I was trying to avoid mentioning this, partially because I half-suspected it was deliberately over the top, and I'm not reading tone well these days. After all:

Virtually every BHC has elected to become an FHC. Under 12 U.S.C. § 1843(k)(4)(H), FHCs are allowed to make "merchant banking investments" in nonfinancial companies, on a principal or agency basis, through affiliated private equity funds or other invesment funds. (Private equity affiliates are dealt with at length in 12 C.F.R. § 225.173.) Goldman carried out the investment in Greely Automotive Holdings through one of its private equity funds, GS Capital Partners VI Fund LP.

I find it very difficult to believe that any serious bankers, no matter how "annoyed," wouldn't have known this. [links in original]

is difficult to treat seriously, given the infodump being followed by the snideness. But so it goes.

Until today, when Brad DeLong made it ones of his links of the day. Because now we have to go into context and depth, and remember a year ago.

Bear was sold to JPMChase in March. Six months later, IBs still had not lowered their leverage ratios, and credit was more difficult to find. So the IB that had six months to return to some semblance of sanity—Lehmann Brothers—dangled on the edge for a while and finally fell off, "murdered" we're now told. (Whether it was murdered by its own CEO is left as an exercise.) But the best was yet to come.



So the weekend was going to be a rocky one. And various plans in various stages were executed:

1. Endangered IB #3, the successor firm to Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner & Smith, looked around for a sucker, saw Ken Lewis, and locked in their bonuses.
   
2. Endangered IB #4, the successor firm to Dean Witter Sears, teetered on the edge, hoping for a life preserver. And, apparently, it was more like Leo-in-Titanic than anyone wanted to admit.
   
3. Endangered IB #5, The Vampire Squid, called its buddies at Treasury.

Maybe it didn't go exactly like that, but by the end of the weekend, there was the declaration that, so long as they re-incorporated as a Bank Holding Company (BHC), IB#4 and IB#5 would have full access to lootsupport from the U.S. Treasury.

And now we are told—in answer to the question Simon Johnson initially raised:

If this is temporary, is it envisaged that Goldman will cease being a bank holding company, or that it will divest itself shortly of activities not usually allowed (and with good reason) by banks? Or will all bank holding companies be allowed to expand on the same basis. (The relevant rules appear to be here in general and here specifically; do tell me what I am missing.)

Increasingly, the issue of “too big to regulate” in the public interest is being brought up – an issue that has historically attracted the interest of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division in sectors other than finance. Should Goldman Sachs now be placed in this category? [italics mine; links, again, from the original]

The response appears to be that those regulations can be circumvented with impunity. Or, as Simon unbelievingly snarked initially, Goldman is doing nothing any other bank cannot do.

But all that does is beg the question: if a BHC can do everything that GS used to be able to do, what was the actual cost to Goldman and Morgan Stanley of converting their business. Or was it just a way for the Fed to save face while letting the taps flow wide?

by Rebecca Wilder

There is always an agenda when a central banker declares the recession is over - and Bernanke is no different. The following facts remain: US GDP contracted at a 1% annualized pace in the second quarter of 2009 (its fourth consecutive drop), industrial output grew just two consecutive months after declining every month (except one) since January 2008, employment is still falling, retail sales are improving somewhat, and real personal income has formed no discernible upward trend.

In that light, the most accurate description of Bernanke's declaration is that he "thinks" the recession is over, rather than it "is" over. His strategic announcement plays on market expectations to the upside, just as announcing that the recession is underway would play on expectations to the downside.

Are central bankers generally more apt to declare the end of a recession sooner that the beginning? I bet that they are. Will an AB reader do a little investigative reporting to find the first time that Bernanke acknowledged the onset of the 07-09 recession? My money's on 12/08, the date when the NBER declared it as such and a year after it began.

To his credit, much of Bernanke's Brookings address was spent highlighting the weak recovery that is expected. Bernanke is brilliant and surrounds himself with likewise brilliant economists - but data is data; and he sees what I see, which is a murky bottom and expected positive growth.

The charts below illustrate the key monthly macroeconomic variables used by the National Bureau of Economic Research to date the recession peak and trough by month: real income (I use personal income through July), employment (through August), industrial production (through August), and wholesale-retail sales (through August).








George Cooper is on to something in his book "The Origin of Financial Crises" (highly recommended). He criticizes central banking for adhering to efficient markets thinking, which leads to lax policy on the upside of the business cycle, i.e., allowing aggregate demand to outpace underlying fundamentals, and overly aggressive policy on the way down.

