Crime And Corruption Part 5

While the speculative rash lasts, a host of pundits, a.n.a.lysts, and scholars aim to justify it. The "new economy" is exempt from "old rules and archaic modes of thinking". Productivity has surged and established a steeper, but sustainable, trend line. Information technology is as revolutionary as electricity. No, more than electricity. Stock valuations are reasonable. The Dow is on its way to 33,000. People want to believe these "objective, disinterested a.n.a.lyses" from "experts".

Investments by households are only one of the engines of this first kind of a.s.set bubbles. A lot of the money that pours into pyramid schemes and stock exchange booms is laundered, the fruits of illicit pursuits. The laundering of tax-evaded money or the proceeds of criminal activities, mainly drugs, is effected through regular banking channels. The money changes ownership a few times to obscure its trail and the ident.i.ties of the true owners.

Many offsh.o.r.e banks manage shady investment ploys. They maintain two sets of books. The "public" or "cooked" set is made available to the authorities - the tax administration, bank supervision, deposit insurance, law enforcement agencies, and securities and exchange commission. The true record is kept in the second, inaccessible, set of files.

This second set of accounts reflects reality: who deposited how much, when and subject to which conditions - and who borrowed what, when and subject to what terms. These arrangements are so stealthy and convoluted that sometimes even the shareholders of the bank lose track of its activities and misapprehend its real situation.

Unscrupulous management and staff sometimes take advantage of the situation. Embezzlement, abuse of authority, mysterious trades, misuse of funds are more widespread than acknowledged.

The thunderous disintegration of the Bank for Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) in London in 1991 revealed that, for the better part of a decade, the executives and employees of this penumbral inst.i.tution were busy stealing and misappropriating $10 billion. The Bank of England's supervision department failed to spot the rot on time. Depositors were - partially - compensated by the main shareholder of the bank, an Arab sheikh. The story repeated itself with Nick Leeson and his unauthorized disastrous trades which brought down the venerable and veteran Barings Bank in 1995.

The combination of black money, shoddy financial controls, shady bank accounts and shredded doc.u.ments renders a true account of the cash flows and damages in such cases all but impossible. There is no telling what were the contributions of drug barons, American off- sh.o.r.e corporations, or European and j.a.panese tax-evaders - channeled precisely through such inst.i.tutions - to the stratospheric rise in Wall-Street in the last few years.

But there is another - potentially the most pernicious - type of a.s.set bubble. When financial inst.i.tutions lend to the unworthy but the politically well-connected, to cronies, and family members of influential politicians - they often end up fostering a bubble.

South Korean chaebols, j.a.panese keiretsu, as well as American conglomerates frequently used these cheap funds to prop up their stock or to invest in real estate, driving prices up in both markets artificially.

Moreover, despite decades of bitter experiences - from Mexico in 1982 to Asia in 1997 and Russia in 1998 - financial inst.i.tutions still bow to fads and fashions. They act herd-like in conformity with "lending trends". They shift a.s.sets to garner the highest yields in the shortest possible period of time. In this respect, they are not very different from investors in pyramid investment schemes.

II. Case Study - The Savings and Loans a.s.sociations Bailout Also published by United Press International (UPI) a.s.set bubbles - in the stock exchange, in the real estate or the commodity markets - invariably burst and often lead to banking crises. One such calamity struck the USA in 1986-1989. It is instructive to study the decisive reaction of the administration and Congress alike. They tackled both the ensuing liquidity crunch and the structural flaws exposed by the crisis with tenacity and skill.

Compare this to the lackl.u.s.ter and hesitant tentativeness of the current lot. True, the crisis - the result of a speculative bubble - concerned the banking and real estate markets rather than the capital markets. But the similarities are there.

The savings and loans a.s.sociation, or the thrift, was a strange banking hybrid, very much akin to the building society in Britain.

It was allowed to take in deposits but was really merely a mortgage bank. The Depository Inst.i.tutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980 forced S&L's to achieve interest parity with commercial banks, thus eliminating the interest ceiling on deposits which they enjoyed hitherto.

But it still allowed them only very limited entry into commercial and consumer lending and trust services. Thus, these inst.i.tutions were heavily exposed to the vicissitudes of the residential real estate markets in their respective regions. Every normal cyclical slump in property values or regional economic shock - e.g., a plunge in commodity prices - affected them disproportionately.

