Seeker Blog

On March 17, Alan Greenspan wrote an article for the FT entitled “We will never have a perfect model of risk“, in which he argued: “We will never be able to anticipate all discontinuities in financial markets.” He concluded: “It is important, indeed crucial, that any reforms in, and adjustments to, the structure of markets and regulation [do] not inhibit our most reliable and effective safeguards against cumulative economic failure: market flexibility and open competition.”

At the Financial Times Economist’s Forum you will find all the responses to the Greenspan article. And Alan Greenspan’s reply, which begins…

I am puzzled why the remarkably similar housing bubbles that emerged in more than two dozen countries between 2001 and 2006 are not seen to have a common cause. The dramatic fall in real long term interest rates statistically explains, and is the most likely major cause of, real estate capitalization rates that declined and converged across the globe. By 2006, long term interest rates for all developed and major developing economies declined to single digits, I believe for the first time ever.

Doubtless each individual housing bubble has its own idiosyncratic characteristics and some point to Fed monetary policy complicity in the US bubble. But the US bubble was close to median world experience…

…De Grauwe is correct; I do believe bank risk managers and loan officers are more knowledgeable than government bank regulators. Bank loan officers, in my experience, know far more about the risks and workings of their counterparties than do the bank regulators that examine those counterparties.

Regulators, to be effective, have to be forward looking to anticipate the next financial malfunction. This has not proved to be feasible. Regulators confronting real time uncertainty have rarely, if ever, been able to achieve the level of future clarity required to act preemptively. Most regulatory activity focuses on activities that precipitated previous crises and that investors have long since largely abandoned, although new laws may prevent recurrences. New problems, to repeat, are by their nature incapable of being anticipated with any degree of confidence.

Aside from far greater efforts to ferret out fraud (a long time concern of mine), would a material tightening of regulation improve financial performance? I doubt it. The problem is not the lack of regulation, but unrealistic expectations about what regulators are able to anticipate and prevent. How we otherwise explain how the FSA, whose effectiveness is held in such high regard, fumbled Northern Rock? Or in the US, our best examiners have repeatedly failed over the years. These are not aberrations.

…Subprime securitization exploded because subprime mortgage-backed securities (MBS) were seemingly under-priced (high-yielding) at original issuance. Subprime delinquencies and foreclosures (in a rising home price market) were modest at the time, creating the illusion of great profit opportunities. Investors of all stripes pressed securitizers for more MBS. Securitizers, in turn, pressed lenders for mortgage paper with little concern about its quality. As a consequence underwriting standards collapsed, and mortgage originations and securitizations rose to far greater heights than would have occurred without securitization. Even with full authority to intervene, it is not credible that regulators would have been able to prevent the subprime debacle. It would have required insights that would enable regulators to override the investment judgments of the most experienced analysts of the private sector, the very people on whom regulators rely for their market insights. When investment judgments are distorted by euphoria, even so valuable a financial innovation as securitization will perform poorly.

…Much of the commentary critical of my FT article is directed less at its substance and more, as Wolf describes it, to “the ideology I display.” Ideology, which regrettably has become a pejorative term, defines that set of ideas that we each believe explains how the world works and therefore how we need to act to achieve our goals. Some of our views of causative forces are rational, some are otherwise. Much of what we confront in reality is uncertain, some of it frighteningly so. Yet people have no choice but to make judgments on the nature of the tenuous ties of causation or they are immobilized.

I do have an ideology. So does each of the members of the Forum. I trust our views are subject to the same standards of evidence that apply to all rational discourse. My view of how the efficiency of global capitalism has evolved over the decades as new evidence has appeared contradicting some earlier judgments and confirming others. I have been surprised by the fierceness of investors in retrenching from risk since August. My view of the range of dispersion of outcomes has been shaken, but not my judgment that free competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We have tried regulation ranging from heavy to central planning. None meaningfully worked. Do we wish to retest the evidence?