With No Power, Comes No Responsibility: Efficient Market’s Role in Regulation (part 1)

“With no power, comes no responsibility”. The catchphrase from the movie "Kick-Ass" seems to describe the current state of financial regulation rather well. Unfortunately, the larger Conversation on financial reform has been anything but kick ass. We have a tragedy of the commons scenario where every regulator, policy maker, academic and practitioner has joined the blame game.

No. It is not their fault. After all, people merely followed what the intellectual luminaries preached, which made the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) one of the “best selling” ideas of all time. By assuming that prices reflect all known information, the EMH is convenient, user-friendly, and rationalizes laziness as an appropriate policy. It is a hypothesis that can never be wrong (cannot be disproved). The Efficient Market Hypothesis had us at hello.

The EMH truly liberated the people. It guided policy makers to pursue deregulation, freed regulators from their jobs, and saved practitioners from performing in-depth analysis. With free time on everyone’s hands, creativity reigned. Complex derivatives such as CDOⁿ proliferated and the EMH encouraged the industry to adopt a “sell first, ask later” motto. Let the market figure out how to price them, says the EMH. Financial innovation quickly transcended the industry. If the EMH were a person, the Nobel Peace prize would be its to lose.

We find ourselves in a very different world today. The EMH is now being crucified as the elegant theory that caused the financial crisis. As Krugman suggests, people mistook beauty for truth and economists everywhere climbed aboard the EMH-Titanic that was destined to hit the iceberg.

However, the fault was never with the theory per se. The EMH is silent on its ability to explain bubbles and crashes, and offers no real use to policy making. No power. No responsibility.

What we need today is a more powerful theory to guide policy and put responsibility back in the hands of the regulators. We do not need more debates on the financial reform, which have done nothing but amplify confusion. Without coherence, there is no reform. And we are running out of time.

In part two of this series, I propose a Cyclical Efficient Market Hypothesis (C-EMH) that integrates viewpoints from psychology and quantitative finance to complete the EMH. The result is a model that is useful to guide policy making and regulation.

Auditing the Federal Reserve is Economic Suicide

Given the potentially fatal repercussions, auditing the Federal Reserve is one of the most underreported stories by the media today. Investors today should be fearful of this development. It is shocking to see three out of four Americans supporting a bill that could lead to economic catastrophe. The passing of Ron Paul’s H.R. 1207 bill may bring serious and unintended inflationary consequences that can destroy investors’ wealth.

While it may not be the intent of the lawmakers, Ron Paul’s bill, a.k.a. Federal Reserve Transparency Act, will enable the congress to influence the outcomes of monetary policy through an audit of the Federal Reserve’s day-to-day operations, thus severely compromising the independence of the U.S. central bank from political influences.

The free market understands that auditing the fed is a very dangerous line to cross. If crossed, U.S. inflation will likely skyrocket over the next decade to unseen levels. The U.S. economy will tank under a hyperinflationary environment. Bond investors lose money as interest rates rise. Stock investors earn negative real return as equity risk premium rises and aggregate PE ratio nose dives. The US Dollar erodes due to higher domestic inflation relative to foreign inflation. Gold and commodity prices rise.

How Does Auditing the Fed Cause Inflation?

Inflation is caused by a central bank that loses control of its money supply. There are two ways that a politically compromised central bank can lose control of its money supply.

Road to Inflation #1: Repeating the Political Cycle

When the central bank is not independent, politicians have historically pumped up the money supply (for temporary economic boost) shortly before an election to buy votes with lower unemployment rate. After the election, the effects wear off, returning the economy to its natural rate of unemployment but at a higher inflation rate than before. Because it is hard to fight off inflation quickly, by the time the next election rolls around the economy has not been squeezed back to its original inflation rate. Politicians pump up the money supply again, this time from a higher base inflation. As this cycle repeats itself, the central bank loses control of the money supply.

Road to Inflation #2: Financing Government Spending

A central bank that lacks independence from politicians makes it tempting for the government to finance an inappropriately large portion of its spending through printing money. A central bank that promises to finance too much government spending also loses control of the money supply.

Will the Bill Pass?

Although Obama and his economic team oppose this bill, it may not matter much. The risk of the bill passing is increasing every day. Ron Paul is using the recent economic recession as an opportunity to sway angry politicians to advance his personal agenda of ending the fed. The table below shows that government officials are embracing the Federal Reserve audit. In fact, support is so overwhelming that we are dangerously close to reaching the veto-proof status. Once reached, the President will have little say in the outcome. Deadline for voting of this bill has been set to December 2010.

