Bailing Out the Fed: Aid to Dependent Pigmen

How Can We Help to Finance the 29 Billion in Risk the Fed is Taking for Bear Stearns and JPM?

How do we insulate the Federal Reserve from absorbing any of those losses, even though they will be passed along to all holders of the US dollar?

By all means let's "Stop Those Rebate Checks."

But this time let's start by stopping the checks to the small elite of wealthiest US citizens that have been going out for the past eight years.

The depths of Wall Street venality knows no bounds. They cannot stop. These are serial Pigmen.

March 24, 2008
Op-Ed Contributor
Stop Those Checks
By BRUCE BARTLETT
Great Falls, Va.

WITH unusual speed and cooperation last month, George W. Bush and Democrats in Congress agreed to a tax rebate set to be paid out beginning in May. Families will get checks for $300 to $1200 or more, and it is assumed that they will all rush out to spend this money immediately, giving retailers a boost that will raise economic growth.

Despite the bipartisan support for the rebate, few economists have supported the idea. They note that we have tried rebates in the past — most recently in 2001 — and there is no evidence that they have meaningfully stimulated either consumption or growth. By and large, people saved the money they received or paid bills (which is the same thing); very few used their rebates to increase spending.

The true reason why the current rebate has been so popular in Washington is that giving away free money in an election year is good for politicians of both parties. Superficially, it looks as if Washington is responding to a real problem with decisive action. After all, if there is a recession the Democrats who control Congress will be held just as accountable as the Republicans who control the executive branch.

But in the almost six weeks since the rebate legislation was signed into law, the economic situation has changed. The meltdown in financial markets is much more serious than it looked in February. At its root are bad mortgages and other debts that are like toxic waste spreading throughout the financial system.

The solution, therefore, is not to drop $100 bills from helicopters — which is essentially what the rebate would do. Rather, what we need is a mortgage Superfund that can clean up the toxic waste. If we can cleanse the financial system of at least some of the bad debts, it will do far more to restore the economy to health than anything that could be accomplished by the rebate — even if the rebate were to work as it is supposed to.

We all know that the government is eventually going to get stuck with a lot of the bad debts, just as it did in the early 1990s when a previous housing bubble burst and bankrupt savings and loans had to be rescued. That bailout cost taxpayers $160 billion. The next one will probably cost more because the problem is bigger and the economy is larger.

At the same time, there are increasing demands for targeted relief for homeowners facing foreclosure. It looks to many people as if Washington cares more about fat-cat bankers than working families in hard times. At some point, Congress is going to respond with additional aid for people caught in the mortgage mess, and this relief will come on top of the $117 billion cost of the rebate.

We need to stop and ask whether we can afford to spend $117 billion that the Treasury Department does not have on a program of dubious effectiveness. It simply makes no sense to send out checks to people who have no need for it as some kind of election-year bribe to vote for incumbents of both parties. That money would go a long way toward cleaning up the mortgages that are poisoning the financial sector.

Congress should immediately repeal the rebate and redirect the money that has been budgeted into a package of measures that would help the housing sector and those people who actually need assistance. The Treasury might use some of the money, for example, to enable Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored housing agencies, to buy up some of the bad mortgages, get them off bank balance sheets and help homeowners refinance them.

My gut tells me that the vast majority of Americans would happily give up their rebate if they knew that the money would be used instead to help families in need and start the process of cleaning up the bad debts in the housing sector. Everyone knows that we will have to spend the money eventually and that the sooner the financial sector goes through detox the better it will be for everyone.

This is a proposal that both Republicans and Democrats should embrace. It involves no increase in the deficit. We would simply redirect already appropriated money into other channels that are much more likely to help the economy.

The checks haven’t gone out yet so no one has to give anything back. Congress could pass a repeal bill in a day if it wanted to. At a minimum, hearings should be held on this proposal in light of the country’s deteriorating financial situation.

Bruce Bartlett, the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” was an official under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.

Stop Those Checks - NY Times

Opera Buffa: JPM Raises Bid for 39.5% of BSC to $10

JP Morgan Increases its offer on Bear Stearns to $10
but for a Minority Share
L'Opera Buffa On Wall Street

It is reported this morning that JP Morgan Chase is increasing its offer to buy Bear Stearns to $10 per share, but will only be buying 39.5% of the company.

