Robert Solow Reviews Richard Posner
Robert Solow on the Current Economic Crisis, and Richard Posner:
How to Understand the Disaster: The plainspokenness I mentioned is what makes this book an event. There is no doubt that Posner has been an independent thinker.... [Yet] much of his thought exhibits an affinity to Chicago school economics: libertarian, monetarist, sensitive to even small matters of economic efficiency, dismissive of large matters of equity, and therefore protective of property rights even at the expense of larger and softer "human" rights. But not this time.... Here is one of several...
Some conservatives believe that the depression is the result of unwise government policies. I believe it is a market failure. The government's myopia, passivity, and blunders played a critical role in allowing the recession to balloon into a depression, and so have several fortuitous factors. But without any government regulation of the financial industry, the economy would still, in all likelihood, be in a depression; what we have learned from the depression has shown that we need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economy from running off the rails. The movement to deregulate the financial industry went too far by exaggerating the resilience—the self-healing powers—of laissez-faire capitalism.
If I had written that, it would not be news. From Richard Posner, it is. The underlying argument--it is not novel but it is sound--goes something like this. A modern capitalist economy with a modern financial system can probably adapt to minor shocks--positive or negative--with just a little help from monetary policy and mostly automatic fiscal stabilizers.... It is easy to be lulled into the comfortable belief that the system can take care of itself if only do-gooders will leave it alone. But that same financial system has intrinsic characteristics that can make it self-destructively unstable when it meets a large shock. One such characteristic is asymmetric information: some market participants know things that others don't, and can turn that knowledge into profit. Another is the capacity of financial engineering to produce securities so complicated and opaque....
In that kind of world, imagine a period of low interest rates. Once a set of profit opportunities is found, big operators will be tempted to borrow so that they can play with much more than their own capital, and thus make very large profits. This has come to be called "leverage.".... In the past, 10-to-1 leverage would have been about par for a bank. More recently, during the housing bubble that preceded the current crisis, many large financial institutions, including now-defunct investment banks such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, reached for 30-to-1 leverage.... Why did I do such a risky and, as it turned out, stupid thing? Well, it had worked in the past, and made a lot of money for many people. If I had backed off, others would probably have continued to make money for a while. I would have looked like a fool, and very likely an unemployed fool....
All those banks and others are now unwilling to lend to one another because they fear that the potential borrower is already broke and will be unable to repay. And so the credit markets freeze up and ordinary businesses that need credit for ordinary business purposes find that they cannot get it on any reasonable terms. This is what happened in September 2008 when the commercial paper market—--he market for daily business borrowin--ceased to work. The breakdown of the financial system exacerbates the recession....
I have deliberately kept this story stylized, omitting the juicy details... complicated derivative securities... greed, stupidity, and corruption. Posner does not ignore those things. They provide an irresistible target for amusement and contempt. I wanted instead to focus on the central role of leverage....
Posner starts the story, reasonably enough, with the period of easy money and low interest rates that began in 2001 as the Fed's normal response to the recession of that year, and lasted until the middle of 2004.... About 1.2 million private housing units were started in 1990, 1.6 million in 2000, and 2.1 million in 2005. Posner emphasizes the corresponding run-up in house prices, and he is right to do so. But the housing boom was not just a financial fact. By 2005 the country had clearly built many more houses, maybe two or three million more, than it could afford to occupy and finance. There would have been a housing slump in any case. We have had housing booms and slumps before, with consequences no worse than an interval of slow growth or a brief downturn.... What made this housing boom different, of course, was... mortgage-backed securities.... Moody's and Standard and Poor's were paid by the same institutions whose securities they were supposed to be judging.... To make matters worse, the fever spread to other assets: stock prices doubled in the five years 2003–2007. When the implosion came in 2007, enormous amounts of what had been perceived as wealth--true, eventually spendable wealth--simply disappeared.... Nothing concrete had changed. Buildings still stood; factories were still just as capable of functioning; people had not lost their ability to work or their skills or their knowledge of technology. But a population that thought in 2007 that they had $64.4 trillion with which to plan their lives discovered in 2008 that they had lost 20 percent of that....
Most commentary, at large, in Posner's book, and in this review, has been about how the financial collapse damages the real economy.It might be thought that somehow fixing the financial mess would automatically fix the real economy. That is not so, for at least two reasons worth mentioning. In the first place, all that vanished wealth cannot be restored.... Secondly, the restoration of credit flows is not just a matter of clarifying and strengthening the balance sheets of banks and other lenders. It takes two to make a loan: a solvent and willing lender and a credible borrower. In a deep recession, there are not enough credible borrowers....
There are other weaknesses in Posner's remarks on the real economy. For example, more than once he says that the various antirecessionary measures—like fiscal stimulus, bailouts—are very "costly" and "may do long-term damage to the economy." He does not explain what these costs and damages are. Sometimes he seems to have budgetary costs in mind. But bailouts are mostly transfers from one group in society to another, for example from taxpayers to financial institutions and their owners. They are certainly not ethically satisfying transfers, but it is not clear how they do long-term damage to the economy. The components of a fiscal stimulus package are costs to the federal budget; but to the extent that they put otherwise unemployed labor and idle industrial capacity to work, they do not impoverish the economy; in fact, they enrich it. (Of course, one would prefer useful projects to wasteful ones.) If fiscal stimulus works, even imperfectly, there is no doubt which way the benefit–cost ratio goes.
Posner is on much firmer ground in worrying about the very large increases in the money supply and in the interest-bearing public debt that are left behind by antirecessionary policy. Even there, we do not know how skillful and lucky the Federal Reserve will be at mopping up excess liquidity....
There is an even odder chapter called "A Silver Lining?" In it Posner flirts with the idea that a recession, even a depression, has a good side. It weeds out inefficient firms and practices. This is a little like saying that a plague is not all bad: it cleans up the gene pool. No doubt there is some truth to this idea of a purifying effect. But the notion that it could possibly compensate for years of lost output and lost jobs seems wholly implausible. There is certainly no calculation of economic costs and benefits behind the thought of a "silver lining."...
The Obama administration has been trying to inject enough clarity and capital into the balance sheets of banks so that they can resume providing credit for businesses and consumers. The job of regulatory reform has had to wait.... The financial system does have a useful social function to perform, and that is to make the real economy operate more efficiently. Some human institution has to collect a nation's savings and put them at the disposal of those who have productive ways to use them. Risks arise in the everyday business of economic life, and some human institution has to transfer them to those who are most willing to bear them. When it goes much beyond that, the financial system is likely to cause more trouble than it averts...
