Central Banks of the World Flying By the Seat of Their Pants

September 12, 2012 by SMB Matters Blog Leave a comment

Mohamed A. El-Erian

CEO and co-CIO, PIMCO

Central Banks’ “Responsible Irresponsibility”?

Many monetary policy purists will not recognize what central banks in Europe and the United States are up to these days. And those that do are likely to express outrage at how far these traditional guardians of monetary stability have ventured into unfamiliar territory — a situation they undoubtedly regard as inadvisable, if not dangerous.

Such reactions are understandable. Yet confusion and outrage are not the right responses for the rest of us. Whether you are a government, an investor or a concerned citizen — and whether you live in the west or in an emerging economy such as Brazil — it is important to understand why both the European Central Bank and the US Federal Reserve are so far adrift from conventional central banking; and what this means for the global economy as a whole, and for individual countries.

Like fiscal agencies, central bankers responded aggressively to the calamity of the 2008 global financial crisis. Eager to avoid an economic depression, they slashed interest rates, opened all sorts of emergency financing windows to keep banks alive, and also injected liquidity into the economy through whatever avenue they could think of.

From the very beginning, the intention was for this unusual policy activism to be both temporary and reversible. Indeed, much time and effort were devoted to designing “exit strategies” that allow central banks to return to “normalcy” in an orderly and timely fashion.

Yet there has been no exiting. Instead, central bankers have found themselves drawn deeper — much deeper — into experimental mode.

With ultra-low interest rates proving insufficient to deal with the economic malaise, the Federal Reserve has felt compelled to provide unprecedented “forward policy guidance.” It signaled its strong expectation that rates would remain floored at zero until at least the end of 2014. And by claiming that it could see that far into the future, it essentially challenged the time-tested view that monetary policy acts with “long and variable lags.”

This was not the only unthinkable. The Federal Reserve has aggressively bought US government and mortgage securities. On the other side of the Atlantic ocean, the ECB has acquired trillions of bonds issued by struggling members of the Eurozone; and it has even found a back door to get money to the Greek government in order for it to meet its debt obligations to the ECB.

The numbers are getting very large; especially as both central banks have signaled their intention to do more (including last Thursday’s ECB announcement). Already, the ECB has ballooned its balance sheet to over 30 percent of GDP and the Federal Reserve to 20 percent of GDP. (Note that the Bank of England and the bank of Japan are in the same ballpark).

Through their ever-larger presence in markets, central banks have inevitably influenced liquidity, price signals and information content. In some cases, even the provision of financial services to the public has been impacted (including money market saving instruments, pensions and life insurance).

Imagine if this were attempted by central banks elsewhere. It would be met in the west by cries of irresponsibility. Yet, ironically — and using a formulation adopted by economists such as Paul Krugman and Paul McCulley — central bankers in Europe and the U.S. have felt that it is in fact responsible for them to be irresponsible.

Central bankers will tell you that they have had no choice but to operate increasingly in unfamiliar and unconventional policy territory. After all, despite massive monetary (and fiscal) stimulus, the US economy has remained sluggish and unemployment is still way too high. Meanwhile, Europe continues to struggle with a debt crisis that started in Greece in 2009 and has spread wide and far. Even Germany, the continent’s powerhouse and the country that has undertaken the deepest structural reforms, is now slowing markedly.

Due to political paralysis and polarization, central bankers seem to be the only policymakers both willing and able to respond to these unusual challenges. Yes they are using imperfect tools. Yes the outcomes of their actions involve collateral damage and unintended consequences. But they see all this as preferable to the alternative of doing nothing.

I suspect that central bankers, whether in Europe or the U.S., realize that — acting by themselves — they cannot deliver the much-needed outcomes of growth, jobs and financial stability. Rather than guarantee the destination, they are helping to define the journey. They are building bridges, hoping to buy time for politicians and other policymaking entities to overcome their bickering and dithering.

Time will tell whether this strategy will work. In the meantime, the rest of the world has no choice but to adapt to this “responsible irresponsibility.”

The more western central banks inject liquidity into their economies, the greater the splash for other countries. The result is something that has been experienced by countries such as Brazil: significantly greater exchange rate volatility, disruptive flows of capital, and higher tensions between domestic and external realities.

Brazil and other responsive emerging countries have responded by re-caliberating their macroeconomic policy mix. They have aggressively cut interest rates while tightening fiscal policy; and they are looking to revamp structural reforms.

It is still early days though. Further policy adjustments will be required in the months and years ahead as western central banks implement additional unconventional policies, and as the longer-term effects become more visible. And it will not be easy. Policy responses will be analytically hard to calibrate precisely, especially as all this is happening with virtually no global policy coordination to speak of.

Have no doubt. While most countries would prefer to be just observers, they are in fact reluctant participants in one of the biggest monetary policy experiments of all time. The entire world shares an interest in the success of this unprecedented endeavor — after all Europe and the United States anchor today’s international monetary system and will do so for quite awhile. Yet in hoping for success, we are all well advised to also think of the range of contingency steps to deal with the collateral damage and the unintended consequences.

This article was originally published in Portuguese in Brazil’s Estado de Sao Paulo.

Filed under -Finance, Features, Lexecon Tagged with el erian, euro, european union, federal reserve, keynes, monetary controls, monetary policy, monetary union, pimco, stability, stimulus, western economies

Day of Reckoning? Influential Insider Now Supports Break Up of Big Banks

July 26, 2012 by SMB Matters Blog Leave a comment

In Defining Hypocrisy, Weill, Who Led Repeal Of Glass Steagall, Now Says Big Banks Should Be Broken Up

Courtesy of ZeroHedge. View original post here.

