Check Out Ben Bernanke's Facebook Page

Actually, I suppose we should clearly state that someone is having some fun by mocking Helicopter Ben, but that person did a good job. Kudos to Tertium Quids for finding this gem.

Bashing Corrupt TARP Bailouts

Appearing on Fox Business News, I summarize the many reasons why the Bush-Paulson-Obama-Geithner TARP bailout was - and still is - bad policy.



I'm sure I have plenty of flaws, but at least I am philosophically consistent. Here's what I said about the issue more than 18 months ago. The core message is the same (though I also notice I have a bad habit of starting too many sentences with "well").

Alan Greenspan Should "Man Up" or Drop Out of Sight

John Stossel appropriately scolds the former Federal Reserve Chairman for blaming the financial crisis on the free market. I'll go one step farther and say that Greenspan's behavior is a reprehensible example of someone lacking the cojones to take responsibility for his mistakes. Greenspan is surely not responsible for the corrupt system of subsidies from the government-created nightmares known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but he definitely deserves the lion's share of the blame for the Fed's easy-money policy of artificially-low interest rates. Greenspan presumably knows he screwed up, which makes his attack on free markets especially despicable. The icing on the cake is that he's also sucking up to the political establishment by endorsing higher taxes. Hasn't he already done enough damage?

I'm getting tired of Alan Greenspan. First, the former Federal Reserve chairman blamed an allegedly unregulated free market for the housing and financial debacle. Now he favors repealing the Bush-era tax cuts. ...During a congressional hearing two years ago, Greenspan shocked me by blaming the free market -- not Fed and housing policies -- for the financial collapse. As The New York Times gleefully reported, "(A) humbled Mr. Greenspan admitted that he had put too much faith in the self-correcting power of free markets." He said he favored regulation of big banks, as if the banking industry weren't already a heavily regulated cartel run for the benefit of bankers. Bush-era deregulation is a myth perpetrated by those who would have government control the economy. We libertarians were distressed by Greenspan's apparent abandonment of his free-market philosophy and his neglect of the government's decisive role in the crisis. ...now Greenspan, going beyond what even President Obama favors, calls on Congress to let the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts expire -- not just for upper-income people but for everyone. ...the stupidest thing said about tax cuts is the often-repeated claim that "they ought to be paid for." How absurd! Tax cuts merely let people keep money they rightfully own. It's government programs, not tax cuts, that must be paid for. The tax-hungry politicians' demand that cuts be "paid for" implies the federal budget isn't $3 trillion, but $15 trillion -- the whole GDP -- with anything mercifully left in our pockets being some form of government spending. How monstrous!

When Keynesians Attack, Part II

I'm still dealing with the statist echo chamber, having been hit with two additional attacks for the supposed sin of endorsing Reaganomics over Obamanomics (my responses to the other attacks can be found here and here). Some guy at the Atlantic Monthly named Steve Benen issued an critique focusing on the timing of the recession and recovery in Reagan's first term. He reproduces a Krugman chart (see below) and also adds his own commentary.

Reagan's first big tax cut was signed in August 1981. Over the next year or so, unemployment went from just over 7% to just under 11%. In September 1982, Reagan raised taxes, and unemployment fell soon after. We're all aware, of course, of the correlation/causation dynamic, but as Krugman noted in January, "[U]nemployment, which had been stable until Reagan cut taxes, soared during the 15 months that followed the tax cut; it didn't start falling until Reagan backtracked and raised taxes."

This argument is absurd since the recession in the early 1980s was largely the inevitable result of the Federal Reserve's misguided monetary policy. And I would be stunned if this view wasn't shared by 90 percent-plus of economists. So it is rather silly to say the recession was caused by tax cuts and the recovery was triggered by tax increases.

But even if we magically assume monetary policy was perfect, Benen's argument is wrong. I don't want to repeat myself, so I'll just call attention to my previous blog post which explained that it is critically important to look at when tax cuts (and increases) are implemented, not when they are enacted. The data is hardly exact, because I haven't seen good research on the annual impact of bracket creep, but there was not much net tax relief during Reagan's first couple of years because the tax cuts were phased in over several years and other taxes were going up. So the recession actually began when taxes were flat (or perhaps even rising) and the recovery began when the economy was receiving a net tax cut. That being said, I'm not arguing that the Reagan tax cuts ended the recession. They probably helped, to be sure, but we should do good tax policy to improve long-run growth, not because of some misguided effort to fine-tune short-run growth.


The second attack comes from some blog called Econospeak, where my newest fan wrote:

I’m scratching my head here as I thought the standard pseudo-supply-side line was that the deficit exploded in the 1980’s because government spending exploded. OK, the truth is that the ratio of Federal spending to GDP neither increased nor decreased during this period. Real tax revenues per capita fell which is why the deficit rose but this notion that the burden of government fell is not factually based.

