Five Former US Treasury Secretaries Endorse the 'Volcker Rule'

I do not expect the Volcker Rule to be passed by Congress for the simple reason that the Wall Street banks hate it. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying money achieving the overturn of the original Glass-Steagall law.

The Senators who are beholden to the banks will simply not allow this restriction, which 'worked' for almost 70 years as effective regulation.

I have yet to read a coherent reason why the rule should NOT be passed, except that the Banks do not like it. I spent quite a bit of time listening to arguments and reading presentations, and even exchanging emails with a highly respected colleague who was not in favor of it.

Without exception, every argument was specious, misdirected, or founded on spurious assumptions. Most of the alternatives proposed are more complex and require the active vigilance of regulators.

Simple rules are best, and most easily enforced. This is why the banks hate them.

Part of the problem with this rule was the highly awkward method in which the Obama Administration chose to introduce it into the process, with little background and discussion. I would attribute this to the huge split amongst his advisors, with the Summers-Geithner group holding the most influence.

The reform will not be passed, no matter who endorses it. Congress is in the pocket of the Banks. That is the long and short of it, in my opinion.

US Treasury Secretaries of the last 40 years.

John Connally DEAD
George P. Shultz ENDORSES VOLCKER RULE
William E. Simon DEAD
W. Michael Blumenthal ENDORSES VOLCKER RULE
G. William Miller DEAD
Donald Regan DEAD
James Baker
Nicholas F. Brady ENDORSES VOLCKER RULE
Lloyd Bentsen DEAD
Robert Rubin
Lawrence Summers
Paul O'Neill ENDORSES VOLCKER RULE
John W. Snow ENDORSES VOLCKER RULE
Henry Paulson


Reuters
Ex-Treasury secretaries back Volcker rule
by Philip Barbara
Feb 21, 2010 8:49pm EST

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Five former Treasury secretaries urged Congress on Sunday to bar banks that receive federal support from engaging in speculative activity unrelated to basic bank services.

"The principle can be simply stated," the five said in a letter to The Wall Street Journal. "Banks benefiting from public support by means of access to the Federal Reserve and FDIC insurance should not engage in essentially speculative activity unrelated to essential bank services."

The Treasury secretaries said, however, that hedge funds, private-equity firms and other organizations engaged in speculative trading should be "free to compete and innovate" but should not expect taxpayers to back up their endeavors.

"They should, like other private businesses, ... be free to fail without explicit or implicit taxpayer support," said the former secretaries for both Republican and Democratic presidents.

The appeal comes as Senate lawmakers are pressing ahead with efforts to produce a financial regulatory reform bill that would curb some of the practices that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

Several major financial firms collapsed, were sold or had to be bailed out after a bubble in the housing market popped, causing real estate prices to plummet and leaving markets uncertain about the value of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities.

The liquidity crisis that followed threatened the financial system and deepened a U.S. recession that became the worst since the Great Depression.

The regulatory reform proposal endorsed by the five former Treasury secretaries is the so-called Volcker Rule, formulated by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, a top economic adviser to President Barack Obama.

Obama surprised the financial markets in late January when he announced the proposal, which calls for new limits on banks' ability to do proprietary trading, or buying and selling of investments for their own accounts unrelated to customers.

Volcker told the banking committee earlier this month that a failure to adopt trading limits would lead to another economic crisis and warned "I may not live long enough to see the crisis, but my soul is going to come back and haunt you" if proprietary trading is not curbed.

The five former Treasury secretaries -- Michael Blumenthal, Nicholas Brady, Paul O'Neill, George Shultz and John Snow -- said in their letter that banks should not be involved in speculative trading activity and still receive taxpayer backing.

"We fully understand that the restriction of proprietary activity by banks is only one element in comprehensive financial reform," their letter said. "It is, however, a key element in protecting our financial system and will assure that banks will give priority to their essential lending and depository responsibilities."

A Fitting Award for Alan Greenspan

Inhale deeply of the madness and illusions of the financial engineers.

Greenspan was a magnet for the enablers, the spokesman for those primarily responsible for the fraud that led to the series of financial crises. But more Meinhof than Baader, one might say. The monied interests are often not famed economists, having more of a yearning for either raw power or opaque solitude. Their recognition must wait for another day and a different venue.

And as for Bernanke, his time has come, and he may eclipse even Greenspan given a little more tenure at the Fed.

Young Tim is no economist, just a useful pair of hands, the hired help.

For Immediate Release
22 February 2010

Greenspan wins Dynamite Prize in Economics

Alan Greenspan has been judged the economist most responsible for causing the Global Financial Crisis. He and 2nd and 3rd place finishers Milton Friedman and Larry Summers have won the first–and hopefully last—Dynamite Prize in Economics.

