*** Financial Crisis

Cause of the financial crisis

In August 2002 an analyst identified a housing bubble. Dean Baker wrote that from 1953 to 1995 house prices had simply tracked inflation, but that when house prices from 1995 onwards were adjusted for inflation they showed a marked increase over and above inflation-based increases. Baker drew the conclusion that a bubble in the US housing market existed and predicted an ensuing crisis. It later proved impossible to convince responsible parties such as the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve of the need for action. Baker's argument was confirmed with the construction of a data series from 1895 to 1995 by the influential Yale economist Robert Shiller, which showed that real house prices had been essentially unchanged over that 100 years.

A common claim during the first weeks of the financial crisis was that the problem was simply caused by reckless, sub-prime lending. However, the sub-prime mortgages were only part of a far more extensive problem affecting the entire $20 trillion US housing market: the sub-prime sector was simply the first place that the collapse of the bubble affecting the housing market showed up.

The ultimate point of origin of the great financial crisis of 2007-2009 can be traced back to an extremely indebted US economy. The collapse of the real estate market in 2006 was the close point of origin of the crisis. The failure rates of subprime mortgages were the first symptom of a credit boom tuned to bust and of a real estate shock. But large default rates on subprime mortgages cannot account for the severity of the crisis. Rather, low-quality mortgages acted as an accelerant to the fire that spread through the entire financial system. The latter had become fragile as a result of several factors that are unique to this crisis: the transfer of assets from the balance sheets of banks to the markets, the creation of complex and opaque assets, the failure of ratings agencies to properly assess the risk of such assets, and the application of fair value accounting. To these novel factors, one must add the now standard failure of regulators and supervisors in spotting and correcting the emerging weaknesses.

For many months before September 2008, many business journals published commentaries warning about the financial stability and risk management practices of leading U.S. and European investment banks, insurance firms and mortgage banks consequent to the subprime mortgage crisis.

Beginning with failures caused by misapplication of risk controls for bad debts, collateralization of debt insurance and fraud, large financial institutions in the United States and Europe faced a credit crisis and a slowdown in economic activity.The crisis rapidly developed and spread into a global economic shock, resulting in a number of European bank failures, declines in various stock indexes, and large reductions in the market value of equities and commodities. Moreover, the de-leveraging of financial institutions further accelerated the liquidity crisis and caused a decrease in international trade. World political leaders, national ministers of finance and central bank directors coordinated their efforts to reduce fears, but the crisis continued. At the end of October a currency crisis developed, with investors transferring vast capital resources into stronger currencies such as the yen, the dollar and the Swiss franc, leading many emergent economies to seek aid from the International Monetary Fund

The role of central banks

Economists of the Austrian School have proposed that the crisis is an excellent example of the Austrian Business Cycle Theory, in which credit created through the policies of central banking gives rise to an artificial boom, which is inevitably followed by a bust. Proponents of this theory have predicted the current financial crises, and argue that central banks should not be involved in debt markets.

The history of the yield curve from 2000 through 2007 illustrates the role that credit creation by the Federal Reserve may have played in the on-set of the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008. Treasury yield is one tool of monetary policy.

The yield curve (also known as the term structure of interest rates) is the shape formed by a graph showing US Treasury Bill or Bond interest rates on the vertical axis and time to maturity on the horizontal axis. When short-term interest rates are lower than long-term interest rates the yield curve is said to be “positively sloped”. This in turn encourages an expansion in money supply and in turn favours debt induced bubbles. When long-term interest rates are lower than short-term interest rates the yield curve is said to be “inverted”. This favours a contraction in money supply. When long term and short term interest rates are equal the yield curve is said to be “flat”. The yield curve is believed by some to be a strong predictor of recession (when inverted) and inflation (when positively sloped).

Other observers have doubted the role that monetary policy plays in controlling the business cycle. In a May 24, 2006 story CNN Money reported: “…in recent comments, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke repeated the view expressed by his predecessor Alan Greenspan that an inverted yield curve is no longer a good indicator of a recession ahead.”

