Now for Something Totally Different

July 31, 2008

It is not my custom to quote the fella who put the you-know-what in Dick Nixon, even if he does tie a mean, Reagan-worthy double-Windsor.

However, courtesy of my friend Ted Whatley, this is worth a read:


Thanks for the Obvious, Mr. Boskin

July 31, 2008

A dear friend asked about my reaction to Michael Boskin’s piece in the WSJ today.:

http://tinyurl.com/boskin

He-my friend, not Mr. Boskin-is obviously at the beach without sufficient distraction, otherwise he wouldn’t give a rip what I thought.

But here’s my reply to his email:

Ok, so here’s my read.

First, anybody at Hoover is just so concerned about irrelevance that they’ll say almost anything to get published.

Second, neither of these candidates has articulated an economic plan that works (not to promote my blog, but the two Fallows pieces I posted yesterday are really good reading). We have a $14 trillion debt and will hang another half trillion on that next year, plus interest paid to the chinese, japanese, russians, and various emirates, none of whom especially likes us. To me, that is issue #1 that nobody is talking about, just like nuclear proliferation is #1 in foreign policy. The reason nobody talks about either is that the problems are so hard to solve. Pete Peterson is on the right track with iousa, but his implementation seems a little out there.

I know Boskin didn’t write the headline, but “recipe for recession” is an impossibly small-bore rx to a bigger problem. It’s like saying “my breakfast was really expensive at the Dorchester” when the real problem is the perilous state of the dollar.


Say of the Day: Bertrand Russell in Conquest of Happiness

July 30, 2008

Wars, pogroms and persecutions have all been a part of the flight from boredom; even quarrels with neighbors have been found better than nothing. Boredom is therefore a vital problem fot the moralist, as half the sins of mankind are caused by fear of it.


Is That So Much To Ask?

July 29, 2008

I just ripped open my Amazon shipment (leaping landfills, Batman-the packaging waste!) of Michael Dobbs’ One Minute to Midnight, about the Cuban missile crisis. I opened the book randomly, and this phrase caught my eye:

“As was often the case, Kennedy was one step ahead of his aides.”

Mercy. Wouldn’t that be something?


James Fallows on Our Dicey Chinese Bargain

July 29, 2008

As the title of the blog indicates, I’m not the best sleeper. And James Fallows has cost me about as much sleep as anybody else I can think of. His clever memo of economic disaster to the President taking office in 2016 was three years ago:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200507/fallows

And now, a Tinker-Evers-Chance explication of why our $1 billion per day borrowing habit from China may prove our undoing:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/fallows-chinese-dollars

China has grown at 9% per year for the last 30 years and still enforces a roughly 50% savings rate on its people (vs. about 25% in India). The U.S. savings rate is zero to slightly negative, and hasn’t been above 10% in two generations. Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Middle Eastern investors have had negative returns on their supposedly uber-safe U.S. Treasury investments, adjusted for inflation and dollar depreciation for the last four years. The U.S. is $9.3 trillion or so in debt, and will run a $.5 trillion deficit next year.

Other than that everything is dandy.

Our nation is officially in the grip of the logic of the alcoholic: since I’m already hammered, what harm is one more drink? What’s needed is a national 12-step program that our political institutions are not set up to provide. This sets up as the most daunting leadership challenge since Churchill faced in WWII. The scariest part is that it’s a challenge which can probably be ducked entirely-for another Presidential term or maybe even five.


More on the Elusive FHFA

July 27, 2008

I don’t know Jim Hamilton, but I thank him for reading HR3321, also known as the Housing and Economic Recovery Act, and summarizing it here:

http://tinyurl.com/hamiltonjim

One fascinating tidbit which hasn’t gotten much play in the media:

As part of the enhanced oversight, the new regulator must specifically approve, disapprove or modify executive compensation at all of the GSEs. A regulated entity may be required to withhold compensation from an executive officer during a review of the reasonableness and comparability of compensation, and may take into consideration any wrongdoing by the officer.

Additionally, the director of the agency is appointed by the President. The current ofheo director is the interim director. It would send a great signal if the President would pick somebody with real lumber rather than expand the powers of a guy who seems like a career bureaucrat.

In any case, all the rearranging of regulatory deck chairs only shines a brighter light on how much of a kluge FM2 have become. I can’t think of another entity anywhere in the world which is subject to exchange, GAAP and Sarbox rules; is supposedly owned by shareholders who supposedly elect a board of directors; but has their executive comp lorded over by a Presidential appointee who in turn reports to his own board, which includes not one but two Cabinet secretaries (HUD and Treasury).

If good decisions actually get made amidst this Rube Goldberg set up, they will likely be accidental.

Oh, and another thing. I haven’t read a peep that perhaps its time to throw the whole lot out-management, boards and regulators. Why on God’s earth would we leave in their seats the same blokes who got us here to begin with?


Bleak Math at the NY Times

July 27, 2008

Haplessness, Thy Name Is OFHEO

July 26, 2008

With the passage of today’s legislation, as nearly as anyone can tell, the Office of Housing Enterprise oversight goes the way of the dodo, and is repaced by the newly created Federal Housing Finance Agency. The FHFA has been in the legislative works since early last year, and will also subsume the Federal Housing Finance Board. The Director of OFHEO, James Lockhart (did we ever hear a peep from this chap as FM2 were melting down?), purports to be just dandy with the demise of his agency. In a release today, he said:

I congratulate and thank Members of the House and Senate on final passage of a sound and comprehensive GSE regulatory reform bill. These provisions will go a long way toward restoring confidence in the housing markets by creating a new, stronger regulator with all the necessary tools to oversee Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks. OFHEO is ready to move forward quickly as part of the new Federal Housing Finance Agency, created by this bill.”

