How markets fail john cassidy pdf

HOW MARKETS FAIL THE LOGIC OF

ECONOMIC CALAMITIES

JOHN CASSIDY

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX • NEW YORK

To Lucinda, Beatrice, and Cornelia

CONTENTS

Also by the Author Copyright Dedication

Introduction

PART ONE: UTOPIAN ECONOMICS 1. Warnings Ignored and the Conventional Wisdom 2. Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand 3. Friedrich Hayek’s Telecommunications System 4. The Perfect Markets of Lausanne 5. The Mathematics of Bliss 6. The Evangelist 7. The Coin-Tossing View of Finance 8. The Triumph of Utopian Economics

PART TWO: REALITY-BASED ECONOMICS 9. The Prof and the Polar Bears

10. A Taxonomy of Failure

11. The Prisoner’s Dilemma and Rational Irrationality

12. Hidden Information and the Market for Lemons

13. Keynes’s Beauty Contest

14. The Rational Herd

15. Psychology Returns to Economics

16. Hyman Minsky and Ponzi Finance

PART THREE: THE GREAT CRUNCH

17. Greenspan Shrugs

18. The Lure of Real Estate

19. The Subprime Chain

20. In the Alphabet Soup

21. A Matter of Incentives

22. London Bridge Is Falling Down

23. Socialism in Our Time

Conclusion

Notes Acknowledgments Index

INTRODUCTION

“I am shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here!” —Claude Rains as Captain Renault in Casablanca

The old man looked drawn and gray. During the almost two decades he had spent overseeing America’s financial system, as chairman of the Federal Reserve, congressmen, cabinet ministers, even presidents had treated him with a deference that bordered on the obsequious. But on this morning—October 23, 2008—Alan Greenspan, who retired from the Fed in January 2006, was back on Capitol Hill under very different circumstances. Since the market for subprime mortgage securities collapsed, in the summer of 2007, leaving many financial institutions saddled with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of assets that couldn’t be sold at any price, the Democratic congressman Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, had held a series of televised hearings, summoning before him Wall Street CEOs, mortgage industry executives, heads of rating agencies, and regulators. Now it was Greenspan’s turn at the witness table.

Waxman and many other Americans were looking for somebody to blame. For more than a month following the sudden unraveling of Lehman Brothers, a Wall Street investment bank with substantial holdings of mortgage securities, an unprecedented panic had been roiling the financial markets. Faced with the imminent collapse of American International Group, the largest insurance company in the United States, Ben Bernanke, Greenspan’s mild-mannered successor at the Fed, had approved an emergency loan of $85 billion to the company. Federal regulators had seized Washington Mutual, a major mortgage lender, selling off most of its assets to JPMorgan Chase. Wells Fargo, the nation’s sixth-biggest bank, had rescued Wachovia, the fourth-biggest. Rumors had circulated about the soundness of other financial institutions, including Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and even the mighty Goldman Sachs.

Watching this unfold, Americans had clung to their wallets. Sales of autos, furniture, clothes, even books had collapsed, sending the economy into a tailspin. In an effort to restore stability to the financial system, Bernanke and the Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, had obtained from Congress the authority to spend up to $700 billion in taxpayers’ money on a bank bailout. Their original plan had been to

buy distressed mortgage securities from banks, but in mid-October, with the financial panic intensifying, they had changed course and opted to invest up to $250 billion directly in bank equity. This decision had calmed the markets somewhat, but the pace of events had been so frantic that few had stopped to consider what it meant: the Bush administration, after eight years of preaching the virtues of free markets, tax cuts, and small government, had turned the U.S. Treasury into part owner and the effective guarantor of every big bank in the country. Struggling to contain the crisis, it had stumbled into the most sweeping extension of state intervention in the economy since the 1930s. (Other governments, including those of Britain, Ireland, and France, had taken similar measures.)

“Dr. Greenspan,” Waxman said. “You were the longest-serving chairman of the Federal Reserve in history, and during this period of time you were, perhaps, the leading proponent of deregulation of our financial markets . . . You have been a staunch advocate for letting markets regulate themselves. Let me give you a few of your past statements.” Waxman read from his notes: “ ‘There’s nothing involved in federal regulation which makes it superior to market regulation.’ ‘There appears to be no need for government regulation of off-exchange derivative transactions.’ ‘We do not believe a public policy case exists to justify this government intervention.’ ” Greenspan, dressed, as always, in a dark suit and tie, listened quietly. His face was deeply lined. His chin sagged. He looked all of his eighty-two years. When Waxman had finished reading out Greenspan’s words, he turned to him and said: “My question for you is simple: Were you wrong?”