In this light, central bankers might be quicker to face the end of the recession and slower to conclude the onset of one. It is akin to policy mistakes being made on the way up and a triumph on the way down.

Rebecca Wilder

by Tom Bozzo

Back in 2005, I argued at Old Marginal Utility that "Greenspan exceptionalism" was not very well founded in that observers rarely engaged in a proper counterfactual analysis of how well Alan Greenspan performed relative to the next best monetary policy technocrat. That's a fairly stringent evaluation criterion, and even Brad DeLong's glass-half-full response revealed what could be considered major errors in Greenspan's judgment. 2009 hindsight of course shows that there was another major error in inflating the housing bubble, failing to recognize it, and allowing his Rand discipleship to overcome common sense in using Fed powers even to skim the froth.

Now some elite opinion favors Ben Bernanke's reappointment, but politicians are irritated over Fed stonewalling of bailout oversight and others (e.g. Dean Baker) point out that Ben Bernanke who put the Fed throttles to the firewall to save the world is also the Ben Bernanke who carried over Greenspan policy until it was too late among other things.

So what should the counterfactual-based evaluation of Bernanke say? What would the hypothetical panel of smart graduate students have done? It seems even harder to suggest that Bernanke was essential than Greenspan — in this case, because well-read economists should have had it from Ben Bernanke the academician that in a depression-level crisis you don't skimp on the monetary policy intervention. Meanwhile, Bernanke gets no points for prescient instincts as the save-the-world interventions have seemed to be firmly of the close-the-barn-doors-after-the-horses-have-bolted variety.

Meanwhile, significant elements like the opaque lending programs have the appearance if not reality of being in part the predator state (a la Jamie Galbraith) in action. There's a line of 'b-b-but Bernanke and Paulson saved the world' opinion along the lines of this bit of fail from the often incisive Joe Nocera:

So why the anger? Why the suggestions of “cover-up” and “lies”? On Thursday, as I watched Mr. Paulson being castigated, it dawned on me. Seven months later, with the palpable fear of a financial collapse largely subsided, it really all boils down to how you view what happened last year. Was it, as Mr. Towns believes, a bailout of a handful of unworthy but too-big-to-fail institutions? Or was it, in the eyes of Mr. Paulson, a rescue of a teetering financial system? My vote is for the latter.

To which the obvious response is, duh, who says it has to be one or the other? A reality-based critique of the bailouts allows them to be both effective at saving the world and unconscionable screw-jobs that kept an array of bad actors from paying for their greed and incompetence. (The latter clearly feeds a lot of the underlying sentiment of the tea partiers, even if it's ultimately the greedy and incompetent who are marshalling it.) However, considering Team Obama's political tone-deafness, it'll be a pleasant but major surprise if they don't let Bernanke go back to Princeton for some R&R.

(Cross-posted at Marginal Utility.)

by divorced one like Bush

Via Glenn Greenwald and his article The war being waged on the TARP watchdog's independence comes an interview with Neil Barofsky the man charged with over seeing TARP. It appears the White House is not keeping true to the President's campaign of a more transparent government.

...the Obama administration is now attempting to induce the Justice Department to issue a ruling that Barofsky's office is not independent at all -- but rather, is subject to, and under the supervision of, the authority of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Seems Mr. Barofsky's latest report states that the grand total of all money currently paid out and pledged totals $23.7 trillion.

This is the original article to go along with the interview.
Click here to download and listen.

Via Naked Capitalism comes Rep. Alan Grayson asking Ben Bernanke who got the 1/2 trillion in US dollars as part of a swap. He notes $24 billion in 2007 is now $553 billion yr end 2008. Who got the money? "I don't know...the loans go to the centeral banks and they then put them out...We are lending to all US financial institutions in exactly the same way." That is, the fed is making no distinction between our nation and the rest of the world. Bernanke notes the law gives them the right to do this. (Sec 14 of the Federal Reseve Act.) Rep. Grayson issue is; at what point is using this "power" to move 1/2 a trillion dollars is infringing on Congresses control of the Treasury.

(Rep. Grayson has further comment at the link regarding this video.)

Transparency. The Federal Reserve and the Treasury say this money can't be traced after it passes to the first receiver. Mr. Barofsky has shown that it can be by simple sending out a questionnaire. Bernanke is treating the lending, regardless of recipient as all the same and thus none of it can be traced and that they have a right and authority to use the Peoples Money as they see fit. Rep. Grayson thinks they are overstepping Congress.

Who was it here that noted we had not bailed out the banks, but instead the banks just bought the Treasury?

by divorced one like Bush

So, they want a loan...

by divorced one like Bush

So, they want a loan...