Donald

Lessons from the Fall of Lehman

As you have undoubtedly noticed, this week marks the one-year anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers–the moment at which the financial crisis became a severe economic crisis.

I did an interview on Fox Business on Tuesday to discuss some of the lessons learned. (My wife’s comment on the interview: “You need to straighten your collar next time.”)

Going in, I had two basic points I wanted to make:

First, the fall of Lehman Brothers was the moment that the abstract threat of “systemic risk” became tangible to many policy makers and the public. As we progressed from propping up Bear Stearns to taking over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, many observers began to suffer from policy fatigue, and, in some circles, there was concern that the scale of the government actions might be disproportionate to the alleged, but little-seen, risk of a systemic crisis. That changed when Lehman fell, and the dominoes started toppling.

Second, we still have our work cut out for us. The major items on our to do list include:

(1) Taking steps to avoid such enormous shocks in the future (e.g., by increasing capital requirements and reducing allowed leverage for financial firms).

(2) Fixing the problem of too-big-to-fail (or, if you prefer, too-interconnected-to-fail). Unfortunately, this problem has worsened, in many ways, since the crisis began. Some gigantic firms have grown even larger. And the necessary interventions to prop up the financial sector have reinforced the idea that the government will prevent these firms from failing in the future.

(3) Disentangling the government from private firms, so that it can again act as a referee, not as a player. That will take time given the enormous investment portfolio that the government has amassed in financial firms and the auto companies. It is heartening, however, that even Citigroup is beginning to ponder how to raise outside capital and reduce the government stake.

The Simple Economics of Student Loan Crises

Yesterday, my students heard my second lecture on supply and demand. You know, the one in which we examined how government policies like rent control and the minimum wage can affect market outcomes. Those are important examples, and I dutifully discussed both of them. But I must admit they also feel a smidgen stale – how many millions of students have seen a lecture on rent control and the minimum wage?

To spice things up, I threw in a third example of government intervention: the market for guaranteed student loans. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, the government has a major program in which it provides guarantees for private student loans. Under the program, lenders are protected against the risk of future defaults by the student borrowers. In return for providing these loans, the lenders receive interest payments that are limited by a formula that is specified in law. (These payments are determined completely separately from the amounts that are charged to students which, for simplicity, I will ignore in what follows.)

This program is currently the focus of a major political battle: the Obama administration has proposed eliminating the program and replacing it with direct loans from the government (which currently account for a much smaller portion of the market). But I didn’t get into that larger debate in class. Instead, the reason I focused on this program is that it has experienced two crises in recent years:

In 2006 and 2007, the crisis was kickbacks. In their enthusiasm to win more business, private lenders were offering “inducements” to schools and student loan officers in order to get preferred access to students who wanted loans.

In 2008, the crisis was a lack of lending. In large part because of the financial crisis, private lenders had no enthusiasm whatsoever for making loans. As a result, there was a real risk that students might not be able to get loans.

As I told my students, I think both of these crises had the same root cause: the fact that the government, rather than market forces, determined how much lenders were paid for making guaranteed student loans. In both cases, the government got the payment levels wrong, and the crises followed soon thereafter.

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Insight on Google and Unemployment

In a series of posts (here, here, and here), I have expressed concern that Google directs its users to what I think is the “wrong” measure of unemployment. For example, if you search for “unemployment rate United States” today, it will tell you that the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 9.6%, when the actual figure is 9.7%.

This discrepancy arises because Google directs users to data that haven’t been adjusted for seasonal variations. Almost all discussions of the national economy, however, use data that have been seasonally-adjusted. Why? Because seasonally-adjusted data (usually) make it easier to figure out what’s actually happening in the economy. The unemployment rate always spikes up in January, for example, because retailers lay off their Christmas help. But that doesn’t mean that we should get concerned about the economy every January. Instead, we should ask how the January increase in the unemployment rate compares to a typical year. That’s what seasonal adjustment does.

My concern about Google’s approach is that many (if not most) data users know nothing about seasonal adjustment. They simply want to know what the unemployment rate is and how it has changed over time. Directing those users to the non-seasonally-adjusted data thus seems like a form of search malpractice.

I’ve wondered why Google has chosen this approach, and thus was thrilled when reader Jonathan Biggar provided the answer in a recent comment. Jonathan writes:

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Wall Street Goes to Washington

A front page story in today’s Washington Post (“In Shift, Wall Street Goes to Washington“) documents the Capital’s rising importance in the financial world:

J.P. Morgan Chase for the first time convened its board in Washington this summer, calling the directors to a meeting at the downtown Hay-Adams hotel, then dispatching them to Capitol Hill for meet-and-greets.