Those are some interesting points, and I might respond to them if I wanted to open a new conversation, but they're not germane to what I said. In my original post (the one he was attacking), I commented on the "burden of government" rather than the "burden of government spending." I'm a fiscal policy economist, so I'm tempted to claim that the sun rises and sets based on what's happening to taxes and spending, but such factors are just two of the many policies that influence economic performance. And with regard to my assertion that Reagan reduced the "burden of government," I'll defer to the rankings put together for the Economic Freedom of the World Index. The score for the United States improved from 8.03 to 8.38 between 1980 and 1990 (my guess is that it peaked in 1988, but they only have data for every five years). The folks on the left may be unhappy about it, but it is completely accurate to say Reagan reduced the burden of government. And while we don't yet have data for the Obama years, there's a 99 percent likelihood that America's score will decline.

This is not a partisan argument, by the way. The Economic Freedom of the World chart shows that America's score improved during the Clinton years, particularly his second term. And the data also shows that the U.S. score dropped during the Bush years. This is why I wrote a column back in 2007 advocating Clintonomics over Bushonomics. Partisan affiliation is not what matters. If we want more prosperity, the key is shrinking the burden of government.

A Victory Against the Federal Reserve

Kudos to the federal appeals court that just ruled that the Federal Reserve has no right to hide the sordid special handouts it provided to well-connected financial firms. Here's an excerpt from a report about the decision:

The Federal Reserve must reveal documents identifying financial companies that received Fed loans to survive the financial crisis, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. A panel of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said in two separate opinions that such information isn't automatically exempt from requests under the Freedom of Information Act. News Corp.'s Fox News Network LLC and Bloomberg L.P. sued separately for details about loans that commercial banks and Wall Street firms received and the collateral they put up. Other news agencies, including The Associated Press, filed briefs with the appellate court in their support. The Fed argued that if it identified banks that drew emergency loans, it could cause a run on those institutions, undermine the loan programs and potentially hurt the economy, and lower-court judges were split on the issue. The Federal Reserve said it's studying Friday's ruling.

On a broader note, I'm periodically asked about monetary policy, the Fed, and the financial crisis. I do my best to stay away from the first two topics, largely because my interests are elsewhere (though I did handle the Federal Reserve for the Bush/Quayle transition team, many years in the past). But that does not mean the issues are unimportant. For those that are interested, I recommend two articles, one by George Selgin and the other by Gerald O'Driscoll.

The Case Against Bernanke

The Washington establishment is rallying behind Ben Bernanke, so that probably means the Fed Chairman will get confirmed for another term. But this is precisely why he is the wrong man for the job. As the Wall Street Journal opines, Bernanke is guilty of two sins. His track record on monetary policy is weak, indicating an insufficent commitment to protecting the value of the dollar. And his willingness to resist political pressure is even weaker, suggesting that America could be headed back to 1970s-style inflation:

The White House said yesterday it has damped down a political revolt against Ben Bernanke and now has the votes to secure the Federal Reserve Chairman's second four-year term. Whether or not Mr. Bernanke is confirmed, the lesson we draw is that overly political central bankers will eventually be undone by politics. ...When we opposed Mr. Bernanke's reconfirmation on December 3, the facile consensus was that the Fed chief was a master of the universe who had saved the world from depression. But after Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts last week, Senate Democrats are suddenly looking for a financial political sacrifice. ...The Democrats' loudest complaint, moreover, is that Mr. Bernanke and the Fed haven't been easy enough in printing money. ...The Fed has already kept interest rates at near zero for more than a year, and it is buying $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities to refloat the housing bubble, among other interventions into fiscal policy and credit allocation. Is the Fed going to buy another $1.25 trillion, or promise to keep rates at zero for another 14 months? Mr. Reid's declaration of a confirmation quid pro quo will not reassure global investors who already fear that the Fed lacks the political will to withdraw its historic post-crisis liquidity binge soon enough to avoid new asset bubbles. ...Mr. Bernanke is already far too susceptible to political pressure. As a Fed governor, he was Alan Greenspan's intellectual co-pilot last decade when their easy money policies created the housing mania. When Congress later put political pressure on the Fed to direct credit toward housing, and even to student loans, Mr. Bernanke (who was then chairman) also quickly obliged. More ominously for the next four years, Mr. Bernanke continues to deny any Fed monetary culpability for creating the mania. Shortly after the New Year, even with his nomination pending, Mr. Bernanke issued an apologia that was striking for its willingness to play to the Congressional theory of the meltdown by blaming bankers and lax regulators. ...Yes, much of Wall Street wants to see Mr. Bernanke confirmed. The Street is currently making a bundle off Fed policy, as it borrows at near-zero rates and lends long, and the banks don't want that to end. The banks also loved negative real interest rates in the middle of the last decade, and we know how that turned out.

