Too Big to Bail
The Fed's Wall Street Dilemma
By PAM MARTENS
Counterpunch
St. Patrick's Day Edition
March 17, 2008
Americans learned two new truths last week from the Bush Administration's version of Life's Little Instruction Book: if you're a Wall Street miscreant you're thrown a lifeline; if you're a Wall Street crime fighter you're thrown a land mine.
In the first effort, the Feds effectively handed a Federal Reserve ATM card to JPMorgan to funnel your tax dollars to the teetering Bear Stearns brokerage firm to address counterparty risks that have been building for at least 4 years as the Feds snoozed. Counterparty risk is the trillions of dollars of insurance contracts (credit default swaps and other derivatives) taken out by Wall Street firms on each others (counterparty) bonds, bundled mortgage and commercial debt (collateralized debt obligations). The firms have used unregulated over-the-counter contracts to perform this risk transfer alchemy and funded their own company, Markit Group Ltd., to take the place of a regulated exchange for price discovery.
In the second effort, the Feds tapped the Department of Justice, Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Attorney's office in New York, FBI, five federal judges and a busy federal court to root out that Code Red threat to our national security: consensual sex. The sex involved a prostitution ring and Democratic New York State Governor, Eliot Spitzer, who was savaged and forced to step down by an avenging media mob abundantly fed with well placed leaks from a suspiciously homogenous group called "anonymous law enforcement officials."
Governor Spitzer, in his former role as New York State Attorney General, had taken the lead in rooting out Wall Street crimes against small investors because the Federal Reserve was preoccupied with lobbying to remove regulations on Wall Street's crime factory.
As usual, the Feds handed the bill to the governed with no thought to the will of the governed.
While mainstream media called the Bear Stearns bailout the first brokerage bailout since the Great Depression, in truth it was the second in seven months.
The first brokerage bailout came without all the media fanfare because it arrived not on the wings of a public announcement but in five pages of indecipherable Fed jargon addressed to the General Counsel of Citigroup.
Here is the effective message sent by the Federal Reserve to Citigroup in its letter of August 20, 2007: now that we have allowed you to become both too big to fail and too big to bail by repealing the depression era investor-protection law known as the Glass-Steagall Act at your mere beckoning, we have to bend more rules to keep you afloat. So, for example, the rule that says the Federal Reserve is not allowed to lend to brokerages, just banks, from its discount window can be tweaked for you by lending up to $25 billion to you and then we'll let you lend it to your brokerage arm. The Federal Reserve Act rule that says a bank can't loan more than 10% of its capital stock and surplus to its brokerage affiliate, we'll let you go as high as about 30% and say it's in the public interest.
By giving Citigroup an exemption from Rule 23A of the Federal Reserve Act, by allowing it to funnel up to $25 Billion from the Fed's discount window to its brokerage clients who were getting hit with margin calls, the Federal Reserve and Chairman Ben Bernanke telegraphed an incredibly dangerous message to global markets: we're just as unaccountable as Wall Street. The Federal Reserve as enabler under Alan Greenspan created today's problem and today's Crony Fed under Ben Bernanke is killing off what's left of U.S. financial credibility. (I had barely finished typing these words on Monday, March 17, 2008, when a news alert came across my screen advising that the Federal Reserve was taking the breathtaking step of making direct loans to all brokerage firms which are primary dealers for Treasury securities.)
The Federal Reserve is stumbling around in the dark and regularly bumping into the next bailout because it stopped being an independent monetary force and started taking its marching orders from Wall Street quite some time ago.
Here's what Nancy Millar, President at the time of the National Organization for Women in New York City, presciently testified in writing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in August 2001. (Ms. Millar edited and signed this testimony while I and other Wall Street activists provided input. This testimony is available in full on the SEC's web site.)
We thank the Securities and Exchange Commission for extending the comment period to September 4, 2001 in the critical area of bank oversight now that the lines between banks and brokerage firms have been blurred with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act.