Interest rate volatility created a mismatch between the a.s.sets of these a.s.sociations and their liabilities. The negative spread between their cost of funds and the yield of their a.s.sets - eroded their operating margins. The 1982 Garn-St. Germain Depository Inst.i.tutions Act encouraged thrifts to convert from mutual - i.e., depositor-owned - a.s.sociations to stock companies, allowing them to tap the capital markets in order to enhance their faltering net worth.

But this was too little and too late. The S&L's were rendered unable to further support the price of real estate by rolling over old credits, refinancing residential equity, and underwriting development projects. Endemic corruption and mismanagement exacerbated the ruin. The bubble burst.

Hundreds of thousands of depositors scrambled to withdraw their funds and hundreds of savings and loans a.s.sociation (out of a total of more than 3,000) became insolvent instantly, unable to pay their depositors. They were besieged by angry - at times, violent - clients who lost their life savings.

The illiquidity spread like fire. As inst.i.tutions closed their gates, one by one, they left in their wake major financial upheavals, wrecked businesses and homeowners, and devastated communities. At one point, the contagion threatened the stability of the entire banking system.

The Federal Savings and Loans Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) - which insured the deposits in the savings and loans a.s.sociations - was no longer able to meet the claims and, effectively, went bankrupt.

Though the obligations of the FSLIC were never guaranteed by the Treasury, it was widely perceived to be an arm of the federal government. The public was shocked. The crisis acquired a political dimension.

A hasty $300 billion bailout package was arranged to inject liquidity into the shriveling system through a special agency, the FHFB. The supervision of the banks was subtracted from the Federal Reserve. The role of the the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was greatly expanded.

Prior to 1989, savings and loans were insured by the now-defunct FSLIC. The FDIC insured only banks. Congress had to eliminate FSLIC and place the insurance of thrifts under FDIC. The FDIC kept the Bank Insurance Fund (BIF) separate from the Savings a.s.sociations Insurance Fund (SAIF), to confine the ripple effect of the meltdown.

The FDIC is designed to be independent. Its money comes from premiums and earnings of the two insurance funds, not from Congressional appropriations. Its board of directors has full authority to run the agency.

The board obeys the law, not political masters. The FDIC has a preemptive role. It regulates banks and savings and loans with the aim of avoiding insurance claims by depositors.

When an inst.i.tution becomes unsound, the FDIC can either sh.o.r.e it up with loans or take it over. If it does the latter, it can run it and then sell it as a going concern, or close it, pay off the depositors and try to collect the loans. At times, the FDIC ends up owning collateral and trying to sell it.

Another outcome of the scandal was the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC). Many savings and loans were treated as "special risk" and placed under the jurisdiction of the RTC until August 1992. The RTC operated and sold these inst.i.tutions - or paid off the depositors and closed them. A new government corporation (Resolution Fund Corporation, RefCorp) issued federally guaranteed bailout bonds whose proceeds were used to finance the RTC until 1996.

The Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) was also established in 1989 to replace the dismantled Federal Home Loan Board (FHLB) in supervising savings and loans. OTS is a unit within the Treasury Department, but law and custom make it practically an independent agency.

The Federal Housing Finance Board (FHFB) regulates the savings establishments for liquidity. It provides lines of credit from twelve regional Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLB). Those banks and the thrifts make up the Federal Home Loan Bank System (FHLBS). FHFB gets its funds from the System and is independent of supervision by the executive branch.

Thus a clear, streamlined, and powerful regulatory mechanism was put in place. Banks and savings and loans abused the confusing overlaps in authority and regulation among numerous government agencies. Not one regulator possessed a full and truthful picture. Following the reforms, it all became clearer: insurance was the FDIC's job, the OTS provided supervision, and liquidity was monitored and imparted by the FHLB.

Healthy thrifts were coaxed and cajoled to purchase less st.u.r.dy ones. This weakened their balance sheets considerably and the government reneged on its promises to allow them to amortize the goodwill element of the purchase over 40 years. Still, there were 2,898 thrifts in 1989. Six years later, their number shrank to 1,612 and it stands now at less than 1,000. The consolidated inst.i.tutions are bigger, stronger, and better capitalized.