The one-paragraph release is followed by what appears to be agency boilerplate that clearly slipped past the irony police:

OFHEO’s mission is to promote housing and a strong national housing finance system by ensuring the safety and soundness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

But before OFHEO’s non-entity status becomes official, it seems pertinent to ask if said status hasn’t been de facto for quite some time.

The OFHEO 2007 annual report makes for entertaining reading. One particularly ripe example:

This year, OFHEO set for itself eight annual performance goals to reach these strategic goals and four annual performance goals to support its resource management strategy. To measure results in achieving goals, there were 34 performance measures for fiscal year 2007, 97 percent of which were achieved or substantially achieved.
If my math is right, that means they went 33 for 34 on their performance objectives. Are we to take it that #34 was something along the lines of, ”inform public that FM2 are about to do an imitation of Thelma and Louise?” What, pray tell, were said performance measures? Coloring inside the lines? Isn’t that a little like saying that, on the bright side, President Lincoln really enjoyed the part of the play he got to see?

Now as it turns out, OFHEO had already admitted that it wasn’t up to the task. In his introduction to the report, Director Lockhart says as much:

The year 2007 also saw progress by the Enterprises toward correcting their problems, but more needs to be done. In addition, as their internal problems that have lasted for many years and this year’s market turbulence and growing credit losses point out, there is a pressing need for a stronger regulator

In fact, his introductory letter reads like one long bitch session that he hasn’t had the authority to do his job.

He certainly wasn’t short on resources. As of the date of the report, OFHEO had 236 people, and were recruiting to fill 40 vacancies created by funding uncertainty, whatever that means. Its 2007 budget was $63 million; that’s $267k per year head, which either means that OFHEOers are well compensated or that they use a lot of post-it notes. Its organization chart looks like something from the “how not to ” chapter of an organizational behavior textbook. OFHEO had a director, a deputy director, and executive director, and then fifteen departments, or “offices.” Even so, the report makes sure to point out that

OFHEO’s operations are structured efficiently to accomplish its mission with a relatively small staff.

Right. No wonder they whiffed on that one performance measure-they were understaffed!!

The report really is worth a read. It’s a surreal mixture of complaint, self-congratulation, and blinding glimpses of the obvious, with a healthy dose of whistling past the grave yard. 87 pages of it.

Does anyone know anything about the Federal Housing Finance Agency that was born today? Why do i have this uneasy feeling the pit of my stomach?

Its charter is here

http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/financialsvcs_dem/hr1427summary030907.pdf

but I couldn’t find my Fedspeak to English dictionary. If it really does exist, it is in hiding from the Internet. In cruising around the web, I *was* able to determine that the FHFA of which we speak should be under no circumstances be confused with other FHFA’s which have preceded it, including:

-Floriday Home Furnishings Association

-Fairly Homogenous Farming Area, and my personal favorite

-Foot Health Foundation of America.

But that was pretty much it. Maybe all 236 of those people were zombies who just returned to the grave.

UPDATE: Here’s a summary of the bill from the Conservative Reader

http://tinyurl.com/billsum


With Cops Like These, No Robbers Need Apply

July 25, 2008

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121641296022866029.html

I’m late on this. But as the front-page article from the 7/21 WSJ didn’t elicit more blowback, here’s a little for good measure.

Apparently, when the FDIC took over Superior Bank in 2001, it pursued an atypical approach. Rather than winding the bank down and selling off its assets, as is the agency’s usual game plan, FDIC both continued to run the bank’s subprime portfolio and to make new subprime loans. 6,700 or so of them in fact, with aggregate value of over $550 million. Since then, 12% of these borrowers have defaulted.

It gets better (or worse). When the FDIC finally decided to unload the portfolio to Beal Bank of Houston, it did so without disclosing just how “sub” was subprime. Subsequent to the sale, 1,500 of the 5,315 loans FDIC sold to Beal have either defaulted or are nonperforming.

In what must be a first, Beal is now suing the FDIC, whose internal counsel estimates it could be on the hook for as much as $70 million in damages.

Lovely. Regulator defrauds regulatee. Man bites dog. Actually, it’s a little more like getting arsenic poisoning at the Police Benevolent bake sale. In his defense, said a senior FDIC staffer:

Our job was to sell the assets of the institution and not to clean up the operations, per se, to make this a better bank.

Said differently, “our job was not to clean up the poo. Our job was to try to move the poo to another, less visible part of the drinking water supply.”

Stuff like this only adds to my conviction that a bottoms-up look at the government’s financial regulatory infrastructure is long overdue:

http://tinyurl.com/jtonreg


I *Knew* I Was Wrong Business….

July 25, 2008

http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11751146

The Economist reminds of this little morsel: between 1998 and 2003, the top five execs of Fannie Mae earned (or at least received) $199 million in compensation. This, for running a B- balance sheet (65:1 leverage) with a AAA credit rating, provided gratis by your grandkids.