Bhidé and Phelps: Central Banking Needs Rethinking: The Fed's monetary policy is hazardous, its bank supervision ineffectual

Bhidé and Phelps: Central Banking Needs Rethinking. By Amar Bhidé and Edmund Phelps
The Fed's monetary policy is hazardous, its bank supervision ineffectual.
The Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2013, on page A15
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324879504578597721920923596.html

The Federal Reserve did well to supply liquidity after Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008 and the world was plunged into financial crisis. But since then the Fed's monetary policy has been increasingly hazardous and bank supervision by the Fed and other regulators dangerously ineffectual.

Monetary policy might focus on the manageable task of keeping expectations of inflation on an even keel—an idea of Mr. Phelps's in 1967 that was long influential. That would leave businesses and other players to determine the pace of recovery from a recession or of pullback from a boom.

Nevertheless, in late 2008 the Fed began its policy of "quantitative easing"—repeated purchases of billions in Treasury debt—aimed at speeding recovery. "QE2" followed in late 2010 and "QE3" in autumn 2012. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said in November 2010 that this unprecedented program of sustained monetary easing would lead to "higher stock prices" that "will boost consumer wealth and help increase confidence, which can also spur spending."

It is doubtful, though, that quantitative easing boosted either wealth or confidence. The late University of Chicago economist Lloyd Metzler argued persuasively years ago that a central-bank purchase, in putting the price level onto a higher path, soon lowers the real value of household wealth—by roughly the amount of the purchase, in his analysis. (People swap bonds for money, then inflation occurs, until the real value of money holdings is back to where it was.)

True, stock prices did rise in real terms in 2009-10. But surely that rebound in share prices from the panic of 2008 was mainly due to a stunning rise in after-tax corporate profits, much of it overseas. Stock markets did not begin their recent breakout until late 2012, by which time other factors were at work, such as Washington's heightened concern over continuing fiscal deficits on top of already high public debt and entitlements. Had Fed purchases raised stock prices to levels that caught the eye of business owners, the purchases might have prompted accelerated business investment, a powerful creator of jobs. But the rise was evidently too little and too late to hasten markedly the recovery.

Moreover, the Fed's quantitative easing appears not to have increased confidence and may have reduced it. No one—the Fed included—knows how much more it will buy or how much of its mountain of Treasurys will be sold back to the market. The Fed said it would end easing at serious signs of faster inflation. But as the housing bubble that preceded the financial crisis showed, imprudent speculation can be destructive without high inflation. Today we have banks, insurance companies and pension funds leveraging their assets and loading up on credit risks because prudence cannot provide acceptable returns.

The cost of this uncertainty can be considerable. An attendant foreboding may lie behind some of the depression in business investment—even if myopic traders in bonds and currencies are impervious to it and too-big-to-fail banks go on making one-way bets. Also, the time and money that businesses give to innovation and efficiency gains are squeezed if the businesses are distracted by the uncertainties surrounding monetary policy.

This ambiguity notwithstanding, President Obama commends Mr. Bernanke for "helping us recover much stronger than, for example, our European partners." Sure, the European Central Bank did not adopt quantitative easing. But the delay in Europe's recovery plausibly derives from the severity of its fiscal and banking problems and its structural disadvantages, such as inflexible labor markets and lack of institutions for early renegotiation of debts.

The Fed attributes persistent joblessness in the U.S. to a deficiency of aggregate demand, which the Fed blames on foreigners' thrift. But if the West's problem were simply that, it long ago would have increased its money supply to meet the increases demanded and would have invested in businesses at an increased pace to take advantage of the cheap credit.

Households have maintained their strong propensity to consume, persuaded that their retirement incomes will be topped up with entitlements. But consumer-goods production—giant machines needing only a guard and a dog, as some wag put it—is generally not labor-intensive enough to provide high employment at normal wages. A central bank's monetary policy, no matter how ambitious, cannot solve this structural problem.

What we do need from the Fed is reform of the ways banks are regulated and supervised. Tough, on-the-ground examination of individual banks not only helps keep them solvent, such scrutiny can also prevent out-of-control money growth without suppressing productive lending. Similarly, rules that discourage banks from relying on yield-chasing hot money will limit the runs and panics the Fed has to fight.

