Submitted by Greg Simmons and Brett Buchanan of Scope Labs

Are financial markets a direct reflection of the overall health of a nation? I wish they were not, but I fear they are.

I wonder at times if our nation has entered a state of purgatory – all of us mulling around in the waiting room to Hell, anxiously counting the minutes until the grim reaper saunters through the door sickle in hand his mission to send us off to eternal damnation. Unfortunately, there is little time to close this door so that we may stave off this potential fate that looms so near. What we need to alter this course is a procession of men who possess moral fortitude and common sense, men of rationality and reason. Men of action who will set in motion the dismantling of institutions that bleed this nation dry.

Hope is not a strategy. This present state of manufactured optimism emanating from the White House and our news outlets is contemptible. We are in dire need of new reformist leadership and of new voices that will speak the truth. A national purification is long overdue. Time is not on our side. Look at the track record this nation has racked up over the last few decades and this economic and moral purgatory in which we find ourselves might very well mark the beginning of our walk of death down the long road to Hell.

I make this analogy of a national state of purgatory not in jest, but rather in practical terms. This nation has gone the way of an absolute meltdown of morality and ethics. We’ve reverted to a sort of Wild West where anything goes. From the halls of congress to our corporate boardrooms our collective morality bar has sunk so low we cannot go any lower without disconnecting from the great past this nation is starved to regain. We stand dangerously close to the point where immorality begets our undoing.

Personally, I am father to a daughter of fourteen years. Brett, my co-author, is father to a twenty-month old daughter and an eighteen-year old son. We desperately want to create for our children a better world. But we are fallible men, and certainly not saints. The paragraphs you are about to read are not written from some moral high ground, or a Holier-than-thou pulpit, but rather from saddened hearts when we see that by walking our own moral tightrope, if we were to allow ourselves to slip below the bar, however slightly, we would be just as guilty as the worst perpetrators of our nation’s moral destruction. Also, when witness to greater moral transgressions, by our own inaction, we become part of the problem. And we are just two men. Amplify this by fifty million, one hundred million, or three hundred million fold and it is no wonder immorality permeates our society.

This article is our personal effort to call people’s attention to the truth. The brevity of our circumstance is immeasurable by past reference. Economically, we have never been so challenged. Over the past few decades a gullible US population cheered the halls of congress and the Oval Office alike as the incestuous bedfellows of money and politics ushered in a financial Coup d’état – co-opting our public trusts with the greed and excess of Wall Street. Profits are now had at any cost – damn the long-term consequences. Instead of being exposed as the obvious fraud he was, Bernie Maddoff was coddled by the SEC – an institution whose role as regulator is a complete failure. As Wall Street and Washington raped an entire nation, employees of the SEC were too busy surfing porn on the Internet and running private businesses instead of doing the jobs taxpayers pay them to do. All the while, young girls were selling their virginity to the highest bidder in public cyber-forums where grown men (not hormonally charged teenage boys) seek out their sexual fantasies in the netherworld of Internet pornography. What of the wives, children, and even parents of these men? Do they approve of such questionable actions?

Think of our children turning on the television to see people eating bile, cow blood, and live bugs for money on game shows like Fear Factor, or Flavor Flav and his hit reality show where he maintains a stable of women all of whom physically fight each other to have sex with him because he’s a celebrity – and a damn ugly one at that. And finally, there’s always Survivor, the ultimate demonstration of all things wrong with modern human interaction. A reality show that pits person against person in a deceitful game of moral destruction where lack of ethics are rewarded, instead of punished. Survivor, this is what our nation’s leadership has become. Win at any cost. Damn the future of anyone but myself.

Morality is in great part the measure of a nation. Have we unlearned morality? Is this why we find ourselves staring down the abyss?

We are allowing ourselves to become more corrupt by the minute. We stare into the face of our future being raped, but we do nothing. We are as corrupt as the corrupters. We accept the unacceptable. We fail to understand that absolute power, corrupts absolutely. In what will go down as the greatest financial heist in history our leaders have chosen to reward corrupt individuals and their hollow corporations for what are arguably criminal levels of risk behavior by the moneyed elite of this country. What message does that send to our children, or to anyone for that matter? Be as corrupt as possible in the US and you will be rewarded? Be the biggest failure jeopardizing the fate of others then stand in the corporate welfare line with all the other wealthiest institutions of the world, your greedy hand extended for a government bailout check while you simultaneously foreclose on an entire nation? Talk about the rich corralling the masses. It’s no wonder someone coined the term “The Sheeple.”

