The Madness of Ben Bernanke - Der Spiegel

There are certain parts of this article from Der Spiegel with which we simply do not agree. But its interesting to see the American financial crisis as viewed through the eyes of others.

We are not sure of course, but we suspect strongly that history will view the last 20 years as a period of collective madness in the United States.

It is a madness brought on by the gods to the proud: ὕβρις hubris, and those who would be as gods, but stumble and fall through a tragic flaw, an error in judgement: ἁμαρτία hamartia. Often that flaw is related to the strength that had made them great.

The US can fall from greatness through pride and imbalanced judgement, and therein lies the recipe for tragedy and disaster.  But we see few Hamlets or King Lears on the stage.


The Madness of Ben Bernanke
By Gabor Steingart

WAHSINGTON - Der Spiegel - The dollar is in a tailspin, the trade deficit is growing and a recession is on the horizon. The American way of life is in serious danger. But the head of the Federal Reserve keeps on pumping easy credit into the system -- a crazy policy that will worsen the crisis.

Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have more in common with the big cat entertainers Siegfried & Roy than any of us can be comfortable with.

The Las Vegas magicians call themselves "Masters of the Impossible" and have been fascinating audiences for decades by getting snow-white tigers to leap through burning rings.

The legendary Federal Reserve Chairman and his successor were equally adept at fascinating their audiences -- with a policy of miraculous monetary growth that gave America one of the longest periods of economic expansion in modern times. Many saw them as "Masters of the Universe." It seemed as if the central bankers had tamed predatory capitalism with their constant interest rate cuts.

Siegfried & Roy at times seemed at one with their cats, until the day everything went out of control. A tiger bit Roy in the neck during a show and looked as though it were about to devour him alive.

Greenspan and Bernanke too have lost their magic touch, and their image has been shredded by the real estate crisis and the dollar slide. The ravages of the financial markets aren't doing them any personal harm. But devalued stocks, bad mortgage loans and the diving dollar are damaging millions of small investors and savers.

It's as if the tiger has leapt of the stage and is mauling the audience. We can't blame wild cats or financial markets for being ruthless. It's in their nature to be brutal. Their unmistakeable message is: you can take things this far and no further.

In the case of the real estate crisis which reached the banks and is now unsettling the stock markets, the markets are now showing what G7 finance ministers and central bank governors meeting last weekend in Washington for their annual spring get-together declined yet again to admit publicly: Americans must change their lives -- or it will be changed for them by force.

American Way of Life Under Threat

The credit-financed consumer boom of recent years is coming to a painful end. Today's American Way of Life has no chance of surviving the coming years undamaged. The virus will continue to ravage its way through the financial system.

The property crisis is likely to spread to credit card providers soon and will then probably infect car manufacturers, furniture makers and all the other firms that owe their sales increases to the growth in credit finance. "The virus will keep on infecting the system," one management board member from a large bank said, requesting anonymity in return for the candour of his analysis.

His argument is that banks that grant mortgages to home buyers virtually unable to pay their bills are unlikely to be especially scrutinizing when it comes to lending cash to the buyers of fridges, cars and furniture. Indeed, a furniture store in Miami recently tried to lure consumers with the following offer: buy now, pay your first credit installment in three years, and no need for a down-payment.

The credit-financed way of life is typical of the US these days. Many people resort to credit to plug the gap between the lifestyle they have become accustomed to and their declining wages.

Dulling the Pain With Credit

The borrowed cash is like an anaesthetic against the painful impact of globalisation. Private household debt has been growing by $4 billion each business day for years.

All this wouldn't be so bad if the US economy were at least doing well in foreign markets. But it isn't, and hasn't been for a long time. Despite the depreciation of the dollar, which makes imports into the US far more expensive while making US exports cheaper in foreign markets, US manufacturers are finding it hard to sell their products.

Contrary to forecasts by both the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, the trade deficit has continued to grow, by 6 percent in February alone. America imported $62 billion worth of goods more than they exported in February, including a disturbingly large number of cars, computers and pharmaceutical products. Try as they might, most private households in America can't keep up this consumer miracle. The savings behavior of many Americans means that many of them now live from hand to mouth.

But Bernanke is doing nothing to dampen this hunger for credit. The former advisor to President George W. Bush is even trying to whip up credit-financed consumption by lowering interest rates. This is helping to fuel inflation because the monetary growth isn't being matched by growth in real economic output. Inflation in the US currently stands at 4 percent.

It's a paradox. The private commercial banks which have just had to make billions of dollars in write downs have become more cautious. They're scared of further risks. The management resignations at Citigroup and Bear Stearns have had a sobering impact.

Patriotic Madness

Meanwhile the Federal Reserve is urging the banks to go on taking risks. It has been injecting cash into the banking system for the past half-year while urging bank CEOs in confidential chats to offer more credit. The aim is to keep on financing consumer spending and even to stimulate it further -- for reasons of patriotism.