In an amended deal, JP Morgan Chase will also be risking 1 billion dollars in losses in Bear Stearns.

The Federal Reserve (the public aka all holders of US dollars) will be taking the risk on the next $29 billion.

Without the Fed's guarantee, Bear Stearns would be in receivership todaywith the shares worth 'zero.' This is Aid to Dependent Pigmen.

Moral hazard reaches comedic proportions.

Text of Revised JPM-BSC Deal
March 24, 2008 10:02 a.m.
JPMorgan Chase and Bear Stearns Announce Amended Merger Agreement
and Agreement for JPMorgan Chase to Purchase 39.5% of Bear Stearns

NEW YORK-- March 24, 2008--

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM)
and The Bear Stearns Companies Inc. (NYSE: BSC) announced an amended merger agreement regarding JPMorgan Chase's acquisition of Bear Stearns.

Under the revised terms, each share of Bear Stearns common stock would be exchanged for 0.21753 shares of JPMorgan Chase common stock (up from 0.05473 shares), reflecting an implied value of approximately $10 per share of Bear Stearns common stock based on the closing price of JPMorgan Chase common stock on the New York Stock Exchange on March 20, 2008.

In addition, JPMorgan Chase and Bear Stearns entered into a share purchase agreement under which JPMorgan Chase will purchase 95 million newly issued shares of Bear Stearns common stock, or 39.5% of the outstanding Bear Stearns common stock after giving effect to the issuance, at the same price as provided in the amended merger agreement. As discussed below, the purchase of the 95 million shares is expected to be completed on or about April 8, 2008.

The Boards of Directors of both companies have approved the amended agreement and the purchase agreement. All of the members of the Bear Stearns Board of Directors have indicated that they intend to vote their shares held as of the record date in favor of the merger.

The JPMorgan Chase guaranty of Bear Stearns' trading obligations has also been significantly clarified and expanded. For more information, the guaranty agreement will be filed publicly and the parties will provide a Question and Answer document describing the guaranty in further detail on their respective websites. JPMorgan Chase has also agreed to guarantee Bear Stearns' borrowings from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York's $30 billion special financing associated with the transaction has also been amended so that JPMorgan Chase will bear the first $1
billion of any losses associated with the Bear Stearns assets being financed and the Fed will fund the remaining $29 billion on a non-recourse basis to JPMorgan Chase.

"We believe the amended terms are fair to all sides and reflect the value and risks of the Bear Stearns franchise," said Jamie Dimon, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of JPMorgan Chase, "and bring more certainty for our respective shareholders, clients, and the marketplace. We look forward to a prompt closing and being able to operate as one company."

"Our Board of Directors believes that the amended terms provide both significantly greater value to our shareholders, many of whom are Bear Stearns employees, and enhanced coverage and certainty for our customers, counterparties, and lenders," said Alan Schwartz, President and Chief Executive Officer of Bear Stearns. "The substantial share issuance to JPMorgan Chase was a necessary condition to obtain the full set of amended terms, which in turn, were essential to maintaining Bear Stearns' financial stability."

While the rules of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) generally require shareholder approval prior to the issuance of securities that are convertible into more than 20% of the outstanding shares of a listed company, the NYSE's Shareholder Approval Policy provides an exception in cases where the delay involved in securing shareholder approval for the issuance would seriously jeopardize the financial viability of the listed company.

In accordance with the NYSE rule providing that exception, the Audit Committee of Bear Stearns' Board of Directors has expressly approved, and the full Board of Directors has unanimously concurred with, Bear Stearns' intended use of the exception. The closing of the sale of the 95 million shares is expected to be completed upon the conclusion of a shareholder notice period required by the NYSE, which is expected to occur on or about April 8, 2008.

Which Way Out of the Minsky Moment?

If we are indeed in a Minsky Moment, which we think we are, then monetary inflation by the Fed and government invervention without reform will most likely increase the probability of a protracted stagflationary repression in the United States, and possibly lead to civil unrest and an exogenous reform of the system. An abandonment of the system as it is with a turn to fascism has been the historic choice of Wall Street. The political lobbying against systemic reform by the Bankers and their sycophants will be intense and as persuasive to the many as most appeals to fear. However, their reckless advice leads to a trip to the brink of the abyss.

