Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Business on the Government Tit

I have watched the progress of the bailout, and the only thing that gives me hope is that the Democrats are playing politics with this. It's the best chance we have of this falling through and the misguided attempt at throwing money at the problem may go away. But the real problem is that we got in to this insane situation in the first place.

Now I have always expressed my trust in private business over government. Why? Because the private business will do what is in its best interest to survive and thrive. A business is selfish, but in our economy it cannot use force to produce a gain. When a bank, for example, lends money, they expect to get that money back, with a percentage of profit. A bank that extends too much credit for the amount they have on hand runs the risk of failure. This is one reason there are some good government regulations that limit the banks from crossing that line.

So this begs the question: Why were these businesses making bad loans that were bound to not get paid back? Let's start with the Community Reinvestment Act.

The Community Reinvestment Act is intended to encourage depository institutions to help meet the credit needs of the communities in which they operate, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, consistent with safe and sound banking operations.

Essentially, it's a measure designed to create "affordable housing" for people who can't get loans. Sounds stupid yet? Well, this gem was dropped back in 1977 to combat the practice of redlining. That is a noble goal in a sense, but it created the need for banks who wanted to move into poor areas to take on bad debt as the price of moving into those areas. But this was only the beginning.

The law was revised in 1995 under the Clinton Administration, creating even more loans for poor people.

In 2003, the Bush administration attempted to revise the act, but it failed under a party-line vote. The change was to get some control over the guarantors of many of these loans, the now-failed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) claimed of the thrifts "These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis, the more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing. [emhasis added]"

In 2005, even more revisions came, which I haven't been able to verify. Somehow, I doubt they were good.

Another aspect of this is trying to determine who decides when banks are ignoring or evading the CRA. Enter organizations like Inner City Press and the infamous ACORN (article does suffer some neutrality issues). Essentially, it gives an activist group the ability to force a bank to either give out loans or stay out. So the cost of getting into an area may be to take on shitty loans in the hopes that may fail. But there's Fannie, Freddie, and the federal government, who have shown a propensity to bail people out.

So 2007 came and the housing market began to crash. This hit the subprime loans. That crushed Fannie and Freddie. Now we're to major Wall Street Banks. And each time, the government has swung in to throw money at the problem, further entangling everyone in more regulation and politics.

Now this is not the whole picture, as this post would get really damned boring if I went through everything. But the pattern we see here is the continued infusion of politics and government into a loan system that had some issues, but was relatively stable since the end of the Great Depression. So the impulse to call for more regulations on top of the shit we have, and for the government to chuck the green bandage on this mess si absolutely the worst thing we could poissibly consider.

I'll admit I don't have the answer to this mess. I hate financial stuff. I gave up trying to balance my checkbook years ago. And I'd be lost if it weren't for online banking. So if this is obvious to me, why can't the financial experts that aren't already paid political bitches figure this out?

11 comments:

Dave Miller said...

Patrick, I am off message here but wanted to just say thanks for your site.

I don't always agree with you but I have found you to be refreshingly honest in your political opinion.

You are an equal opportunity offender of both the Dems and the GOP.

Keep it up.

Toad734 said...

no one forced anyone to give loans to homeless or even poor people. In fact, a large percentage of forclosures are not from poor people in 60k dollar homes, they are from suburbanites and speculators who wanted to keep up with the Jones' or thought that the bubble would never burst. Sure, there are pelnty of foreigners who couldn't speak English who signed documents without reading them but I didn't read all the papers I signed when I closed on my place. And sure, there are the homeless people who should have never been given loans but the government never forced anyone to give these people loans. All the government did was back the money from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and they are living up to their obligation. It wasn't until wall street bought these loans where the troubles began. Sure, we would still have people lossing their homes due to ARMs expiring but it wouldn't have ended up in AIG if Gramm wouldn't have deregulated depression era laws in order to generate a quick profit for his employer UBS.