The path we traveled to this purgatorial limbo is both easily understood and misunderstood. The answers to understanding are sometimes right in front of us. What are seemingly benign things or actions, those everyday judgments or decisions we make to do one thing or another, are not always benign. Tell a little white lie to make that one sale that will put us into our bonus. Rig the game in our favor so that we might enjoy a little more opulence for the few decades we have remaining on this planet. Look the other way while the Federal Reserve and Wall Street blow economic bubble after economic bubble and in the process create a six-hundred trillion dollar shadow banking system that plays by no one’s rules but its own. In the case of Goldman Sachs, and Wall Street in general, lie, cheat, and steal their way to profitability at the expense of three hundred million taxpayers. The fact is that we have become an uncooperative nation willing to take advantage of anyone for the sake of profit. The idea of building a cooperative future where everyone wins has been sacrificed at the altar of short-mindedness.

It might be this purgatorial limbo I speak of is simpler than it appears. It could be that we are collectively suffering the consequences of the “Peter Principle”, or getting to the job of failure. This principle supposes that an individual rises in a corporate hierarchy to their first level of incompetence. An assembly worker gets promoted to supervisor then to assistant manager, then manager, until he next gets promoted to an upper management job for which he is ill equipped and subsequently gets promoted no further as he can no longer demonstrate the competence required for the task at hand. He rather relies on subordinates who are then stuck with an upper manager who cannot carry out his own duties. Could this be the state of our nation? Have we been promoted as far as our competence allows? Are we in fact incompetent to handle our future? Have we now elected a man just incompetent enough for the Presidency who is being manipulated by Goldman Sachs, the Federal Reserve, and a circle of (previous) Wall Street insiders now on the government payroll as cabinet members and high-ranking advisors? The saddest thing is that we sit idly by whilst our virtue is being stolen. We do nothing.

A view of the world through rose-colored glasses does no one, any good. We are not as resilient as we think we are. Instead, we exist in a world of synthetic productivity where multi-tasking renders us incapable of doing anything effectively or with any level of competence. Multi-tasking, that art of simultaneous ineffectiveness is a counter productive weapon that to a large degree has contributed to the potential failure of this nation. If you were to listen to Alan Greenspan however, you would believe that multi-tasking through technological gains by way of the “new paradigm” was the gold at the end of the Information Superhighway and that exotic mortgages and the burgeoning spending class paved the road to riches. We now know these premises to be empirically wrong.

It can now be argued that what would seemingly be advancements in productivity are proving to be setbacks. The Information Superhighway has led us to an era of technological arrogance. In reality all we have accomplished is to dilute our ability to carry out simple tasks as we click from a quarterly sales report due in an hour, to Facebook, to on-line solitaire, to writing an email explaining to our boss why the quarterly report will be delayed this day. We are a nation of excuse makers. We look for someone else to keep us one step ahead of our accumulating debt that smothers the potential of what could have been an equitable future. Ironically, it is our technological arrogance that impedes our ability to produce and manufacture our way to prosperity.

Craftsmen who used to flock to this country to fulfill the needs of a manufacturing base flock here no more. “Made in the USA” used to mean something. It meant quality. It was the definition of industrial capitalism. But now through the wonders of globalization we have exported our craftsmanship through an outflow of jobs to China and India as we turned everyone in the USA into real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and web designers – a perfect playground for bankers to ply their craft, lending money in every creative manner both thinkable, and unthinkable. “Made in the USA” has been reduced to the status of punch-line – synonymous only with “Mortgage Backed Securities” and other “Toxic Derivatives.”

