Greenspan: No Irrational Exuberance, Stocks 'Undervalued' - The Rake's Progress

 

“I recognise that there is a stock market bubble problem at this point, and I agree with Governor Lindsey that this is a problem that we should keep an eye on....We do have the possibility of raising major concerns by increasing margin requirements. I guarantee that if you want to get rid of the bubble, whatever it is, that will do it.”

Alan Greenspan, September 24, 1996 FOMC Minutes


"Where a bubble becomes so large as to pose a threat the entire economic system, the central bank may appropriately decide to use monetary policy to counteract a bubble, notwithstanding the effects that monetary tightening might have elsewhere in the economy.

But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade? And how do we factor that assessment into monetary policy? We as central bankers need not be concerned if a collapsing financial asset bubble does not threaten to impair the real economy, its production, jobs, and price stability."

Alan Greenspan, December 5, 1996, Speech to the American Enterprise Institute


"American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage. To the degree that households are driven by fears of payment shocks but are willing to manage their own interest rate risks, the traditional fixed-rate mortgage may be an expensive method of financing a home."

Alan Greenspan, February 23, 2004, Speech to Credit Union National Association


"Although a "bubble" in home prices for the nation as a whole does not appear likely, there do appear to be, at a minimum, signs of froth in some local markets where home prices seem to have risen to unsustainable levels...

The apparent froth in housing markets may have spilled over into mortgage markets...

Although we certainly cannot rule out home price declines, especially in some local markets, these declines, were they to occur, likely would not have substantial macroeconomic implications."

Alan Greenspan, June 9, 2005, Economic Outlook


"I was aware that the loosening of mortgage credit terms for subprime borrowers increased financial risk. But I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk."

Alan Greenspan, September 2007, The Age of Turbulence


"...the problem at its root is a flawed business model, and that business model is the product of a government regulatory decision to repeal Glass-Steagall administratively and legislatively, and to seek this tremendous concentration of power; and then the abuse of that power by the investment houses...

What we want to do is clean up the system and hold the individuals accountable, and that is what we have tried to do...But there was an understanding that if we were to seek criminal sanctions against either the institution or the most senior people of the institution, the practical impact in our regulatory environment would have been to destroy those institutions, and then structural reform would be meaningless...because the harm to our economy that would result from eliminating a Citigroup or a Merrill Lynch is enormous, and it's disproportionate to the remedy that we want.....

It was incredible. It was distressing to me how simple and outrageous it was. It wasn't so complicated that you said, "Wow, at least they're smart in the way they're doing it." It was simple. It was brazen. The evidence of it was overwhelming. It's just that it hadn't been revealed to the public, and that's why could get away with it...

Over the past decade we've wanted to deregulate, and we've said, "Let's get government out of the business of looking at these issues, and permit industry to control itself, because we can trust them." Maybe that's been a very good thing in some ways.

One of the things that is eminently clear from our investigation is that all the compliance departments, all the self-regulation is nothing. They watched it, but they did nothing. So we've got to think this through, and it's not only the financial community. There are a lot of sectors where we have said self-regulation is the answer. We've got to think about it."

Eliot Spitzer, The Wall Street Fix, March 16, 2003


"The vast majority of privately negotiated OTC contracts are settled in cash rather than through delivery.

Cash settlement typically is based on a rate or price in a highly liquid market with a very large or virtually unlimited deliverable supply, for example, LIBOR or the spot dollar-yen exchange rate.

To be sure, there are a limited number of OTC derivative contracts that apply to nonfinancial underlying assets. There is a significant business in oil-based derivatives, for example. But unlike farm crops, especially near the end of a crop season, private counterparties in oil contracts have virtually no ability to restrict the worldwide supply of this commodity. (Even OPEC has been less than successful over the years.)

Nor can private counterparties restrict supplies of gold, another commodity whose derivatives are often traded over-the-counter, where central banks stand ready to lease gold in increasing quantities should the price rise.

To be sure, a few, albeit growing, types of OTC contracts such as equity swaps and some credit derivatives have a limited deliverable supply. However, unlike crop futures, where failure to deliver has additional significant penalties, costs of failure to deliver in OTC derivatives are almost always limited to actual damages.

There is no reason to believe either equity swaps or credit derivatives can influence the price of the underlying assets any more than conventional securities trading does."

Alan Greenspan, July 24, 1998, Testimony on the Regulation of OTC Derivatives

Hubris has no shame.