Later on, Congress demanded that thrifts obtain a bank charter by 1998. This was not too onerous for most of them. At the height of the crisis the ratio of their combined equity to their combined a.s.sets was less than 1%. But in 1994 it reached almost 10% and remained there ever since.

This remarkable turnaround was the result of serendipity as much as careful planning. Interest rate spreads became highly positive. In a cla.s.sic arbitrage, savings and loans paid low interest on deposits and invested the money in high yielding government and corporate bonds. The prolonged equity bull market allowed thrifts to float new stock at exorbitant prices.

As the juridical relics of the Great Depression - chiefly amongst them, the Gla.s.s-Steagall Act - were repealed, banks were liberated to enter new markets, offer new financial instruments, and spread throughout the USA. Product and geographical diversification led to enhanced financial health.

But the very fact that S&L's were poised to exploit these opportunities is a tribute to politicians and regulators alike - though except for setting the general tone of urgency and resolution, the relative absence of political intervention in the handling of the crisis is notable. It was managed by the autonomous, able, utterly professional, largely a-political Federal Reserve. The political cla.s.s provided the professionals with the tools they needed to do the job. This mode of collaboration may well be the most important lesson of this crisis.

III. Case Study - Wall Street, October 1929 Also published by United Press International (UPI) Claud c.o.c.kburn, writing for the "Times of London" from New-York, described the irrational exuberance that gripped the nation just prior to the Great Depression.

As Europe wallowed in post-war malaise, America seemed to have discovered a new economy, the secret of uninterrupted growth and prosperity, the fount of transforming technology: "The atmosphere of the great boom was savagely exciting, but there were times when a person with my European background felt alarmingly lonely. He would have liked to believe, as these people believed, in the eternal upswing of the big bull market or else to meet just one person with whom he might discuss some general doubts without being regarded as an imbecile or a person of deliberately evil intent?some kind of anarchist, perhaps."

The greatest a.n.a.lysts with the most impeccable credentials and track records failed to predict the forthcoming crash and the unprecedented economic depression that followed it. Irving Fisher, a preeminent economist, who, according to his biographer-son, Irving Norton Fisher, lost the equivalent of $140 million in today's money in the crash, made a series of soothing predictions. On October 22 he uttered these avuncular statements: "Quotations have not caught up with real values as yet ... (There is) no cause for a slump ...

The market has not been inflated but merely readjusted..."

Even as the market convulsed on Black Thursday, October 24, 1929 and on Black Tuesday, October 29 - the New York Times wrote: "Rally at close cheers brokers, bankers optimistic".

In an editorial on October 26, it blasted rabid speculators and compliant a.n.a.lysts: ''We shall hear considerably less in the future of those newly invented conceptions of finance which revised the principles of political economy with a view solely to fitting the stock market's vagaries.'' But it ended thus: "(The Federal Reserve has) insured the soundness of the business situation when the speculative markets went on the rocks.''

Compare this to Alan Greenspan Congressional testimony this summer: "While bubbles that burst are scarcely benign, the consequences need not be catastrophic for the economy ... (The Depression was brought on by) ensuing failures of policy".

Investors, their equity leveraged with bank and broker loans, crowded into stocks of exciting "new technologies", such as the radio and ma.s.s electrification. The bull market - especially in issues of public utilities - was fueled by "mergers, new groupings, combinations and good earnings" and by corporate purchasing for "employee stock funds".

Cautionary voices - such as Paul Warburg, the influential banker, Roger Babson, the "Prophet of Loss" and Alexander Noyes, the eternal Ca.s.sandra from the New York Times - were derided. The number of brokerage accounts doubled between March 1927 and March 1929.

When the market corrected by 8 percent between March 18-27 - following a Fed induced credit crunch and a series of mysterious closed-door sessions of the Fed's board - bankers rushed in. The New York Times reported: ''Responsible bankers agree that stocks should now be supported, having reached a level that makes them attractive.'' By August, the market was up 35 percent on its March lows. But it reached a peak on September 3 and it was downhill since then.