A positively sloped yield curve allows Primary Dealers (such as large investment banks) in the Federal Reserve system to fund themselves with cheap short term money while lending out at higher long-term rates. This strategy is profitable so long as the yield curve remains positively sloped. However, it creates a liquidity risk if the yield curve were to become inverted and banks would have to refund themselves at expensive short term rates while losing money on longer term loans.

Following the bursting of the Dot-com bubble in 2000 and the Stock market downturn of 2002 the US Federal Reserve reacted by sharply lowering short-term interest rates. The Fed lowered the Fed Funds target rate beginning in January 2001 at 6.5% to a nadir of 1% in June 2003. The Fed also held rates at this low level for an unusually long period of time (1yr) until June 2004. This prolonged period of stimulative Federal Reserve monetary policy created a very positively sloped yield curve. The yield on the 3-month T-bill reached its lowest point (0.88%) for the cycle in the late 2003 while at the same time 30-year T-bond rates were in excess of 5%.

The inflationary effect of the prolonged period of a very positively sloped yield curve resulted in inflation of asset prices rather than a general increase in the price level of all goods and services. The reason this happened was likely due to the cheap goods that were imported from BRIC economies prevented any inflation. The excess money was channeled into various assets. Without a globalised economy this may not have happened. In particular, it led to a United States housing bubble that began to attract attention as early as 2002 but reached its peak in 2005.

In June 2004 the Fed began to slowly increase Fed Funds rates and the yield curve slowly narrowed. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan notably described this narrowing of spreads between short term and long term rates as a “conundrum” during testimony in February 2005. The chairman expected long term rates to rise in line with short term rates. However, the tightening of monetary policy caused by rising short term rates was slowing the economy and reducing demand for long-term borrowing.

The Fed raised Fed Funds target rates to a peak of 5.25% in June 2006. By October 2006 the yield curve on 90-day T-bills vs 30-year T-bonds was essentially flat indicating neutral monetary policy (neither stimulative nor contractionary). While the Fed maintained Fed Funds rates at this high level, long term rates began to fall causing the yield curve to become more and more inverted. The yield curve was most strongly inverted in March 2007 when concern about current inflation was reaching its peak.

Commodity bubble

The narrowing of the yield curve from 2004 and the inversion of the yield curve during 2007 indicated a bursting of the housing bubble and a wild gyration of commodities prices as moneys flowed out of assets like housing or stocks. A commodity bubble was created following the collapse in the housing bubble. The price of oil rose to over $140 dollars per barrel in 2008 before plunging as the financial crisis began to take hold in late 2008. A similar bubble in oil prices has preceded other historical economic contractions.

Sub-prime lending

Based on the assumption that sub-prime lending precipitated the crisis, some have argued that the Clinton Administration may be partially to blame, while others have pointed to the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act by the 106th Congress, and over-leveraging by banks and investors eager to achieve high returns on capital.

Some, like American Enterprise Institute fellow Peter J. Wallison, believe the roots of the crisis can be traced directly to sub-prime lending by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are government sponsored entities. On 30 September 1999, The New York Times reported that the Clinton Administration pushed for sub-prime lending: "Fannie Mae, the nation's biggest underwriter of home mortgages, has been under increasing pressure from the Clinton Administration to expand mortgage loans among low and moderate income people."

In 1995, the administration also tinkered with Carter's Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 by regulating and strengthening the anti-redlining procedures. It is felt by many[who?] that this was done to help a stagnated home ownership figure that had hovered around 65% for many years. The result was a push by the administration for greater investment, by financial institutions, into riskier loans. A 2000 United States Department of the Treasury study of lending trends for 305 cities from 1993 to 1998 showed that $467 billion of mortgage credit poured out of CRA-covered lenders into low and mid level income borrowers and neighborhoods.

Others have pointed out that there were not enough of these loans made to cause a crisis of this magnitude. In an article in Portfolio Magazine, Michael Lewis spoke with one trader who noted that "There weren’t enough Americans with (bad) credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. (Investment banks and hedge funds) used (financial technology) to synthesize more of them. They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans."

