Why Economic Regulation Is Detrimental to Economy - Essay Example

CURRENT ECONOMIC REGULATION IS DETRIMENTAL TO OUR ECONOMY INTRODUCTION In 1989, three Washington based s, the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and the US Treasury Department, developed the set of neoliberal reforms, which for almost twenty years was establishing and promoting the expansion of free market and globalization. This set of reform became later known as the Washington Consensus. The tools that eventually comprised this neo-liberal economic agenda included “liberalization of cross-border transactions, deregulation of market dynamics, and privatization of both asset ownership and the provision of social services” (Scholte 2000, p.284). Liberalization, deregulation, and privatization are a large part of the push for a neo-liberal economic agenda by its proponents to get “official authorities [to] create an enabling environment for markets and then let the private sector supply the social good with (according to the theory) maximum efficiency” (Scholte 2000, p.285). Krugman (1995) states in spite of possible and actual negative outcomes, governments have been eager to adopt the programs outlined by the leaders of the Washington consensus at the same time markets have been busy dumping money into reforming economies for two main reasons. The first is the speculative bubble in the financial markets. The second has more to do with sociological rather than economic perceptions in that the seemingly endless number of meetings, negotiations, and press releases concerning financial and related markets converged into a commonsense understanding of economic opinion. In addition, governments adopted the prescribed programs because markets were rewarding those who adopted and embraced these programs. According to Krugman (1995, np), “[p]eople believe certain stories because everyone important tells them, and people tell those stories because everyone important believes them. Indeed, when a conventional wisdom is at its fullest strength, one’s agreement with that conventional wisdom becomes almost a litmus test of one’s suitability to be taken seriously.” It became difficult to question or stand against, and easier to support this common wisdom, thus further reinforcing it. Hence, the Washington consensus has been embraced even if its program results have had devastating effects on many countries and eventually on the United States in the year 2008. In 2008, the collapse of key American financial organizations sent the global financial system into free fall as credit began to freeze and trillions of dollars in shareholder value were wiped out. European banks wrote down a combined $1.6 trillion due to their exposure from the United States financial sector (Wroughton 2009). Several of the largest European banks were deemed financially unstable and were either acquired or nationalized with sovereign funds. Within Europe, the financial instability affected Spain and Ireland, which suffered 35 and 50 percent declines in home prices respectively. In Iceland, the three largest banks collapsed when they were unable to roll over foreign debt holdings that totaled eleven times the Gross Domestic Product (Boyes 2009). In the Middle East, a sharp fall in oil prices coupled with the losses from American and European investments resulted in an estimated three trillion dollar decline in the region. Even emerging economies such as India and China reported slower growth due to declines in global consumption and exposure to the United States economic system. It is evident that the regulation of the United States economy accompanied with neoliberal global agenda is detrimental to national and global economies. This paper aims to examine and analyze the problem why current regulation of the economy can be considered as ineffective and eventually detrimental to nation’s economic health. EFFICIENT MARKET HYPOTHESIS From the practical perspective, economists should bear some blame for current financial and economic crisis for largely failing to recognize the shifting market conditions in the mortgage market, the risk exposure in credit default swaps, and the massive problems created by leverage of investment banks. For instance, the failure of the efficient market driven Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1998 should have sensitized economists to the risk of and an overreliance upon quantitative modeling, but over the intervening decade, there was an increasing reliance upon quantitative modeling (Lowenstein 2000). On numerous occasions, prominent economists assured policymakers that the fundamentals of the economy were sound and the amount of regulation was appropriate in the financial system (Williams 2010). Summing up the damage noted by adherence to the efficient market hypothesis and deregulation, prominent University of Chicago professor Richard Posner (2009) noted that “excessive deregulation of the financial industry was a government failure abetted by the political and ideological commitments of mainstream economists, who overlooked the possibility that the financial markets seemed robust because regulation had prevented previous financial crises” (p.260). During 1965-1970, Eugene Fama developed his efficient market hypothesis. First, he conducted a series of tests to determine the extent that past history could be used to predict future prices. What Fama (1965) found was that prices exhibited a “random walk,” meaning that the path of future price and successive price changes are independent, identically distributed random variables without memory (p.34). From this, Fama (1965) concluded that past performance is not an accurate predictor of future prices and the appearance of randomness in future prices is because current prices “fully reflect” all information (p.35). Thus, if the pricing of an asset was inefficient, meaning that the presumed underlying value was lower or higher than the price at which the asset was currently trading, then well informed traders could engage in arbitrage and buy or sell the stock. If this occurred, then the unexploited profit opportunity would soon erode as well informed