There may be five stages of grief, but economics blogger Barry Ritholtz argues there are 10 stages of bailouts, all of which cause taxpayers grief. For example, a company (think American International Group or Bank of America) risks more money than it should. News trickles from insiders to industry-specific journalists. Corporate managers get antsy. The public panics. Later (hear those hooves?) government comes to the rescue.
In his raucous polemic, “Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy,” Ritholtz, who writes “The Big Picture” blog and is chief executive of New York equity research firm Fusion IQ, argues that bailouts are a perversion of capitalism with a mind-bending cost to taxpayers. He figures government bailouts in the last century have cost $14 trillion. That’s more money, he calculates, than the combined inflation-adjusted costs of the Marshall Plan, Louisiana Purchase, race to the moon, New Deal, Vietnam War, Korean War, savings-and-loan crisis, Iraq invasion and NASA space program.
Bailouts violate Wall Street’s “eat what you kill” ethos, Ritholtz argues.
“There are … market players who fail to live or die by their own swords — and then expect to be rescued by others from their own folly,” he writes.
Ritholtz traces bad-idea bailouts back to the early 1970s, when the government saved Lockheed Aircraft Corp. and Penn Central Railroad. Lockheed had been in trouble for years, Ritholtz notes, losing a combined $10.8 million in 1969 and 1970, and had miscalculated on several big U.S. military projects. It got $250 million in loan guarantees. Penn Central, which in 1970 was America’s largest passenger railroad, also had mounting losses; it got $125 million in loan guarantees. In 1976, Congress spent $7 billion in operating subsidies for what was left of Penn Central and five other flailing East Coast rail lines.
“If Lockheed was the government’s first gulp of bailout elixir,” Ritholtz writes, “Penn Central was a big gulp that opened the floodgates for the bailout binge that was to come.”
By saving Chrysler Corp. with $1.5 billion in loan guarantees and $2 billion in commitments or concessions from owners, stockholders and others, the government may have saved 200,000 jobs, Ritholtz writes, but it also forestalled changes that could have prevented further disaster. If Chrysler had failed, he reasons, Ford and General Motors might have rethought their designs and created more attractive, efficient cars. And, he argues, the United Auto Workers, having seen the loss of thousands of union jobs, might have traded pension guarantees and health-care benefits for equity in the remaining Big Two. Carmakers would have been stronger going forward, he argues.
Ritholtz says President Ronald Reagan ushered in a deregulation trend that blossomed into nonregulation, or as he calls it, nonfeasance. Disaster followed, he says.
The 1999 repeal of the Depression-era Glass Steagall Act eliminated rules prohibiting bank holding companies from owning other financial companies. Minus Glass Steagall, Ritholtz writes, the new banking-center companies started underwriting all sorts of exotic products, including credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations.
Ritholtz finds two main villains behind the current crisis: former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and former President George W. Bush. Greenspan, he said, allowed the housing bubble to inflate by cutting and keeping the federal funds rate, the interest rate at which banks lend to one another, below 1.75 from December 2001 to September 2004.
Although he blames President Bill Clinton for allowing the repeal of Glass Steagall and the passage of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which exempted derivatives from regulation, Ritholtz says Bush caused more damage making bad choices for leaders of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Reserve and Treasury Department and for letting his free-markets-reign-supreme ideology rule.
Ritholtz covers the topics in a conversational, digestible way. People who missed the recent news, or slept in economics class, will emerge enlightened, and maybe enraged. They may also be exhausted by the book’s steady spray of superlatives. Reading them all was like having my head banged against a metal locker: “massive” (bam!) “tremendous” (bam!) “unbelievably enormous” (bam!).
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“Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy” by Barry Ritholtz, 332 pages, Wiley, $24.95.
Matthew Crowley is a copy editor for the Business Press’ sister publication, the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He can be reached atmcrowley@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0304.
BOOK REVIEW Named and shamed Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy by Barry Ritholtz with Aaron Task
For the past three decades, finance replaced doctor or lawyer as the smart career choice. The cleverest people gravitated to business schools and then to Wall Street, some detouring to Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. So how did these masters of the universe create the worst global economic misery in 80 years?