We believe that the comments made in the letter dated June 29, 2001 from the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency should be disregarded in their totality. The banks of America have enough lobbyists and trade associations to argue their case before the SEC. It is not the charter or mandate of these three regulatory bodies to lobby on behalf of banks.
The body of evidence that should dictate how the SEC must now proceed since Congress saw fit to eliminate the critical protections afforded the investing public in the Glass-Steagall Act, resides in the tens of thousands of pages of transcripts of the Pujo Committee hearings held in 1913 and the Pecora Committee hearings of 1933 and 1934. Fancy promises from regulators that banks functioning in the dual role as brokerage firms can and will be self-policing is not what the SEC or Congress should rely on. The well-developed history of egregious abuses bestowed on the investing public prior to the enactment of Glass-Steagall, and since its recent repeal, is what the SEC and Congress must look to. To believe that the dynamics of power and greed have been materially altered in nine decades is to engage in naiveté at the public's peril.
Our Nation's prosperity, democracy and the productivity of its citizens demand a level playing field to acquire and safeguard financial assets. Society crumbles when assets achieved through years of honest hard work can be fleeced by brokerage firms masquerading as insured-deposit banks. It is the role of federal regulators to maintain a level playing field through stringent regulation.
We ask that the SEC immediately impose the same regulations that govern outside broker-dealers to securities' operations within banks. And, we herewith ask Congress to reconsider the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act or be held accountable for the peril that unfolds from this unwise and inadequately deliberated decision.
If ever there was evidence that America is now facing that peril, it was the most recent news that the Bush administration's much touted "free and efficient market" had priced Bear Stearns at $30 a share at the close of trading on Friday, March 14, 2008 but on further examination of its books over the weekend, it was valued at $2 a share and absorbed by JPMorgan at that price.
Equally troubling is the growing awareness among Wall Street veterans that neither the Federal Reserve nor the U.S. Treasury comprehend was has happened here, much less how to contain it. Here's what we heard from Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, last week:
"regulation needs to catch up with innovation and help restore investor confidence but not go so far as to create new problems, make our markets less efficient or cut off credit to those who need it."
Innovation? Less efficient? Is there anything at all that looks innovative or efficient about Wall Street today? It is a seized up house of cards built on a toxic formula of hubris, corruption and free market madness.
Before there is a complete breakdown, Congress must quickly address the five key reasons we have today's mess on our hands:
(1) Incentive: from mortgage brokers paid higher fees to sell subprime loans rather than prime loans, to stockbrokers paid dramatically higher fees to sell mortgage-backed securities rather than U.S. Treasury securities, to investment bankers paid dramatically higher fees to package Collateralized Debt Obligations rather than issue plain vanilla corporate bonds, Wall Street has been incentivized to greed rather than honest service to investors.
(2) Artificial Demand: The above outsized incentive produced a glut of unwanted and unneeded product that had to be eventually hidden off Wall Street's balance sheet in Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs) or dressed up to look like Commercial Paper and buried in mom and pop money market funds. It is this glut and the lack of transparency as to where else this toxic paper is hiding that is creating the fear and panic on Wall Street.
(3) Counterparty Risk: The regulators allowed Wall Street firms/banks to balloon their asset base and pretend they were meeting capital adequacy tests by buying "insurance" in the form of derivative contracts. There was only one problem with these "hedging" techniques; the counterparty in many cases was just another Wall Street firm or an inadequately capitalized municipal bond insurer. Instead of spreading risk, the risk was concentrated among the same players.
(4) Glass-Steagall Act: Congress was incentivized through Wall Street campaign financing to throw reason and judgment out the window and repeal the only law that stood between the country and another 1929. Glass-Steagall must be restored; and public financing of federal campaigns is the only means of restoring the will of the governed to Washington.
Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years; she has no securities position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article. She writes on public interest issues from New Hampshire. She can be reached at pamk741@aol.com
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