Is it any wonder we have evolved into the ‘entitled society’? If we weren’t on the government payroll, or subsidized by the US taxpayer through social welfare then we were borrowing our way to prosperity. Enter the God-fearing middle class. Just dumb enough to buy into the scam a couple hundred million people began signing over their paychecks, selling their future for the enjoyment of having things now. We were transformed into non-productive Sheeple, selling our souls for an easier life in lieu of a better future for our children. At our current rate of productive attrition we will soon be a nation of declawed housecats, possessing no skill-set whatsoever to survive in a world where the ability to produce real goods still reins supreme. Yet we remain the ‘entitled society’, when we are entitled to nothing.

We forget (through economic amnesia) that throughout history all societies fail. Nicolaus Copernicus maintained that civilizations failed when bad money, controlled and understood by an elite few, drove out good money. The same can be said for morality. Bad, drives out good. This is a reality of which we should all be acutely aware but rather are immune to its possibility. We dangerously believe we cannot fail. That, in fact, is the greatest gamble of all. A roll of the dice against history, a bet against all natural laws of the universe, all things are in a state of entropy. All things eventually wither away to nothing. To possess longevity is to be ahead of the universe. Sadly, we have constructed a fragile world that produces material things that do not last. The fiat money we use as the currency of our production is by design, destructive itself. The Federal Reserve prints greed, nothing more. But still we covet it. We pursue it as if it had value. And in this pursuit we destroy earth’s resources as if the laws of nature have no relevance. We believe there is only now.

We, the entitled society, morally and fiscally bankrupt have borrowed, spent, and bailed our way into a historical corner. Nero should be so proud. Our public trusts are nothing more than government sanctioned check-kiting operations shifting liabilities from one credit card to another faster than our creditors can say “Federal Reserve.” The Ponzi-scheme that is our fiat currency system is about to go the way of what was for a time the symbol of American superiority, General Motors. It used to be said that what was good for General Motors was good for our nation. As I claimed in 2005 that GM would go bankrupt I will now guarantee that the US government is soon to follow. How our ultimate entropy will take form I cannot say, but form it will. We will default. We will restructure. It will be at this point our arrogance will end.

From Dow Jones:

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday approved a short-term $290 billion extension in the nation's debt ceiling, delaying a decision until February about a larger increase in the borrowing cap.

The vote comes less than a week after House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) said he intended to seek a $1.8 trillion increase in the ceiling to support federal government borrowing through 2010.

A decision was made to seek the more modest increase after it became clear the larger increase may have failed to win support in the Senate.

The Senate must still take up the two month increase, which it is expected to do next week.

House lawmakers voted by a razor thing margin of 218-214 to pass the borrowing increase. On most major pieces of legislation, 218 votes are required for approval in the House.

Not a single Republican lawmaker voted to support the hike. They argued that increasing the debt ceiling was giving the Democratic majority and the Obama administration a license to spend more money.

The increase in the debt limit raises the total debt the federal government can hold to $12.394 billion from $12.104 billion.

Treasury officials have warned the current cap will shortly be hit, requiring the ceiling to be increased.

Increasing the debt ceiling is largely symbolic as the public debt is the accumulation of past deficits, or money already spent.

But were the U.S. to breach its debt limit, it would default on its obligations, potentially lose its prized top-shelf credit rating and have to pay significantly higher interest to its creditors

Such a scenario, albeit an extremely unlikely one, would have tremendous ramifications for the wider financial markets.

The federal budget deficit reached historic levels of $1.4 trillion in fiscal 2009. Through the first two months of fiscal 2010, the government is on pace to surpass that level.

One day, Vince McMahon will pay handsomley to get Ben Bernanke and Alan Grayson in the squared circle. Until that day, we should just hope and dream. In the meantime, we have litters and public appearances by the Florida Congressman, who takes the latest AIG "taxpayer payback" opportunity to remind everyone of just how deeply he loves the "we create money out of thin air" institution that is the Federal Reserve.

I write with concern about two announced deals that are lauded by AIG CEO Robert Benmosche as AIG's plan to 'pay back the taxpayer'. In reading through the deal, it looks to me like the Federal Reserve is simply engaged in yet another disguised bailout of AIG. It's not surprising that the New York Fed continues to shovel money at AIG using its balance sheet, since this seems to be official policy, but this time, the bailout also involves cheating the IRS.