CNN
Greenspan: No irrational exuberance, stocks undervalued
By Chris Isidore
March 15, 2013

NEW YORK (CNNMoney)
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that even with record-high stock prices, investors don't need to worry about "irrational exuberance" this time.

In fact, his current view is that stocks are still "significantly undervalued."

Read the entire article here.

Related: Michael Hudson and Pierre Rinfret: The Myth of Alan Greenspan

JPMorgan Used Political Influence With Fed and Treasury to Create London Loss Loophole In Volcker Rule

"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime."

Thomas Paine

Using political influence with the Fed and the Treasury, JP Morgan overrode concerns at the SEC and CFTC to create a broad loophole in the Volcker Rule which was designed to allow them to continue risky and highly leveraged 'prop trading' in their CIO unit under the phony rationale of 'portfolio hedging.'   This is the backstory on the antics of the 'London Whale' and quite likely their rationale of 'hedging' to justify enormous and manipulative positions in other markets.

Throughout the lead up to the financial crisis, banking lobbyists used their friends at the Fed and the Treasury to suppress the warnings of regulators and undermine reforms to protect the public interest.

One of the most infamous instances was the bullying of Brooksley Born and the silencing of her warning as chairman of the CFTC by Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers.   PBS Frontline: The Warning.

This crony capitalism is one of the reasons why the financial system collapsed, and why the markets are still so dangerously unstable, despite the determined efforts to disguise it with liquidity and lax regulation. The responsibility for this goes back to the Clinton and Bush Administrations at least.

Obama was elected with a mandate to reform, but instead packed his Administration with Wall Street figures. He has one of the worst records for pursuing financial frauds in the last twenty years.

It is time to stop apologizing for and tolerating the soft corruption that has characterized the Obama Administration's policy on the financial sector since day one. The price of giving him a pass on this failure to do his job and making excuses for him is too high.    The excuse that Romney will be worse is not acceptable.

The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained growth and recovery.

NY Times
JPMorgan Sought Loophole on Risky Trading
By Edward Wyatt
May 12, 2012

WASHINGTON — Soon after lawmakers finished work on the nation’s new financial regulatory law, a team of JPMorgan Chase lobbyists descended on Washington. Their goal was to obtain special breaks that would allow banks to make big bets in their portfolios, including some of the types of trading that led to the $2 billion loss now rocking the bank.

Several visits over months by the bank’s well-connected chief executive, Jamie Dimon, and his top aides were aimed at persuading regulators to create a loophole in the law, known as the Volcker Rule. The rule was designed by Congress to limit the very kind of proprietary trading that JPMorgan was seeking.

Even after the official draft of the Volcker Rule regulations was released last October, JPMorgan and other banks continued their full-court press to avoid limits.

In early February, a group of JPMorgan executives met with Federal Reserve officials and warned that anything but a loose interpretation of the trading ban would hurt the bank’s hedging activities, according to a person with knowledge of the meeting. In the past, the bank argued that it needed to hedge risk stemming from its large retail banking business, but it has also said that it supported portions of the Volcker Rule.

In the February meeting was Ina Drew, the head of JPMorgan’s chief investment office, the unit that suffered the $2 billion loss...

JPMorgan wasn’t the only large institution making a special plea, but it stood out because of Mr. Dimon’s prominence as a skilled Washington operator and because of his bank’s nearly unblemished record during the financial crisis.

“JPMorgan was the one that made the strongest arguments to allow hedging, and specifically to allow this type of portfolio hedging,” said a former Treasury official who was present during the Dodd-Frank debates.

Those efforts produced “a big enough loophole that a Mack truck could drive right through it,” Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who co-wrote the legislation that led to the Volcker Rule, said Friday after the disclosure of the JPMorgan loss.

The loophole is known as portfolio hedging, a strategy that essentially allows banks to view an investment portfolio as a whole and take actions to offset the risks of the entire portfolio. That contrasts with the traditional definition of hedging, which matches an individual security or trading position with an inversely related investment — so when one goes up, the other goes down.

Portfolio hedging “is a license to do pretty much anything,” Mr. Levin said. He and Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who worked on the law with Mr. Levin, sent a letter to regulators in February, making clear that hedging on that scale was not their intention.

“There is no statutory basis to support the proposed portfolio hedging language,” they wrote, “nor is there anything in the legislative history to suggest that it should be allowed.”