On September 30, 1999 The New York Times said, referring to the Fannie Mae Corporation easing credit requirements on loans purchased from lenders: "In moving, even tentatively, into this new area of lending, Fannie Mae is taking on significantly more risk, which may not pose any difficulties during flush economic times. But the government-subsidized corporation may run into trouble in an economic downturn, prompting a government rescue similar to that of the savings and loan industry in the 1980's."

Former employees from Ameriquest, which was United States's leading wholesale lender, described a system in which they were pushed to falsify documents on bad Ameriquest mortgages and then sell them to Wall Street banks eager to make fast profits. There is growing evidence that such mortgage frauds may be at the heart of the Financial crisis of 2007–2009.

Deregulation

In 1992, the 102nd Congress weakened regulation of government sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with the goal of making available more money for the issuance of home loans. The Washington Post wrote: "Congress also wanted to free up money for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy mortgage loans and specified that the pair would be required to keep a much smaller share of their funds on hand than other financial institutions. Where banks that held $100 could spend $90 buying mortgage loans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could spend $97.50 buying loans. Finally, Congress ordered that the companies be required to keep more capital as a cushion against losses if they invested in riskier securities. But the rule was never set during the Clinton administration, which came to office that winter, and was only put in place nine years later."

Other deregulation efforts have also been identified as contributing to the collapse. In 1999, the 106th Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. This repeal has been criticized for having contributed to the proliferation of the complex and opaque financial instruments which are at the heart of the crisis.

Over-leveraging, credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations

This began with failures caused by misapplication of risk controls for bad debts, collateralization of debt insurance and fraud.

Another probable cause of the crisis -- and a factor that unquestionably amplified its magnitude -- was widespread miscalculation by banks and investors of the level of risk inherent in the unregulated collateralized debt obligation and Credit Default Swap markets. Under this theory, banks and investors systematized the risk by taking advantage of low interest rates to borrow tremendous sums of money that they could only pay back if the housing market continued to increase in value.

The risk was further systematized by the use of David X. Li's Gaussian copula model function to rapidly price Collateralized debt obligations based on the price of related Credit Default Swaps. This formula assumed that the price of Credit Default Swaps was correlated with and could predict the correct price of mortgage backed securities. Because it was highly tractable, it rapidly came to be used by a huge percentage of CDO and CDS investors, issuers, and rating agencies. According to one wired.com article: "Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril... Li's Gaussian copula formula will go down in history as instrumental in causing the unfathomable losses that brought the world financial system to its knees."

The pricing model for CDOs clearly did not reflect the level of risk they introduced into the system. It has been estimated that the "from late 2005 to the middle of 2007, around $450bn of CDO of ABS were issued, of which about one third were created from risky mortgage-backed bonds...out of that pile, around $305bn of the CDOs are now in a formal state of default, with the CDOs underwritten by Merrill Lynch accounting for the biggest pile of defaulted assets, followed by UBS and Citi."

The average recovery rate for high quality CDOs has been approximately 32 cents on the dollar, while the recovery rate for mezzanine CDO's has been approximately five cents for every dollar. These massive, practically unthinkable, losses have dramatically impacted the balance sheets of banks across the globe, leaving them with very little capital to continue operations.

Boom and collapse of the shadow banking system

In a June 2008 speech, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, then President and CEO of the NY Federal Reserve Bank, placed significant blame for the freezing of credit markets on a "run" on the entities in the "parallel" banking system, also called the shadow banking system. These entities became critical to the credit markets underpinning the financial system, but were not subject to the same regulatory controls. Further, these entities were vulnerable because they borrowed short-term in liquid markets to purchase long-term, illiquid and risky assets. This meant that disruptions in credit markets would make them subject to rapid deleveraging, selling their long-term assets at depressed prices. He described the significance of these entities: "In early 2007, asset-backed commercial paper conduits, in structured investment vehicles, in auction-rate preferred securities, tender option bonds and variable rate demand notes, had a combined asset size of roughly $2.2 trillion. Assets financed overnight in triparty repo grew to $2.5 trillion. Assets held in hedge funds grew to roughly $1.8 trillion. The combined balance sheets of the then five major investment banks totaled $4 trillion. In comparison, the total assets of the top five bank holding companies in the United States at that point were just over $6 trillion, and total assets of the entire banking system were about $10 trillion." He stated that the "combined effect of these factors was a financial system vulnerable to self-reinforcing asset price and credit cycles."