In describing the deal specifics:

This relationship is not significantly different from just making the subsidiaries collateral for the existing loan from the New York Fed, with four exceptions. One, the FRBNY's right are downgraded in this deal from creditors to preferred shareholders. Two, AIG gets to claim "repayment" and take a tax loss to reduce the company's income taxes. Three, the FRBNY credit facilities are already collateralized. Four, the New York Fed owns nearly 80% of AIG, putting it on all sides of the deal.

And most brazenly, and deserving of applause, the allegation that Bernanke is implicilty breaking the law by his most recent AIG bailout:

As the New York Fed owns most of AIG, this deal could be considered a faked sale to generate a capital loss for the purposes of injecting Treasury funds into AIG without the consent of Congress. Please explain the legality of the arrangement.

Full Grayson letter to Bernanke:

By Economic Forecasts & Opinions

Stock markets around the world cracked on Friday with the Dow Jones industrial average down more than 150 points (Fig. 1), and commodities plunging as Dubai debt woes unnerved investors, and sent tremors of uncertainty throughout all markets.

The crisis flared after Dubai, a part of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) federation, asked to delay interest payment for six months on $60 billion of debt issued by the state-run conglomerate Dubai World and its main property unit Nakheel.

Concerns that a government-backed investment company risked default ripped through world markets. Investors read it as a sign of yet another sovereign implosion after Iceland and Ireland, and recoiled from risk and piled into dollars.

Las Vegas on Steroids

Dubai World has served as Dubai's main driver of growth, operating ports, transportation groups, spearheading real-estate & infrastructure projects both at home and abroad. Its real-estate subsidiary Nakheel built Dubai's iconic palm-tree-shaped island, packed with luxury villas and hotels, many still under construction. Real estate and construction accounts for about 23% of Dubai’s GDP.

With little oil, Dubai financed much of this rapid real estate development with debt. After incurring its estimated $80-$90 billion of debt in a four-year construction boom to transform its economy into a regional financial and tourism hub, Dubai suffered the world’s steepest property slump in the first global recession since World War II.

Deutsche Bank estimates that Dubai’s property prices, both commercial and residential, have halved since August last year, and could fall a further 15-20% this year.

U.S. Banks Less Exposed

Most analysts believe U.S. banks are probably less exposed than European rivals to a potential debt default by Dubai World, but a lack of transparency and the interconnection of the modern financial system make it difficult to know which institutions are ultimately exposed.

Dubai World's largest creditors are reportedly domestic banks in Dubai and Abu Dhabi. MarketWatch noted data from the Bank for International Settlements which put cross-border banking exposure for the UAE as a whole at $123 billion at the end of June. Of that total, European banks hold 72%, with the United States and Japan only holding 9% and 7% of the exposure, respectively. The United Kingdom is by far the biggest creditor with a share of 41%.

Reminder of Other Risks

On a global scale, Dubai World's debt problem seems relatively minor, but it illustrates the impact from one tiny country in an increasingly interconnected world. The Dubai news also cast doubt over the strength of the U.S. economic recovery, and the prospects for a bottoming of property prices.

Commercial Real Estate

As pointed out in my previous article that the commercial real estate sector posed a much greater threat than the over-hyped “mother of all carry trades.”  The Dubai debt crisis further reinforces this viewpoint.

The potential for contagion from Dubai's debt woes could further unhinge an already fragile U.S. commercial real estate sector, whose values have already fallen 42.9% from their 2007 peak, close to the lowest since 2002, according to Moody's. (Fig. 2) The latest Moody's projection is for prices to bottom at 45-55% below their peak, but could drop as much as 65% from their peak in a "stress case".

As commercial property values fall, debt defaults rise. The $3.4 trillion outstanding in debt backed by commercial real estate poses a real threat to the recovery. Trepp LLC reported that last month, delinquencies on U.S. commercial real estate loans that were packaged into commercial mortgage-backed securities reached 4.8%, more than six times the year earlier level. Hotel loans, at 8.7% distressed, have begun falling into delinquency faster than any other kind of commercial real estate debt.

Write-downs and losses at banks around the world have risen to more than $1.7 trillion since 2007 as the credit crisis undermined the value of assets owned by financial institutions, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Any further deleveraging and the resulting credit tightening from commercial real estate would impede the financial sector and probably derail the U.S. economy sending it into another recession. 