“Partially,” Greenspan replied. He went on: “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms . . . The problem here is something which looked to be a very solid edifice, and, indeed, a critical pillar to market competition and free markets, did break down. And I think that, as I said, shocked me. I still do not fully understand why it happened and, obviously, to the extent that I figure out what happened and why, I will change my views.”

Waxman, whose populist leanings belie the fact that he represents some of the wealthiest precincts in the country—Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Malibu—asked Greenspan whether he felt any personal responsibility for what had happened. Greenspan didn’t reply directly. Waxman returned to his notes and started reading again. “ ‘I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We have tried regulations. None meaningfully worked.’ ” Waxman looked at Greenspan. “That was your quote,” he said. “You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. Now our whole economy is paying the price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to

make decisions that you wish you had not made?” Greenspan stared through his thick spectacles. Behind his mournful gaze lurked a

savvy, self-made New Yorker. He grew up during the Great Depression in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood in upper Manhattan. After graduating from high school, he played saxophone in a Times Square swing band, and then turned to the study of economics, which was coming to be dominated by the ideas of John Maynard Keynes. After initially embracing Keynes’s suggestion that the government should actively manage the economy, Greenspan turned strongly against it. In the 1950s, he became a friend and acolyte of Ayn Rand, the libertarian philosopher and novelist, who referred to him as “the undertaker.” (In his youth, too, he was lugubrious.) He became a successful economic consultant, advising many big corporations, including Alcoa, J.P. Morgan, and U.S. Steel. In 1968, he advised Richard Nixon during his successful run for the presidency, and under Gerald Ford he acted as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. In 1987, he returned to Washington, this time permanently, to head the Fed and personify the triumph of free market economics.

Now Greenspan was on the defensive. An ideology is just a conceptual framework for dealing with reality, he said to Waxman. “To exist, you need an ideology. The question is whether it is accurate or not. What I am saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I have been very distressed by that fact.” Waxman interrupted him. “You found a flaw?” he demanded. Greenspan nodded. “I found a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak,” he said.

Waxman had elicited enough already to provide headlines for the following day’s newspapers—the Financial Times: “ ‘I made a mistake,’ admits Greenspan”—but he wasn’t finished. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right,” he said. “It was not working?”

“Precisely,” Greenspan replied. “That’s precisely the reason I was shocked. Because I had been going for forty years, or more, with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

This book traces the rise and fall of free market ideology, which, as Greenspan said, is more than a set of opinions: it is a well-developed and all-encompassing way of thinking about the world. I have tried to combine a history of ideas, a narrative of the financial crisis, and a call to arms. It is my contention that you cannot comprehend recent events without taking into account the intellectual and historical context in which they unfolded. For those who want one, the first chapter and last third of the book contain a reasonably comprehensive account of the credit crunch of 2007–2009. But unlike other books on the subject, this one doesn’t focus on the firms and characters involved: my aim is to explore the underlying economics of the

crisis and to explain how the rational pursuit of self-interest, which is the basis of free market economics, created and prolonged it.

Greenspan isn’t the only one to whom the collapse of the subprime mortgage market and ensuing global slump came as a rude shock. In the summer of 2007, the vast majority of analysts, including the Fed chairman, Bernanke, thought worries of a recession were greatly overblown. In many parts of the country, home prices had started falling, and the number of families defaulting on their mortgages was rising sharply. But among economists there was still a deep and pervasive faith in the vitality of American capitalism, and the ideals it represented.

For decades now, economists have been insisting that the best way to ensure prosperity is to scale back government involvement in the economy and let the private sector take over. In the late 1970s, when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan launched the conservative counterrevolution, the intellectuals who initially pushed this line of reasoning—Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer, Sir Keith Joseph—were widely seen as right-wing cranks. By the 1990s, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and many other progressive politicians had adopted the language of the right. They didn’t have much choice. With the collapse of communism and the ascendancy of conservative parties on both sides of the Atlantic, a positive attitude to markets became a badge of political respectability. Governments around the world dismantled welfare programs, privatized state-run firms, and deregulated industries that previously had been subjected to government supervision.