While the banks lobbied furiously, they were in some ways pushing on an open door. Officials at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve, the main overseer of the banks, as well as the Comptroller of the Currency, also wanted a loose set of restrictions, according to people who took part in the drafting of the Volcker Rule who spoke on the condition of anonymity because no regulatory agencies would officially talk about the rule on Friday.

The Fed and the Treasury’s views prevailed in the face of opposition from both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulate markets and companies’ reporting of their financial positions. Both commissions and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which insures bank deposits, pushed for tighter restrictions, the people said...

Read the rest here.

Michael Hudson and Pierre Rinfret: The Myth of Alan Greenspan

Although he is now passed away, and his internet site has been discontinued, economist Pierre Rinfret published some rather pithy descriptions of the people whom he had known during his long career as an economist in the commercial world, and the halls of power of the US government.    I was reminded of that today by the video from Michael Hudson which is included at the bottom.

Pierre Rinfret was a very good economist with a long and successful career, but made a fairly awful politician to say the least.  That is to say, he was not a politician at all, and why he ever let them talk him into his one fateful run at it is still a bit of a mystery to me.

He was famous for telling the economic truth, even when those in power did not want to hear it.  And he was outspoken, too much so for the pampered princes of politics and the media.   He himself was often naive I think, in believing that the truth would prevail even among those who were determined not to see it because it conflicted with their interests, and that those to whom he had been loyal would repay him in kind.  He was 'set up' to take a loss in his run for governor of NY.   But that was just politics and he had made quite a few enemies, especially amongst the emerging neo-conservatives who took control of his beloved Republican Party. 

I had the opportunity to discuss quite a few things with him before he died, and I found that his information often tracked with things that I knew. We differed greatly on some subjects, especially when it came to certain loyalties he held to faithfully, and on the role of the US dollar as reserve currency going forward. But I welcomed his perspective given the differences in our age and his direct experience with so many of the famous and with the Great Depression. He was an intelligent and often passionate man with a good heart.  I was sorry to see him go, and I remember him in my prayers, as I will remember you.

Here is his stated reason for producing his site.

"I have come to realize that the vast majority of decent, wonderful people, have no idea how they are being hoodwinked day in and day out by the scum of this world. We are lied to, misled, bamboozled, suckered, cheated, misrepresented, conned, manipulated and royally screwed!

They take us to the cleaners day in and day out in every way possible. We, the people, pay the price of their cheating, their folly, their lying and their sheer stupidity."

Although he discussed a wide range of subjects on his website, and had a wonderful section on the Great Depression, what had made it controversial was a set of memoirs called 'People I Knew' that remains only in the internet archives now.  We have to keep in mind that what he says are one man's opinions, and everyone is subjective whether they realize it or not, especially in their opinions of other people.  So I try to concentrate on the facts in what people say, and take the opinions with a grain of salt.

His description of Alan Greenspan was very similar to the description provided here by Michael Hudson in the video interview below.

Here is what Pierre had to say about his impressions of Alan Greenspan:

"I first met Alan Greenspan in 1948 when we both attended the New York University School of Commerce, Accounts and Finance. At that time I was the senior fellow in the Economics Department. The run in was a forerunner of his behavior throughout his entire life. But I am not going to bore you with the gruesome details.I have, therefore, known Dr. Greenspan for more than 50 years and I must say that he has always underwhelmed me! I was in the class of NYU before him and our paths crossed innumerable times in our professional careers.

I debated him on many an occasion, we shared many speaking platforms together, we both worked for Richard Nixon in the 1968 and 1972 campaigns as well as in between , we both graduated from NYU undergraduate school and Graduate School and we both ran our own economic and financial consulting businesses. In addition we played golf together more than once with mutual friends.

One of the absolute lies about him is that he retired from his consulting business a wealthy man. Absolutely and totally untrue. When he closed down his economic consulting business to go on the Board of the Federal Reserve he did so because he had no clients left and the business was going under.We even went so far as to try and hire some of his former employees only to find out he had none for the 6 months prior to his closing. When he closed down he did not have a single client left on a retainer basis. His only source of income was his speech making. As a speaker he had to be the ultimate bore exceeded only by Paul McCracken about who Richard Nixon told me on many an occasion "When he talks MEDGO" meaning "my eyes doth glaze over".

