Courtesy of Steve Randy Waldman of Interfluidity
Robert Kuttner has a great column about the “rentier class” and the struggle between “between the claims of the past and the potential of the future”. See responses by Adam Levitin, Mike Konczal, Paul Krugman, Yves Smith and Matt Yglesias.
I want to make an obvious political economy point. The most organized and active agents of the rentier class are, of course, banks. As Konczal points out
[Financial sector] profits are based off milking the bad debts of the housing and credit bubbles while Americans struggling under a crushing debt load. Instead of sharing the losses, the financial sector has locked itself into the profit stream and left the real economy to deal with the mess.
Financial sector lobbying plays an outsized role in tilting policy away from risk-and-loss-sharing arrangements and towards an alchemy of blood from turnips.
But it didn’t have to be this way. Banks, after all, are not only creditors. They are also the economy’s biggest debtors. In theory, bank loyalties ought to be mixed. On the one hand, banks prefer deflationary, zero-forgiveness tight-money policies, to maximize the real value of their assets and of the lending spread from which they draw profits and bonuses. On the other hand, troubled banks are very happy to support loose money and expansionary policy, even at risk of inflation. For bank managers and shareholders, it is bad to have the value of past loans eroded by inflation. But it is much worse to lose their franchises entirely, to have their wealth, prestige, and freedom put at risk in the aftermath of an explicit bank failure. When banks are in trouble, they are perfectly happy to support all manner of expansionary policy, as long as short-term interest rates are kept low. Even a broad-based inflation helps troubled banks twice over, by increasing borrowers incomes and by steepening the yield curve. Increased incomes ensure that loans will be repaid in nominal terms, preventing insolvency due to credit losses. A steep yield curve permits banks to recapitalize themselves via maturity transformation, using deposits to purchase Treasury notes while the central bank promises to hold short rates low for a few years.
But banks’ interests are aligned with those of debtors only to the degree that banks, like debtors, are at risk of real insolvency. When we committed to a policy of “no more Lehmans”, when we made clear via TARP and TGLP and the Fed’s alphabet soup that big banks would have funding on demand and on easy terms, when we modified accounting standards to eliminate the risk that bad loans on the books would translate to failures, when we funded their recapitalization on the sly, we changed banks. We transformed them from nervous debtors into pure rentiers, who see a lot more upside in squeezing borrowers than in eliminating a crippling debt overhang. And since banks are, shall we say, not entirely disenfranchised among policymakers, we increased the difficulty of making policy that includes accommodations between creditors and debtors, accommodations that permit the economy to move forward rather than stare back over its shoulder, nervously and greedily, at a gigantic pile of old debt.
Our problem is not that our banks are still weak, our financial system too fragile. Our problem is that we have made our banks strong and cocky, so they needn’t care about abstractions like lives disrupted, production foregone, human capacities undeveloped. We’d have better policy if banks themselves were at risk of foreclosure when Joe Sixpack still can’t find a job. We should work to put them in that position.