It was stupidity and arrogance, pure and simple, fund manager and TheStreet.com columnist Barry Ritholtz contends in Bailout Nation, the same traits that led a previous generation of America’s best and brightest to the tragedy of Vietnam (and a group of more recent, less illustrious ideologues to the debacle in Iraq). At least
Camelot’s villains thought they were doing good for the world. The modern bankers and traders and quants and arbs who acted so irresponsibly, almost exclusively with other people’s money, were simply trying to make themselves obscenely wealthy.
These “idiots”, as Ritholtz often calls them, richly deserve every ounce of approbation he musters. He repeatedly contends that rather than being bailed out, they deserve to have been bankrupted, exposed as charlatans, hooted out of their professions, tarred, feathered, and in some cases jailed.
Helping hand
In his very readable book that will delight general readers as well as finance buffs, Ritholtz traces the history of US bailouts. He acknowledges that American capitalism was never purely laissez faire. From manipulating tariffs, to war, to attacking Barbary pirates, to railroad land grants, Uncle Sam has assisted commerce.
Moving to modern times, Ritholtz rightly rejects comparisons between the New Deal and later bailouts. Although the 1930s feature remarkably similar shrieks of socialist takeover and demagoguery over presidential loyalty and origins (Franklin Delano Rosenfeld, they said back then), the government response was quite different.
The New Deal focused on sector reform and aid to victims while the present – and Ritholtz contends, less justifiable – effort provides direct aid to corporations often guilty of gross mismanagement.
The US conversion to doing the wrong thing to support business began, according to Ritholtz, with the bailout of Lockheed Aviation in 1971. In that and subsequent industrial bailouts of Penn Central Railroad and Chrysler Motors, the
government became convinced the country and taxpayers had less to lose from a bailout than letting the companies fail. Ritholtz explodes that myth by simply asking how the US auto industry could possibly be in worse shape now if Chrysler had gone belly up 30 years ago?
Who stole my cape? The financial bailout era begins with the October 19, 1987, Black Monday crash, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted a harrowing 22.6%. That was a first intervention by the man Ritholtz assigns the greatest slice of blame for the current debacle, former US Federal Reserve chairman and financial superhero Alan Greenspan. (Oddly and disappointingly, the book barely mentions the government’s US$180 billion Savings & Loan bailout of the early 1990s. which at least superficially resembles the present crash.)
Greenspan’s predilection to meddle in equity markets combined with his paradoxical disdain for regulation in the name of free markets created a climate for excessive risk-taking. When Greenspan cut interest rates to all-time lows after September 11, 2001, it forced bond investors to search for new products for returns in an atmosphere where those best and the brightest had carte blanche to practice financial alchemy with disastrous results.
After Greenspan, Ritholtz assigns the greatest blame to the Fed, twice – for keeping interest rates too low and failing as a bank regulator; then to rating agencies Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch for classifying risky bonds as Triple A; to the Securities and Exchange Commission, for loosening leverage restrictions on investment banks; to mortgage lenders for offering liar loans; to borrowers and home buyers for lying; to Congress for its complicity in all; to the big five Wall Street firms and their greed-addled chief executive officers for ignoring Ritholtz’s “first rule of economics: ‘There is no free lunch’.”
Too big to succeed Ritholtz also placed high in the blame game a figure that epitomized the pollution of politics with money and the (literal) marriage of government and business to advantage the privileged while preaching the free-market gospel, former senator Phil Gramm. Gramm’s wife, Wendy, began the job of dismantling regulation of futures markets and then joined the board of directors at beneficiary Enron. Gramm (along with Bill Clinton Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, number 14 on Ritholtz’s blame list with protege Larry Summers) spearheaded repeal of the Glass-Stegall Act that kept banks separate from other financial institutions. That enabled banks like Citigroup to become, as Ritholtz puts it, “too big to succeed” and pose systemic risk when they went bad.
After their government service, Gramm and Rubin took jobs at Swiss bank UBS and Citigroup respectively, leviathans they helped create and eventually beach, costing shareholders and the public billions. Gramm remains unrepentant, “Bailout Nation’s most intellectually bankrupt citizen,” Ritholtz writes. “Like Greenspan, Gramm had only one idea; unlike Greenspan, he had no comprehension it was wrong.”
