Month: April 2019

WHO WAS BAILED OUT AFTER THE 2008 FINANCIAL CRASH?

The 2008 financial crash and resultant bailout have been in the news recently for two reasons: 1) some critiques have been leveled at Sen. Bernie Sanders’ statement on the presidential campaign trail that no Wall St. executives went to jail and that they got a trillion-dollar bailout, and 2) a new book has come out: Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world by Adam Tooze. The book has been described as insightful and telling a story that is both “opaquely complex and dazzlingly simple.” [1] In terms of Sen. Sanders’ statement, it takes a real spin doctor to dispute the truth of it (see below).

In the aftermath of the 2008 implosion of the huge Wall St. corporations, the U.S. government and Federal Reserve Bank came to the rescue. The government quickly made $700 billion available to bailout the Wall St. firms. Otherwise, twelve of the 13 largest ones probably would have gone bankrupt in late September or October of 2008 (as Lehman Brothers did before the rescue was in place and the scale of the disaster was clear). The government also bailed out the auto industry, insurance companies (e.g., AIG), and the quasi-public mortgage-purchasers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

In addition, the Federal Reserve Bank (Fed) made unprecedented purchases of assets from the technically bankrupt financial corporations under the innocuous-sounding banner of “quantitative easing”, to the tune of over $4 trillion. The six largest firms alone (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) also borrowed about $500 billion from the Federal Reserve Bank in peak periods of need. [2] Furthermore, the Fed extended what were effectively loans to the central banks of other countries of an also unprecedented $10 trillion. Estimates of the overall contribution of the Fed to the bailout range from $7.7 trillion to $29 trillion.

In addition, the U.S. government supported the big financial corporations in a variety of other ways. For example, short-selling of 799 financial stocks was banned in 2008 to protect these companies from free market speculation, which boosted their stock prices. Emergency bank charters were given to Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on Sept. 21, 2008, so they could borrow from the Fed as only banks can do. In October, the Fed, for the first time in history, paid interest to the banks on required reserve deposits. Shortfalls in required reserves and failed stress tests were effectively ignored. And except for one relatively low-level officer at Credit Suisse, no one and no company was criminally prosecuted or went to jail. The value of all these benefits is truly incalculable.

Therefore, pinning down a single figure for the total bailout is impossible because there were so many different pieces and the amounts in some of them fluctuated daily, given that banks borrow money from the Fed daily to meet their reserve requirements. However, to state that it was a trillion-dollar bailout is definitely true and to say that no Wall St. executives went to jail is also true for all meaningful purposes.

With all this bailout money and support for the financial corporations and the financial system, one might think that some significant money or support would have been made available to bailout out the workers and homeowners caught in the maelstrom of Wall St. malfeasance. However, precious little assistance was made available to the millions of homeowners trying to pay mortgages on homes where the mortgage was now greater than the value of the home, given that many homes had lost half their value. Very little was done for the millions of homeowners who suffered foreclosure. And it was not only individuals who suffered; whole communities – usually minority and low-income communities – were underwater due to predatory and discriminatory mortgage lending by the big financial corporations and their agents. Moreover, millions were unemployed as the economy went into a severe recession due to the malfeasance on Wall St. [3]

Two things make all this truly galling. The first is that despite the massive intervention of the U.S. government and the Fed, the rescued financial corporations were not required to change their basic mode of operation. The instability of speculative financial transactions that is endemic in their model of profitability and the huge financial rewards for employees, especially executives, was left intact, along with public insurance against losses that threaten consumers’ deposits.

The second galling outcome is that no executives of the financial corporations were punished, either through significant loss of compensation or criminal prosecution, let alone jail time. Remember, that in the 1980s Savings and Loan crisis, which was much smaller in scale, nearly 900 executives of Savings and Loan banks went to jail.

“The contrast between the solicitous care shown the culpable financial sector and the negligence shown to the innocent homeowner was startling.” [4] As a result, class-based economic inequality in the U.S. was exacerbated and economic gaps in income and wealth between Whites and Blacks grew dramatically.

The bailed out financial corporations were expected to make loans available to help households and businesses, as well as to avoid foreclosures whenever possible. When foreclosure was unavoidable, it was expected that the financial corporations would promptly resell those homes. These actions would have helped individuals, businesses, and communities recover. However, no requirements were placed on bailed out banks to do these things and, therefore, they did not happen.

The programs that were supposed to assist homeowners typically had draconian rules to prevent “undeserving” homeowners from benefiting. The story line from Wall St. and its backers on Capitol Hill was that home buyers were the ones at fault; they should have known better than to be duped by the predatory practices of the mortgage brokers or that the home buyers were simply trying to live above their means. This concern about benefiting undeserving individuals clearly did not extend to the undeserving bank and financial sector executives responsible for perpetrating fraud in the mortgage business and crashing their companies and the economy.

Similar opposition blocked the expansion of unemployment benefits and job training for workers who had lost their jobs. On the other hand, there were no significant limits put on the pay of executives whose corporations were bankrupt without the bailout, let alone requirements that executives pay back compensation they had received based on profits generated by fraudulent activities.

As the Great Recession lingered on and jobs, homes, and economic security did not return (still true today for many people), the deep anger and discontent that set in was the breeding ground for support for Trump.

