Mielipidekirjoitus: Talouden kriisi johtuu pankkiireista ja poliitikoista, ei markkinataloudesta
Olli Juntunen
Olli J.
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Talouden kriisi johtuu pankkiireista ja poliitikoista, ei markkinataloudesta
Maailma on jälleen kerran suuren kansainvälisen talouskriisin kourissa. Taas
kerran suomalaiset poliitikot ja media syyttävät ongelmista vapaata
markkinataloutta, koska sitä on helpompi syyttää kuin yksittäisiä ihmisiä
tai yrityksiä. Erityisesti suomalaista mediaa on vaivannut kyvyttömyys
raportoida kriisistä asiallisesti, mikä johtunee toimittajien olemattomasta
taloustietämyksestä ja lähtökohtaisesta vastenmielisyydestä vapaata
markkinataloutta kohtaan.
Tämänkertainen kriisi johtuu samasta asiasta kuin aikaisemmatkin:
talouselämän johtajien sekä poliitikkojen tekemistä virheistä, joista
esitämme alla rautalankamallin.
Yhdysvaltojen Keskuspankki on pyrkinyt pitämään korkotason mahdollisimman
alhaisena. Tämä toiminta perustui virheelliseen näkemykseen siitä, että
alhainen korkotaso lisäisi talouskasvua. Alhainen korkotaso mahdollisti sen,
että pankit pystyivät antamaan aikaisempaa enemmän lainaa sijoittajille sekä
asuntojen ostajille. Lisäksi Yhdysvaltojen viranomaiset painostivat muun
muassa syrjinnän vastaisella lainsäädännöllä pankkeja lainaamaan rahaa
myös talouksille, joiden maksukyky oli heikko. Liittovaltion
asuntolainayhtiöt Fannie Mae ja Freddie Mac tarjoutuivat ostamaan pankeilta
lainoja. Tämä loi pankeille kannustimen lainata rahaa aivan kenelle tahansa,
koska lainat pystyi myymään näille valtionyhtiöille, vaikka lainanottaja ei
pystyisikään maksamaan lainaa takaisin.
Pankit vaativat asuntolainoja antaessaan vain vähäisiä käsirahavaatimuksia.
Jos esimerkiksi otti 100 000 dollarin asuntolainan, saattoi käsirahavaatimus
olla vain 5 000 dollaria. Tällöin asuntojen hintojen romahtaessa ei ollut
enää kannattavaa maksaa pois 95 000 dollaria, jos asunnon arvo oli vain 80
000 dollaria. Tästä syystä ihmiset eivät halunneet enää maksaa
asuntolainojansa pois, minkä takia pankit ja julkiset asuntolainayhtiöt
eivät saaneet rahojaan takaisin. Sijoittajia pidetään syyllisinä kriisiin,
mutta itse asiassa useimmat sijoittajat toimivat olosuhteisiin nähden
järkevästi ottamalla ja takaamalla lainoja, jotka viime kädessä vaikuttivat
vakavaraisten pankkien ja lopulta valtion takaamilta.
Jottei kriisi olisi jäänyt pieneksi, päättivät viranomaiset vielä kruunata
koko sotkun muuttamalla yritysten kirjanpitosäädöksiä siten, että pankkien
täytyi merkata lainojen ja asuntojen arvo saataviensa sijaan niiden
jälleenmyyntiarvon mukaan. Tästä syystä asuntojen hintojen romahtaessa myös
pankkien taseeseen merkitty varallisuus romahti ja pankit joutuivat tekemään
kymmenien miljardien dollarien alaskirjauksia taseeseensa. Pankkien
reaaliomaisuus säilyi samana, mutta taseen äkillinen romahdus johti siihen,
että liittovaltio julisti pankit luottokelvottomiksi. Tämä hämäsi monia
sijoittajia ja poliitikkoja, jotka panikoivat shokissa, mikä pahensi
kriisiä entisestään.
Tässäkään vaiheessa ei olisi syntynyt mitään suurempaa ongelmaa, sillä koska
pankkien reaaliomaisuus ei ollut muuttunut, olisi sektori voinut vielä
selvitä. Pankit kuitenkin havaitsivat voivansa hyödyntää tilannetta
painostamalla valtiolta kohtuuttomia tukiaisia. Pankeille muodostui intressi
liioitella ongelmiaan mahdollisimman suurten tukiaisten toivossa.