Ritholtz also absolves two of the rightwing fringe’s favorite targets, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 and government-sponsored mortgage packagers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The toothless CRA never compelled any bank to make any loan, let alone a bad loan. Moreover, most lenders making bad loans weren’t covered by CRA. As for Fannie and Freddie, Ritholtz acknowledges their problems (from good, old-fashioned fraud) that had nothing to do with the crisis. Politicians and ideologues that seize on CRA, Fannie and Freddy as villains are showcasing their own ignorance and intellectual bankruptcy.
Putting the A in AIG When things fell apart in September last year, Ritholtz says, the government should have nationalized AIG, separating the giant’s solvent insurance business from its loopy financial funhouse. Instead, US taxpayers have doled out $173 billion and counting to repay not widows and orphans holding policies on dear departed dads, but a coterie of Wall Street tycoons and overseas banks escaping the consequences of their foolish risks. That’s not capitalism but socialism for the wealthy at taxpayer expense.
For the housing market at the root of the boom and bust, Ritholtz convincingly demonstrates its disproportionate impact in the post-September US economy. He proposes converting 30% of any delinquent mortgage into a 10-year balloon loan with no interest accruing, and lenders carrying the loan as an asset. Ritholtz estimates that would save about one in five of the homes now threatened with foreclosure. The rest would need to be foreclosed to let prices adjust to reality. That’s how free markets are supposed to work, rather than the “we win-you lose” bets Wall Street is still cashing.
Bailout Nation‘s straightforward, compelling account puts the crisis in context, explains why the US government responded so stupidly, offers solutions, and advises how to prevent a repeat. Ritholtz’s indictment of the financial and political establishment isn’t terribly unique, but it’s devastatingly accurate.
Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy by Barry Ritholtz with Aaron Task. Hoboken, New Jersey, USA, John Wiley & Sons, May 2009. ISBN: 978-0-470-52038-3. US$24.95; 332 pages.
Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s story to the world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie. Follow Muhammad Cohen’s blog for more on the media and Asia, his adopted home.
The US President Barack Obama, despite being articulate, is allowing his team to sound like philosophers and researchers when they explain what is going on in the marketplace and what the business plan is to fix it, rues Barry Ritholtz in ‘Bailout Nation’ (www.wiley.com). “This is the first time we’ve had to handle this situation, and it’s incredibly complex and difficult. While it takes great minds to devise a solution, when it’s time to explain it to the typical family, it needs to be kept reasonably simple and clear.”
The author gives an analogy from the field of sports, thus: “If a football coach has a brilliant game plan on the blackboard but cannot simplify it so it is crystal clear to the players, that plan will not get executed properly. The probability for failure increases.”
Perhaps, Obama’s speech last week, in the Federal Hall on Wall Street, was to make amends for the absence of clear communication. He had then chastised the industry for still engaging in “reckless behaviour,” “quick kills,” “bloated bonuses,” and taking “exorbitant risks that were unsustainable for the system,” as www.bloomberg.com reported on September 15.
The book has a chapter titled ‘Casino capitalism,’ which suggests that a simple solution to banks’ problems is to identify the banks that are insolvent and temporarily nationalise them. “Appoint new management, and give them six months to spin out 10 per cent of each of the separate viable pieces, with the taxpayer retaining the rest as passive investors. Bank of America can spin out five major pieces: BoA, Merrill, Countrywide, a toxic holding company, and the rest of its holdings,” Ritholtz recommends.
The call for nationalisation, he reasons, is not a move toward socialism, but an attempt to prevent casino capitalism from bankrupting the country. “Real capitalists nationalise; faux capitalists look for the free lunch.”
An example of the latter is the backdoor bailout of major financial institutions with AIG serving as the middleman; for, it is actually a bailout of private speculators, the author fumes. “Not only are US taxpayers subsidising the bad decisions made by executives in the US, but we are also bailing out the poor judgment of the rest of the world.”