In sum, auditing the Fed’s daily operations will cause it to succumb to political pressure, lose control of the money supply, and create sticky inflation that could be much worse than the 1970’s. America is an angry nation right now. When it comes time to vote on the bill, it remains to be seen if cooler heads will prevail or if America will swallow the economic suicide pill.

*Related links: Reactions from 6 economists, Bernanke, Bernanke (2), Geithner, Washington Post, and general public.

Stimulating the Economy: The Great Debate

The debate on the fiscal stimulus plan is all the rage these days. Prominent economists are killing each other over this topic. The arguments from the pro-stimulus camp can be found from Krugman (1), Krugman (2), Stiglitz, Mankiw, Summers, Feldstein. The anti-stimulus camp include the usual Chicago-school suspects such as Fama (1), Fama (2), Barro, Cochrane, Murphy, and Chinn (Chinn is not Chicago). You can click on the names to view their arguments.

Where do the disagreements come from? The whole thing centers around three key issues:

Is government intervention worth the costs?

Keynesians believe that an economy can become stuck in a recession when its natural recovery forces operate far too slowly, creating prolonged periods of high unemployment. They further believe that the government is able to move the economy out of a recession through fiscal policy and it should.

Chicago-school economists believe that the government has no business interfering in the economy, and that government intervention, however well-intentioned, too often makes things worse, not better.

What extent of the role should government play?

People on the left of the political spectrum – liberals, socialists, and Democrats – believe that more control by the government over resource allocation in the economy is a good thing. Those on the right – conservatives and Republicans – believe the government is an inefficient allocator of resources, and that individuals, through spending financed by tax cuts, can cause the market to produce and distribute more desirable outputs in a more efficient fashion.

How should the government finance an increase in spending?

An increase in government spending can be financed in three ways:

1. Raising taxes
2. Selling bonds to the public
3. Printing money (selling bonds to the central bank)

Chicago-school economists, such as Fama, essentially ignore printing money as a method of financing. As a result, stimulus plans can never work because raising taxes or selling bonds to the public lead to a phenomenon called “crowding out”, that is, financing offset the impact a stimulus plan is supposed to have on aggregate demand.

In contrast, financing by selling bonds to the central bank increases the money supply. When buying a government bond, the central bank writes a check against itself and thereby creates money out of thin air (printing money). In this case, there are no crowding-out effects. This is where Krugman thinks Fama made his mistake.

Recently, China proposed to increase government spending by a massive 4 trillion Yuan, or about 16% of GDP. This dwarfs the proposed stimulus package in the United States, a mere 5% of GDP. However, the U.S. has expanded its monetary base by 100% from last year. Clearly China favours the use of fiscal policy while the U.S. favours monetary policy. Why is it so? I will blog about this interesting phenomenon in the near future.

The above materials are based on Peter Kennedy’s Macroeconomic Essentials, a wonderful book written by my favourite university professor.

When Did The Recession Start?

Hugh Cleland made an interesting observation about recession and the stock market. He noted that the NBER start date of the recession in 1990 coincided with the top in the S&P 500. Using this relationship, he conjectured that the market top in October 2007 may be the start date of the recession.

However, data from the past 7 US recessions reveal that this relationship was not repeated in any of the other 6 recessions and therefore, is a mere coincidence. So when did the recession actually start?

Below are ECRI’s official recession calls in the past:
Feb. 6, 1990 by Geoffrey Moore. Lead time = 6 months.
Mar. 26, 2001 by Anirvan Banerji. Lead time = 0 months.
Mar. 21, 2008 by Lakshman Achuthan. Lead time = ?

My own speculation is that ECRI’s recession call is late this time around. There was solid evidence for a recession call in January 2008. Unfortunately, ECRI was hoping that rapid rate cuts by the Fed could help avert a recession. They did not realize that this particular recession, driven by a deflating credit bubble, would increase the time needed for monetary stimulus to work itself into the economy.

Hence, until NBER announces the official recession dates for this cycle, I will assume that it began in January 2008.
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Edit: NBER's Business Cycle Dating Committee announced on December 11, 2008 that the recession officially began in December 2007. My speculations have been proven correct and ECRI was late by 3 months in calling the recession.