The Great Deformation (71 page)

During the year which followed this unaccountable utterance, the US banking system recorded more than $100 billion in losses. Kroszner's “years of robust profits” were effectively wiped out, owing to the fact that Wall Street had been booking phantom gains from underwriting and from trading loans, securities, and derivatives which were the progeny of the Fed's bubble finance. So, if the monetary planners in the Eccles Building did not have a clue that the financial system was built on a house of cards even at the eleventh hour in the fall of 2007, it is not surprising that they had no clue as the bubbles evolved each step along the way.

THE GREAT MODERATION: A DELUSION FOR THE AGES

The monetary politburo was blind to the vast deformations it was unleashing on the American economy. In the aftermath of the dot-com crash the Fed was just plain petrified of another stock market hissy fit. As indicated, it therefore launched an orgy of interest rate reductions that had no parallel in monetary history, and was profoundly irrational in light of the massive bubbles it was bound to produce.

Thus, in November 2000 the Federal fund rate had stood at 6.5 percent. That was not unreasonable—given the prevailing 2–3 percent inflation and the desperate need to revive the faltering domestic savings rate. As has been seen, however, the FOMC frantically hacked away with non-stop interest rate cuts of 25 and 50 basis points over the next 30 months until after 17 separate cuts the funds rate reached a rock bottom 1.0 percent in June 2003.

In a flight of desperate interest rate cutting, the Fed had thus gone all-in with its “wealth effects” theory of prosperity management. In due course the stock market did have a rebound back into the bubble zone but the route to this dubious, short-lived success wreaked mayhem upon Main Street all along the way.

It caused a fixed asset investment boom, but only for domestic real estate—since the grim reaper of the “China price” warded investors away from anything related to the production of tradable goods. It caused a Main Street consumption boom, but mainly from mortgage equity withdrawal, or MEW—not income honestly earned.

It also spurred a huge increase in retail sales of durable goods, but on the margin the source of increased supply was almost entirely East Asia. It generated a surging demand for consumer services ranging from real estate brokerage to yoga classes and personal shoppers, but the demand for these services was mainly financed from transient sources like home ATM borrowings and stock market gains, rather than a permanent increase in real incomes and capacity to spend.

Needless to say, as the effects of the Fed's poisonously low interest rates twisted and turned through the Main Street economy, they did cause the standard measures of economic activity to tick upward, thereby perpetuating the illusion of economic recovery and growth. Meeting after meeting, year upon year, the FOMC minutes noted the improved indicators while congratulating itself for the policy astuteness that had purportedly fostered these pleasing macroeconomic results.

The extent of its blind hubris was starkly evident when the leader of these prosperity howlers famously delivered a speech in February 2004 modestly titled “The Great Moderation.” In this statement the future Fed chairman, who would preside over the most brutal drop in employment and output since the 1930s, noted the “remarkable decline in the variability of both output and inflation” over the prior two decades. Not surprisingly, Bernanke insisted that “improved performance of macroeconomic policies, particularly monetary policy,” should be given the credit for this purported golden age of steady, unending growth.

In fact, goods inflation had been pinned down to the global economy's floorboard by the currency-pegging central banks of East Asia and the tens of millions of rural serfs who flooded out of the rice paddies and into the export factories of East China after 1990. By contrast, asset-price inflation had gotten more cyclically violent than at any time since 1929. That seminal fact of life would have been obvious to Bernanke, had he bothered to think about the implications of the two bruising stock market crashes (1987 and 2000) which had occurred precisely during the period of the Great Moderation.

Keynesian models recognize debt only when it shows up as current-period spending rather than as a permanent entry on the balance sheet, perhaps owing to the fact that Keynesian models do not even have a balance sheet. Peering through these Keynesian blinders, therefore, Bernanke blotted out a huge chunk of worrisome macroeconomic reality in divining his Great Moderation.