Even Drug Dealers Don't Want to Use the Dollar

I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or bad thing, but it surely says something that international drug dealers and money launderers prefer the euro over the dollar. The good news, so to speak, is that this is not a referendum on Bernanke's easy-money policy. The drug lords apparently prefer larger denominations, and the U.S. no longer circulates bills larger than $100. The Guardian reports:

International drug cartels have abandoned the US dollar for high denomination euros to launder millions in illegal profits, Europol has revealed. The gangs no longer use $100 bills because €500 notes – the largest denomination of euro – take up less room when transporting large amounts of cash across the world. ...Rob Wainwright, director of Europol, said last week police forces across continental Europe were tracking the movements of smuggled and laundered euros and had traced much of it back to large drug gangs. ...The scale of the smuggling operation was revealed in figures from the Colombian National Directorate. Only $300,000 worth of euros were declared as entering Colombia between January and June 2007, but over $551m in euros left the country. Once in Europe, the notes can be exchanged for dollars.

Federal Reserve Chairman Wants Central Bank to Be Rewarded for a Crummy Job

We've all heard the joke about the guy who gets convicted of murdering his parents and then asks a judge for mercy because he's an orphan. That same kind of chutzpah was displayed in a recent column by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke is the Washington Post. In an attempt to preserve some of the Fed's regulator powers (which are not necessary for, and may be harmful to, the central bank's ostensible mission of price stability) and dodge accountability and oversight, Bernanke warns that, "These measures are very much out of step with the global consensus on the appropriate role of central banks, and they would seriously impair the prospects for economic and financial stability in the United States. The Fed played a major part in arresting the crisis, and we should be seeking to preserve, not degrade, the institution's ability to foster financial stability and to promote economic recovery without inflation." These two sentences would be laughable if it wasn't for the fact that Fed policy mistakes have caused so much misery. At the risk of stating the obvious, the Fed's easy-money policy was the main reason for the financial crisis. Bernanke's argument is akin to an arsonist expecting praise for calling the fire department after setting a house on fire. But Bob Higgs, the highly-regarded economic historian, had the best analysis:

And about this “economic and financial stability in the United States” that a Fed audit would threaten: Is Bernanke thinking about the stability we enjoyed between the world wars, when the Fed managed to bring about the onset on what proved to be the greatest depression in world history (an accomplishment for which he has previously accepted responsibility on behalf of the Fed)? Or perhaps he is thinking instead about the stability we enjoyed since 2001, when the Fed pushed the Fed funds rate quickly from 6.5 percent to 1 percent, held it at a negative real rate for several years, then pushed it up quickly to 5.25 percent in 2006-2007, then shoved it down quickly to almost zero in the past year? Zounds. It would certainly be tragic if the American people had to give up such remarkable stability. Or perhaps he is thinking about the fact that before the Fed was created, the dollar had retained its purchasing power more or less constant for more than a century, except for transitory war-related ups and downs, but since the Fed’s creation, the dollar has lost more than 95 percent of its purchasing power. Who calls this degree of debasement stability?

Weekly Economics Lesson: The "Sugar High" of Easy Money

Steve Pearlstein of the Washington Post has a common-sense column warning about the dangers of the Fed's easy-money policy. It is possible, to be sure, that the Fed will withdraw (or "soak up") all this liquidity as the economy recovers, but all the signs suggest that the central bank is kowtowing to the politicians and debasing the currency in order to help politicians create illusory growth. This is a recipe for a return to the 1970s. The bad policy started under Bush (and Greenspan) and is continuing under Obama (and Bernanke):

The Federal Reserve is still going through its "lessons-learned" exercise from the recent financial crisis, but there's one lesson it clearly has not yet absorbed -- the one about ignoring and enabling credit bubbles. That's the only conclusion that can be drawn from the Fed's decision last week to not only keep its benchmark interest rates at zero but also let everyone know that it intends to leave them there for a good long time. ...Not surprisingly, all of this sparked a week-long party in financial markets that had already experienced powerful rallies over the past six months. Even with Thursday's modest pullback on Wall Street, U.S. stocks are up 60 percent since March, and share prices in emerging markets have nearly doubled. Commodity prices are soaring once again, led by gold, which is now selling for more than $1,100 an ounce, and crude oil, which is up a whopping 126 percent since February. A rally in the junk-bond and third-world debt markets has driven interest rates back to where they were before the crisis. In urban China, India and Brazil, property prices have doubled in the past year. "The markets are on a sugar high," Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive of Pimco, the giant money manager, told Newsweek's Rana Foroohar last week. Judging from how sharply and quickly these prices have risen, it's a pretty good guess that most of the buying has not been done by long-term investors who are suddenly upbeat about the prospects of global economic growth. The better bet is all this is the handiwork of short-term speculation by banks, hedge funds, private-equity funds and other financial center wise-guys moving as a herd, financing their purchases directly or indirectly with some of that yummy zero-percent money provided courtesy of the Fed. ...There's no way to know how long all this can continue before one of these bubbles finally bursts, the dollar spikes upward and investors all rush to unwind their trades at the same time. But it is a good guess that it will last as long as the Fed and other central banks indicate there is no end in sight for the current cheap-money regime. The longer they wait, the bigger the bubbles, and the bigger the mess to clean up. All of which is why the recent statements by policymakers were so disappointing -- and so dangerous.

