The Next Financial Crisis
To many observers, the Federal Reserve has never looked more heroic than it does right now. This past winter, America’s financial system faced the prospect of utter ruin. And, while the economy has suffered plenty in 2009, the worst did not come to pass. The banking system that lends to our employers, thereby allowing our economy to function, never did collapse. Now, many of the accolades for averting catastrophe are going to the Fed. President Obama himself ratified this analysis last week when he renominated Fed chairman Ben Bernanke for a second term. Bernanke, the president told reporters, had marshaled “his background, his temperament, his courage, and his creativity” to help prevent a second Great Depression.
What these words of presidential praise obscured was that the Fed may well have mitigated our current crisis by sowing the seeds for the next one. All modern economies need a financial system that can connect people who want to save with those who have good investment projects. This is essentially what banks do. But, unfortunately, this process often goes wrong. And that is precisely what is happening now. Our banks have gotten into the habit of needing to be rescued through repeated bailouts. During this crisis, Bernanke--while saving the financial system in the short term--has done nothing to break this long-term pattern; worse, he exacerbated it. As a result, unless real reform happens soon, we face the prospect of another bubble-bust-bailout cycle that will be even more dangerous than the one we’ve just been through.
If you’ve studied U.S. economic history, none of this will come as a surprise. We have seen this spectacle--the Fed saving us from one crisis only to instigate another--many times before. And, over the past few decades, the problem has become significantly more dire. The fault, to be sure, doesn’t lie entirely with the Fed. Bernanke is a prisoner of a financial system with serious built-in flaws. The decisions he made during the recent crisis weren’t necessarily the wrong decisions; indeed, they were, in many respects, the decisions he had to make. But these decisions, however necessary in the moment, are almost guaranteed to hurt our economy in the long run--which, in turn, means that more necessary but harmful measures will be needed in the future. It is a debilitating, vicious cycle. And at the center of this cycle is the Fed.
Banking was once a dangerous profession. In Britain, for instance, bankers faced “unlimited liability”--that is, if you ran a bank, and the bank couldn’t repay depositors or other creditors, those people had the right to confiscate all your personal assets and income until you repaid. It wasn’t until the second half of the nineteenth century that Britain established limited liability for bank owners. From that point on, British bankers no longer assumed much financial risk themselves.
In the United States, there was great experimentation with banking during the 1800s, but those involved in the enterprise typically made a substantial commitment of their own capital. For example, there was a well-established tradition of “double liability,” in which stockholders were responsible for twice the original value of their shares in a bank. This encouraged stockholders to carefully monitor bank executives and employees. And, in turn, it placed a lot of pressure on those who managed banks. If they fared poorly, they typically faced personal and professional ruin. The idea that a bank executive would retain wealth and social status in the event of a self-induced calamity would have struck everyone--including bank executives themselves--as ludicrous.
Enter, in the early part of the twentieth century, the Federal Reserve. The Fed was founded in 1913, but discussion about whether to create a central bank had swirled for years. “No one can carefully study the experience of the other great commercial nations,” argued Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich in an influential 1909 speech, “without being convinced that disastrous results of recurring financial crises have been successfully prevented by a proper organization of capital and by the adoption of wise methods of banking and of currency”--in other words, a central bank. In November 1910, Aldrich and a small group of top financiers met on an isolated island off the coast of Georgia. There, they hammered out a draft plan to create a strong central bank that would be owned by banks themselves. What these bankers essentially wanted was a bailout mechanism for the aftermath of speculative crashes--something more durable than J.P. Morgan, who saved the day in the Panic of 1907 but couldn’t be counted on to live forever. While they sought informal government backing and substantial government financial support for their new venture, the bankers also wanted it to remain free of government interference, oversight, or control.