traders would exploit the opportunity, and thus, the value of the asset price would resemble the value priced in the market. Therefore, Fama (1970) concluded that an efficient market is one in which large numbers of rational, profit-seeking units can make production investment decisions through markets, with each trying to predict future market values upon all available information. By 1980s, the principles of efficient market hypothesis began to permeate the day-to-day wisdom of practitioners in the financial markets in practice and in government (Brealey, Myers and Marcus 2008). Using the efficient market hypothesis as a guide, since prior history and long-term performance did not seem to matter as much as efficient practice, financial experts and analytics sought opportunities that made asset management more efficient and were constantly attempting to generate new information that would influence asset pricing in the short-term, thereby providing lucrative profits for the firm and themselves. For instance, it appears that many decisions made inside the collapsed US financial companies relied upon efficient market ideology. Initially, they became involved in mortgage origination, they purchased mortgages from private originators but as the demand for additional securitizations increased, financial companies like Lehman Brothers lowered their costs and improved efficiency by acquiring their own origination units. When these mortgage originators no longer proved profitable, they, in an efficient cost-cutting measure, closed down their subprime mortgage originators and laid-off unnecessary labor (Setzer 2007). In addition, financial companies also sought to improve favorable information about the firm‘s value by engaging in a series of leveraged buyouts to inspire investor confidence and keep share price high (McDonald and Robinson 2009). However, when the increased borrowing coupled with deteriorating assets made it difficult for them to meet analysts‘ expectations and keep the shareholder price high, rather than release new information that would be detrimental to share price, companies engaged in balance sheet adventuring. In reality, balance sheet adventuring only prolonged the loss of investor confidence and amplified the distance between market value and the underlying value of assets. Although the efficient market hypothesis may appear beneficial for pricing assets on a day-to-day basis for the functioning of markets, the idea that financial experts can adequately price all available information about an asset or firm instantaneously is a heroic assumption. When financial experts are unable to do so, financial instability can be amplified as values become inflated and dissonance may emerge between market prices and underlying values. Once this occurs, financial instability exists in the system and the efficient market hypothesis is limited in its ability to explain why this has occurred, or effectively predict what impact such instability is likely to have on the financial system in the short- or long-term. For these reasons, economists, financial experts, and policymakers who understood US financial system through the lens of the efficient market hypothesis were ill-prepared once in 2007-2008, the financial world became collapsing and intervention was necessary. From the critical perspective, it is evident adherence to the ideology of efficient market hypothesis demonstrated by the majority of financial managers and analytics as well as policymakers ultimately became detrimental and led to financial and economic collapse within the United States and entire world. FINANCIAL INSTABILITY HYPOTHESIS Hyman Mynsky (2008), the developer of financial instability hypothesis, in his critique of modern neoliberal economic policy and the efficient market hypothesis suggested that that economists, financial experts and policymakers had created a system that ignored “the existence of internally disruptive forces” and in effect had become “the economics of capitalism without capitalists, capital assets and financial markets” (p.134). Minsky (2008) offered five major critiques of the efficient market hypothesis and the broader neo-liberal research program. First, in contrast to the efficient market hypothesis that views markets as efficient in the allocation of market functions of supply and demand, Minksy asserts that while the market mechanism can be a powerful tool for setting price, markets may not always function efficiently and some constraint in the form of surveillance and regulation may be necessary. Second, in contrast to the efficient market hypothesis that views prior price history as a built-in to current values that has little bearing on future prices, Minsky argues that time and prior investment are integral to understanding present and future obligations and earnings. Minsky (2008) argues that by focusing on investment, one can gain insight into past, present, and future debt obligations that influence future capital expansion in a firm or the larger economy. Third, in contrast to the efficient market hypothesis that treats banking as mechanical, static and passive, Minsky places banks as central to the financial system as they are dynamic and innovative profit-making institutions that actively seek fortunes and attempt to take advantage of profit opportunities like all other facets of the capitalist economy. Fourth, and probably most importantly, in contrast to the efficient market hypothesis that views the financial system as rational in the aggregate, coherently stable and only destabilized by exogenous shocks of new or unexpected information, Minsky argued that the financial system is inherently unstable due to internal processes of expansion and innovation that produce increasing speculation that, if left unregulated, is an unsustainable destabilizing force. Finally, in contrast to the efficient market hypothesis that views regulation as cumbersome and ineffective for controlling the market mechanism, Minsky (2008) views the financial system as unstable and in need of policy constraints to stabilize an unstable economy. In Minsky‘s view, social organizations in the United