Even more importantly, the “moderation” in the business cycle alleged by Bernanke was an utter illusion. It resulted from the arithmetic of GDP computation under conditions of massive credit growth. Specifically, the $25 trillion credit bubble that the Fed was busy inflating flowed right into GDP. It showed up as incremental aggregate demand, mainly in the form of personal consumption expenditures, but also in the investment accounts for residential and commercial real estate.

But this was credit-money growth, not honest organic expansion. Had the GDP reports been constructed by double-entry bookkeepers, they would have offset some or all of these debt-fueled spending gains with a debit for future credit losses and busted investments. At the end of the day, the Great Moderation, like the Roman Empire, depended upon the spending power of exogenously obtained loot. In this case, it came from the freshly minted credit arising from the Wall Street machinery of leverage and speculation that the Fed so assiduously attended and enabled.

CHAPTER 18

 

T
HE COLLAPSE OF THREE SEPARATE $5 TRILLION FINANCIAL BUBBLES
in less than a decade attested to the deeply impaired condition of the nation's capital markets. Yet the spectacular round-trips of the S&P 500 and Case–Shiller housing price index were not the only progeny of the Fed's bubble finance. There was actually an even greater deformation lurking beneath these wild rides; namely, the aberrant journey of the giant government bond market which forms the foundation of Wall Street and drives the financial rhythms by which it operates.

During the 1970s the financial system, in the aftermath of Camp David, endured the near-destruction of the government bond market. But then for the following thirty years it was favored with continuously rising bond prices constituting not only the greatest uninterrupted market rally in financial history, but also the greatest deformation.

It instilled in Wall Street the utterly false lesson that fortunes can be made in the carry trade, an illusion that is possible only when the Treasury bond price keeps rising, rising, and rising. Yet under a régime of sound money it is not possible for public debt to appreciate for long stretches of time, and most certainly not for thirty years.

THE GLORIOUS REIGN OF THE BRITISH CONSOL: GOVERNMENT BONDS IN THE ERA OF SOUND MONEY

This truth is illustrated by the glorious reign of the 3 percent British consol, a perpetual bond of the British government. First issued in 1757, it remained in circulation until 1888. Other than temporary wartime fluctuations, the price of the 3 percent consol did not change for 131 years. Accordingly, no punter got rich riding the consol on leverage, yet no saver
lost his shirt by owning it for its yield. The consol was a sound public bond denominated and payable in sound money.

After August 1971, by contrast, the US Treasury bond became the “anti-consol”; that is, the poker chip of speculators, not the solid redoubt of savers. The thing to do was to short it during the 1970s when the Great Inflation crushed its value; own it during the 1980s and 1990s when disinflation lifted its price; and rent it after December 2000 when well-telegraphed bond-buying campaigns by the central bank made holding the bond a front runner's dream.

The crucial difference between the stable era of the consol and the volatile era of the anti-consol, of course, is the monetary standard. The gold content of the pound sterling did not change for 131 years; in fact, not for 212 years. By contrast, for the last forty years the dollar has had no content at all, aside from the whim of the FOMC. Needless to say, what is implicated here is far more than “fun facts” about the classical gold standard.

The era of the anti-consol demonstrates that capital markets eventually lose their capacity to honestly price securities under a régime of unsound money; they end up dancing to the tune of the central bank; that is, pricing the trading value of financial assets based on expected central bank interventions, not the intrinsic value of their cash flows, rights, and risks.

This profound deformation of capital markets during the last forty years shaped the evolution of present-day Wall Street. These financial institutions had a near-death experience during the Great Inflation, when the value of stock and bond inventories was pummeled and activity rates in brokerage, underwriting, and mergers and acquisitions (M&A) advisory withered. But Wall Street was born again when Paul Volcker broke the back of wage and commodity inflation, thereby triggering the thirty-year ascent of the Treasury bond.