Again, the government forced no one to give loans to people who didn't qualify for them. The government forced no one to engage in predatory lending. The free market allowed these companies to do as they pleased and pass the buck on to someone else.

Z-man said...

Had to laugh at your title, sounds like a soft-core porno. Sums up my feelings exactly, government today is like some easily won-over woman, "Oh poor baby, here's my breast."

Patrick M said...

Thanks Dave. While I definitely have an opinion on everything, I do my best to be accurate and consistent. I could lay of the GOP though, if they'd just do everything I say.

Toad: Do you even read what I wrote or do you just repeat the same damned thing you've been saying for weeks?

The free market allowed these companies to do as they pleased and pass the buck on to someone else.

NO! The free market has little to do with this debacle.

In a free market, banks would only give out loans if they expected to make a profit. However, when you create an atmosphere where banks are "encouraged" by the government (which is unlegislated force) to expand their loan criteria, they provide an out for bad loans, and then show the propensity to throw out the buck when their pile of laws creates the clusterfuck of a market we have now, that's not the free market.

We haven't had a free market in the banking industry in over a century or so.

Patrick M said...

Z: Except we're talking about a bloated pig when we talk about government. Lipstick not included.

Z-man said...

They used to say money doesn't grow on trees but for the government it does. Everyone else has limited resources and has to balance their checkbooks every month but Uncle Sam can just go on and keep printing money. I still don't know how the Iraq War is being paid for and now we're talking bailouts! & this is a Republican administration. They say though if you're a relatively small bank like Lehman Brothers you don't even get a crack at a nipple, might be harassment, dunno.

Dave Miller said...

Okay, I'm at home and have had a little time to sit, think, and process stuff.

Let's assume we move ahead on this bailout.

In the future, when we are dealing with other countries, how do we talk to them about open, free markets?

How can we encourage countries to not have nationalized industries, after what we have done with Freddie and Fannie?

Mexico is a good example. We are currently pressuring them to sell off parts of PEMEX to private companies [US Companies naturally] to encourage oil exploration. The driving factor behind this has been our insistence that business works better when it is unconstrained by gov't regulations.

Based on our experiences of the last few days, how do we square that in the future?

Just askin' is all.

Patrick M said...

Good questions, Dave. I don't have an answer, so I'll make one up and it will be right, of course.

The rest of the free world is slowly pulling away of the socialist tendency of government-run businesses. And we conveniently forget that every time it might impact Christmas shopping or impact a Congressman's pet project.

Don't know when we'll figger it out. 2012? 2016? 2108? Don't think I'll live to see it, and I'm not even middle age yet.

Toad734 said...

They were encouraged by Wallstreet not the Government. If Wallstreet wasn't buying those loand, Countrywide wouldn't have initiated them. Again, "encouraged" does not mean forced.

Yes, this is the epitomy of the free market in action.

James Manning said...

Patrick,

I don't disagree that CRA played a role in this mess but I still believe that when investment firms are allowed to create exotic financial instruments, insure them, then leverage them to the hilt, whether it's mortgages or t-bills, that system will eventually fail.

and i agree with toad, the government had an easy money policy and the banks were willing to make the loans because they didn't have to carry the risk of default. and the investments banks created default swaps to insure them but never required any capital to cover in case of a default. and once this "insurance policy" became a securites, people could trade them and short them. in essence, borrowing the MBS and betting that it will go down, and when it does, they take the profit return the securities to the insurance company that now doesn't have the money to cover the default.

it was a ponzi scheme. and no no body knows what the the CDO's are worth because it was never backed by real capital.

and you can believe there a student at MIT coming up with some fancy scheme

Patrick M said...

James: I can agree with you on all that. But it's a matter of getting to the root cause of the mess. The business response is a cause, but also an effect.

Until you fix the problem that led to the need for these bad investments, there will just be another way that corporations find to use the system, up to the point you nationalize them. And do you want to go that far?