The absence of any discussion concerning all the roles held by these important Wall Street figures, including in the governance of the Fed itself, does a disservice to the stakeholders who are entitled to all the facts.
It is widely held, even by Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, that the Federal Reserve System helped to bail out Wall Street when it agreed to “loan” $29 billion to facilitate JPMorgan’s purchase of distressed investment bank Bear Stearns. We will have more on the subject of that so-called loan in an upcoming posting. What has gone unnoticed and uncommented upon by the press, analysts and members of the U.S. Senate banking committee during its hearing last week, however, is the fact that key Wall Street figures, including Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Richard S. Fuld, Jr., chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers and Jeffery R. Immelt, chairman and CEO of GE, are directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the institution that is putting up the money.
Mr. Dimon is a “Class A” director of the New York Fed, elected by member banks to represent member banks (i.e., Wall Street). Mr. Fuld and Mr. Immelt are elected by member banks to represent the public. One might take the view that foxes are generally elected to guard the henhouse, too. The New York Fed’s governance brings to mind the crony-stocked, self-serving boardroom of the New York Stock Exchange under Richard Grasso before it was forced to make major changes to ensure higher standards of independence and accountability. It is clearly time to look at to whom and how the New York Federal Reserve is held accountable.
We know that JPMorgan benefited handsomely from the Fed’s dramatic measures. Lehman Brothers, widely rumored a few weeks ago as the next possible Bear Stearns, got a boost from the Fed’s market soothing actions. And GE, who just today jolted the market by announcing a 5.8 per cent decline in first quarter net income, was also having problems with its financial services division. Mr. Immelt told CNBC (a unit of GE) that he began to be aware in March of a weakening company outlook. (In an interview earlier that month, he indicated the company was still on target to meet its previous positive guidance.) A less volatile capital market temperament was no doubt helpful to him as well.
More and more, the picture is emerging that this was a bailout of Wall Street, prompted by Wall Street, over problems caused by Wall Street, with terms dictated by Wall Street. The Fed’s agreement constitutes the single most significant market intervention in generations. Such a decision, which places substantial taxpayer dollars on the line and the concept of moral hazard in jeopardy, should be arrived at in a manner that is beyond reproach not only in fact but also in appearance.
The absence of any discussion by the media, the Federal Reserve or legislators concerning all the roles held by these important Wall Street figures, including in the governance of the Fed itself, does a disservice to the stakeholders who are entitled to all the facts in order to properly hold government and its agencies to account. It is our call for the Outrage of the Week.
Fed’s dabbling with debt innovation in a time of over-leveraging is a decidedly subprime idea.
The Fed, which recently bailed out Wall Street over its subprime related credit blunders (see the testimony of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben S. Bernanke before the Senate Banking Committee on April 3, 2008), is now looking at ways of becoming even more creative in the economy. The Wall Street Journal reports options being considered include:
Having the Treasury borrow more money than it needs to fund the government and leave the proceeds on deposit at the Fed; issuing debt under the Fed’s name rather than the Treasury’s; and asking Congress for immediate authority for the Fed to pay interest on commercial-bank reserves instead of waiting until a previously enacted law permits it in 2011.
One option we think should be on the Fed’s table is this: do less.
American governments, corporations and households are already mired in unparalleled levels of debt. The current credit fiasco is the result of an experiment in debt gone terribly wrong. It was made worse when Wall Street got into the picture and saw the unavoidable temptation of more subprime innovation. So far, in addition to record home foreclosures, mounting unemployment and staggering corporate losses, it has resulted in the collapse of Bear Stearns, which the Fed warned before the Senate last week nearly resulted in calamity for the world’s financial system. We will have further comments on the Fed’s Wall Street bailout in an upcoming post on these pages.
If we have learned anything from the efforts of these too-clever-by-half financial players to defy the laws of physics (i.e., risk) in the economy in recent months, it is that what is lauded as creative genius one day can quickly turn into a symbol of reckless folly the next. Americans don’t need a debt experimenting Fed in a time when excesses in risk and imagination have already created a masterpiece of chaos.
It can only be hoped that his recent experience with the limelight and the cheers of the Wall Street crowd has not turned the otherwise conservatively inclined, academically trained Ben Bernanke into the Angelo Mozilo of central bankers.
We have been saying for a while now that the U.S. Federal Reserve needs a better pair of glasses. Its ability to see even the obvious seems to have been severely challenged, beginning with Alan Greenspan’s era and carrying on with his successor, Ben S. Bernanke. Over a period of several years, the Fed failed to understand the destructive dimensions of the subprime trend or the need to regulate these faulty investment instruments. The New York Times details some of the background to this troubling performance in a major piece today. It paints an unsettling picture during a time of growing economic uncertainty and one that should prompt many observers to ask what else might the Fed be missing.
Here is an excerpt from the piece. (more…)
Last March we expressed concerns about the Fed’s failure to anticipate the subprime mortgage meltdown. As we said at the time:
We don’t expect the Fed to be omniscient. But we can expect it to see and act on the obvious. It failed to react to the looming subprime disaster. Which begs the question: What else is the Fed missing?
We got the answer last week, when the world’s central bankers led by the Fed’s own $62 billion injection, poured hundreds of billions into the global economy following huge reversals on key North American stock markets and the unraveling of portfolios deep into mortgage backed securities.
This is the largest amount central bankers have put out since the terrorist attacks in 2001 and it comes in the wake of major fears for the stability of the world’s economy. The injections are a substantial gift to banking and investment institutions which, by the way, make huge fees from the sale of securities to central bankers. They are also a lifeline to hedge funds and LBO firms, which need billions in low interest loans to complete their deals and where the payout to their partners is astronomical. What is being done for the homeowners who are the real casualties of these events is less immediately clear.
Several months ago Fed chairman Ben S. Bernanke told a committee of the U.S. Congress that he didn’t expect the meltdown would spread to other parts of the economy. It’s a good thing he isn’t in the business of forecasting the weather, or we might be dealing with snowstorms in August. One concern is that these highly unusual moves suggest a larger problem that has not been disclosed to the public and that some players are cleaning up even from the mess they helped to create. The other is that the Fed lacks the foresight to know what is really happening now, just as it did a few months ago.