Unfortunately, over the past couple of decades, bank regulation, like the Fed's macro-interventions, has become more top-down and formulaic.

Until the 1980s, for instance, bank examiners would assess how large a capital buffer each bank should have, taking into account its specific risks instead of relying on internationally standardized ratios.

Dysfunctional rules have also sustained the growth of monolithic megabanks that have little interest in traditional productive lending.

Unsurprisingly, the Fed's aggressive monetary easing has helped large companies already flush with cash issue bonds at low rates, while small businesses have struggled to secure working-capital loans.

In a modern economy some areas of top-down control are likely to be unavoidable. But that does not mean we should settle for institutions that are less participatory or accountable. It is not desirable that seven people on the Federal Open Market Committee have the power to intervene on a massive scale based on theories that may or may not be right and do not reflect a popular consensus.

America has a constitutional takings clause, as well as checks and balances on the state's power of eminent domain. Such matters as tax laws and budgets are subject to votes rather than being left to "experts." These arrangements are as much about legitimacy and consent of the governed as they are about economic efficiency.

Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913 mainly to forestall and contain panics, discourage speculation and improve the supervision of banks, not to steer the economy. Indeed, the Federal Reserve System was set up as 12 more-or-less independent reserve banks to assuage concerns about centralized control and capture by financial interests.

Restoring the modest foundational aims and diffused governance of the Fed would be good for our economy and good for our democracy.

Mr. Bhidé, a professor at Tufts University's Fletcher School, is the author of "A Call for Judgment: Sensible Finance for a Dynamic Economy" (Oxford, 2010). Mr. Phelps, the 2006 Nobel laureate in economics and director of Columbia University's Center on Capitalism and Society, is the author of "Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge and Change," forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Trevor Butterworth's Fad Food Nation

Fad Food Nation. By Trevor Butterworth
A skeptical survey of the claims being made about food, health and the environment.
The Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2013, on page A13
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323823004578593943760620664.html  

Excerpts:

Not so long ago, I spoke to a chef who ministers to children attending some of the most elite and expensive schools in America. Why, I asked him, was his company's website larded with almost comical warnings about the lethality of eating genetically modified (GM) food? Did he actually believe this as scientific fact or was he catering to his clientele's spiritual fears? It was simply for the mothers, he said, candidly. They ate it up—or, rather, they had swallowed so many apocalyptic warnings about genetically modified food that he had no choice but to echo their terror. How could they entrust their children to him otherwise? The downside of such dogma, he explained, was cost. Many of the mothers wouldn't agree to their children eating anything less than 100% organic, even if organic food required flying in, as he put it, "apples from Cuba."

Mr. Butterworth is a contributor at Newsweek and editor at large for STATS.org.

The Financial Instability Council - Regulators want to make insurers too big to fail. Uh-oh.

The Financial Instability Council
Regulators want to make insurers too big to fail. Uh-oh.
The Wall Street Journal, July 16, 2013, on page A14
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324634304578537490141477314.html

There's finally a healthy discussion in Washington about how to end too-big-to-fail banks. But before the government can start getting rid of taxpayer-backed behemoths, it first has to stop creating them.

The 2010 Dodd-Frank law classified all banks with more than $50 billion in assets as systemically important, and the federal Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) is considering which non-banks should also be deemed too big to fail. Last year the board of regulators slapped the systemic tag on eight "financial market utilities," including clearinghouses, which means taxpayers now stand behind derivatives trading. Congratulations.

And last week the council, chaired by Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, declared that GE Capital, the finance arm of General Electric, GE and AIG are also officially important. Now the council is trying to designate insurer Prudential as systemic, and perhaps MetLife too.

GE Capital was rescued in the 2008 panic and thus deserves the systemic label. AIG seems to welcome the designation, perhaps because its current mix of businesses means that it will face a lighter regulatory burden than some competitors. But taxpayers should be cheered to learn that Prudential and MetLife are resisting membership in the too-big-to-fail club, and for good reason. It's a giant and counterproductive leap to conclude that the insurance business presents a systemic risk to the financial system.

