Hard to Stop

I've often noted how important faith and trust are in a credit-based economy like ours. When the confidence that people have in other individuals, institutions and systems begins to get tested in some sort of meaningful way, it can set a destructive cascade in motion that is hard to stop. In "A Crisis of Faith," economist and New York Times' Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman explores a key component of the spreading crisis.

A decade ago, during the last global financial crisis, the word on everyone’s lips was “contagion.” Troubles that began in a far-away country of which most people knew nothing (Thailand) eventually spread to much bigger countries with no obvious connection to Southeast Asia, like Russia and Brazil.

Today, we’re witnessing another kind of contagion, not so much across countries as across markets. Troubles that began a little over a year ago in an obscure corner of the financial system, BBB-minus subprime-mortgage-backed securities, have spread to corporate bonds, auto loans, credit cards and now — the latest casualty — student loans.

Indeed, this week the state of Michigan suspended a major student-loan program because of the sudden collapse of another $300 billion market you’ve never heard of, the market for auction-rate securities.

Why has a crisis that began with loans to a limited group of home buyers ended up disrupting so much of the financial system? Because, ultimately, it’s more than a subprime crisis; indeed, it’s more than a housing crisis. It’s a crisis of faith.

I know that sounds dramatic. But, let me talk about what just happened to auction-rate securities.

Like many of the financial innovations that are now being called into question, auction-rate securities are complicated deals that seemed to offer something for nothing.

They seemed to offer the borrowers — typically local governments or quasi-governmental agencies, like the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Michigan Higher Education Student Loan Authority — a way to borrow long term without paying the relatively high interest rates investors usually demand on long-term loans.

At the same time, they seemed to offer investors an asset that was as good as cash — readily available whenever needed — but paid higher interest rates than bank deposits.

The operative word in all of this, of course, is “seemed.”

Auction-rate securities seemed as good as cash because they involve regular, well, auctions, held as often as once a week, in which investors wanting out sell their positions to investors wanting in. In principle, it was always possible for auctions to fail for lack of enough willing buyers — but that wasn’t ever supposed to happen.

Meanwhile, these securities seemed like a good deal for borrowers despite the fact that they contain a penalty clause: if an auction fails, the interest rate the borrower pays jumps up. (The Port Authority, which had a failed auction last week, just saw the interest rate it pays leap from 4.3 percent to 20 percent.) You see, there weren’t ever supposed to be failed auctions, so the penalties weren’t supposed to be relevant.

Now, what wasn’t ever supposed to happen has. In the last few weeks, a series of auctions have failed, leaving investors who thought they had ready access to their cash stuck, even as borrowers find themselves paying penalty rates.

The collapse of the auction-rate security market doesn’t reflect newly discovered problems with the borrowers: the Port Authority is as financially sound today as it was a month ago. Instead, it’s contagion from the broader credit crisis.

One channel of contagion involves monoline bond insurers, the specialized insurance companies that are supposed to guarantee debt. These companies insured buyers of local government debt against losses — but they also guaranteed a lot of subprime-related investments, which makes everyone wonder whether they’ll actually have the money to compensate losers in other markets.

More important, however, is the way the ever-widening financial crisis has shaken investors’ faith in the whole system. People no longer trust assurances that fancy financial instruments will function the way they’re supposed to — after all, they know what happened to people who thought their subprime-backed securities were safe, AAA-rated investments. Why, then, should they believe that auction-rate securities are as good as cash?

And loss of trust can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now that new investors won’t buy auction-rate securities because they no longer believe that they’re as good as cash, those securities become a much worse investment.

Needless to say, all of this is bad for the economy. I like to think of what’s happening as a sort of minor-key reprise of the banking crisis that swept America in 1930 and 1931. Frustrated investors who can’t get their money out of auction-rate securities aren’t as photogenic as angry mobs milling outside closed banks, but the principle is the same. And so are the effects: would-be borrowers can’t get credit, and the economy suffers.

One simple measure of the seriousness of the credit problem is this: although the Federal Reserve has sharply cut the interest rate it controls over the past few weeks, the borrowing costs facing many companies and households have actually gone up.

And the financial contagion is still spreading. What market is next?

Comments

[roger pasa]

I do not believe that a crisis a of faith as anything to do with our present situation my question would rather be What caused this crisis of faith?

[Rocky]

What caused this crisis of faith? One could start with bad underwriting standards on the part of lenders, brokers, mortgage guarantors, bond insurance companies etc. Who lends money to people with no income, no job and no assets? The people who got these NINJA loans were bound to get into financial trouble, thereby setting off a domino effect.

[Aaron Krowne]

It annoys me when pundits like Krugman suddenly jump on the "me too" bandwagon and start Monday-morning-quarterbacking the crisis.

The answer to where the "contagion" will spread next is irrelevant, because ultimately it will be "everywhere", same as we've been reporting all along. I started ml-implode largely because I expected the severe disruption if not collapse of the banking system, only incidentally triggered by the housing finance sector.

This conclusion is simple to come to when one truthfully acknowledges the vector of the contagion: it is the lack of capitalization (or lack of reserves) in the banking system. How is it that from the early 90s till recently, the capital in the Federal reserve system could stay the same (~$40B) while the economy doubled or tripled in size? Of course now, the non-borrowed reserves are negative, so we don't even have that. FDIC itself has only a fraction of a percent cash backing all deposits. And if you consider the broader financial system, the picture is even worse.

The positions of the majority of the banking system relative to zero-maturity capital are so large that a loss of a only few percent causes (is causing) major distress, if not wipes some players out entirely (I'm looking at you NetBank). The derivatives book of JPMorgan and a handful of other core money center banks are so gigantic (many times the world GDP) that the potential to wipe out the capital of the entire banking system is very real.

The dirty little secret someone like Krugman is loathe to let on to is that, in supporting Fed easing in response to every crisis over the last two decades, they contributed to making the banking system gradually less and less fundamentally solvent. In addition Greenspan and his acolytes worshiped at the church of "technological innovation" instead of extending fundamental banking constraints to "new, can't-fail" vehicles. Now we are simply paying the price for the limit of this progression.

This is all less a flaw in the manner of control as it is the folly of having a centrally controlled system. After each crisis, the capital requirements are loosened a little bit more, the "normal" interest rate goes down a little bit more, and the party goes on. It is exactly what you'd expect from politicians and insiders propping up the source of their own wealth and power, as well as the prime source of the perceived well-being of the nation.

Enough already. All interest rates should be set on the free market, deposit insurance should be private, and banks should be allowed to fail. Hard money/competitive money wouldn't hurt either.

The answer isn't tweaking and tuning a centralized financial system and then hoping fallible bureaucrats run it responsibly in perpetuity (remember how lionized Greenspan once was? Seems pretty dumb now, huh?) You won't hear it from Krugman, but centralized systems intrinsically break down like this. A free banking system wouldn't be free of hazard, but at least the hazard would be confined to smaller, more natural boundaries, as opposed to a national disaster every 30 years or so.

[Independent Accountant]

I agree with Krowne.