In awarding the Prize, Edward Fullbrook, editor of the Real World Economics Review, noted that “They have been judged to be the three economists most responsible for the Global Financial Crisis. More figuratively, they are the three economists most responsible for blowing up the global economy.”

The prize was developed by the Real World Economics Review Blog in response to attempts by economists to evade responsibility for the crisis by calling it an unpredictable, Black Swan event.

In reality, the public perception that economic theories and policies helped cause the crisis is correct.

The prize winners were determined by a poll in which over 7,500 people voted—most of whom were economists themselves from the 11,000 subscribers to the real-world economics review . Each voter could vote for a maximum of three economists. In total 18,531 votes were cast.

Fullbrook cautioned that not all economics and economists were bad. “Only neoclassical economists caused the GFC. There are other approaches to economics that are more realistic—or at least less delusional—but these have been suppressed in universities and excluded from government policy making.”

“Some of these rebels also did what neoclassical economists falsely claimed was impossible: they foresaw the Global Financial Crisis and warned the public of its approach. In their honour, I now call for nominations for the inaugural Revere Award in Economics, named in honour of Paul Revere and his famous ride. It will be awarded to the 3 economists who saw the GFC coming, and whose work is most likely to prevent another GFC in the future.”

Dynamite Prize Citations

Alan Greenspan (5,061 votes): As Chairman of the Federal Reserve System from 1987 to 2006, Alan Greenspan both led the over expansion of money and credit that created the bubble that burst and aggressively promoted the view that financial markets are naturally efficient and in no need of regulation.

Milton Friedman (3,349 votes): Friedman propagated the delusion, through his misunderstanding of the scientific method, that an economy can be accurately modeled using counterfactual propositions about its nature. This, together with his simplistic model of money, encouraged the development of fantasy-based theories of economics and finance that facilitated the Global Financial Collapse.

Larry Summers (3,023 votes): As US Secretary of the Treasury (formerly an economist at Harvard and the World Bank), Summers worked successfully for the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which since the Great Crash of 1929 had kept deposit banking separate from casino banking. He also helped Greenspan and Wall Street torpedo efforts to regulate derivatives.

In total 18,531 votes were cast. The vote totals for the other finalists were:

Fischer Black and Myron Scholes 2,016
Eugene Fama 1,668
Paul Samuelson 1,291
Robert Lucas 912
Richard Portes 433
Edward Prescott and Finn E. Kydland 403
Assar Lindbeck 375

The poll was conducted by PollDaddy. Cookies were used to prevent repeat voting.

Note: By way of disclosure, I voted for Fama, Greenspan, and Summers. - Jesse

Modern Economic Myths and The Failure of Financial Engineering

"The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards." Walter Bagehot

The housing bubble did nothing for real median incomes in the US but it did wonders for the insiders in the financial sector.

This is why the average Joes in the States went into debt to continue to maintain their consumption.

Until this situation is addressed, there will be no sustained economic recovery in the US. The US Census Bureau only goes to 2007, but it is highly likely that the median income has taken another serious downturn in the latest financial crisis.

Very little has been done by the Obama administration to address this problem.



Trickle down or supply side economics does well for the upper percentiles of income but does much less for the median wage.



Why care? For several reasons.

First, the median wage is the bulwark of general consumption and savings, and the prosperity of a nation. It must match the character of the social fabric, or place a severe strain on the contract between classes and peoples. A nation cannot survive both slave and free without necessarily resorting to repression.

Second, in any relatively free society, the reversion to the mean in the distribution wealth and justice is never pleasant, and often bloody and indiscriminate.

There are several economic myths, popularized over the last thirty years, that are falling hard in the recent series of financial crises: the efficient market hypothesis, the inherent benefits of globalization from the natural equilibrium of national competitive advantages, and the infallibility of unfettered greed as a ideal method of managing and organizing human social behaviour and maximizing national production.

One has to wonder what would have happened if some more coherent, approachable science, had put forward a system of management that relied upon the nearly perfect rationality and unnatural goodness of men as a critical assumption in order to work? They would have been laughed out of the academy. Yes, there is a certain power to befuddle and intimidate common sense through the use of professionally specific jargon, supported by pseudo-scientific equations.

Why doesn't 'greed is good' work? Because rather than work harder, a certain portion of the population, not necessarily the most productive and intelligent, will immediately seek rents and extraordinary income obtained by unnatural advantages, by gaming the system, by cheating and coercion, by the subversion of the rule of law, which saps the vitality of the greater portion of the population which does in fact work harder, until they can no longer sustain themselves. And then the lawless few seek to expand their reign of greed, and colonies and empires are born.

What will take the place of these modern economic myths? Time will tell, and it will vary from nation to nation. But the winds of change are rising, and may soon be blowing a hurricane.