Yhdysvaltojen liittovaltio meni lankaan ja perusti roskapankin, jolle
liittovaltio myönsi 700 miljardia dollaria määrärahoja roskalainojen
ostamiseen. Roskaluottojen omistajat saivat siis sitä mitä halusivatkin -
riskivapaata sijoitusta valtion takuulla.
Kriisin ratkaiseminen pankkitukiaisilla muodostaa jo tulevan kriisin
siemenen. Pankkitukiaisten seurauksena pankit uskaltavat ottaa kohtuuttomia
riskejä luottaen siihen, että valtio pelastaa heidät. Tämän
pankkisosialismin maksavat veronmaksajat.
Olli Juntunen
olli.j...@gmail.com
Veli-Matti Lahnala
lah...@gmail.com
markus....@gmail.com
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
Did Liberals Cause the Sub-Prime Crisis?
Conservatives blame the housing crisis on a 1977 law that helps-low
income people get mortgages. It's a useful story for them, but it
isn't true.
Robert Gordon | April 7, 2008 | web only
The idea started on the outer precincts of the right. Thomas
DiLorenzo, an economist who calls Ron Paul "the Jefferson of our
time," wrote in September that the housing crisis is "the direct
result of thirty years of government policy that has forced banks to
make bad loans to un-creditworthy borrowers." The policy DiLorenzo
decries is the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks
to lend throughout the communities they serve.
The Blame-CRA theme bounced around the right-wing Freerepublic.com. In
January it figured in a Washington Times column. In February, a Cato
Institute affiliate named Stan Liebowitz picked up the critique in a
New York Post op-ed headlined "The Real Scandal: How the Feds Invented
the Mortgage Mess." On The National Review's blog, The Corner, John
Derbyshire channeled Liebowitz: "The folk losing their homes? are
victims not of 'predatory lenders,' but of government-sponsored -- in
fact government-mandated -- political correctness."
Last week, a more careful expression of the idea hit The Washington
Post, in an article on former Sen. Phil Gramm's influence over John
McCain. While two progressive economists were quoted criticizing
Gramm's insistent opposition to government regulation, the Brookings
Institution's Robert Litan offered an opposing perspective. Litan
suggested that the 1990s enhancement of CRA, which was achieved over
Gramm's fierce opposition, may have contributed to the current crisis.
"If the CRA had not been so aggressively pushed," Litan said, "it is
conceivable things would not be quite as bad. People have to be honest
about that."
This is classic rhetoric of conservative reaction. (For fans of
welfare policy, it is Charles Murray meets the mortgage mess.) Most
analysts see the sub-prime crisis as a market failure. Believing the
bubble would never pop, lenders approved risky adjustable-rate
mortgages, often without considering whether borrowers could afford
them; families took on those loans; investors bought them in
securitized form; and, all the while, regulators sat on their hands.
The revisionists say the problem wasn't too little regulation; but too
much, via CRA. The law was enacted in response to both intentional
redlining and structural barriers to credit for low-income
communities. CRA applies only to banks and thrifts that are federally
insured; it's conceived as a quid pro quo for that privilege, among
others. This means the law doesn't apply to independent mortgage
companies (or payday lenders, check-cashers, etc.)
The law imposes on the covered depositories an affirmative duty to
lend throughout the areas from which they take deposits, including
poor neighborhoods. The law has teeth because regulators' ratings of
banks' CRA performance become public and inform important decisions,
notably merger approvals. Studies by the Federal Reserve and Harvard's
Joint Center for Housing Studies, among others, have shown that CRA
increased lending and homeownership in poor communities without
undermining banks' profitability.
But CRA has always had critics, and they now suggest that the law went
too far in encouraging banks to lend in struggling communities.
Rhetoric aside, the argument turns on a simple question: In the
current mortgage meltdown, did lenders approve bad loans to comply
with CRA, or to make money?