The Minsky Moment
by John Cassidy
February 4, 2008
The New Yorker

Twenty-five years ago, when most economists were extolling the virtues of financial deregulation and innovation, a maverick named Hyman P. Minsky maintained a more negative view of Wall Street; in fact, he noted that bankers, traders, and other financiers periodically played the role of arsonists, setting the entire economy ablaze. Wall Street encouraged businesses and individuals to take on too much risk, he believed, generating ruinous boom-and-bust cycles. The only way to break this pattern was for the government to step in and regulate the moneymen.

Many of Minsky’s colleagues regarded his financial-instability hypothesis, which he first developed in the nineteen-sixties, as radical, if not crackpot. Today, with the subprime crisis seemingly on the verge of metamorphosing into a recession, references to it have become commonplace on financial Web sites and in the reports of Wall Street analysts. Minsky’s hypothesis is well worth revisiting. In trying to revive the economy, President Bush and the House have already agreed on the outlines of a “stimulus package,” but the first stage in curing any malady is making a correct diagnosis.

Minsky, who died in 1996, at the age of seventy-seven, earned a Ph.D. from Harvard and taught at Brown, Berkeley, and Washington University. He didn’t have anything against financial institutions—for many years, he served as a director of the Mark Twain Bank, in St. Louis—but he knew more about how they worked than most deskbound economists. There are basically five stages in Minsky’s model of the credit cycle: displacement, boom, euphoria, profit taking, and panic. A displacement occurs when investors get excited about something—an invention, such as the Internet, or a war, or an abrupt change of economic policy. The current cycle began in 2003, with the Fed chief Alan Greenspan’s decision to reduce short-term interest rates to one per cent, and an unexpected influx of foreign money, particularly Chinese money, into U.S. Treasury bonds. With the cost of borrowing—mortgage rates, in particular—at historic lows, a speculative real-estate boom quickly developed that was much bigger, in terms of over-all valuation, than the previous bubble in technology stocks.

As a boom leads to euphoria, Minsky said, banks and other commercial lenders extend credit to ever more dubious borrowers, often creating new financial instruments to do the job. During the nineteen-eighties, junk bonds played that role. More recently, it was the securitization of mortgages, which enabled banks to provide home loans without worrying if they would ever be repaid. (Investors who bought the newfangled securities would be left to deal with any defaults.) Then, at the top of the market (in this case, mid-2006), some smart traders start to cash in their profits.

The onset of panic is usually heralded by a dramatic effect: in July, two Bear Stearns hedge funds that had invested heavily in mortgage securities collapsed. Six months and four interest-rate cuts later, Ben Bernanke and his colleagues at the Fed are struggling to contain the bust. Despite last week’s rebound, the outlook remains grim. According to Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, average house prices are falling nationwide at an annual rate of more than ten per cent, something not seen since before the Second World War. This means that American households are getting poorer at a rate of more than two trillion dollars a year.

It’s hard to say exactly how falling house prices will affect the economy, but recent computer simulations carried out by Frederic Mishkin, a governor at the Fed, suggest that, for every dollar the typical American family’s housing wealth drops in a year, that family may cut its spending by up to seven cents. Nationwide, that adds up to roughly a hundred and fifty-five billion dollars, which is bigger than President Bush’s stimulus package. And it doesn’t take into account plunging stock prices, collapsing confidence, and the belated imposition of tighter lending practices—all of which will further restrict economic activity.

In an election year, politicians can’t be expected to acknowledge their powerlessness. Nonetheless, it was disheartening to see the Republicans exploiting the current crisis to try to make the President’s tax cuts permanent, and the Democrats attempting to pin the economic downturn on the White House. For once, Bush is not to blame. His tax cuts were irresponsible and callously regressive, but they didn’t play a significant role in the housing bubble.

If anybody is at fault it is Greenspan, who kept interest rates too low for too long and ignored warnings, some from his own colleagues, about what was happening in the mortgage market. But he wasn’t the only one. Between 2003 and 2007, most Americans didn’t want to hear about the downside of funds that invest in mortgage-backed securities, or of mortgages that allow lenders to make monthly payments so low that their loan balances sometimes increase. They were busy wondering how much their neighbors had made selling their apartment, scouting real-estate Web sites and going to open houses, and calling up Washington Mutual or Countrywide to see if they could get another home-equity loan. That’s the nature of speculative manias: eventually, they draw in almost all of us.