States deregulated economy create an evolutionary process of invention, innovation and obligations. For each unit, whether a household, a firm, or a national economy, these obligations appear as liabilities on the balance sheet and determine a series of prior, current, and future obligations that constrain or facilitate future opportunities (Minsky 1992). The financial instability hypothesis begins with the proposition that in the capitalist economy, finance occurs within a system of borrowing and lending based upon the margins of safety, or the ratio of cash flows relative to debt obligations. When hedge finance units dominate the economy there is general stability in the financial system. Over time, speculative or Ponzi finance units may offer innovations not traditionally found among hedge finance units. Since innovation is an essential aspect of the capitalist economy, hedge finance units may invest in the development of instruments and markets that enable higher levels of profit to be financed. In return, borrowing units assure those who finance them that the money will be available at the appropriate time requested. For instance, since 2001 low interest rates led to mortgage origination and securitization. Such innovations included ARM, Pick-a-Payment, QSPE, securitizations, rating arbitrage and lucrative shareholder values and bonuses. Second, over time, the success of prior hedge investments into speculative and Ponzi finance units breeds confidence, additional borrowing, and additional economic Expansion (Minsky 1992). During this period of economic expansion, additional borrowing tends to result in a decline in hedge finance units and an increase in speculative and Ponzi finance units. Indeed, speculative activity increased through the numerous mortgage funds acquisitions conducted by the US major financial corporations. Leverage ratios increased as investment in mortgage origination and securitization increased. Third, the period of economic expansion may lead economic euphoria and a belief that a new era has arrived, where increasing short-term financing of long positions becomes normative. Once an investment boom starts, the volume of funds demanded increases and the rapid expansion of investment straps liquidity, or the amount of capital available to be borrowed. During this period, debt-to-equity increases, margins of safety erode, and a generalized belief may emerge that these developments are not cause for concern (Minsky 1992). The reason for this is that as innovations gain increasing acceptance, output, employment and firm profits increase, leading many economists, financial experts and policymakers to believe that hedge finance units were justified in their decision to invest in financial innovations (Minsky 1992). This period may also be characterized by a disregard for the possibility of failure, and in the absence of serious failure, this leads to further support of the exuberant economy. During this period, warnings that there is a financial breaking point that will lead to a crisis are ignored due to such profitable circumstances. Additionally, since critics may not have quantitative data to support future predictions that differ so drastically from the contemporary reality, their claims and unconventional wisdom is easily dismissed and ignored by the established authorities of economics, finance and policy. Practically, during the period starting from 2004 the lax regulation enabled declines in leverage restrictions, Value-at-Risk became unregulated, and CDS provided sense of protection to the financial companies. It is necessary to emphasize that these deregulation policies occurred despite warnings expressed by many leading economists and macroeconomic experts. Fourth, delays or unforeseen exceptions lead to additional unanticipated erosions of the margins of safety. When these unanticipated erosions occur, additional borrowing is required, or firms may engage in balance sheet adventuring to avoid disclosing their actual exposure to risk (Minsky 1992). Once this occurs, speculative and Ponzi units reliant upon borrowing to meet current obligations must attempt to shore up their financial positions and may have difficulty doing so as additional questions may arise about their financial stability. The two most frequent sources of unanticipated erosions of the margins of safety stem from the long gestation of capital intensive projects and financial innovations that fail to produce the projected levels of output (Minsky 1992). The financing of positions may also be complicated whenever short- and long-term interest rates rise, and new valuations must occur. Practically, during the period 2006-2007 rising interest rates and ARM resets led eventually to rising defaults. This was attempted to be offset by many financial companies through stock buy backs and decoupling strategies in the form of LBOs. However, decoupling had the reverse effect, making firms more financially unstable and pushed the management to undergo the balance sheet adventuring. Fifth, in an effort to sure up financial positions, more stable hedge and speculative units may request additional capital from borrowing units. Since speculative borrowing and Ponzi finance units, which are entirely reliant upon the servicing or sale of debt to meet current obligations, borrowing units must use their margins of safety, which may quickly disappear once selling of liabilities evaporates and short-term financing is still necessary to meet current obligations. Since Ponzi finance routinely results in a continuous erosion of equity, Ponzi financial units may no longer become rare and the financial system becomes increasingly fragile as the ratio of Ponzi finance units increases. As an increasing numbers of units are unable to meet debt obligations, firms may attempt to merge, be acquired by other financial units, or request lender of last resort action from the federal government. In 2007-2008, as rumors of instability were growing, stock prices values of major financial corporations declined precipitously necessitating intervention. In 2008, the US and global financial system witnessed the acquisition of Bear