In the United States, deregulation started out modestly, with the Carter administration’s abolition of restrictions on airline routes. The policy was then expanded to many other parts of the economy, including telecommunications, media, and financial services. In 1999, Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (aka the Financial Services Modernization Act), which allowed commercial banks and investment banks to combine and form vast financial supermarkets. Lawrence Summers, a leading Harvard economist who was then serving as Treasury secretary, helped shepherd the bill through Congress. (Today, Summers is Barack Obama’s top economic adviser.)

Some proponents of financial deregulation—lobbyists for big financial firms, analysts at Washington research institutes funded by corporations, congressmen representing financial districts—were simply doing the bidding of their paymasters. Others, such as Greenspan and Summers, were sincere in their belief that Wall Street could, to a large extent, regulate itself. Financial markets, after all, are full of well- paid and highly educated people competing with one another to make money. Unlike in some other parts of the economy, no single firm can corner the market or determine the market price. In such circumstances, according to economic orthodoxy, the invisible hand of the market transmutes individual acts of selfishness into socially desirable collective outcomes.

If this argument didn’t contain an important element of truth, the conservative movement wouldn’t have enjoyed the success it did. Properly functioning markets reward hard work, innovation, and the provision of well-made, affordable products; they punish firms and workers who supply overpriced or shoddy goods. This carrot- and-stick mechanism ensures that resources are allocated to productive uses, making market economies more efficient and dynamic than other systems, such as communism and feudalism, which lack an effective incentive structure. Nothing in this book should be taken as an argument for returning to the land or reconstituting the Soviets’ Gosplan. But to claim that free markets always generate good outcomes is to fall victim to one of three illusions I identify: the illusion of harmony.

In Part I, I trace the story of what I call utopian economics, taking it from Adam Smith to Alan Greenspan. Rather than confining myself to expounding the arguments of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and their fellow members of the “Chicago School,” I have also included an account of the formal theory of the free market, which economists refer to as general equilibrium theory. Friedman’s brand of utopian economics is much better known, but it is the mathematical exposition, associated with names like Léon Walras, Vilfredo Pareto, and Kenneth Arrow, that explains the respect, nay, awe with which many professional economists view the free market. Even today, many books about economics give the impression that general equilibrium theory provides “scientific” support for the idea of the economy as a stable and self-correcting mechanism. In fact, the theory does nothing of the kind. I refer to the idea that a free market economy is sturdy and well grounded as the illusion of stability.

The period of conservative dominance culminated in the Greenspan Bubble Era, which lasted from about 1997 to 2007. During that decade, there were three separate speculative bubbles—in technology stocks, real estate, and physical commodities, such as oil. In each case, investors rushed in to make quick profits, and prices rose vertiginously before crashing. A decade ago, bubbles were widely regarded as aberrations. Some free market economists expressed skepticism about the very possibility of them occurring. Today, such arguments are rarely heard; even Greenspan, after much prevarication, has accepted the existence of the housing bubble.

Once a bubble begins, free markets can no longer be relied on to allocate resources sensibly or efficiently. By holding out the prospect of quick and effortless profits, they provide incentives for individuals and firms to act in ways that are individually rational but immensely damaging—to themselves and others. The problem of distorted incentives is, perhaps, most acute in financial markets, but it crops up throughout the economy. Markets encourage power companies to despoil the environment and cause global warming; health insurers to exclude sick people from coverage; computer makers to force customers to buy software programs they

don’t need; and CEOs to stuff their own pockets at the expense of their stockholders. These are all examples of “market failure,” a concept that recurs throughout the book and gives it its title. Market failure isn’t an intellectual curiosity. In many areas of the economy, such as health care, high technology, and finance, it is endemic.

The previous sentence might come as news to the editorial writers of The Wall Street Journal, but it isn’t saying anything controversial. For the past thirty or forty years, many of the brightest minds in economics have been busy examining how markets function when the unrealistic assumptions of the free market model don’t apply. For some reason, the economics of market failure has received a lot less attention than the economics of market success. Perhaps the word “failure” has such negative connotations that it offends the American psyche. For whatever reason, “market failure economics” never took off as a catchphrase. Some textbooks refer to the “economics of information,” or the “economics of incomplete markets.” Recently, the term “behavioral economics” has come into vogue. For myself, I prefer the phrase “reality-based economics,” which is the title of Part II.