There's a word for this policy -- madness.

But because there is method in this madness, the meeting of mighty central bank governors and finance ministers in Washington over the weekend remained silent about it, at least officially. Outside the meeting rooms, though, there were murmurings about the poisoned legacy of Alan Greenspan and Bernanke's irresponsible behavior.

One participant told me: "There's an unwritten code of honor that says central bank governors should refrain from criticizing each other." Not least out of respect for the independence of central banks.

But the US is unlikely to realize the error of its ways on its own. "The Americans will always do the right thing," British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said, "after they've exhausted all the alternatives."

Central bankers and tiger tamers have something else in common -- obstinacy. Roy has recovered from his wounds and wants to return to the stage in Las Vegas. "The magic is back," came the defiant announcement.

Alan Greenspan cut a similarly indestructible figure at the weekend. Even though criticism of his cheap money policy was only murmured privately, the 82-year-old legend of central banking said: "I was praised for things I didn't do. I am now being blamed for things I didn't do."

Not that he ever complained about getting false praise.

The Madness of Ben Bernanke - Der Spiegel

Housing Madness

This is the legacy of Greenspan and his chairmanship at the Federal Reserve.

Yes, the borrowers are also at fault, and 'no one made them borrow' as the Wall Streeters and their sock puppets like to say at bubble-bust times like these (remember the tech bubble: 'no one made them buy stocks' - CNBC).

But let's not allow the spin to muddy the waters.

It was fraud. Fraud on a massive and pre-meditated scale. Not unprecedented unfortunately.

It had its core in the Clinton-Bush administrations and the chairmanship of Alan Greenspan. It was aided and abetted by a host of enablers in the media and the universities. And at the heart of it all was the Wall Street Banks.

There is madness in crowds, but the genesis of the madness is in those who assemble the crowds, give them weapons, and walk among them whispering.... madness.

Let there be no doubt. The housing bubble was a financially engineered Ponzi scheme with the Wall Street Banks at the center. And its not over yet. They will not, and probably cannot, stop on their own. The banks must be restrained.

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency...the banks and the corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs." Thomas Jefferson, 1802

U.S. Foreclosures Jump 57% as Homeowners Walk Away
By Dan Levy

April 15 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. foreclosure filings jumped 57 percent and bank repossessions more than doubled in March from a year earlier as adjustable mortgages increased and more owners gave up their homes to lenders.

More than 234,000 properties were in some stage of foreclosure, or one in every 538 U.S. households, Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc., a seller of default data, said today in a statement. Nevada, California and Florida had the highest foreclosure rates. Filings rose 5 percent from February.

About $460 billion of adjustable-rate loans are scheduled to reset this year, according to New York-based analysts at Citigroup Inc. Auction notices rose 32 percent from a year ago, a sign that more defaulting homeowners are ``simply walking away and deeding their properties back to the foreclosing lender'' rather than letting the home be auctioned, RealtyTrac Chief Executive Officer James Saccacio said in the statement.

``We're not near the bottom of this at all,'' said Kenneth Rosen, chairman of Rosen Real Estate Securities LLC, a hedge fund in Berkeley, California and chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate at the University of California at Berkeley. ``The foreclosure process will accelerate throughout the year.''

Rising foreclosures will add more inventory to an already glutted market, keep home prices down through at least next year and thwart efforts by Congress and President George W. Bush to help homeowners avoid default, Rosen said in an interview.

`Drag' on Prices

About 2.5 million foreclosed properties will be on the market this year and in 2009, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. analysts led by Michelle Meyer said in an April 10 report. U.S. home price declines will probably double to a national average of 20 percent by next year, with lower values most likely in metropolitan areas in California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada, mortgage insurer PMI Group Inc. said last week in a report.

Borrowers who owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth may be buffeted by increasing job losses in a ``very substantial recession,'' Rosen said. About 8.8 million borrowers had home mortgages that exceeded the value of their property, Moody's Economy.com said last week.

``At least 2 million jobs will be lost because of this recession, so we'll get a cumulative negative spiral,'' Rosen said. ``A normal recession is 10 months. We think this one may be twice as long.''

Bank seizures climbed 129 percent from a year earlier, according to RealtyTrac, which has a database of more than 1 million properties and monitors foreclosure filings including defaults notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions. March was the 27th consecutive month of year-on-year monthly foreclosure increases. In February, foreclosure filings rose 60 percent.

Nevada Leads

A surge in defaults among subprime borrowers, those with poor or limited credit, spurred the collapse of the U.S. home loan market and has led more than 100 mortgage companies to stop lending, close or sell themselves. As the value of securities tied to mortgages plummeted, lenders and securities firms have reported writedowns and credit losses of at least $245 billion since the beginning of 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Nevada had the highest U.S. foreclosure rate in March at one for every 139 households, almost four times the national rate, RealtyTrac said. Filings there increased almost 62 percent from a year earlier to 7,659.