Housing Market Mortgage Crisis

So far, the appearance of recovery in the housing sector is being driven primarily by reduced prices combined with federal programs to lower mortgage rates with the goal of bringing more buyers into the market.

Based on a study released by Zillow.com, the foreclosure crisis has moved beyond subprime mortgages and into the prime mortgage market. (Fig. 3) While subprime borrowers are still a factor in the current foreclosure epidemic, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the weak labor market is the driving force behind the mortgage crisis we face today.

According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, one in seven U.S. home loans was past due or in foreclosure as of Sept. 30, putting that quarterly delinquency measure at its highest level since the report’s inception, 1972, and up from one in ten at the beginning of the year.

The continued surge in delinquencies suggests that a recovery in the housing market could be hindered by the weak job market as well as by further fallout from the easy money and loose lending practices of the past. The foreclosures and delinquencies are expected to keep risi ng well into 2010, not leveling off until the unemployment rate starts to moderate.

In a study by First American CoreLogic found that one in four of all U.S. mortgage-borrowers owe more than the value of their properties in the 3rd quarter. And many experts didn't expect U.S. home prices to hit bottom until early 2011, perhaps falling another 5-10%, as more foreclosures get pushed onto the market.

Negative equity is another outstanding risk hanging over the mortgage market.

Dubai Is No Lehman

The circumstances behind Dubai's moves are murky, making it hard to gauge the exact risk to the pertaining bonds and Dubai's own general creditworthiness. UBS cautioned that Dubai's overall debt "might be higher than the generally assumed $80 billion to $90 billion, due to potential off-balance sheet liabilities. These could include unlimited and unquantifiable amount of credit default swaps (CDS) and other derivatives against the underlying assets, and once unraveled, could potentially erupt into a subprime-like crisis.

The current expectation; however, is that there's a good chance that Dubai's problems will probably prove a local issue. Most likely, Dubai, or its neighboring emirate, Abu Dhabi, won't risk tarnishing their images and reputation further, and will come up with a reasonable resolution.

Even if Dubai goes into sovereign default, the amount is probably not enough on its own to threaten the financial system since any actual losses would be a fraction of the total. So, the problems in Dubai are unlikely to be as serious as last year's Lehman Brothers collapse, nor is it a reflection on the ability of emerging markets to lead a global economic recovery.

Rational Expectations?

But Dubai could well spur a broader crisis of investor confidence in overly leveraged economies as market confidence world-wide is still fragile from the severity of the financial crisis.  The debts of many emerging markets have risen even further as the countries governments have fought the ravages of the global recession by issuing more stimulus debt to fill the gap voided by private investment.

The spread of credit-default swaps on developing-nation’s bonds jumped 14 basis points after the Dubai news broke, the most in a month, to 3.24 percentage points, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s EMBI+ Index. There is also a clear sign of potential contagion effects of global risk aversion on basically all risky assets, with the dollar and yen being the prime beneficiaries.

Rational expectations or not, for now, the Dubai crisis is simply a reminder that the severe global recession has relegated much debt to near junk status, and there still remains a high degree of uncertainty as to the percentage recoverable on all outstanding debt which is going to be coming due over the next 5 years.

Despite some seminal signs of green shoots in the news headlines during this 9 month liquidity driven rally in many asset classes around the globe, we should be reminded that all that glitters is not gold, and that the global economic recovery is still on shaky ground.

#  "I know the odds are against me, but if there's a win I'm gonna find it!"  ~Goku  #

Economic Forecasts & Opinions

→ Washington’s Blog.

Why isn't the government breaking up the giant, insolvent banks?

We Need Them To Help the Economy Recover?

Do we need the Too Big to Fails to help the economy recover?

No.