AIG was a giant insurer when it failed, but its disastrous housing bets largely occurred outside its traditional insurance businesses, which have always been regulated by the states. The company's catastrophic wagers on the mortgage market were overseen by the U.S. Treasury's Office of Thrift Supervision. So of course Treasury's solution is to expand federal regulation to the businesses that weren't overseen by the department and didn't fail. Makes perfect Beltway sense.

But this logic should give taxpayers pause. Along with the "systemic" designation comes regulation that was created for banks, not for insurance companies, and that will create problems for taxpayers and policyholders. Any firm dubbed "systemically important" will be regulated by the Federal Reserve. This will likely mean heavy new capital requirements designed to prevent problems that generally don't exist at an insurer.

Banks accept short-term liabilities in the form of deposits and use them to fund long-term loans. This "maturity transformation" has wonderful economic benefits but carries the risk of failure if lots of depositors suddenly want to withdraw their funds. To address this risk, banks are required to maintain capital cushions and liquidity to meet deposit withdrawals that can occur at any time.

Insurers, by contrast, match long-term liabilities with long-term assets. Premiums to cover some event likely to occur decades in the future are invested in assets of a similar duration. There is little risk of a "run on the bank" because policyholders, unlike depositors, typically cannot demand the face value of their policies in cash. Tornadoes, car accidents and terminal cancer do occur, but they don't occur everywhere at once, and they are not triggered by a panic in financial markets.

Insurers can fail, but since customers cannot immediately demand their money the way bank depositors can, the failures tend to play out slowly over many years. States also typically require insurers to contribute to a fund to make up for the shortfall if one of them fails and its assets and liabilities don't match. Without the same immediate demands for cash as at a bank that's heading south, there is less risk of an asset fire sale that could roil markets.

Treating insurers like banks would also raise costs substantially at insurers as they scramble to comply with the new burdens. This means higher premiums for customers. MetLife hired consultant Oliver Wyman to calculate the consumer costs of bank regulation if applied to several insurers that could potentially fall under federal bank rules. The industrywide estimate: $5 billion to $8 billion a year.

If companies can't pass along these higher costs to customers and stay competitive, they are likely to exit the business, especially the capital-intensive life insurance market. That would mean less competition.

The other big risk is that the systemic risk designation could turn out to be self-fulfilling. If an insurer has to accept bank regulation, it might as well consider expanding into bank businesses. If it has to pay the regulatory costs of holding short-term liabilities, then the natural next step is to consider relying more on short-term funding, which almost everyone agrees was a key vulnerability leading into the 2008 crisis. Insurers may become riskier institutions than they now are, which means more risks for taxpayers.

This is no idle fear because the only certainty about financial regulation is that it never prevents the next crisis. Yet in order to reinforce the illusion of effective regulation, and vindicate the folly of Dodd-Frank, regulators are about to force insurance companies and customers who didn't cause the last crisis to pay more while encouraging firms to pursue riskier business thanks to an implied federal backstop. They should have called it the Financial Instability Council.

Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating. By Malcolm Moore

Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating. By Malcolm Moore
What should have been a hushed scene of 800 Chinese students diligently sitting their university entrance exams erupted into siege warfare after invigilators tried to stop them from cheating. The Telegraph, Jun 20, 2013
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10132391/Riot-after-Chinese-teachers-try-to-stop-pupils-cheating.html

The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China's notoriously tough "gaokao" exams, each year winning a disproportionate number of places at the country's elite universities.

Last year, the city received a slap on the wrist from the province's Education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject. Forty five examiners were "harshly criticised" for allowing cheats to prosper.

So this year, a new pilot scheme was introduced to strictly enforce the rules.

When students at the No. 3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams earlier this month, they were dismayed to find they would be supervised not by their own teachers, but by 54 external invigilators randomly drafted in from different schools across the county.

The invigilators wasted no time in using metal detectors to relieve students of their mobile phones and secret transmitters, some of them designed to look like pencil erasers.

A special team of female invigilators was on hand to intimately search female examinees, according to the Southern Weekend newspaper.

Outside the school, meanwhile, a squad of officials patrolled the area to catch people transmitting answers to the examinees. At least two groups were caught trying to communicate with students from a hotel opposite the school gates.