He had a horrible record on forecasting the American economy.  He missed calling, in advance, every single recession in the entire postwar period with only one exception. He neither called recessions nor expansions for the very simple reason that he has never been one to stick his neck out. In American industry they don't pay consultants for Pablum or for saying what everybody else does! And that is what he has always served up:  Pablum...

The driving force that may push Greenspan more than anyone or himself realizes is that he graduated from the "Bronx High School of Science" and that his peers included one Henry Kissinger and other famous (infamous?) politicians of about his age. A classmate of his once said to me that Alan had to prove to them that he was as smart as they were...

I once called him a political hack in a speech before the Chamber of Commerce in Chicago and I did not retract that statement then or now."

The problem is not that Alan Greenspan himself may have been 'a hack' who was willing to say and do whatever power politics required.   There is certainly evidence that he was surrounded by secrecy, and a bit of mythology regarding his infallible judgement that was promoted at the time by the popular press.

The real problem is that being a hack has become fashionable, almost de rigueur, and public policy decisions are being regularly distorted by hacks, economic and otherwise, who are willing to say and do almost anything to curry favor from power, but often dress those political opinions up as science.

 And they are defended by other economists and media people  and talking heads who also seek to curry favor from power, in a pyramid of intellectual corruption.    I have seen this contagion destroy very large companies, and apparently that works for countries as well.

This is of course nothing new.  I have previously written about the book and testimony of A. Newton Plummer, a Wall Street 'public relations man,' who had testified to Congress, most effectively with a suitcase full of cancelled checks in hand, about the widespread payoffs to almost every financial pundit on the Street, that helped to fuel the rampant fraud that led to the Great Crash of 1929.

 

Financial collapses that are not due to natural disasters or war are always founded in fraud.  And if you dig a bit, you will find that there are individuals behind it.  It is not some random madness, but a weakness of character, a perennial gullibility, a feeling that 'everyone is doing it,'  that seems to be exploited periodically by heartless individuals.

Pierre was of the opinion that not everyone is bad, and he was no misanthrope as you can tell from his first quotation above.   But there is always a small number of people who will say or do almost anything to get ahead, and who will obsessively seek money and power. 

In certain periods of history they seem to become more socially acceptable, and less furtive.  And by example and influence they can corrupt the weak, who are many.   I had come to a similar conclusion based on personal observation, and the theory of the white collar sociopath as a foil to the romantic notion of the efficient markets hypothesis and the natural goodness of markets.  To assume that people are perfectly rational and self-effacing actors, like angels, is a dangerous folly.

People are corruptible, some more readily than others, and there are those who are a bad sort, a bad seed if you will, who will corrupt them if the system and the people do not actively oppose it.  It seems fairly simple and common sense when said that way, but if you apply it to certain financial systems and their underlying assumptions, you see their weaknesses exposed.  

 

Corruption hides, and so you look for those who operate in the dark.  When things seem to come mysteriously rushed out of nowhere with little factual basis behind them, and don't make sense, then they probably don't.  This holds true for the Iraq war, and the bank bailouts, MF Global, and the financial and commodity market scandals that are yet to be revealed. 

These are dangerous times of course, because when a people, a nation, have bought into a lie, occasionally they decide that they have gone too far to return, and follow their deceits, straight into a living hell. This is how even an educated and civilized people can, on the whole, gradually become torturers and monsters, often without even realizing it.

"Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities."

Voltaire

So we see times when corruption seems more prevalent than others.  I think we are in such a time now, as a legacy of the embracing of the 'greed is good' mentality in the 1980's.  Where it will take us, who can say.   But it seems fairly clear that the economic system can only be restored to some working order through reform, transparency, and accountability.

Michael Hudson: Firing Alan Greenspan

By the way, before you write me about it, I do not agree with Michael Hudson on Social Security, and his aversion to taking out money as 'pre-savings.' I think the fact that it is pre-paid insurance, rather than a pure social spending program, without means testing, is one of its enduring strengths. Its greatest single problem is that the deduction cap has not kept pace with inflation. And I think Obama is willfully undermining it with these payroll tax cuts, but that is a matter for another day. But I do find those who promote canards about those bonds in the Trust that seek to justify a 'selective default' in Social Security to be contemptible. If those bonds are no good, then no US bonds are good, and it is time to restructure, revalue, and reissue the currency. And issue plenty of indictments. Therein lies the credibility trap.