The following top economists and financial experts believe that the economy cannot recover unless the big, insolvent banks are broken up in an orderly fashion:

• Nobel prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz

• Nobel prize-winning economist, Ed Prescott

• Dean and professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School, and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, R. Glenn Hubbard

• MIT economics professor and former IMF chief economist, Simon Johnson (and see this)

• President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Thomas Hoenig (and see this)

• Deputy Treasury Secretary, Neal S. Wolin

• The President of the Independent Community Bankers of America, a Washington-based trade group with about 5,000 members, Camden R. Fine

• The Congressional panel overseeing the bailout

• The head of the FDIC, Sheila Bair

• The leading monetary economist and co-author with Milton Friedman of the leading treatise on the Great Depression, Anna Schwartz

• Economics professor and senior regulator during the S & L crisis, William K. Black

• Economics professor, Nouriel Roubini

• Economist, Marc Faber

• Professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the Chicago Booth School of Business, Luigi Zingales

• Economics professor, Thomas F. Cooley

• Former investment banker, Philip Augar

• Chairman of the Commons Treasury, John McFall

Others, like Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, think that the giant insolvent banks may need to be temporarily nationalized.

In addition, many top economists and financial experts, including Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer - who was Ben Bernanke’s thesis adviser at MIT - say that - at the very least - the size of the financial giants should be limited.

Even the Bank of International Settlements - the "Central Banks' Central Bank" - has slammed too big to fail. As summarized by the Financial Times:

The report was particularly scathing in its assessment of governments’ attempts to clean up their banks. “The reluctance of officials to quickly clean up the banks, many of which are now owned in large part by governments, may well delay recovery,” it said, adding that government interventions had ingrained the belief that some banks were too big or too interconnected to fail.

 

This was dangerous because it reinforced the risks of moral hazard which might lead to an even bigger financial crisis in future.

If We Break 'Em Up, No One Will Lend?

Do we need to keep the TBTFs to make sure that loans are made?

Nope.

Fortune pointed out in February that smaller banks are stepping in to fill the lending void left by the giant banks' current hesitancy to make loans. Indeed, the article points out that the only reason that smaller banks haven't been able to expand and thrive is that the too-big-to-fails have decreased competition:

Growth for the nation's smaller banks represents a reversal of trends from the last twenty years, when the biggest banks got much bigger and many of the smallest players were gobbled up or driven under...

 

As big banks struggle to find a way forward and rising loan losses threaten to punish poorly run banks of all sizes, smaller but well capitalized institutions have a long-awaited chance to expand.

BusinessWeek noted in January:

As big banks struggle, community banks are stepping in to offer loans and lines of credit to small business owners...


At a congressional hearing on small business and the economic recovery earlier this month, economist Paul Merski, of the Independent Community Bankers of America, a Washington (D.C.) trade group, told lawmakers that community banks make 20% of all small-business loans, even though they represent only about 12% of all bank assets. Furthermore, he said that about 50% of all small-business loans under $100,000 are made by community banks...


Indeed, for the past two years, small-business lending among community banks has grown at a faster rate than from larger institutions, according to Aite Group, a Boston banking consultancy. "Community banks are quickly taking on more market share not only from the top five banks but from some of the regional banks," says Christine Barry, Aite's research director. "They are focusing more attention on small businesses than before. They are seeing revenue opportunities and deploying the right solutions in place to serve these customers."

And Fed Governor Daniel K. Tarullo said in June:

The importance of traditional financial intermediation services, and hence of the smaller banks that typically specialize in providing those services, tends to increase during times of financial stress. Indeed, the crisis has highlighted the important continuing role of community banks...


For example, while the number of credit unions has declined by 42 percent since 1989, credit union deposits have more than quadrupled, and credit unions have increased their share of national deposits from 4.7 percent to 8.5 percent. In addition, some credit unions have shifted from the traditional membership based on a common interest to membership that encompasses anyone who lives or works within one or more local banking markets. In the last few years, some credit unions have also moved beyond their traditional focus on consumer services to provide services to small businesses, increasing the extent to which they compete with community banks.

Indeed, some very smart people say that the big banks aren't really focusing as much on the lending business as smaller banks.

Specifically since Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999, the giant banks have made much of their money in trading assets, securities, derivatives and other speculative bets, the banks' own paper and securities, and in other money-making activities which have nothing to do with traditional depository functions.

Now that the economy has crashed, the big banks are making very few loans to consumers or small businesses because they still have trillions in bad derivatives gambling debts to pay off, and so they are only loaning to the biggest players and those who don't really need credit in the first place. See this and this.