For the students, and for their assembled parents waiting outside the school gates to pick them up afterwards, the new rules were an infringement too far.

As soon as the exams finished, a mob swarmed into the school in protest.

"I picked up my son at midday [from his exam]. He started crying. I asked him what was up and he said a teacher had frisked his body and taken his mobile phone from his underwear. I was furious and I asked him if he could identify the teacher. I said we should go back and find him," one of the protesting fathers, named as Mr Yin, said to the police later.

By late afternoon, the invigilators were trapped in a set of school offices, as groups of students pelted the windows with rocks. Outside, an angry mob of more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent its rage, smashing cars and chanting: "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."

According to the protesters, cheating is endemic in China, so being forced to sit the exams without help put their children at a disadvantage.

Teachers trapped in the school took to the internet to call for help. "We are trapped in the exam hall," wrote Kang Yanhong, one of the invigilators, on a Chinese messaging service. "Students are smashing things and trying to break in," she said.

Another of the external invigilators, named Li Yong, was punched in the nose by an angry father. Mr Li had confiscated a mobile phone from his son and then refused a bribe to return the handset.

"I hoped my son would do well in the exams. This supervisor affected his performance, so I was angry," the man, named Zhao, explained to the police later.

Hundreds of police eventually cordoned off the school and the local government conceded that "exam supervision had been too strict and some students did not take it well".

Additional reporting by Adam Wu

Discussion on balancing risk sensitivity, simplicity and comparability within the Basel capital standards initiated by the Basel Committee

Discussion on balancing risk sensitivity, simplicity and comparability within the Basel capital standards initiated by the Basel Committee
July 8, 2013
http://www.bis.org/press/p130708.htm

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision today released a Discussion Paper on the balance between risk sensitivity, simplicity and comparability within the Basel capital standards.

In response to the financial crisis, the Basel Committee introduced a range of reforms designed to substantially raise the resilience of the banking system against shocks. In addition to these reforms, during 2012 the Committee commissioned a small group of its members (the Task Force on Simplicity and Comparability) to undertake a review of the Basel capital framework. The goal of the Task Force was to identify opportunities to remove undue complexity within the framework, and improve the comparability of its outcomes. The creation of the Task Force acknowledged that the framework has steadily grown over time as risk coverage has been expanded and more sophisticated risk measurement methodologies have been introduced.

The paper being released today discusses the reasons behind the evolution of the current framework, and outlines the potential benefits and costs that arise from a more risk sensitive methodology. The paper also discusses ideas that could possibly be explored to further reform the framework with the objective that it continues to strike an appropriate balance between the complementary goals of risk sensitivity, simplicity and comparability.

The purpose of the discussion paper is to seek views on this critical issue so as to help shape the Committee's thinking. At this stage, the Committee has not made a decision to pursue any of the ideas presented; the paper is being published to elicit comments and feedback from interested stakeholders, which will help the Committee refine its thinking in this area. Furthermore, the Committee remains firmly of the view that full, timely and consistent implementation of Basel III remains fundamental to building a resilient financial system, maintaining public confidence in regulatory ratios and providing a level playing field for internationally active banks. Adopting the Basel III reforms (higher and better quality capital, improved risk coverage, capital buffers, and liquidity and funding requirements) in accordance with the internationally-agreed transition period deadlines is itself an important step in improving the consistency of bank regulation globally.

Mr Stefan Ingves, Chairman of the Basel Committee and Governor, Sveriges Riksbank said: "The Committee is keenly aware of the current debate concerning the complexity of the current regulatory framework. For that reason, the Committee set up a Task Force last year to look at this issue in some depth. The Committee believes that it would benefit from further input on this critical issue before deciding on the merits of any specific changes to the current framework. The paper being released today is designed to encourage discussion amongst, and solicit views from, a broad set of stakeholders."

The Committee welcomes views on the issues outlined in this paper. Comments should be submitted by Friday 11 October 2013 by e-mail to baselcommittee@bis.org. Alternatively, comments may be sent by post to: Secretariat of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, Bank for International Settlements, CH-4002 Basel, Switzerland. All comments may be published on the website of the Bank for International Settlements unless a respondent explicitly requests confidential treatment.