Recession

This is the fifth column in a series by Bruce Jentleson, Professor at Duke University, and Jay Pelosky, Principal of J2Z Advisory. It originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

Over the past century, the United States has experienced two large-scale financial crises: the Great Depression of 1929 and the recent Great Recession, which began in 2007. These periods also represented peaks in the share of U.S. income collected by the top 1 percent of earners. In 1929, the top 1 percent accrued over 22 percent of total national income, including capital gains – a share several percentage points above its historical average, and one that would not be seen again until 2006. Notably, the number of bank failures in the U.S.

Some call this moment the Great Recession. As the hardship has lingered, others have begun calling it the Little Depression. But equating the hard times of the 1930s with the hard times of today is mostly overblown rhetoric. Or is it?

On the surface, the comparisons are obvious: a period of great wealth and exuberance, followed by a stock market crash. After the crash, widespread economic pain. Millions of people out of work, thousands of homes lost. Families going hungry.

This presentation was part of the World Economic Roundtable.  A summary of the Roundtable session can be read here.

This presentation was part of the World Economic Roundtable.  A summary of the Roundtable session can be read here.

At the last World Economic Roundtable, Michael Kumhof, Deputy Division Chief of the Modeling Division of the International Monetary Fund, and Raymond Torres, Director of the International Institute for Labour Studies of the International Labour Organization, came to discuss the relationship between inequality and financial crises. 

By historical measures, there’s really not all that much to be angry about. Since 1981, the proportion of the developing world living in extreme poverty has fallen from 50 percent to less than 20 percent, according to the United Nations. Infant mortality is down across the board; the number of girls in school is up. Terrorists and tyrants get their comeuppance with toe-tapping regularity. The chances of dying in war have never been lower. In 2011, the 7 billionth person was born into a world that’s richer, healthier, and safer than at any time in history.

I missed this on my way out of town, but I wanted to steer people to this article by Joe Nocera of the New York Times.

He writes about the workings of an ideologically-driven campaign to lay the entire financial crisis at the feet of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored entities charged with boosting mortgage lending. Yes, mistakes and miscalculations were made by these GSEs and we certainly should be asking what we can do differently, but in my opinion Nocera’s diagnosis is spot on. The subprime mortgage market had already exploded before Fannie and Freddie began purchasing these loans in earnest. In fact, they were actually late to the game. Once on the field, they began buying up these loans not to promote low- and moderate –income homeownership but to chase market share. They exacerbated the problem but hardly caused it. They should have stayed on the sidelines.

It was the drive for market share—and not the requirement to meet affordable housing mandates—that moved Fannie and Freddie into the already exploding subprime market. Nocera paints the picture of a textbook operation to muddy the waters of understanding, with staring roles played by the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the American Enterprise Institute. He calls it “The Big Lie” and it depends on an echo chamber to advance the thesis that government rather than actors in the financial sector are to blame for the advent of the financial crisis and its aftermath.

What to do about Fannie and Freddie remains an open question. The Obama administration has sketched out a set of potential options but (for some reason) doesn’t believe they can advance a reasonable, bipartisan discussion on the Hill. That’s too bad because there are important issues to address, such as how to help aspiring families become responsible homeowners in the future get out from under the debilitating debt of mortgages that exceed the value of thier homes. I wholeheartedly agree with Nocera’s conclusion:

Three years after the financial crisis, the country would be well served by a real debate about the role of government in housing. Should the government be helping low- and moderate-income Americans own their own homes? If so, is there an acceptable level of risk? If not, how do we recast the American dream?

To have that debate, though, we need a clear understanding of what role the government’s affordable-housing goals did — and did not — play in the crisis. And that is impossible as long as the Big Lie holds sway.

--This is a column by Bruce Jentleson, Professor at Duke University, and Jay Pelosky, Principal of J2Z Advisory. It originally appeared on the Huffington Post.

The policy vs markets debate makes for good rhetoric but lousy results. It's not if government should play a role in the economy. It's how best to do it.

This week, renowned blogger Matthew Yglesias argued that moving away from a physical currency would make the US economy recession proof. He points out that a time-tested approach to ending recessions is cutting interest rates, since "when rates fall, business investment, homebuilding, and durable goods purchases all rise and next thing you know everybody’s back to work." The problem is that currently the US has interest rates are already near one percent, and any drop below zero would lead "people [to] just withdraw money and store it in shoeboxes." That is, unless taking cash out of the bank was not an option. In this case, argues Yglesias, a negative interest rate would incentivize those with money in the bank to invest, make purchases and spend the country out of recession as they have in times past.