For some time now, I’ve known that Barry Ritholtz’s new book Bailout Nation was definitely not going to be kind to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, but, had I known that it would offer the most damning critique of his term at the central bank, I certainly wouldn’t have let the book sit on my desk for the last few weeks before finally picking it up the other day and polishing it off in record time.
With the subtitle How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy, it was natural to think the focus might be more on greed than easy money, but that’s really not the case.
Greed is a constant on Wall Street and, for that matter, in most of the rest of the world, but financial systems don’t implode unless generously lubricated with easy money, bailouts, and moral hazard – key elements of the Greenspan legacy.
Ironically, Fed economists and assorted hangers-on are meeting in Jackson Hole this week to deliberate on what’s changed in the world of finance and monetary policy over the last year.
It was four years ago at that same gathering (i.e., before the housing and credit bubbles met their respective pins) that some were still lauding the former Fed chief as “the greatest central banker of all time” in something of a “going-away” party.
I wonder if his name will come up at this session…
Anyway, the book is not only fun-filled, thanks to the inimitable writing style of Mr. Ritholtz, but it’s chock full of interesting little bits of information and perspective that, even to me, cast new light on what will surely be looked back upon as a disastrous period for central banking.
For example, it is common knowledge that Alan Greenspan was much more interested in asset prices than were his predecessors – they didn’t coin the term “the Greenspan put” for nothing – but this passage gives the concept a bit more color.
History teaches us that the development of Bailout Nation, Wall Street edition, was not done in secret meetings. Rather, it occurred in the very public functions of the Federal Reserve, and the subsequent results of its policy actions.
The Greenspan Fed created an endemic culture of excessive risk taking. The U.S. central bank created moral hazard not by targeting inflation or the business cycle, but instead by focusing on asset prices. From the squishy focus on psychology, it was a short hop to asset prices. After all, when price go down, it negatively impacts sentiment, right? This was the Fed’s fatal flaw under Greenspan’s leadership.
…
The Fed’s previous rate cuts had only implied a concern over asset prices; now, the chief explicitly affirmed the fact. The Fed was not concerned just about inflation and employment; asset prices were an “integral part” of its calculus, too.
This was revolutionary. Fed chiefs didn’t usually care so much about stock prices; they were more concerned with the bond market. After all, it was the fixed-income traders – known as bond ghouls for their morbid affection for bad economic news – who set interest rates. Worries about deficits, inflation, and trade balances all found a receptive audience among the bond traders.
Once Wall Street figured out Greenspan was concerned about equity prices, it wasn’t too long before it learned how to play the Fed like the devil’s fiddle. When rate cuts did not materialize, the Street would have itself a hissy fit. It is always ill advised to anthropomorphize markets, but observing the market kick and scream when cuts weren’t forthcoming was akin to watching a two-year-old throw a tantrum. It may be illegal to manipulate the markets, but no trader will ever got thrown in jail for manipulating Greenspan.
Unfortunately, the current Fed chairman seems to share this same trait.
First Amendment Award 2009 Bailout Nation: Best Book
Many authors, journalists, and publicists have asserted causes for the financial crisis and stock market crash of 2008. However, none have done as comprehensive a job as Barry Ritholtz in his Mount Everest view of how it all went down: Bailout Nation.
Bailout Nation avoids all the disingenuous blame-shifting onto specific political parties or individuals. Instead, the surprisingly easy-to-read overview has the balls to publish the entire laundry list of culprits and variables. If you are interested in Truth rather than fancy academic erudition or rhetorical smoke and mirrors, Bailout Nation will fill your brain with the equivalent of a nutritious gourmet meal.
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Ah, a crisis-free summer! Stocks are rallying, credit markets are no longer in a panic, and the big banks — at least most of them — have survived. Although, of course, we’re all trillions of dollars poorer.
So, I thought it was a good time to reflect on what got us here. My beach reading this summer, aside from the usual novels I promise to finish but rarely do, included “Bailout Nation,” by Barry Ritholtz.
Bailout joins a growing list of books about The Crisis. It’s a good old-fashioned polemic, written by a noted blogger and financial analyst who, unlike most economists and journalists (including yours truly), saw this all coming. But few people in Troy listened to Cassandra, either: That big wooden horse full of Greeks looked so cool.