So we don't really need these giant gamblers. We don't really need JP Morgan, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. What we need are dedicated lenders.

The Fortune article discussed above points out that the banking giants are not necessarily more efficient than smaller banks:

The largest banks often don't show the greatest efficiency. This now seems unsurprising given the deep problems that the biggest institutions have faced over the past year.

 

"They actually experience diseconomies of scale," Narter wrote of the biggest banks. "There are so many large autonomous divisions of the bank that the complexity of connecting them overwhelms the advantage of size."

And Governor Tarullo points out some of the benefits of small community banks over the giant banks:

Many community banks have thrived, in large part because their local presence and personal interactions give them an advantage in meeting the financial needs of many households, small businesses, and agricultural firms. Their business model is based on an important economic explanation of the role of financial intermediaries--to develop and apply expertise that allows a lender to make better judgments about the creditworthiness of potential borrowers than could be made by a potential lender with less information about the borrowers.

A small, but growing, body of research suggests that the financial services provided by large banks are less-than-perfect substitutes for those provided by community banks.

It is simply not true that we need the mega-banks. In fact, as many top economists and financial analysts have said, the "too big to fails" are actually stifling competition from smaller lenders and credit unions, and dragging the entire economy down into a black hole.

The Giant Banks Have Recovered, And Are No Longer Insolvent?

Have the TBTFs recovered, so that they are no longer insolvent?

Negatory.

The giant banks have still not put the toxic assets hidden in their SIVs back on their books.

The tsunamis of commercial real estate, Alt-A, option arm and other loan defaults have not yet hit.

The overhang of derivatives is still looming out there, and still dwarfs the size of the rest of the global economy. Credit default swaps have arguably still not been tamed (see this).

Indeed, Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said recently:

The U.S. has failed to fix the underlying problems of its banking system after the credit crunch and the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

 

“In the U.S. and many other countries, the too-big-to-fail banks have become even bigger,” Stiglitz said in an interview today in Paris. “The problems are worse than they were in 2007 before the crisis.”

 

Stiglitz’s views echo those of former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, who has advised President Barack Obama's administration to curtail the size of banks, and Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer, who suggested last month that governments may want to discourage financial institutions from growing “excessively.”

While the big boys have certainly reported some impressive profits in the last couple of months, some or all of those profits may have been due to "creative accounting", such as Goldman "skipping" December 2008, suspension of mark-to-market (which may or may not be a good thing), and assistance from the government.

Some very smart people say that the big banks - even after many billions in bailouts and other government help - have still not repaired their balance sheets. Tyler Durden, Reggie Middleton, Mish and others have looked at the balance sheets of the big boys much more recently than I have, and have more details than I do.

But the bottom line is this: If the banks are no longer insolvent, they should prove it. If they can't prove they are solvent, they should be broken up.

The Government Lacks the Power to Break Them Up?

Does the government lack the power to break up the TBTFs?

Wrong.

One of the world's leading economic historians - Niall Ferguson - argues in a current article in Newsweek:

[Geithner is proposing that] there should be a new "resolution authority" for the swift closing down of big banks that fail. But such an authority already exists and was used when Continental Illinois failed in 1984.

Indeed, even the FDIC mentions Continental Illinois in the same breadth as "too big to fail" banks.

And William K. Black (remember, he was the senior regulator during the S&L crisis, and is a Professor of both Economics and Law) - says that the Prompt Corrective Action Law (PCA), 12 U.S.C. § 1831o, not only authorizes the government to seize insolvent banks, it mandates it, and that the Bush and Obama administrations broke the law by refusing to close insolvent banks.

Whether or not the banks' holding companies can be broken up using the PCA, the banks themselves could be. See this.

And no one can doubt that the government could find a way to break up even the holdign companies if it wanted.

FDR seized gold during the Great Depression under the Trading With The Enemies Act.

Geithner and Bernanke have been using one loophole and "creative" legal interpretation after another to rationalize their various multi-trillion dollar programs in the face of opposition from the public and Congress (see this, for example).

And the government could use 100-year old antitrust laws to break them up.

So don't give me any of this "our hands are tied" malarkey. The Obama administration could break the "too bigs" up in a heartbeat if it wanted to, and then justify it after the fact using PCA or another legal argument.