Last month, a firm run by the billionaire investor Wilbur Ross hired the head of Washington’s top mortgage regulator to pick through the wreckage of the housing bust looking for bargains.

And the world’s largest bond fund, Pimco, which has traditionally assessed the risk of any new investment according to five financial criteria, recently added one more: the impact of any change in federal policy.

…

“In the old days, Washington was refereeing from the sideline,” said Mohamed A. el-Erian, chief executive officer of Pimco. “In the new world we’re going toward, not only is Washington refereeing from the field, but it is also in some respects a player as well. . . . And that changes the dynamics significantly.”

The Ross example doesn’t tell us much — the financial world has always recruited government officials. The J.P. Morgan and Pimco examples, however, highlight how much the playing field has changed over the past two years. Washington is not just a more aggressive regulator. Given the stresses on the system, it has become a serial intervener — stepping in to prop up specific firms or credit channels that appear too important to fail. And it is now a major investor, with a burgeoning portfolio of investments in financial firms, auto companies, and mortgage backed securities.

As we commemorate the first anniversary of the fall of Lehman, it appears that the worst of the financial and economic crisis is behind us. And the policy conversation should increasingly focus on exit strategies. Not just the narrow question of how the Federal Reserve eventually unwinds the extraordinary expansion of its programs. But also how the Treasury eventually unwinds it TARP investments. How the FDIC walks back from offering guarantees on bank debt. How the government restructures Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

And, perhaps most importantly, how policymakers recalibrate their relationship with financial markets. To paraphrase Mohamed A. el-Arian: can Washington return to being a referee on the sidelines or will it continue to be a player?

Google and Me

A strange this happened last week: Google misplaced my blog.

I’ve run all the usual diagnostics, and I can confirm that Google still knows that my blog exists. But it no longer appears in any of the searches – e.g., “natural gas price”, “unemployment”, “budget deficit”, or “brooke boemio” – that used to help new readers find posts on my site.

Things are so bad, in fact, that my blog doesn’t even come up when you search for “donald marron”. I feel an existential crisis coming on.

I presume this is just the result of some obscure algorithm tweak and that, over time, my posts will reappear in the ranks of the Google-worthy. But it’s fun to imagine that Google is mad at me for my posts criticizing the way it reports unemployment data.

I just checked and, no surprise, Google is still reporting the wrong data. If you search for “unemployment rate”, Google will tell you that the U.S. unemployment rate was 9.6% in August, when in fact it was 9.7%. Why the difference? Because Google is reporting an obscure measure of unemployment, not the one used by 99% of the world.

How Much Did Cash-for-Clunkers Boost Auto Sales?

The busy folks at the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released a quartet of studies today, covering the economic impacts of:

I suspect that other bloggers (not to mention the regular media) will have lots to say on the stimulus analyses, so I started my reading with the clunkers piece, which I found quite interesting.

News accounts often describe the program as a success because almost 700,000 people participated in it in just a few weeks. But, as CEA emphasizes in their new study, the fact that someone participated in the program does not necessarily mean that they bought a car because of it. Indeed, CEA estimates that the 690,000 auto sales under the program boosted 2009 auto sales by only 330,000:

What about the other 360,000?

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The Exploding Deficit Reaches $1.4 Trillion

Earlier today, CBO released its latest monthly snapshot on the federal budget. The key things you should know are:

CBO estimates that the government ran a deficit of almost $1.4 trillion during the first eleven months of the fiscal year (up from $501 billion at this point last year).

CBO reiterated its forecast that the full year’s deficit will also come in around $1.4 trillion (September is usually a month of surplus because of strong tax receipts, but CBO apparently thinks this September will be close to break-even.)

CBO’s estimate is noticeably lower than the administration’s most recent deficit forecast of $1.58 trillion. If the final numbers next month are in line with CBO’s projections, some commentators will thus spin the full year deficit as good news (“the deficit came in lower than the administration expected”), while others will spin it as bad news (“yikes, the deficit was $1.4 trillion”). (As noted in an earlier post, CBO’s summer update was a bit complicated to interpret because its headline deficit estimate used different accounting for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than the administration used; on an apples-to-apples basis, however, CBO then forecast a deficit of $1.41 trillion.)

As shown in the following chart, the deficit has exploded for three main reasons:

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Voyaging Through U.S. Jobs

In honor of Labor Day, you may want to check out Job Voyager by Flare. It provides a graphical history of the rise and fall of different types of jobs in the United States from 1850 to 2000.

Here’s what you get for “Farmer”:

Back in 1850, farmers accounted for more than 40% of reported jobs. Today, less than 1%.

If you click around, you will find that the decline in farmers has been offset by growth in a host of jobs, including clerical, retail, and nurses.