California had the second-highest rate at one filing for every 204 households, and the most filings for the 15th consecutive month at 64,711. Foreclosure filings more than doubled from a year earlier and were up about 21 percent from February.

Florida, Ohio

Florida had the third-highest rate, one filing for every 282 households, and ranked second in total filings at 30,254. Foreclosures increased 112 percent from a year earlier and decreased almost 7 percent from February, RealtyTrac said.

Ohio ranked third in filings at 11,273 and had the seventh- highest foreclosure rate, one for every 448 households. Georgia, Texas, Michigan, Arizona, Illinois, Nevada and Colorado also ranked among the top 10 states with the most filings, RealtyTrac said.

``The continued increase in new foreclosures implies an even larger drag on prices in 2008,'' Goldman Sachs Chief U.S. Economist Jan Hatzius wrote April 8. Home prices fell 8.9 percent in the fourth quarter, the biggest decline in 20 years as measured by the S&P/Case-Shiller home price index.

Some borrowers are ``hanging on at the margins'' in the face of resets, said Mark Goldman, a loan officer at Windsor Capital Mortgage Corp. in San Diego.

Goldman said one of his clients is a self-employed contractor whose adjustable-rate mortgage rose by two percentage points two months ago. His mortgage payment has increased to $7,200 from $4,900.

``I've had people sitting in my office in tears because there are no loans available,'' said Goldman. ``There are no loans for someone who's upside down on their house.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Dan Levy in San Francisco at dlevy13@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: April 15, 2008 05:25 EDT

The Fed Failed As Regulator - It Was in Good Company

Wall Street veteran Henry Kaufman says in an interview with the Financial Times this week: “Certainly the Federal Reserve should shoulder a substantial part of this responsibility. . . it allowed the expansion of credit in huge magnitudes."

In the Fed's defense, a significant feature of their failure was the chairmanship of Alan Greenspan, who is probably most personally responsible of all the Fed governors for failing to safeguard the US financial system. As the long term chairman he had a significant power and influence over the rest of the board.

Also in the Fed's defense, their failure was no worse than the failure of the SEC and the CFTC, the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress in acting in the public's best interests. However, Chairman Greenspan is a personal standout culprit to anyone who follows the markets closely.

We find it ironic indeed that the plans to 'reform' the markets include giving more power to the Fed, since they are most certainly culpable in the current fiasco, not a public agency, still opaque and unaudited, apparently lacking sufficient checks and balances and public oversight.

Kaufman says Fed failed as regulator
By Aline van Duyn in New York

Published: April 14 2008 03:39 Last updated: April 14 2008 03:39

Henry Kaufman, the distinguished Wall Street economist, has added his voice to the debate about the Federal Reserve’s role in the credit crisis, saying the central bank failed to give enough importance to its role as a regulator.

In a video interview with the Financial Times, Mr Kaufman criticised the Fed’s monetary policy. He said it allowed too much credit expansion over the past 15 years and that this contributed to the market turmoil.

“Certainly the Federal Reserve should shoulder a substantial part of this responsibility. . . it allowed the expansion of credit in huge magnitudes,” Mr Kaufman said.

“Besides its monetary policy approach, [the Fed] really indicated very clearly that it was performing its role as a supervisor . . . in a minute fashion, not in an encompassing fashion. Monetary policy had a high priority, supervision and regulation within the Fed had a smaller priority.”

Mr Kaufman, who is on the board at Lehman Brothers, has long advocated tougher regulation of the biggest financial firms, arguing that they need to be made “too good to fail”, rather than remain “too large to fail”.

The near-collapse of Bear Stearns last month, and the Fed’s intervention which resulted in a purchase of the Wall Street firm by JPMorgan Chase, has triggered a renewed debate about whether banks can regulate themselves, or whether regulators need to impose tougher rules.

The credit crisis, which stems from losses on securities backed by risky mortgages made during the height of the housing bubble, could lead to total losses and writedowns of nearly $1,000bn for banks and investors around the world, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Mr Kaufman said a distinctive feature of the financial crisis was “much greater lapses in official supervision and regulation than in earlier periods”.

He said there should be a new federal regulator appointed who would work with the Federal Reserve but who would have responsibility for “intensively” regulating the 30 or 40 biggest financial firms. Failure to do so could lead to a “crisis that’s bigger than the one which we have today”.

“The supervision of major financial institutions requires deep skills in credit, deep skills in risk analysis techniques and it requires within that organisation, very skilled, trained professional people,” Mr Kaufman said. “That is lacking in the supervisory area in the United States.”

He added that recent proposals from Hank Paulson, secretary of the US Treasury, to overhaul US regulation “lack focus”. “There is going to be some reform of financial supervision and regulation; hopefully it will be along my lines rather than the big compendium of suggestions that came out of the US Treasury”, he said.

Henry Kaufman Video Interview at Financial Times Online