You might think that the best solution is to prevent manias from developing at all, but that requires vigilance. Since the nineteen-eighties, Congress and the executive branch have been conspiring to weaken federal supervision of Wall Street. Perhaps the most fateful step came when, during the Clinton Administration, Greenspan and Robert Rubin, then the Treasury Secretary, championed the abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which was meant to prevent a recurrence of the rampant speculation that preceded the Depression.

The greatest need is for intellectual reappraisal, and a good place to begin is with a statement from a paper co-authored by Minsky that “apt intervention and institutional structures are necessary for market economies to be successful.” Rather than waging old debates about tax cuts versus spending increases, policymakers ought to be discussing how to reform the financial system so that it serves the rest of the economy, instead of feeding off it and destabilizing it. Among the problems at hand: how to restructure Wall Street remuneration packages that encourage excessive risk-taking; restrict irresponsible lending without shutting out creditworthy borrowers; help victims of predatory practices without bailing out irresponsible lenders; and hold ratings agencies accountable for their assessments. These are complex issues, with few easy solutions, but that’s what makes them interesting. As Minsky believed, “Economies evolve, and so, too, must economic policy.” ♦


In Time of Tumult,Obscure Economist Gains Currency
Mr. Minsky Long Argued Markets Were Crisis Prone;
His 'Moment' Has Arrived
By JUSTIN LAHART
August 18, 2007

At its core, the Minsky view was straightforward: When times are good, investors take on risk; the longer times stay good, the more risk they take on, until they've taken on too much. Eventually, they reach a point where the cash generated by their assets no longer is sufficient to pay off the mountains of debt they took on to acquire them. Losses on such speculative assets prompt lenders to call in their loans. "This is likely to lead to a collapse of asset values," Mr. Minsky wrote.

When investors are forced to sell even their less-speculative positions to make good on their loans, markets spiral lower and create a severe demand for cash [that can force central bankers to lend a hand]. At that point, the Minsky moment has arrived.

The worst of all worlds would be a stagflationary depression in which unemployment was high, wages were stagnant for the majority, and the price of essentials spiraled higher despite slack aggregate demand.

The Financial Instability Hypothesis by Hyman Minsky May 1992

An increasing complexity of the financial structure, in connection with a greater involvement of governments as refinancing agents for financial institutions as well as ordinary business firms (both of which are marked characteristics of the modern world), may make the system behave differently than in earlier eras. In particular, the much greater participation of national governments in assuring that finance does not degenerate as in the 1929-1933 period means that the down side vulnerability of aggregate profit flows has been much diminished. However, the same interventions may well induce a greater degree of upside (i.e. inflationary) bias to the economy.

It is our view that the only sustainable exit from this boom-bust cycle will be a systemic reform of the banking system so that it once again serves the real economy, and a return to the growth of real wages and a more equitable distribution of wealth in the country to foster aggregate savings and sustainable consumption.

Moral Hazard

Moral hazard is the probability that a party insulated from risk will behave differently from the way they would behave if fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act with increasing recklessness, literally 'without reckoning." It also encourages the rise to power of the sociopath in the affected organizations.

It is difficult to explain moral hazard to tenured professors or the pampered princes of bureaucracy, who beat the drum with their silver spoons in support of shifting the risk of loss to the public every time that Wall Street falls into one of its own schemes and blows itself up.

It is a lesson that the average person learns by the age of twelve and relearns, sometimes spectacularly, at least once in young adulthood. If you do something wrong there can be bad outcomes, and you will pay the price and penalty. Unfortunately there is a small but powerful oligopoly of privilege that is trying to project themselves onto the global stage while believing that they are immune to ordinary consequence, and have become addicted to the notion that 'others must pay' for their failures.

Moral hazard comes from rewarding bad behaviour in markets with wristslaps and bailouts. It is a danger to the economy and to the public.