On October 19, five days before "Black Thursday", Business Week published this sanguine prognosis: "Now, of course, the crucial weaknesses of such periods -- price inflation, heavy inventories, over-extension of commercial credit -- are totally absent. The security market seems to be suffering only an attack of stock indigestion... There is additional rea.s.surance in the fact that, should business show any further signs of fatigue, the banking system is in a good position now to administer any needed credit tonic from its excellent Reserve supply."

The crash unfolded gradually. Black Thursday actually ended with an inspiring rally. Friday and Sat.u.r.day - trading ceased only on Sundays - witnessed an upswing followed by mild profit taking. The market dropped 12.8 percent on Monday, with Winston Churchill watching from the visitors' gallery - incurring a loss of $10-14 billion.

The Wall Street Journal warned naive investors: "Many are looking for technical corrective reactions from time to time, but do not expect these to disturb the upward trend for any prolonged period."

The market plummeted another 11.7 percent the next day - though trading ended with an impressive rally from the lows. October 31 was a good day with a "vigorous, buoyant rally from bell to bell". Even Rockefeller joined the myriad buyers. Shares soared. It seemed that the worst was over.

The New York Times was optimistic: "It is thought that stocks will become stabilized at their actual worth levels, some higher and some lower than the present ones, and that the selling prices will be guided in the immediate future by the worth of each particular security, based on its dividend record, earnings ability and prospects. Little is heard in Wall Street these days about 'putting stocks up.'"

But it was not long before irate customers began blaming their stupendous losses on advice they received from their brokers. Alec Wilder, a songwriter in New York in 1929, interviewed by Stud Terkel in "Hard Times" four decades later, described this typical exchange with his money manager: "I knew something was terribly wrong because I heard bellboys, everybody, talking about the stock market. About six weeks before the Wall Street Crash, I persuaded my mother in Rochester to let me talk to our family adviser. I wanted to sell stock which had been left me by my father. He got very sentimental: 'Oh your father wouldn't have liked you to do that.' He was so persuasive, I said O.K. I could have sold it for $160,000. Four years later, I sold it for $4,000."

Exhausted and numb from days of hectic trading and back office operations, the brokerage houses pressured the stock exchange to declare a two day trading holiday. Exchanges around North America followed suit.

At first, the Fed refused to reduce the discount rate. "(There) was no change in financial conditions which the board thought called for its action." - though it did inject liquidity into the money market by purchasing government bonds. Then, it partially succ.u.mbed and reduced the New York discount rate, which, curiously, was 1 percent above the other Fed districts - by 1 percent. This was too little and too late. The market never recovered after November 1. Despite further reductions in the discount rate to 4 percent, it shed a whopping 89 percent in nominal terms when it hit bottom three years later.

Everyone was duped. The rich were impoverished overnight. Small time margin traders - the forerunners of today's day traders - lost their shirts and much else besides. The New York Times: "Yesterday's market crash was one which largely affected rich men, inst.i.tutions, investment trusts and others who partic.i.p.ate in the market on a broad and intelligent scale. It was not the margin traders who were caught in the rush to sell, but the rich men of the country who are able to swing blocks of 5,000, 10,000, up to 100,000 shares of high-priced stocks. They went overboard with no more consideration than the little trader who was swept out on the first day of the market's upheaval, whose prices, even at their lowest of last Thursday, now look high by comparison ...

To most of those who have been in the market it is all the more awe- inspiring because their financial history is limited to bull markets."

Overseas - mainly European - selling was an important factor. Some conspiracy theorists, such as Webster Tarpley in his "British Financial Warfare", supported by contemporary reporting by the likes of "The Economist", went as far as writing: "When this Wall Street Bubble had reached gargantuan proportions in the autumn of 1929, (Lord) Montagu Norman (governor of the Bank of England 1920-1944) sharply (upped) the British bank rate, repatriating British hot money, and pulling the rug out from under the Wall Street speculators, thus deliberately and consciously imploding the US markets. This caused a violent depression in the United States and some other countries, with the collapse of financial markets and the contraction of production and employment.

In 1929, Norman engineered a collapse by puncturing the bubble."

The crash was, in large part, a reaction to a sharp reversal, starting in 1928, of the reflationary, "cheap money", policies of the Fed intended, as Adolph Miller of the Fed's Board of Governors told a Senate committee, "to bring down money rates, the call rate among them, because of the international importance the call rate had come to acquire. The purpose was to start an outflow of gold - to reverse the previous inflow of gold into this country (back to Britain)." But the Fed had already lost control of the speculative rush.