Submitted by Tyler Durden.

Who is Sandy Weill? He is none other than a retired Citigroup Chairman, a former NY Fed Director, and a “philanthropist.” He is also the man who lobbied for overturning of Glass Steagall in the last years of the 20th century, whose repeal permitted the merger of Travelers of Citibank, in the process creating Citigroup, the largest of the TBTF banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers. In his memoir Weill brags that he and Republican Senator Phil Gramm joked that it should have been called the Weill-Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Informally, some dubbed it “the Citigroup Authorization Act.” As The Nation explains, “Weill was instrumental in getting then-President BillClinton to sign off on the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible restraints on financecapital that had worked splendidly since the Great Depression.” Of course, by overturning Glass Steagall the last hindrance to ushering in the TBTF juggernaut and the Greenspan Put, followed by the global Bernanke put, was removed, in the process making the terminal collapse of the US financial system inevitable. Why is Weill relevant? Because in a statement that simply redefines hypocrisy, the same individual had the temerity to appear on selloutvision, and tell his fawning CNBC hosts that it is “time to break up the big banks.” That’s right:the person who benefited the most of all from the repeal of Glass Steagall is now calling for its return.

Hypocrisy defined 5:20 into the interview below:

I am suggesting that [big banks] be broken up so that the taxpayer will never be at risk, the depositors won’t be at risk, the leverage of the banks will be something reasonable… I want us to be a leader… I think the world changes and the world we live in now is different from the world we lived in ten years ago.

How ironic is it then that at the signing ceremony of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley, aka the Glass Steagall repeal act, Clinton presented Weill with one of the pens he used to “fine-tune” Glass-Steagall out of existence, proclaiming, “Today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.”

How ironic indeed. And how hypocritical for this person to have the temerity to show himself in public, let alone demand the law he ushered in, be undone.

Weill discussing all of the above and more with a straight face here:

For those curious to learn a bit more about Weill, here is some good reading:

Weill is the Wall Street hustler who led the successful lobbying to reverse the Glass-Steagall law, which long had been a barrier between investment and commercial banks. That 1999 reversal permitted the merger of Travelers and Citibank, thereby creating Citigroup as the largest of the “too big to fail” banks eventually bailed out by taxpayers. Weill was instrumental in getting then-President Bill Clinton to sign off on the Republican-sponsored legislation that upended the sensible restraints on finance capital that had worked splendidly since the Great Depression.

Those restrictions were initially flouted when Weill, then CEO of Travelers, which contained a major investment banking division, decided to merge the company with Citibank, a commercial bank headed by John S. Reed. The merger had actually been arranged before the enabling legislation became law, and it was granted a temporary waiver by Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve. The night before the announcement of the merger, as Wall Street Journal reporter Monica Langley writes in her book “Tearing Down the Walls: How Sandy Weill Fought His Way to the Top of the Financial World… and Then Nearly Lost It All,” a buoyant Weill suggested to Reed, “We should call Clinton.” On a Sunday night Weill had no trouble getting through to the president and informed him of the merger, which violated existing law. After hanging up, Weill boasted to Reed, “We just made the president of the United States an insider.”

The fix was in to repeal Glass-Steagall, as The New York Times celebrated in a 1998 article: “…the announcement on Monday of a giant merger of Citicorp and Travelers Group not only altered the financial landscape of banking, it also changed the political landscape in Washington…. Indeed, within 24 hours of the deal’s announcement, lobbyists for insurers, banks and Wall Street firms were huddling with Congressional banking committee staff members to fine-tune a measure that would update the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial banking from Wall Street and insurance, to make it more politically acceptable to more members of Congress.”

At the signing ceremony Clinton presented Weill with one of the pens he used to “fine-tune” Glass-Steagall out of existence, proclaiming, “Today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down those antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority.” What a jerk.

Although Weill has shown not the slightest remorse, Reed has had the honesty to acknowledge that the elimination of Glass-Steagall was a disaster: “I would compartmentalize the industry for the same reason you compartmentalize ships,” he told Bloomberg News. “If you have a leak, the leak doesn’t spread and sink the whole vessel. So generally speaking, you’d have consumer banking separate from trading bonds and equity.”

Instead, all such compartmentalization was ended when Clinton signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in late 1999. In his memoir Weill brags that he and Republican Senator Phil Gramm joked that it should have been called the Weill-Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Informally, some dubbed it “the Citigroup Authorization Act.”

Gramm left the Senate to become a top executive at the Swiss-based UBS bank, which like Citigroup ran into deep trouble. Leach—former Republican Representative James Leach—was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009 to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, where his banking skills could serve the needs of intellectuals. Robert Rubin, the Clinton administration treasury secretary who helped push through the Citigroup Authorization Act, was the most blatant double dealer of all: He accepted a $15-million-a-year offer from Weill to join Citigroup, where he eventually helped run the corporation into the ground.

Citigroup went on to be a major purveyor of toxic mortgage–based securities that required $45 billion in direct government investment and a $300 billion guarantee of its bad assets in order to avoid bankruptcy.

Weill himself bailed out shortly before the crash. His retirement from what was then the world’s largest financial conglomerate was chronicled in the New York Times under the headline “Laughing All the Way From the Bank.” The article told of “an enormous wooden plaque” in the bank’s headquarters that featured a likeness of Weill with the inscription “The Man Who Shattered Glass-Steagall.”