savings accounts at banks, Treasury securities, and currency, all of which can be useful in avoiding missed payments, etc., when financial stresses arise. Also, assets and debts are of course measured in terms of dollars, rather than numbers of bonds, shares, etc. In all of the financial ratios discussed in this post, GDP is expressed in terms of seasonally adjusted output per year, though the data are for individual quarters.)

In the next figure, shown below, we can see that the personal sector (households, small businesses, and nonprofit organizations) has experienced increasing ratios of securities holdings to GDP in recent quarters, along with falling ratios of liquid assets to GDP. Moreover, as a percentage of GDP, the liabilities of this sector, too, have been falling.

The falling private-sector debt-to-GDP ratios are not surprising in light of the recent financial crisis and the collapse of the real estate market, which not surprisingly led to a retrenchment in many forms of lending, as well as many defaults. Some will find it remarkable that private-sector debt has fallen so rapidly, but for a number of reasons, financial crises are typically followed by at least a partial turn toward financial conservatism and reregulation. Also, the weak economy has naturally curtailed the kinds of spending that are often fueled by new borrowing. On the other hand, the nearly relentless upward trends shown throughout both figures put more recent declines in private-sector debt into perspective. These long-run trends reflect what can be thought of loosely as a gradual increase in U.S. financial fragility beginning in the aftermath of World War II, in the 1940s. Levy Institute scholar Hyman Minsky was noted for observing this trend and warning of the threat it posed.

Update, July 27, 2011: I have made a few changes to this post to improve its clarity. Also, to see all comments on this post, please click on the link below. -G.H.

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