Stearns by JP Morgan Chase, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the buyout of Merill Lynch by Bank of America, and desperate attempts of the US Government to assist the world’s largest insurance company AIG. Finally, at this point, a break in the boom occurs, leading to a financial crisis. The extent that the financial system will enter a recession or depression depends largely upon the overall liquidity relative to government policy and lender of last resort actions by the government. Lender of last resort interventions almost always follow an explosion of speculative and Ponzi finance and generally, once a lender of last resort intervention has occurred, hedge finance units, burned by their previous speculative or Ponzi finance investments build up their margins of safety once again, to the point where the cycle may repeat. In 2008, 50 billion Ponzi scheme orchestrated by B. Madoff collapsed, stripping all the inadequacy and inefficiency of the US regulatory regime. ANALYSIS It is evident that claims of many economists, financial experts, and policymakers that the US economic and financial system is efficient, rational in the aggregate, and can develop and maintain a market equilibrium without surveillance or intervention are not supported by the emergence of economic and financial crisis in the United States and collapse of country’s backbone companies. Practically, when the US financial system had been left largely unregulated, investment banking processes amplified instability through cultural practices and inappropriate risk analyses. At each stage in the economic process, a lack of regulation or appropriate oversight led to instability. For mortgage originators, there was no state regulator to look over and insure that mortgages were properly underwritten, while there was tremendous incentive to originate as many loans as possible because ultimately, the originators bore little of the risk as it was transferred to the investment banks. Investment banks such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns had little incentive to assess risk beyond their ability to securitize them because they passed risk on to the investor. Ratings agencies, a largely unregulated financial industry, had little incentive to adversely rate or downgrade complex securities because they offered higher yields to the agencies than rating traditional bonds and a downgrade might mean a loss of future ratings from investment banks. For their part, investment banks largely advocated for, and were able to receive a relaxation of leverage restrictions, which enabled them to rapidly leverage upwards relative to their tangible equity with only internal surveillance through Value-at-Risk modeling, rather than external oversight from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Commodity and Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), or Congressional oversight committees (McDonald and Robinson 2009). This lax regulatory environment enabled profit seeking firms to take on increasing levels of risk to the point that they were no longer operating within the margins of safety, becoming financially unstable, which in turn, made the entire financial and economic system unstable due to financial interdependence. This led to a massive federal intervention under crisis conditions, as firms such as AIG had to be backstopped because they posed a systemic risk to the entire global financial system due to their exposure to the once seemingly remote credit events such as a default by Lehman Brothers or other financial institutions (McDonald and Robinson 2009). Therefore, it is no longer acceptable to assume that markets are rational in the aggregate, that they are capable of efficiently allocating resources to the point where they internally develop and maintain equilibrium without surveillance or intervention, and to continue to operate under such assumptions only accelerates and exacerbates future financial instability. Thus, it is important to recognize that contemporary government’s regulation is inefficient and ultimately detrimental for the US economy. Recently, the United States Senate passed the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010, designed to alleviate some of the problems responsible for the collapse of many businesses and the broader global financial instability. The act provides some examination and enforcement authority through the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to evaluate mortgage related lenders, servicers and mortgage brokers, and creates a new independent watchdog group inside the Federal Reserve with authority to enforce that consumers have clear and accurate information about mortgages. It is hoped that these efforts will protect consumers from abusive and deceptive practices such as the pay option negative amortization adjustable rate mortgage, better known as the “pick-a-payment mortgage.” The passage of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010 suggests that policymakers have learned some lessons from the collapse of American financial companies. The act clearly focuses on addressing areas such as mortgage origination, ratings oversight, securitization, capital and leverage restrictions that led to instability in the financial and economic system. From the traditional perspective, when policymakers set policy in the aftermath of an economic crisis, it is retrospective and regulatory in nature. This means that regulations are designed as laws and set minimum requirements going forward for how financial institutions are expected to perform and non-compliance means that the firm has failed to meet minimum government mandated regulations. Generally, the intent of such policymaking is reactive and retrospective to ensure that there is not a repeat of the previous crisis once again. This intent is demonstrated in a great deal of the Restoring American Financial Stability Act demonstrates. However, the act is largely silent on what should be the focus of governance beyond the very broad goals of limiting risk, creating market discipline, and reducing financial instability. Surveillance and risk reducing measures