And economists? Well, we grew rapidly until 1990, and then tailed off. Perhaps the would-be economists ran off to Wall Street instead?

P.S. The Job Voyager charts were inspired by the famous Name Voyager charts that let you track the popularity of first names.

Why Economists Messed Up

The biggest thing in economics today is Paul Krugman’s “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” in the New York Times Magazine. If you have any interest in macroeconomic policy, you should read it.

For one thing, the illustrations by Jason Lutes are quite entertaining:

More important, though, is Paul’s evaluation of how we economists missed the 800-pound gorilla in the room. He fingers three suspects:

Mistaking beauty for truth. I.e., too much reliance on elegant, solvable, mathematical models in which economic players are rational and markets adjust to shocks easily. These models are a joy to play with — and provide important insights — but they miss messy truths about the actual economy.

Excess confidence in financial markets. He argues that widespread acceptance of the efficient markets hypothesis (the idea that asset prices incorporate all information and thus get prices “right”) left us blind to the risks of asset bubbles.

The limits of mainstream macroeconomics. This critique is harder to summarize, but in a nutshell he argues that (a) some economists have (incorrectly) embraced the classical view that the government can’t and shouldn’t try to moderate the business cycle and (b) the larger body of mainstream of economists have (correctly) embraced the Keynesian view that the government can try to moderate the business cycle but have (incorrectly) concluded that the Federal Reserve is the only appropriate tool to do so.

I think each of these charges has merit, with one caveat. Back in graduate school, I was indeed taught that monetary policy was the preferred tool for addressing economic weakness (e.g., because of policy lags and concerns about the political economy of what passes as fiscal stimulus from the Congress). In my years in Washington, however, I have met many economists, of the left, right, and center, who believe in fiscal policy as well. Indeed, in policy circles, the idea of fiscal stimulus was active in 2001, 2003, 2008, and 2009, each of which witnessed tax cuts (and, in the most recent case, spending increases) that were partly or wholly passed in the name of stimulus. One can debate the merits of those acts, but the concept of fiscal stimulus has been alive and kicking.

Paul’s recommendations for the way forward for economists:

First, they have to face up to the inconvenient reality that financial markets fall far short of perfection, that they are subject to extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds. Second, they have to admit — and this will be very hard for the people who giggled and whispered over Keynes — that Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions. Third, they’ll have to do their best to incorporate the realities of finance into macroeconomics.

On his final point, I should note that one of the leading thinkers on the links between finance and macro is none other than Ben Bernanke, current (and, one hopes, future) chairman of the Federal Reserve. That’s one of the reasons he’s the right person for the job.

Related commentary: EconomistMom, Barry Ritholz, Paul Kedrosky, Brad DeLong, and Paul Krugman himself.

Unemployment Still Rising

Today’s jobs report didn’t deliver any real surprises. The number of payroll jobs fell by 216,000 in August, slightly less than expectations, but revisions to earlier months subtracted an additional 49,000 jobs. The unemployment rate rose to 9.7%, more than expected and consistent with the consensus view that unemployment will exceed 10% in coming months.

In short, we are still losing jobs, but at a much slower pace than earlier in the year.

Looking further into the details, there are two things I’d highlight. First, the U-6 measure of unemployment, which includes workers who are discouraged or working part-time for economic reasons, increased even more than the regular unemployment rate, rising from 16.3% to 16.8%:

Second, unemployment among teenagers in August was the highest ever recorded. More than 25% of teenage workers were unemployed in August, topping the previous peak of 24.1% set in late 1982:

Teenage unemployment jumped sharply from July to August, rising from 23.8% to 25.5%, an increase of 1.7 percentage points. In comparison, unemployment among adult men increased by “only” 0.3 percentage points and among adult women by 0.1 percentage point.

I predict that the econo-blogosphere will feature some healthy debate about whether the sharp increase among teenagers has anything to do with the most recent increase in the minimum wage that went into effect toward the end of July (and, therefore, after the July unemployment data were collected). As you would expect, teenagers are more likely to earn the minimum wage than are adult workers. If the latest minimum wage increase had immediate, negative effects on employment, you might therefore expect to see it among teenagers.

On the other hand, the chart shows that teenage unemployment can be quite volatile from month to month; as a result, analysts should be humble about what they can infer from the changes observed during a single month. Moreover, teenage unemployment has been rising rapidly throughout the downturn, which may reflect the intensity of the economic weakness rather than a series of increases in the minimum wage.

My advice: Before accepting or rejecting the idea that the recent minimum wage hike has hurt teen employment, wait to see whether any enterprising economists come up with compelling data that go beyond the month-to-month pattern. For example, it would be interesting to see comparisons among states. Some states had minimum wages above the federal level, and thus were unaffected by the recent increase.