Is Temporarily Nationalizing the Giant Banks Socialism?

Many argue that it would be wrong for the government to break up the banks, because we would have to take over the banks in order to break them up.

That may be true. But government regulators in the U.S., Sweden and other countries which have broken up insolvent banks say that the government only has to take over banks for around 6 months before breaking them up.

In contrast, the Bush and Obama administrations' actions mean that the government is becoming the majority shareholder in the financial giants more or less permanently. That is - truly - socialism.

Breaking them up and selling off the parts to the highest bidder efficiently and in an orderly fashion would get us back to a semblance of free market capitalism much quicker.

The Real Reason the Giant Banks Aren't Being Broken Up

So what is the real reason that the TBTFs aren't being broken up?

Certainly, there is regulatory capture, cowardice and corruption:

• Joseph Stiglitz (the Nobel prize winning economist) said recently that the U.S. government is wary of challenging the financial industry because it is politically difficult, and that he hopes the Group of 20 leaders will cajole the U.S. into tougher action

• Economic historian Niall Ferguson asks:

  Guess which institutions are among the biggest lobbyists and campaign-finance contributors? Surprise! None other than the TBTFs [too big to fails].

• Manhattan Institute senior fellow Nicole Gelinas agrees:

  The too-big-to-fail financial industry has been good to elected officials and former elected officials of both parties over its 25-year life span

• Investment analyst and financial writer Yves Smith says:

  Major financial players [have gained] control over the all-important over-the-counter debt markets...

  It is pretty hard to regulate someone who has a knife at your throat.

• William K. Black says:

  There has been no honest examination of the crisis because it would embarrass C.E.O.s and politicians . . .
  

  Instead, the Treasury and the Fed are urging us not to examine the crisis and to believe that all will soon be well. There have been no prosecutions of the chief executives of the large nonprime lenders that would expose the “epidemic” of fraudulent mortgage lending that drove the crisis. There has been no accountability...

  The Obama administration and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke have refused to investigate the nature and causes of the crisis. And the administration selected Timothy Geithner, who with then Treasury Secretary Paulson bungled the bailout of A.I.G. and other favored “too big to fail” institutions, to head up Treasury.

  Now Lawrence Summers, head of the White House National Economic Council, and Mr. Geithner argue that no fundamental change in finance is needed. They want to recreate a secondary market in the subprime mortgages that caused trillions of dollars of losses.

  Traditional neo-classical economic theory, particularly “modern finance theory,” has been proven false but economists have failed to replace it. No fundamental reform can be passed when the proponents are pretending that there really is no crisis or need for change.

• Harvard professor of government Jeffry A. Frieden says:

  Regulatory agencies are often sympathetic to the industries they regulate. This pattern is so well known among scholars that it has a name: “regulatory capture.” This effect can be due to the political influence of the industry on its regulators; or to the fact that the regulators spend so much time with their charges that they come to accept their world view; or to the prospect of lucrative private-sector jobs when regulators retire or resign.

• Economic consultant Edward Harrison agrees:Regulating Wall Street has become difficult in large part because of regulatory capture.

But there is an even more interesting reason . . .

The number one reason the TBTF's aren't being broken up is [drumroll] . . . the 'ole 80's playbook is being used.

As the New York Times wrote in February:

In the 1980s, during the height of the Latin American debt crisis, the total risk to the nine money-center banks in New York was estimated at more than three times the capital of those banks. The regulators, analysts say, did not force the banks to value those loans at the fire-sale prices of the moment, helping to avert a disaster in the banking system.

In other words, the nine biggest banks were all insolvent in the 1980s.

And the Times is not alone in stating this fact. For example, Felix Salmon wrote in January:

In the early 1980s, when a slew of overindebted Latin governments defaulted to their bank creditors, a lot of big global banks, Citicorp foremost among them, became insolvent.

So the government's failure to break up the insolvent giants - even though virtually all independent experts say that is the only way to save the economy, and even though there is no good reason not to break them up - is nothing new.

William K. Black's statement that the government's entire strategy now - as in the S&L crisis - is to cover up how bad things are ("the entire strategy is to keep people from getting the facts") makes a lot more sense.