A Weak Currency Does Not Lead to a Strong Economy, Part II

Appearing on MSNBC, I engage in some wholesome Fed-bashing.

In my research before appearing on the program, the most shocking factoid I discovered is that the dollar has lost 95 percent of its value since the Fed was created in 1913.

But let's not forget that the Fed's accelerate-too-fast/brake-too-hard approach to monetary policy (with the first part generally being the result of trying to artificially goose the economy to help politicians get reelected) is largely responsible for disasters ranging from the Great Depression to the current financial crisis.

And now the Fed is turning the dollar into the Argentine peso by running the printing presses 24/7. What's not to love?

A Weak Currency Does Not Lead to a Strong Economy

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, David Malpass explains why the Fed's weak-dollar policy (supported by both Bush and Obama) is a recipe for economic decline:

Some weak-dollar advocates believe that American workers will eventually get cheap enough in foreign-currency terms to win manufacturing jobs back. In practice, however, capital outflows overwhelm the trade flows, causing more job losses than cheap real wages create. This was the lesson of the British malaise, the Carter malaise, the Mexican malaise of the 1990s, Yeltsin's Russian malaise through 1999 and the rest. No countries have devalued their way into prosperity, while many—Hong Kong, China, Australia today—have used stable money to invite capital and jobs. ...If stocks double but the dollar loses half its value, who beyond Wall Street are the winners and losers? There's been a clear demonstration this decade. The S&P nearly doubled from 2003 through 2007. Those who borrowed to buy won big-time. Rich people got richer, seeing their equity bottom line double. At the same time, the dollar's value was cut nearly in half versus the euro and other stable measures. Capital fled, undercutting job growth. Rent, gasoline and food prices rose more than wages. ...The solution is a strong U.S. jobs and wealth program. It has to include stable money, a flatter, more competitive tax structure, spending restraint, and common-sense bank regulation so small business lending can restart. ...Instead, Washington's current economic program pushes capital away by weakening the dollar, threatening higher tax rates, borrowing short (the Fed's near trillion-dollar overnight debt, Treasury's mounds of bill and note issuance) to lend long (mortgages, student loans, entitlements), doubling down on government subsidies, and rechanneling bank loans to governments and big businesses instead of the small business job-growth engine.

United Nations Wants Global Currency

Bloomberg reports that a key division of the United Nations wants a global currency (presumably under the contrrol of the U.N.). Somehow, we are supposed to believe that a global monopoly central bank will produce better monetary policy than national monopoly central banks. That is theoretically possible, to be sure. After all, the Italians are better off with the euro than they were with the lira, but that is because the Germans dominate the European Central Bank. One can only imagine what sort of kleptocrats would be in charge of a "global reserve bank." Moreover, since the same bureaucracy also is promoting restrictions on capital mobility, there is good reason to suspect they are either clueless or malignant. Bloomberg reports:

The dollar’s role in international trade should be reduced by establishing a new currency to protect emerging markets from the “confidence game” of financial speculation, the United Nations said. UN countries should agree on the creation of a global reserve bank to issue the currency and to monitor the national exchange rates of its members, the Geneva-based UN Conference on Trade and Development said today in a report. China, India, Brazil and Russia this year called for a replacement to the dollar as the main reserve currency after the financial crisis sparked by the collapse of the U.S. mortgage market led to the worst global recession since World War II. ...“The most important lesson of the global crisis is that financial markets don’t get prices right,” [German Deputy Finance Minister] Flassbeck said. “Governments are being tempted by the resulting confidence game catering to financial-market participants who have shown they’re inept at assessing risk.” The 45-year-old UN group, run by former World Trade Organization chief Supachai Panitchpakdi, “promotes integration of developing countries in the world economy,” according to its Web site. Emerging-market nations should consider restricting capital mobility until a new system is in place, the group said.