The 2008 financial crisis and the bailout of the financial corporations and their executives, but not the homeowners and workers who suffered from the resultant crash, are exhibit one in the indictment of the corporate takeover of U.S. policy making. I urge you to contact your elected officials and ask them to stand up against corporatocracy and demand democracy back. Our government should work for the people, the workers and homeowners of America, not the big corporations.

[1]      Bloom Raskin, S., Winter 2019, “Whose recovery was it?” The American Prospect (This article is a review and commentary on Tooze’s book.)

[2]      Taibbi, M., 3/18/19, “Turns out that trillion-dollar bailout was, in fact, real,” RollingStone

[3]      Bloom Raskin, S., Winter 2019, see above

[4]      Bloom Raskin, S., Winter 2019, see above, page 86

U.S. CAPITALISM KILLS COMPETITION

The theory of capitalism says that free market competition will ensure quality products and services at competitive prices. Unfortunately, that theory is not the reality of U.S. capitalism today.

Deregulation and our business laws and practices, from anti-trust to financing to patent protections, have destroyed competition. Without competition, businesses have no incentives to restrain price increases, to ensure quality, or to provide consumers the choices that free market theories assume. Furthermore, monopolistic employers and business owners have little incentive to fairly compensate workers or even invest in the future of their businesses. Instead, they can and have been keeping profits high and lining their own pockets.

Rather than free markets, the U.S. economy is sea of monopoly or, at least, oligopoly, where a small group of sellers or producers control a market. For example: [1]

  • Four airlines control the bulk of air travel
  • Two corporations produce the bulk of beer
  • Six enormous banks / financial institutions hold over 40% of deposits and 50% of assets
  • Drug companies find ways to extend patents or otherwise restrict competition so they can jack up prices and make huge profits (see previous posts here, here, and here)
  • Two corporations control all on-line travel bookings
  • Two companies make nearly all the intravenous saline solution used in hospitals
  • Two firms control the majority of on-line advertising
  • Three companies control the agricultural markets for seeds and pesticides
  • Four firms make 89% of baby formula
  • Two companies make 76% of coffins
  • The supermarket and media industries are continuing to consolidate so that a handful of corporations control these markets
  • Two companies control the mobile app market

Furthermore, the oligopolists find ways, such as carving up geography or colluding (for example, generic drug makers) to make themselves effectively monopolists and charge exorbitant prices and/or deliver low quality goods and services. For example, there are many Internet service providers (ISPs) in the U.S., but three dominant providers (Comcast, Charter Communications, and AT&T, each with over 15 million subscribers) and six midsize providers (with between 3.5 and 7 million subscribers). Every other provider has under 1.3 million users. The nine dominant and midsized companies have carved up the country so that 76% of households have only one choice of Internet provider making the ISPs effectively monopolies.

The monopolists and oligopolists have used political and market place power to restrict new entrants to their markets. The rate of new business formation today is half of what it was in the late 1970s. When competition does emerge, the big, dominant companies often simply buy up the competition, sometimes to use its technology or innovations, and other times simply to eliminate it as competition.

Our anti-trust laws and regulators have failed to stop anti-competitive acquisitions. In the last ten years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have purchase 436 companies and startups without a single challenge from anti-trust regulators. [2] As a result, with almost every purchase consumers make, we are paying a toll, an excessive price, to one or another of the many monopolies or sets of oligopolies.

This trend of business and economic concentration, which allows companies to build high levels of market share and power, began in the 1980s under President Reagan and supposedly “conservative” Republicans. An important symbolic step in this trend was when the Federal Trade Commission stopped collecting data on market concentration in 1981.

Capitalism without real competition is not capitalism; it’s monopoly or oligopoly. The monopolists and oligopolists have very strong incentives to preserve their dominant status. Until the American public responds forcefully, and demands that its elected representatives do so as well, the number and size of monopolies and oligopolies are likely to grow.

Unfortunately, the mass media, which could provide the information to the public on the growing economic concentration, lack of competition, and harm to consumers and our politics, are highly concentrated corporations themselves. Therefore, our mass media have a vested interest in not telling us this story.

In the early 1900s, when the U.S. government fought back against the giant trusts such as Standard Oil and U.S. Steel, anti-trust laws and anti-monopoly regulatory actions were viewed as a check on excessive private power, and competition was seen as necessary to preserve opportunity, as well as human freedom and liberty. We need to fight back against the excessive private power of economic concentration again today.

An important piece of reclaiming our democracy from the plutocrats is reclaiming our economy from the monopolists and oligopolists. Some of the 2020 presidential candidates, especially Senator Elizabeth Warren, are talking about this and presenting policy proposals (e.g., here and here) to do so.

I encourage you to follow the presidential candidates’ proposals and the discussion of America’s Winner-Take-All, anti-competitive, faux free market, monopolistic capitalist economic system.

 

P.S. Sorry for the recent lack of posts to this blog. I was managing a campaign for the local Select Board (i.e., town council). The election was April 2 and we were successful! Over the last 3 years, we’ve replaced 4 of the 5 Select Board members with strong progressives, including two young mothers. A real turnaround!! All politics is local and political change does start at the grassroots.

[1]      Dayen, D., Winter 2019, “The new economic concentration,” The American Prospect

[2]      Dayen, D., Winter 2019, see above