Ritholtz’s book takes us along two parallel tracks: the history of financial bailouts in America and a scathing account of Alan Greenspan’s two-decade reign as Federal Reserve chairman. Along with some monumental failures by Congress and regulators and the bottomless venality of financial firms, those two tracks came together in a catastrophic train wreck whose damage may not be cleared for a generation.
How did we get to the point where U.S. taxpayers have propped up Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Citibank, Bank of America, General Motors, and Chrysler (again)? Ritholtz claims it started small, back in 1971, when Congress and the Nixon administration saved Lockheed Aircraft from bankruptcy.
This all-but-forgotten episode, which Ritholtz calls the first government bailout of an individual company, set the stage for what was to follow: Penn Central Railroad, Chrysler (the first time), and Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust all relied on taxpayer largesse to save them from themselves.
As time went on, the bailouts got bigger and the federal government got more comfortable using them. And the usual necessary purging effects of the free market went out the window. “Creative destruction is a brilliant concept to discuss in grad school,” Ritholtz writes, “but with real money on the line, it becomes readily dismissed as an abstract academic concept.”
In fact, Ritholtz has a much too brief description of a 10-step pattern he says is common to all the major bailouts, from “risk event” through “interested party” agitation to “deepening panic” and “major intervention/bailout” all the way to “unintended consequences.”
In all cases, he says, the companies demonize their early critics, then lobby politicians furiously as the danger grows. When the inevitable crisis comes, officials warn of “systemic risk” or “economic catastrophe” and steamroll Congress and the public into taking actions they wouldn’t otherwise accept. Mr. Paulson, I presume?
Ritholtz is at his best in dissecting the record of another leading figure, Alan Greenspan, whom he calls most responsible for the debacle we’ve just experienced. Attacking Greenspan has become almost a requirement among analysts of the crisis, but Ritholtz brings fresh analysis as he eviscerates decision after decision in Mr. Greenspan’s long tenure.
“The Greenspan Fed created an endemic culture of excessive risk taking,” he writes. “Greenspan learned early on that the solution to every problem was to throw money at it — liquidity in the parlance of central bankers — even though doing so ultimately leads to bigger problems down the road.”
That started during the 1987 stock market crash, which occurred months after Greenspan succeeded Paul Volcker and continued through the 1990-1991 recession, the dot.com bust a decade later, Sept. 11, and so on.
Greenspan refused to deflate the Internet bubble of the 1990s even though a simple tool at his disposal, “constraining margin lending, would have tamped down some of the mad speculation.”
Instead, he waited for the bubble to burst and then “in January 2001, started an extraordinary rate-cutting process, one for which there is no comparison.” That rate-cutting campaign, to stave off what Ritholtz calls a relatively mild recession, led to the present disaster.
“Bailout Nation” demonstrates better than any account I have read how unusual that Fed policy was. During previous recessions, he writes, “rates had been below 2% — but only for a few weeks or months at a time. Incredibly, the Greenspan Fed maintained a 1.75% cap on the Fed funds rate from September 2001 to September 2004.”
Then came the coup de grace, as the Fed cut the federal funds rate to 1% in June 2003, and kept it there for 12 months. “While the Fed funds rate had been as low as 1% some 46 years earlier, it had never been allowed to stay that low for more than a year,” Ritholtz states.
Why did he do it? Ritholtz argues that “the only plausible explanation for the radical rate cuts was asset prices. Greenspan was hell-bent on bailing out stock investors.”
Alternative view
From interviews with people involved in those decisions, I’ve come to a different conclusion, which Ritholtz himself supplies later on: “The possibility of a double-dip recession was real, and that was making the Federal Reserve very nervous.”
In other words, they panicked and overreacted. Sound familiar?
The Fed was to repeal those ultralow interest rates starting in 2004, but the damage had been done: “The combination of ultralow rates, new types of exotic mortgages, changes in lending standards, and massive securitization created the perfect storm for a housing boom.”
Meanwhile, with rates at rock-bottom lows, institutional investors were hungry for yield, and “the nearly insatiable assembly line Wall Street was running for mortgage-backed securities” eagerly obliged them.