Though contracted a bit from the most recent implosion, the game still limps along with the coo-coo kisses of the Wall Street sycophants and other people's money. Now we might expect even more brazen attempts to game the system. This inevitably leads to wild gyrations in stocks and bonds and commodities. History suggests ever more brazen price manipulation so disconnected from reality that actual physical shortages result because of the corruption of the market pricing mechanism.

Can't happen? Enron made it happen in the energy markets, and almost brought California, a state the size of most countries, to its knees.

The wristslaps and bailouts will continue until these modern Phaetons kill themselves or someone else, and create damage too great to be bought off in the backrooms of the county courthouse.

At least their descent from the heights will be impressive, if you can avoid the impact crater.

AP
Wall Street Culture Not Likely to ChangeSaturday March 22, 7:05 am ET
By Joe Bel Bruno

Culture of Risk on Wall Street Not Seen Changing Amid Bear Stearns Downfall

NEW YORK (AP) -- Wall Street investment bankers got another lesson about the dangers of risk-taking this past week with the downfall of Bear Stearns Cos. The question now obviously is, how long will it last?

Those bankers, many of whom lived through market debacles like the dot-com bust at the start of this decade, turned out to have very short memories. And so analysts believe the sale of Bear Stearns to JPMorgan Chase & Co. for a stunning $2 per share ultimately won't have that much of an impact on how Wall Street conducts business.

In fact, bankers and traders are under even more pressure to reap big returns because of the ongoing credit crisis, and risk is just part of the game.

"There's an old saying on Wall Street that, for traders and bankers, you'd have to take a normal 30 year career and distill it to 15 years," said Quincy Krosby, chief investment strategist for The Hartford. "This whole episode might change Wall Street for a little while."

Krosby believes that Bear Stearns' near-collapse, which followed the company's investing too heavily in risky mortgage-backed securities, might force some bankers to change their ways in the short term. But it won't be enough to temper the financial industry's relentless pursuit of money.

Indeed, the past decade has seen a number of investing fiascoes that Wall Street doesn't appear to have learned much from. Krosby noted the go-go Internet days -- when untested high-tech companies reaped piles of cash in public offerings. The lesson then was, don't put a lot of money into a venture that isn't on fairly solid ground -- but mortgages granted to people with poor credit are quite akin to high-tech firms that had never turned a profit. In both cases, investors gleefully looked past the risk.

Now investors are smarting from what happened to Bear Stearns. And traders are somewhat chastened, for now.

Erin Callan, the chief financial officer for Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., said her firm has certainly become more wary about the risks it takes amid the credit crisis. However, the market's gyrations also offer Lehman's army of traders an opportunity to make money.

"We just try to come in, and run the business the best way we can," she said. "But, you can't survive if you take no risks at all. All we can do is plan in this environment, making sure we do all the things to optimize running the firm."

It seems there's little that will change an industry and a lifestyle attached to Wall Street, which is thought of by Americans as more than just the center of free-market capitalism. Its culture attracts men and women with a swashbuckling mentality -- smart, aggressive risk takers with the potential to become very rich. (You could use the same description for conmen, gangsters and drug dealers - Jesse)
And, their skills in trading and investment banking were proven this past week -- even after news of Bear Stearns' buyout.

Chief executives at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Lehman Brothers pointed out that trading desks played a big part in offsetting massive mortgage-backed asset write-downs, which have ticked past $156 billion for global banks since last year.


As the three companies released first-quarter earnings data, Morgan Stanley said equity trading revenue surged 51 percent to $3.3 billion. Revenue at its fixed-income sales and trading group dropped 15 percent to $2.9 billion, but it was still the firm's second-highest performance ever despite having to write down $2.3 billion linked to subprime mortgages and leveraged loans.

And that pleased investors. Morgan Stanley had its largest gain in more than a decade on Wednesday, climbing 18.8 percent to $42.86. Rival investment banks also had their best week since 2001.

But, investors shouldn't get too comfortable -- the investment banking industry, and Wall Street in general, still have a long way to go before they can be called healthy. It's not just the credit market problems that are an issue, it's also the struggling U.S. economy and its potential to hurt other countries.

"Until we feel more certain about the worldwide economies, we don't see things picking up dramatically," said Goldman Sachs CFO David Viniar. "We just need to keep plugging away."