Only a Roosevelt-Scale Counterrevolution Can Prevent Great Depression II

By Robert Kuttner, The American Prospect. Posted September 18, 2008.

The current carnage on Wall Street, with dire spillover effects on Main Street, is the result of a failed ideology -- the idea that financial markets could regulate themselves. Serial deregulation fed on itself. Deliberate repeal of regulations became entangled with failure to carry out laws still on the books. Corruption mingled with simple incompetence. And though the ideology was largely Republican, it was abetted by Wall Street Democrats.

Why regulate?

As we have seen ever since the sub-prime market blew up in the summer of 2007, government cannot stand by when a financial crash threatens to turn into a general depression -- even a government like the Bush administration that fervently believes in free markets. But if government must act to contain wider damage when large banks fail, then it is obliged to act to prevent damage from occurring in the first place. Otherwise, the result is what economists term "moral hazard"-- an invitation to take excessive risks.

Government, under Franklin Roosevelt, got serious about regulating financial markets after the first cycle of financial bubble and economic ruin in the 1920s. Then, as now, the abuses were complex in their detail but very simple in their essence. They included the sale of complex securities packaged in deceptive and misleading ways; far too much borrowing to finance speculative investments; and gross conflicts of interest on the part of insiders who stood to profit from flim-flams. When the speculative bubble burst in 1929, sellers overwhelmed buyers, many investors were wiped out, and the system of credit contracted, choking the rest of the economy.

In the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration acted to prevent a repetition of the ruinous 1920s. Commercial banks were separated from investment banks, so that bankers could not prosper by underwriting bogus securities and foisting them on retail customers. Leverage was limited in order to rein in speculation with borrowed money. Investment banks, stock exchanges, and companies that publicly traded stocks were required to disclose more information to investors. Pyramid schemes and conflicts of interest were limited. The system worked very nicely until the 1970s -- when financial innovators devised end-runs around the regulated system, and regulators stopped keeping up with them.

Seven Deadly Sins

Sin One: Allowing Mortgage Lending to Become a Casino. Until 1969, Fannie Mae was part of the government. Mortgage lenders were tightly regulated. Homeownership rates soared throughout the postwar era, from about 44 percent on the eve of World War II to 64 percent by the mid-1960s. Nobody in the mortgage business got filthy rich, and hardly anyone lost money. Fannie's job was to buy mortgages from banks and thrift institutions, to replenish their money to make mortgages, and along the way to set standards. Fannie financed its operations by selling bonds. In the late 1970s, private Wall Street firms started emulating Fannie. They packaged mortgages, and converted them into bonds. Over time, their standards deteriorated, because they could make more money creating riskier products. In order to avoid losing market share, Fannie emulated some of the same abuses. Government did not step in to regulate the affair -- which was a time bomb waiting for the creation of the sub-prime mortgage business.

Sin Two: Allowing Unregulated Bond Rating Agencies to Decide What was Safe. Sub-prime is only the best known of a widespread fad known as "securitization." The idea is to turn loans into bonds. Bonds are given ratings by private companies that have official government recognition, such as Moody's and Standard and Poors, but no government regulation. These rating agencies have become thoroughly corrupted by conflicts of interest. If you want to package and sell bonds backed by risky loans, you go to a bond-rating agency and pay it a hefty fee. In return, the agency helps you manipulate the bond so that it qualifies for a triple-A rating, even if the underlying loans include many that are high-risk. Without the collusion of the bond-rating agencies, sub-prime lending never would have gotten off the ground, because it would not have found a mass market. Had regulators looked inside this black box, they would have shut it down. They might have needed new legislation, but they never asked for it. And public-minded regulators might have done a lot under existing law, since banks (which are regulated) were heavily implicated in the financing of sub-prime.

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Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect magazine, as well as a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the think tank Demos. He was a longtime columnist for Business Week, and continues to write columns in the Boston Globe. He is the author of Obama's Challenge and other books.

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