Throw in rubber-stamp rating agencies, inept regulation by Greenspan’s Fed and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and former Sen. Phil Gramm’s, R-Texas, wrongheaded lifting of key regulatory constraints, especially for derivatives, and you have a recipe for disaster.
So, where are we now? In a recent interview, Ritholtz told me he doesn’t think the reforms proposed so far will change much: The administration and Congress still haven’t repudiated the bailout as a solution and some institutions — notably Citigroup — are still too big to fail.
And there’s been little change in either the rating agencies’ practices or Wall Street compensation that caused reckless people to take unconscionable risks with shareholders’ and taxpayers’ money. See video interview here.
But there should be little doubt that having the Fed regulate “systemically risky” financial institutions after the poor job it’s done would make as much sense as putting FEMA in charge of national security after its performance following Hurricane Katrina.
“It’s consistent with rewarding incompetence and failure,” Ritholtz told me.
Unfortunately that’s become standard operating procedure in Bailout Nation USA.
Still, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
Howard R. Gold is executive editor of MoneyShow.com.
MANY people were outraged when Goldman Sachs returned $10 billion in federal bailout money just in time to report its biggest quarterly profit ever, along with a plan to pay $11 billion in employee bonuses. Barry Ritholtz, who writes The Big Picture, a popular financial blog, wasn’t heartened by the news, either.
Mr. Ritholtz, however, tried to keep his sense of humor. He posted a satirical story on his Web site by the comedian Andy Borowitz, titled “Goldman Sachs in Talks to Acquire Treasury Department: Sister Entities to Share Employees, Money.”
This is very much in the spirit of Mr. Ritholtz’s book, “Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy” (Wiley), in which he argues that the American financial system has been twisted beyond recognition by cynical bankers and their Washington enablers, who champion the free market in good times but cry out for government rescue when times are hard.
The author writes with the fury of an insider mortified by the behavior of his heretical peers. Mr. Ritholtz is himself a creature of Wall Street — the chief executive of FusionIQ, an online equity research firm that profited last year by shorting the shares of companies like A.I.G. and Lehman Brothers.
The way the author sees it, there are two kinds of people on Wall Street. There are the ones, like himself, who believe that the industry should be a “brutal meritocracy” where “you eat what you kill.”
Then, he writes, there are the ones at the top of some institutions that made billions of dollars disappear in the last 12 months through misuse of numbingly complex derivative products. When it appeared that they might go hungry, they hurried to Washington to feed on the government’s bailout package, which the author calculates will leave taxpayers with $14 trillion in liabilities if you also factor in the rescues of General Motors, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
“Yes, that’s $14 trillion (plus) — about equal to the gross domestic of the United States in 2007,” Mr. Ritholtz laments. “And as 2008 came to a close, even more industries caught the scent of easy money: Automakers, home builders, insurers, and even state and local governments were clamoring for a piece of the bailout pie.”
Many argue that the government averted a catastrophe by pumping money into the banking system. Mr. Ritholtz isn’t so sure. He thinks the rescue of Bear Stearns emboldened the ailing Lehman Brothers to brush off potential saviors like Warren E. Buffett, who were ready to invest in it.
In September, Lehman went bankrupt and all hell broke loose. Suddenly, the government couldn’t dole out money fast enough.
Mr. Ritholtz notes that the government wasn’t always so willing to provide a safety net to banks. He contrasts efforts of George W. Bush last fall to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the Great Depression. Roosevelt, he says, came to the rescue of ordinary people, financing public works programs that created jobs and making mortgage loans to homeowners facing foreclosure.
It all started to change in 1971, Mr. Ritholtz writes, when the government dished out $250 million in loan guarantees to Lockheed, which was ailing because it had submitted low bids to win government military contacts. That bailout paved the way for the $1.5 billion rescue of Chrysler in 1980.
He writes that this rescue left the carmaker with the same management and did nothing to change onerous union contracts. If the government had allowed Chrysler to fail, he argues, the United Automobile Workers might have been more eager to make health care and pension concessions that would have made the industry more competitive.
The author argues that someone might have scooped up Chrysler’s remains and made better cars, spurring rivals to do the same.
