American Capitalism: Profit, But Fairly

Adam Davidson wrote up an interesting apologia for Wall Street in the NY Times last week, which I think is ultimately a call for better regulation, rather than bank-hating.  I missed the piece originally, but Yves Smith found it and has nothing good to say about it. I think Yves is a little too harsh on Davidson. I've got issues with parts of the piece, but on different grounds, namely that it efuses to engage on the real issue. The problem isn't financial intermediation.  That's a perfectly fine thing that plays a useful role in society.  

Instead, the problem is when financial intermediaries do not treat the intermediating parties (meaning consumer and investors) fairly. The history of US financial services is nothing short of a history of scandals involving financial institutions variously ripping off investors and consumers. I'm not just talking about those scandals we remember, like Milken or Madoff or the recent slew or even the second tier ones like the Salad Oil scam or all of 1920s mortgage bonds. The history of US financial services is largely a history of unregulated innovation resulting in abuse and then follow-up regulatory reform. Lather, rinse, wash, repeat. 

Davidson argues that the reason to "hate the banks" is that 

Wall Street firms enforce the cold rules of capitalism: hostile takeovers, foreclosures, fee increases, defaults. But those rules clearly do not apply to the largest banks themselves. 

Davidson misses the mark here a bit. It's not just that the banks get bailed out, meaning that the rules of market discipline don't apply to them. It's that the banks frequently break the rules when applied to others.  It's fine to do foreclosures or hostile takeovers or sell consumers speculative securities. But it's not ok to foreclose without following the law or to profit on insider knowledge on hostile takeovers or or to sell investors "safe" assets when you know they are junk.

The fundamental rule of American capitalism is "profit, but fairly." Whatever one thinks is "fair", I don't think there should be much disagreement that Wall Street too often disregards the second part of this dictum to focus on the first. But take away the "but fairly" and society quickly becomes a Gilded Age baronial kleptocracy, a post-Soviet (or pre-Soviet) Russia. If we want capitalism to work--meaning that there is social stability, pace OWS--market players must play by the rules. This is where the debate needs to be focused:  ensuring that our financial intermediaries play by the rules. 

Davidson could use a little work on his history.  Consider his arguments about the importance of Wall Street for fighting poverty, innovation, funding socially beneficial projects, and for the existence of the middle class.  All seem quite debatable to me.

The Poor Would Stay Poor?

Davison argues that Wall Street has helped the poor:

In the U.S., we use credit cards, mortgages, credit scores, securitized loans and other Wall Street innovations to do the miraculous: to persuade some institution with a lot of money to hand it over to someone who doesn’t have that much. 

This is just ridiculous. First, the poor still generally do not get credit and when they do, it is of dubious value to them. For the poor, credit may help with today's problem, but it becomes tomorrow's problem, not least because of the terms on which it is offered, which are often based as much on market power, not risk-based pricing. Second, it often isn't Wall Street that's funding the loans--it is investors, with Wall Street taking a commission, meaning no skin-in-the-game. The result is what we saw in the housing bubble--Wall Street fleecing investors by brokering unsustainable loans to homeowners. Finally, Davidson presents no case that any of these innovations help the poor. If you want to look at programs that have been successful at raising living standards and eradicating poverty in the US, you need to look at government programs like the TVA (which for all of its controversy resulted in electricity and employment and a decline in malaria in the Tennessee valley). 

Innovation?

We have seen some innovation in consumer finance over the past century, no doubt. As for innovation, how much has really benefitted consumers, as opposed to benefitting Wall Street? No doubt we have much greater convenience in payments due to plastic and ACH. But what else? The payment-option ARM?  Yes, an innovation.  But a good one?  Credit life insurance?  Cash-out refinancings?  We have Paul Volcker's famous comment that the last major innovation in consumer finance was the ATM. I'd say that's more or less correct. Consider the cutting edge innovations of today--mobile payments, contactless, etc. None of them are game changers.

Beyond that, let's give credit where it's due. Some of the greatest innovation has been by the government, not by Wall Street. Securitization, in its modern form, is a government invention (Ginnie Mae!). Likewise, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage is a government creation (a genesis from the HOLC to the FHA to the VA). Suburban housing--financed originally by the FHA. Other innovations have been made possible only because of implicit governmental backing (e.g., money market mutual funds, which also benefit from an accounting treatment exception). Par clearing payment systems (meaning when you pay $100, the payee gets $100 credited, not $90), are a function of the Federal Reserve.

No Awesome Things?

Davidson is on his strongest ground when he argues that but for Wall Street, lots of cool projects would never be funded. No Facebook, no Apple, no mobile phones, etc. I can't disagree with him that businesses need funding, and that financial intermediation by Wall Street enables this to happen on a much larger scale than otherwise. But whether it is being done fairly is another question, and that's where my issue lies. 

This is not my particular area of academic focus, so others may have better examples, but consider IPOs, which are the intermediation par excellence, of shifting funding from limited private sources to public sources. That's fine, but the intermediaries frequently engage in insider trading on the IPOs. And again, remember that government plays a role in all of this, with support for small businesses, ranging from tax breaks for partnerships and S-corporations to SBA-loan guarantees and industry specific (e.g., solar) loan guarantees. 

No Middle Class?

What about the "there would be no middle class" meme? This is a very debatable counterhistory. Consumer credit enabled greater consumption by the middle class, but consumer credit isn't free. It just shifts consumption between time periods. The US had a well-established middle class by the end of the 19th century (and arguably much earlier). It grew substantially in the 20th century, but the GI Bills and post-War employment boom and unionization had as much to do with that as anything. 

Still, consumer credit played a role, but that role can't be attributed solely to Wall Street. The original consumer credit wasn't Wall Street. It was companies like Singer Sewing Machines or Sears Roebuck and employer- and community-based credit unions. Banks didn't do consumer finance for quite a while. If you look at the source of mortgage loans historically, the "household sector" was a major provider well into the 1950s, meaning that you would get a mortgage from the rich guy down the street or from your uncle, etc., rather than from a bank. As for other financial services, they can, have been, and are often provided not by the private sector, but by the government. Recall that we had a US Postal Service Bank from 1911-1968, that at one point had 20% of deposits and innovated deposit by mail (the postal bank was the Republican counter-proposal to federal deposit insurance!). Most of the rest of the world still has postal banking systems. (Yes, I'm working on a project about this.) The government supports payment systems via the Fed, and housing finance via deposit insurance, FHA, VA, FHLBs, and Fannie/Freddie.

This is hardly a system of pure private capitalism. And if government is going to be assuming some of the risks, it will, not surprisingly dictate some of the terms on which services are offered, both to manage its risk and to further its policies; government support comes with strings attached.

Bottom line here is that the benefits of increasingly specialized financial intermediation are questionable, and the role of government in financial intermediation and development is often overlooked. Privatized financial intermediation often means privatization of gains and socialization of losses, as we have recently seen. More critically, though, absent vigorous regulation, it easily dissolves into a system of profit über alles, in which rules of fair play (and we can debate just what those should be) are disregarded as inconvenient. For capitalism to work in a democracy, it is necessary that everyone play by the rules of the game.