The crash of 1929 was not without its Enrons and World.com's.

Clarence Hatry and his a.s.sociates admitted to forging the accounts of their investment group to show a fake net worth of $24 million British pounds - rather than the true picture of 19 billion in liabilities. This led to forced liquidation of Wall Street positions by harried British financiers.

The collapse of Middle West Utilities, run by the energy tyc.o.o.n, Samuel Insull, exposed a web of offsh.o.r.e holding companies whose only purpose was to hide losses and disguise leverage. The former president of NYSE, Richard Whitney was arrested for larceny.

a.n.a.lysts and commentators thought of the stock exchange as decoupled from the real economy. Only one tenth of the population was invested - compared to 40 percent today. "The World" wrote, with more than a bit of Schadenfreude: "The country has not suffered a catastrophe ... The American people ... has been gambling largely with the surplus of its astonishing prosperity."

"The Daily News" concurred: "The sagging of the stocks has not destroyed a single factory, wiped out a single farm or city lot or real estate development, decreased the productive powers of a single workman or machine in the United States." In Louisville, the "Herald Post" commented sagely: "While Wall Street was getting rid of its weak holder to their own most drastic punishment, grain was stronger. That will go to the credit side of the national prosperity and help replace that buying power which some fear has been gravely impaired."

During the Coolidge presidency, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, "stock dividends rose by 108 percent, corporate profits by 76 percent, and wages by 33 percent. In 1929, 4,455,100 pa.s.senger cars were sold by American factories, one for every 27 members of the population, a record that was not broken until 1950.

Productivity was the key to America's economic growth. Because of improvements in technology, overall labour costs declined by nearly 10 percent, even though the wages of individual workers rose."

Jude Waninski adds in his tome "The Way the World Works" that "between 1921 and 1929, GNP grew to $103.1 billion from $69.6 billion. And because prices were falling, real output increased even faster." Tax rates were sharply reduced.

John Kenneth Galbraith noted these data in his seminal "The Great Crash": "Between 1925 and 1929, the number of manufacturing establishments increased from 183,900 to 206,700; the value of their output rose from $60.8 billions to $68 billions. The Federal Reserve index of industrial production which had averaged only 67 in 1921 ... had risen to 110 by July 1928, and it reached 126 in June 1929 ... (but the American people) were also displaying an inordinate desire to get rich quickly with a minimum of physical effort."

Personal borrowing for consumption peaked in 1928 - though the administration, unlike today, maintained twin fiscal and current account surpluses and the USA was a large net creditor.

Charles Kettering, head of the research division of General Motors described consumeritis thus, just days before the crash: ?The key to economic prosperity is the organized creation of dissatisfaction.?

Inequality skyrocketed. While output per man-hour shot up by 32 percent between 1923 and 1929, wages crept up only 8 percent. In 1929, the top 0.1 percent of the population earned as much as the bottom 42 percent. Business-friendly administrations reduced by 70 percent the exorbitant taxes paid by those with an income of more than $1 million. But in the summer of 1929, businesses reported sharp increases in inventories. It was the beginning of the end.

Were stocks overvalued prior to the crash? Did all stocks collapse indiscriminately? Not so. Even at the height of the panic, investors remained conscious of real values. On November 3, 1929 the shares of American Can, General Electric, Westinghouse and Anaconda Copper were still substantially higher than on March 3, 1928.

John Campbell and Robert Shiller, author of "Irrational Exuberance", calculated, in a joint paper t.i.tled "Valuation Ratios and the Lon- Run Market Outlook: An Update" posted on Yale University' s Web Site, that share prices divided by a moving average of 10 years worth of earnings reached 28 just prior to the crash. Contrast this with 45 on March 2000.

In an NBER working paper published December 2001 and tellingly t.i.tled "The Stock Market Crash of 1929 - Irving Fisher was Right", Ellen McGrattan and Edward Prescott boldly claim:

"We find that the stock market in 1929 did not crash because the market was overvalued. In fact, the evidence strongly suggests that stocks were undervalued, even at their 1929 peak."