The evidence strongly suggests the latter. First, consider timing. CRA
was enacted in 1977. The sub-prime lending at the heart of the current
crisis exploded a full quarter century later. In the mid-1990s, new
CRA regulations and a wave of mergers led to a flurry of CRA activity,
but, as noted by the New America Foundation's Ellen Seidman (and by
Harvard's Joint Center), that activity "largely came to an end by
2001." In late 2004, the Bush administration announced plans to
sharply weaken CRA regulations, pulling small and mid-sized banks out
from under the law's toughest standards. Yet sub-prime lending
continued, and even intensified -- at the very time when activity
under CRA had slowed and the law had weakened.
Second, it is hard to blame CRA for the mortgage meltdown when CRA
doesn't even apply to most of the loans that are behind it. As the
University of Michigan's Michael Barr points out, half of sub-prime
loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA. A
further 25 to 30 percent came from bank subsidiaries and affiliates,
which come under CRA to varying degrees but not as fully as banks
themselves. (With affiliates, banks can choose whether to count the
loans.) Perhaps one in four sub-prime loans were made by the
institutions fully governed by CRA.
Most important, the lenders subject to CRA have engaged in less, not
more, of the most dangerous lending. Janet Yellen, president of the
San Francisco Federal Reserve, offers the killer statistic:
Independent mortgage companies, which are not covered by CRA, made
high-priced loans at more than twice the rate of the banks and
thrifts. With this in mind, Yellen specifically rejects the "tendency
to conflate the current problems in the sub-prime market with CRA-
motivated lending.? CRA, Yellen says, "has increased the volume of
responsible lending to low- and moderate-income households."
Yellen is hardly alone in concluding that the real problems came from
the institutions beyond the reach of CRA. One of the only regulators
who long ago saw the current crisis coming was the late Ned Gramlich,
a former Fed governor. While Alan Greenspan was cheering the sub-prime
boom, Gramlich warned of its risks and unsuccessfully pushed for
greater supervision of bank affiliates. But Gramlich praised CRA,
saying last year, "banks have made many low- and moderate-income
mortgages to fulfill their CRA obligations, they have found default
rates pleasantly low, and they generally charge low mortgages rates.
Thirty years later, CRA has become very good business."
It's telling that, amid all the recent recriminations, even lenders
have not fingered CRA. That's because CRA didn't bring about the
reckless lending at the heart of the crisis. Just as sub-prime lending
was exploding, CRA was losing force and relevance. And the worst
offenders, the independent mortgage companies, were never subject to
CRA -- or any federal regulator. Law didn't make them lend. The profit
motive did.
And that is not political correctness. It is correctness.
Mikko Ellilä
My Heroes Have Always Been Killjoys
Jesse Walker | October 20, 2008, 6:15pm
Matt Welch has replied ably
(http://www.reason.com/blog/show/129561.html) to Jacob Weisberg's
latest sneer (http://www.slate.com/id/2202489/) at libertarianism. I
have just one point to add, about this passage near the end of
Weisberg's piece:
"The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are
intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed
from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues,
libertarians react to the world's failing to conform to their model by
asking where the world went wrong. Their heroic view of capitalism
makes it difficult for them to accept that markets can be irrational,
misunderstand risk, and misallocate resources or that financial
systems without vigorous government oversight and the capacity for
pragmatic intervention constitute a recipe for disaster."
The "heroic" view of capitalism may well be popular among high school
Randites. But what serious adult libertarian, whether or not he went
through a Rand phase, argues that markets run on heroism? We argue
that markets are a discovery process filled with trial and error; that
businesses misunderstand risks and misallocate resources all the time,
and that this is why we need market discipline to keep them in line.
Instead of that discipline, during the lead-up to the current crisis,
they received first a gushing river of subsidized credit and then a
series of bailouts.
When you don't believe in the heroic corporate chieftain, it should be
equally hard to put your faith in that alternative fantasy, the heroic
regulator: neutral and public-spirited, always attuned to market
failure, constantly prepared to right the ship of commerce. Instead we
favor a decentralized system of checks and balances, of which the most
important are the checks imposed by an open, competitive marketplace.
Not because it's heroic, but because it can ruthlessly cut a would-be
hero down to size.
Jan-Patrick Bollström
--
Terveisin,
Jan-Patrick Bollström