Today, instead, foreign car manufacturers dominate the American market. The author writes that the U.A.W.’s membership has fallen by more than two-thirds since its peak of 1.5 million in 1979. And Chrysler recently declared bankruptcy along with G.M.
“If that’s your idea of a successful bailout,” Mr. Ritholtz writes, referring to the earlier attempt to save Chrysler, “I’d hate to see what your idea of a losing one is like.”
But the bailout he finds particularly abhorrent is the Federal Reserve’s rescue in 1998 of Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that nearly collapsed under heavily leveraged bets on exotic securities. He concedes that Long-Term Capital’s lenders — everybody from Bear Stearns to Merrill Lynch to Lehman — would have felt pain if the fund had gone belly-up. But, he says, that would have been a “ripping good lesson” in risk management.
Instead, he writes, the Fed sent these banks the implicit signal that they, too, could expect to be saved if they took on too much risk. “In sum,” he says, “Long-Term Capital Management was the dress rehearsal for the great credit crisis of 2008 — and a missed opportunity to prevent the ongoing tragedy.”
THE book sometimes reads like a lengthy blog post, and occasionally drives home its arguments with rude trading-floor jokes. There are moments when it almost chokes on its own bile. “Adam Smith would not know whether to weep or retch were he alive to see this today,” Mr. Ritholtz says as he nears the conclusion.
Yet there is much to be said for the book’s irreverence. Mr. Ritholtz has written an important book about a complicated subject, and yet you could still read it at the beach. Here’s hoping that some policy makers in Washington take it with them on vacation this month.
Some nice words about Bailout Nation in today’s WSJ, as the first of several suggested beach readings:
“Heading into August, beaches and books beckon. While it’s nice to curl up with a page-turning, mind-free thriller, this summer of our great recessionary discontent might be a good time to bone up on things finance and investing.
There’s certainly been plenty of news in the past several months, and many books have come out to chronicle all that has gone awry with the economy and the markets.
So, here’s a short reading list that includes current items as well as a few classics:
Mr. Ritholtz is a financial commentator who has drawn a large following to his blog, The Big Picture (ritholtz.com). Several people have written books about the current crisis, but Mr. Ritholtz succeeds in laying out all that transpired in easy-to-understand language. If you want to know how we got into this mess and what might still be coming, this is the book for you.”
If you are willing to scour through the facts and events of the past several years, if you are more inclined to honesty than dishonesty, then you might pick up a copy of Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy (John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey). The author is Barry Ritholtz (with Aaron Task), and we will have to admit that they have made a serious effort at cataloguing, meticulously cataloguing, what has been happening on Wall Street. They try to be pretty honest and blunt, and by and large they are. I know that Nouriel Roubini is a crank, so I admit I was put off by his prominent endorsement of the book. But Bill Fleckenstein writes the Foreword, so I was impressed. Fleckenstein is a good guy, and a very serious and honest professional. Ritholtz’s book is a realistic appraisal of the true state of affairs: we are indeed getting bailed out, but the elite Wall Street cabal is getting 99% of this bailout.
Wall Street fraud has gone mainstream – just as it went mainstream in the 1920s. Nothing much changes, except the actors. This time around, the media was and is a major player in the scam. What is amazing is that scammers, in the media, in the Federal Reserve, on Wall Street, dominate the events and the crimes. There are days when I just cannot control my laughter. Things have gotten very much out of control in the United States. “Capitalism” is getting exploited for all its worth. Ritholtz tells the story. Ritholtz is a hard worker, he is diligent, and I commend his efforts to tell the truth.
I recently called up (for the second time) Ritholtz to see if he would discuss his book and Wall Street. In 2006 or so Ritholtz understood that something serious was coming – he then turned bearish. His instincts are sound and impressive. He likes to tell the truth, and he is a likeable guy, and moreover he is the author of a popular financial blog called The Big Picture.
Most people are naïve and stupid, so this makes the scamming pretty easy. The Ritholtz book is, as I have said, a pretty good catalogue of the scamming operations. Thank goodness for the internet. Without the internet, the scammers would be enjoying impunity.