During this long upward march, Wall Street progressively learned that the Fed was operating much more than a disinflation cycle that would run its course. Instead, it had set in motion an asset inflation scheme that it would nurture and backstop at all hazards. The thing to do, therefore, was to accumulate financial assets, fund them with short-term debt, and harvest the positive spread.

More or less continuously over thirty years, bond prices rose and the cost of carry in the wholesale money markets fell. At length, this fundamental yield curve arbitrage, along with a plethora of variations on that trade, generated stupendous profits.

Some profits filtered down to the bottom line of Wall Street profit and loss statements (P&Ls), but much of the windfall was corseted in the salary
and bonus accounts of the major Wall Street houses. In either case, the signal was unmistakable: the Fed's deformation of the financial markets was turning Wall Street balance sheets into money machines: the bigger the balance sheet, the better the money.

WHEN WALL STREET TRADING DESKS AWOKE IN SPECULATORS' HEAVEN

The crucial first step in fostering the carry trade bonanza was bringing money market interest rates down to ground level after they had erupted into double digits during the Great Inflation. At the peak of the Volcker monetary crunch in mid-1981, open market commercial paper rates reached 16 percent before receding to a 6–8 percent range during the following decade and a half. In this period the Fed steadily reduced the trend levels of short-term rates, but usually with a decent regard for the state of the business cycle and the rate of progress on disinflation.

An inflection point was reached at the time of the dot-com bust, however, and this cautionary approach was abruptly jettisoned. Indeed, soon after the Fed commenced its manic interest rate–cutting campaign in December 2000, Wall Street trading desks thought they had died and gone to speculator's heaven.

The interest rate on AA-rated financial commercial paper, the benchmark for Wall Street wholesale funding, then stood at 6.5 percent. By the end of the following year, unsecured financial paper rates had dropped to 4 percent and then to 2 percent by the end of 2002 and eventually to 1 percent by the spring of 2003. Moreover, repo financing, which was secured by collateral, dropped even more sharply.

In the face of an 85 percent plunge in Wall Street's cost of production—that is, the cost of funding its assets—there was hardly an asset class imaginable that did not generate gushers of positive cash flow. When financed with this 1 percent wholesale money, the much bigger yields of Treasuries, corporates, GSEs, real estate loans, junk bonds, and junk mortgages all produced fat profit spreads. Indeed, given standard leverage in excess of 90 percent on most of these asset classes, the huge “spread” gifted to Wall Street by the Fed was equivalent to handing dealers their very own printing press.

HOW FIVE WALL STREET “INVESTMENT BANKS” GREW 200X

It thus happened that the Keynesian prosperity managers at the Fed took aim at levitating the GDP, but instead unleashed the assembled genius of Wall Street in hot pursuit of balance sheet growth at all hazards. The most spectacular case was the five so-called investment banking houses—
Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman, and Bear Stearns. On the eve of the 2008 crisis, these five Wall Street houses had combined balance sheet footings of $5 trillion, meaning that their girth exceeded the GDP of Japan at the time.

As recently as 1998, however, the combined balance sheet of these firms or their predecessors was only $1 trillion. And back in 1980, before these “investment banking” houses were reborn as hedge funds, their footings had totaled only a few ten billions. The five behemoths thus started their thirty-year ride on the rising bond market when they were less than 1 percent of the size where they ended.

As previously indicated, there was a good reason for this historic modesty. The old-time Wall Street businesses of securities underwriting, merger advisory, and stock brokerage didn't require much capital; they made money providing value-added financial services, not by scalping the yield curve and trading swaps.

Furthermore, the devastation of financial markets by the Great Inflation so sharply diminished demand for investment banking services that Wall Street had been virtually drawn and quartered. Two-thirds of all firms doing business in August 1971 had been carried off the field or merged by the time Chairman Volcker had finished his bleeding cure. So, when the market hit its July 1982 bottom, Wall Street didn't have much of a balance sheet or much of a business.