in the financial system must address at least three key areas of (1) improving financial transparency, (2) developing better measures of risk assessment, and (3) focusing on sustainable economic development. Until these matters are effectively resolved, financial and economic instability that could lead to crisis or deepening recession or depression remains a possibility. First, better measures of transparency must be developed. Recently, New York University Economics Professor Nouriel Roubini has warned that if a bank is too big to fail, it is likely to big to succeed and that “no CEO can monitor the activities of thousands of separate profit and loss statements, and the activities of thousands of different bankers and traders” (Carter and Roubini 2010, p.1). The complexity of modern financial institutions, whether bank holding companies or multinational corporations, provides a size of economic activity and data which is exceedingly difficult for regulators to effectively monitor. For example, in analyzing the Securities and Exchange Commission filings for Lehman Brothers since 1994 when the firm went public from American Express, there have been more than 6,200 filings ranging in size from a single page to thousands of pages. Even annual or quarterly reports, which are a standard Securities and Exchange Commission form, have become a labyrinth of jargon and concepts that often obfuscate more than they clarify. The thousands of pages of filings and the information provided to the SEC by thousands of firms is a broken mechanism of the “efficient market” as it is nearly impossible that all of these data could be “fully reflected” in the underlying price of a stock as claimed by the efficient market hypothesis. Such complex balance sheets coupled with off-balance sheet transactions create conditions whereby shifting market conditions may encourage balance sheet adventuring that is cyclically repeated in order to meet investor or policymaker expectations. Based upon some inside accounts, managers and executives inside the firm‘s as evidenced in the final days of Lehman Brothers where executives could not find anyone who authorized trades or acquisitions (Sorkin 2009; Williams 2010). A partial solution to this problem for policymakers could take the form of additional “stress test” style audits of entire sectors where the goal is not necessarily to punish any individual firms for their lack of transparency retroactively, unless egregious malfeasance has occurred, but rather, to have a better understanding of the level and extent that balance sheet adventuring has occurred. Although the actual level and extent may never be known, the opportunity for firms to “come clean” during a particular period where criminal balance sheet restatements is allowed could greatly aid policymakers in reducing financial instability within the system as it highlights how margins of safety may have eroded. Second, better measures of risk assessment must be developed. Policymakers, regulators and market participants have seen how the financial system relied too heavily upon quantitative measures such as Value-at-Risk modeling to assess their financial risk and this over reliance resulted in devastating losses in capital. They also witnessed how the relaxation of net capital rules allowed for firms to rapidly increase leveraging in very short period of time to the point where firms were leveraged well beyond 25:1, and in some cases, 40:1. Although the leverage ratios could have been previously calculated by academics, financial experts or policymakers, there is very little evidence to conclude that the amount of borrowing firms did in such short order was fully realized until the crisis ensued. To this end, the Oversight Council, in coordination with the Securities and Exchange Commission, should work with academics and financial experts to develop leverage velocities, which would be a statistical calculation of the rate at which a firm borrows from quarter-to-quarter and year-to-year and have this clearly indicated in their quarterly (8-K) and annual (10-K) reports . Additionally, the Council must actively seek academics and financial experts who study particular firms or sectors of the financial system that can provide expert testimony that conditions may exist in the system where financial instability is most likely to occur. Third, it is important to recognize that great crises are often preceded by economic booms and rapid expansion of growth. Periods of economic growth often make it is difficult to assess when the economy is trending towards instability until after growth has declined. This problem is particularly complicated by the fact that many times, claimsmakers warning of future instability may not always have adequate data to support their claims as mortgage defaults may not have risen, housing prices may not have dropped, or shareholder values have yet to decline. For these reasons, it is necessary to recognize the importance of sustainable economic development, which has a traditional corollary over the long-term, and is rarely characterized by exorbitantly high yields. Just as there traditionally a relationship between home price construction and home price value, or a relationship between stock price and earnings, there are often corollaries in a variety of other sectors of the financial system (Mishkin and Eakins 2009; Shiller 2008). When some of these relationships begin to change, there may not necessarily be immediate need for policymakers to intervene as a variety of reasons could explain the increase in economic development and expansion. However, when these trends begin to reach ranges where, for example, home price values are doubling in less than two years, these outliers require additional oversight as this would be an indicator that economic development is accelerating at an unsustainable level that would lead toward broader instability. REFERENCES Boyes, Roger. (2009). Meltdown Iceland: How the Global Financial Crisis Bankrupted an Entire Country. London, England: Bloomsbury. Brealey, Richard, Stewart Myers and Alan Marcus. (2008). 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