Reality-based economics is less unified than utopian economics: because the modern economy is labyrinthine and complicated, it encompasses many different theories, each applying to a particular market failure. These theories aren’t as general as the invisible hand, but they are more useful. Once you start to think about the world in terms of some of the concepts I outline, such as the beauty contest, disaster myopia, and the market for lemons, you may well wonder how you ever got along without them.

The emergence of reality-based economics can be traced to two sources. Within orthodox economics, beginning in the late 1960s, a new generation of researchers began working on a number of topics that didn’t fit easily within the free market model, such as information problems, monopoly power, and herd behavior. At about the same time, two experimental psychologists, Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, were subjecting rational economic man—Homo economicus—to a withering critique. As only an economist would be surprised to discover, humans aren’t supercomputers: we have trouble doing sums, let alone solving the mathematical optimization problems that lie at the heart of many economic theories. When faced with complicated choices, we often rely on rules of thumb, or instinct. And we are greatly influenced by the actions of others. When the findings of Tversky, Kahneman, and other psychologists crossed over into economics, the two strands of thought came together under the rubric of “behavioral economics,” which seeks to combine the rigor of economics with the realism of psychology.

In Part II, I devote a chapter to Kahneman and Tversky, but this book shouldn’t be mistaken for another text on behavioral economics. Reality-based economics is a much broader field, a good part of which makes no departure from the axioms of

rationality, and it is also considerably older. I trace its development back to Arthur C. Pigou, an English colleague and antagonist of John Maynard Keynes who argued that many economic phenomena involve interdependencies—what you do affects my welfare, and what I do affects yours—a fact that the market often fails to take into account. After using global warming to illustrate how such “spillovers” arise, I move on to other pervasive types of market failure, involving monopoly power, strategic interactions (game theory), hidden information, uncertainty, and speculative bubbles.

A common theme of this section is that the market, through the price system, often sends the wrong signals to people. It isn’t that people are irrational: within their mental limitations, and the limitations imposed by their environment, they pursue their own interests as best they can. In Part III, The Great Crunch, I pursue this argument further and apply it to the financial crisis, using some of the conceptual tools laid out in Parts I and II. The mortgage brokers who steered hard-up working-class families toward risky subprime mortgages were reacting to monetary incentives. So were the loan officers who approved these loans, the investment bankers who cobbled them together into mortgage securities, the rating agency analysts who stamped these securities as safe investments, and the mutual fund managers who bought them.

The subprime boom represented a failure of capitalism in the presence of bounded cognition, uncertainty, hidden information, trend-following, and plentiful credit. Since all of these things are endemic to the modern economy, it was a failure of business as usual. In seeking to deny this, some conservatives have sought to put the blame entirely on the Fed, the Treasury Department, or on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two giant mortgage companies that were actually quasi-governmental organizations. (The U.S. Treasury implicitly guaranteed their debt.) But at least one prominent conservative, Richard Posner, one of the founders of the “Law and Economics” school, has recognized the truth. “The crisis is primarily, perhaps almost entirely, the consequence of decisions taken by private firms in an environment of minimal regulation,” he said in a 2008 speech. “We have seen a largely deregulated financial sector breaking and seemingly carrying much of the economy with it.”

How could such a thing happen? Bad economic policy decisions played an important role. In keeping interest rates too low for too long, Greenspan and Bernanke distorted the price signals that the market sends and created the conditions for an unprecedented housing bubble. Greed is another oft-mentioned factor; stupidity, a third. (How could those boneheads on Wall Street not have known that lending money to folks with no income, no jobs, and no assets—the infamous “NINJA” mortgage loans—was a bad idea?) In the wake of the revelations about Bernie Madoff and his multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, criminality is yet another

thing to consider. At the risk of outraging some readers, I downplay character issues. Greed is ever

present: it is what economists call a “primitive” of the capitalist model. Stupidity is equally ubiquitous, but I don’t think it played a big role here, and neither, with some obvious exceptions, did outright larceny. My perhaps controversial suggestion is that Chuck Prince, Stan O’Neal, John Thain, and the rest of the Wall Street executives whose financial blundering and multimillion-dollar pay packages have featured on the front pages during the past two years are neither sociopaths nor idiots nor felons. For the most part, they are bright, industrious, not particularly imaginative Americans who worked their way up, cultivated the right people, performed a bit better than their colleagues, and found themselves occupying a corner office during one of the great credit booms of all time. Some of these men, perhaps many of them, harbored doubts about what was happening, but the competitive environment they operated in provided them with no incentive to pull back. To the contrary, it urged them on. Between 2004 and 2007, at the height of the boom, banks and other financial companies were reaping record profits; their stock prices were hitting new highs; and their leaders were being lionized in the media.