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman described the run on the shadow banking system as the "core of what happened" to cause the crisis. "As the shadow banking system expanded to rival or even surpass conventional banking in importance, politicians and government officials should have realized that they were re-creating the kind of financial vulnerability that made the Great Depression possible--and they should have responded by extending regulations and the financial safety net to cover these new institutions. Influential figures should have proclaimed a simple rule: anything that does what a bank does, anything that has to be rescued in crises the way banks are, should be regulated like a bank." He referred to this lack of controls as "malign neglect."

Systemic crisis

Another analysis, different from the mainstream explanation, is that the financial crisis is merely a symptom of another, deeper crisis, which is a systemic crisis of capitalism itself. According to Samir Amin, an Egyptian economist, the constant decrease in GDP growth rates in Western countries since the early 1970s created a growing surplus of capital which did not have sufficient profitable investment outlets in the real economy. The alternative was to place this surplus into the financial market, which became more profitable than productive capital investment, especially with subsequent deregulation. According to Samir Amin, this phenomenon has lead to recurrent financial bubbles (such as the internet bubble) and is the deep cause of the financial crisis of 2007-2009.

John Bellamy Foster, a political economy analyst and editor of the Monthly Review, believes that the decrease in GDP growth rates since the early 1970s is due to increasing market saturation.

Growth of the housing bubble

The housing bubble grew up alongside the stock bubble of the mid-1990s. People who had increased their wealth substantially with the extraordinary run-up of stock prices were spending based on this increased wealth. This led to the consumption boom of the late 1990s, with the savings rate out of disposable income falling from five percent in the mid-90s to two percent by 2000. The stock-wealth induced consumption boom led people to buy bigger and/or better homes, since they sought to spend some of their new stock wealth on housing.

The next phase of the housing bubble was the supply-side effect of the dramatic increase in house prices, as housing starts rose substantially from the mid-1990s onwards. Baker notes that if the course of the bubble in the United States had followed the same pattern as in Japan, the housing bubble would have collapsed along with the collapse of the stock bubble between 2000-2002. Instead, the collapse of the stock bubble helped to feed the US housing bubble. After collectively losing faith in the stock market, millions of people turned to investments in housing as a safe alternative. In addition, the economy was very slow in recovering from the 2001 recession, the weakness of the recovery leading the Federal Reserve Board to continue to cut interest rates - one of numerous occasions where the Fed cut rates in response to a crisis, a pattern of behaviour that had, by that time, become known as a Greenspan put. Fixed-rate mortgages and other interest rates hit 50-year lows. To further fuel the housing market, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan suggested that homebuyers were wasting money by buying fixed rate mortgages instead of adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs). This was peculiar advice at a time when fixed rate mortgages were near 50-year lows, but even at the low rates of 2003 homebuyers could still afford larger mortgages with the adjustable rates available at the time.

The bubble began to burst in 2007, as the building boom led to so much over-supply that prices could no longer be supported. Prices nationwide began to head downward, with this process accelerating through late 2007 and into 2008. As prices decline, more homeowners face foreclosure. This increase in foreclosures is in part voluntary and in part involuntary. It can be involuntary, since there are cases where people who would like to keep their homes, who would borrow against equity if they could not meet their monthly mortgage payments. When falling house prices destroy equity, they eliminate this option. The voluntary foreclosures take place when people realize that they owe more than the value of their home, and decide that paying off their mortgage is in effect a bad deal. In cases where a home is valued far lower than the amount of the outstanding mortgage, homeowners may be able to simply walk away from their mortgage.

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