The Great Recession

At the end of April PBS’s investigative unit Frontline began showing the first of their four part series,  Money, Power and Wall St. Each one hour segment  is worth paying close attention to. I developed a greater appreciation for how collateralized debt obligations (CDO’s) and credit default swaps (CDS’s) are created, traded, and how the market for these derivatives — private, proprietary, opaque — contributed to (if not created) the financial crisis and continues to create enormous risk today. Several of the economists and public officials that I have looked to to gain understanding of the crisis, and have found to be progressively minded and extremely knowledgeable, Robert Reich, Joseph Stieglitz, Paul Krugman, Jared Bernstein, are featured along with a number of other smart, informed, highly credible players in the drama that unfolded. The role of Occupy Wall Street is featured prominently is this discussion, especially in the last hour with interviews of the Occupiers, former Wall St. traders, involved with Occupy the SEC and whose workgroup is offering public comment on the rule-making process surrounding the Frank-Dodd legislation.

The Derivative Markets

The phenomenal profit to be made from securitizing mortgages for a growing derivatives market drove both unscrupulous and unwitting lenders to write mortgages as fast as they could that many borrowers simply couldn’t afford, or similarly didn’t understand as to the terms to which they were agreeing. Predatory lending and aggressive markets in derivatives largely fueled a worldwide housing bubble, which when bursting caught up millions of people stuck with out-sized mortgages worth more than the homes they had financed. This derivatives market is to this day a largely unregulated shadow banking industry, which in 2010 held assets of $13 trillion, $3 trillion more than the regulated, public, commercial banking system held in loans.

This shadow banking system trades derivatives in private, proprietary transactions and counter bets which wiped out unsuspecting investors not only in mortgage markets, but created turmoil for cities in the US and Europe, and for nations such as Greece, Ireland, Spain. A complicated deriviatives deal in Italy by Bear Stearns left the city of Casino in debt to the financiers at Bear. Goldman Sachs profited by the hundreds of millions from derivative deals with Greece, helping propel Greece into the civil turmoil discussed below in the posting Dignity. The bank runs that ensued in the turmoil of late 2008 and 2009 depleted some of the largest Wall St. banks of their already thin, over-leveraged capital reserves, freezing credit, and very nearly initiating a second Great Depression. Nearly $8 Trillion in emergency loans by the Federal Reserve to banks around the globe prevented a much more serious crisis from enveloping the world economy.

An Occupier

Additional at length interviews by some of the contributors are also worth taking in. Cathy O’Neil wanted to be a mathematician since she was in her early teens. Her academic path lead her from UC Berkeley to Harvard to MIT and post-grad training. After joining a hedge fund company and coming to see the basic immorality of the prevailing attitude on Wall St. she left her firm to take up risk analysis. As a former “quant,” an analyst who understood the statistical models used to gauge trends traders reacted to Ms. O’Neil brought to the alternative banking working group of OWS her expertise with risk management and how the system can and does get gamed. She has been working with the sub-group Occupy the SEC to submit public comment on the Volker Rule which is meant to regulate the extent to which commercial and investment banking in a single firm might overlap. A step in the right direction to the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall-like protections, which provided a clear separation of commercial and investment banking, the Volker Rule as part of the Frank-Dodd Financial Reform Act may help Frank-Dodd be an effective piece of reform legislation. If watered down too much, by banking lobbyists and the loopholes they argue for, the legislation will be weak and unable to reign in the predatory nature of Wall St. investment banking.

 

Another additional at length interview worth your attention is by Phil Angelides, head of the Financial Inquiry Commission that investigated the crisis and who has advocated deep reform measures to address the ongoing threat, as serious a threat as before the crisis that in his words “hasn’t ended.”

Some may view this series as “too establishment,” as too much an endorsement of a system thoroughly broken… I view this as a good starting place to begin to understand the history, knowing no historical depiction is ever 100% correct. I encourage folks to have a look and take from this what they will.