Consider what would have happened if Prince, who served as chief executive of Citigroup from 2003 to 2007, had announced in 2005, say, that Citi was withdrawing from the subprime market because it was getting too risky. What would have been the reaction of Prince’s rivals? Would they have acknowledged the wisdom of his move and copied it? Not likely. Rather, they would have ordered their underlings to rush in and take the business Citi was leaving behind. Citi’s short-term earnings would have suffered relative to those of its peers; its stock price would have come under pressure; and Prince, who was already facing criticism because of problems in other areas of Citi’s business, would have been written off as a fuddy-duddy. In an interview with the Financial Times in July 2007, he acknowledged the constraints he was operating under. “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated,” Prince said. “But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” Four months later, Citi revealed billions of dollars in losses on bad corporate debts and distressed home mortgages. Prince resigned, his reputation in tatters.

In game theory, the dilemma that Prince faced is called the prisoner’s dilemma, and it illustrates how perfectly rational behavior on the part of competing individuals can result in bad collective outcomes. When the results of our actions depend on the behavior of others, the theory of the invisible hand doesn’t provide much guidance about the likely outcome. Until the formulation of game theory in the 1940s and 1950s, economists simply didn’t have the tools needed to figure out what happens in these instances. But we now know a lot more about how purposeful but self-defeating behavior, or what I refer to as rational irrationality, can develop

and persist. In Part III, The Great Crunch, I show how rational irrationality was central to the

housing bubble, the growth of the subprime mortgage market, and the subsequent unraveling of the financial system. Much as we might like to imagine that the last few years were an aberration, they weren’t. Credit-driven boom-and-bust cycles have plagued capitalist economies for centuries. During the past forty years, there have been 124 systemic banking crises around the world. During the 1980s, many Latin American countries experienced one. In the late 1980s and 1990s, it was the turn of a number of developed countries, including Japan, Norway, Sweden, and the United States. The collapse of the savings-and-loan industry led Congress to establish the Resolution Trust Corporation, which took over hundreds of failed thrifts. Later in the 1990s, many fast-growing Asian countries, including Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea, endured serious financial blowups. In 2007–2008, it was our turn again, and this time the crisis involved the big banks at the center of the financial system.

For years, Greenspan and other economists argued that the development of complicated, little-understood financial products, such as subprime mortgage– backed securities (MBSs), collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), and credit default swaps (CDSs), made the system safer and more efficient. The basic idea was that by putting a market price on risk and distributing it to investors willing and able to bear it, these complex securities greatly reduced the chances of a systemic crisis. But the risk-spreading proved to be illusory, and the prices that these products traded at turned out to be based on the premise that movements in financial markets followed regular patterns, that their overall distribution, if not their daily gyrations, could be foreseen—a fallacy I call the illusion of predictability, the third illusion at the heart of utopian economics. When the crisis began, the markets reacted in ways that practically none of the participants had anticipated.

In telling this story, and bringing it up to the summer of 2009, I have tried to relate recent events to long-standing intellectual debates over the performance of market systems. The last ten years can be viewed as a unique natural experiment designed to answer the questions: What happens to a twenty-first-century, financially driven economy when you deregulate it and supply it with large amounts of cheap money? Does the invisible hand ensure that everything works out for the best? This isn’t an economics textbook, but it does invite the reader to move beyond the daily headlines and think quite deeply about the way modern capitalism operates, and about the theories that have informed economic policies. We tend to think of policy as all about politics and special interests, which certainly play a role, but behind the debates in Congress, on cable television, and on the Op-Ed pages, there are also some complex and abstract ideas, which rarely get acknowledged. “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences,

are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,” John Maynard Keynes famously remarked on the final page of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”