Last week, the Levy Economics Institute hosted the 20th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference, a wonkish discussion on all things Hyman Minsky. This year’s focus was on Financial Reform and the Real Economy.
For those of you who are not academic economists, Professor Hyman Minsky argued that stability eventually leads to instability. The stable economic backdrop causes people to become complacent and take on more risks than they might during riskier times.
For some background, see this discussion on Minsky by Prof. Steve Mihm. You can see our earlier guest posts on the Minsky Conference here and here.
The purpose of the Minsky Conference was to “address the ongoing effects of the global financial crisis on the real economy, and examine proposed and recently enacted policy responses. Should ending too-big-to-fail be the cornerstone of reform? Do the markets’ pursuit of self-interest generate real societal benefits? Is financial sector growth actually good for the real economy? Will the recently passed US financial reform bill make the entire financial system, not only the banks, safer?”
I was unable to attend, but several colleagues not only went, but reported back what they saw. The following discussion was art of a longer email thread on some of the emails; it is reproduced here with the permission of the authors.
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Steve Waldman (Interfluidity) writes about the original updates:
I find little to disagree with in your note, except that I find little resemblance between what you say and what I heard in Gorton’s speech.
You write “His key observation is that what is gained by having the Fed and other policymakers guarantee bank liabilities –- namely, financial stability –- is lost through the ensuing complacency which tends to spawn longer, more damaging crises.”
That’s just not what I took from the speech. What I heard was quite the opposite, that the crisis was basically a result of the financial system having evolved means of duration-mismatched finance that were NOT guaranteed, and that therefore the liquidity crises endemic to the system pre-Fed/FDIC had returned.
Gorton carefully avoided making specific policy recommendations, preferring instead to shelter in his self-aggrandizing evidence fetish and putting all hope in Dodd Frank’s Office of Financial Research.
But it seems to me that the clear implication of Gorton’s story — which described the crisis as an old-fashioned, individually rational but collectively destructive bank run — is to guarantee the shadow banking system. I heard nothing of a critique of, say, FDIC in his speech. (Gorton did point out that FDIC was something of a policy accident. Neither FDR nor the banks initially supported deposit guarantees but popular support forced Congress to act. But my sense was that he took this to be a happy accident, that despite an odd process we had stumbled into good policy.)
If you think the crisis was a run on the shadow banking system, AND you think that the sponsors and guarantors of the shadow banking system actually did an okay job in underwriting, AND you think that the right way to prevent “sunspot” bank runs is with deposit guarantees, then the logical policy response is to guarantee the shadow banking system, and not to worry so much about regulating or holding to account sponsors and guarantors, since market forces have in fact proven sufficient to enforce good-enough behavior.
This is almost a syllogism. Gorton set up all three assumptions quite explicitly. That he didn’t state the conclusion was rhetorically savvy, but doesn’t alter the implicit recommendation.
And yet what you heard was almost precisely opposite to what I heard. You see Gorton’s speech as a criticism of complacency due to guarantees, as a warning about moral hazard. I heard Gorton explicitly mock people for “jumping” to moral hazard as an explanation without “evidence”.
Maybe I misheard, and your description is a better characterization of Gorton’s view than my own. If I’m going to write so much about it, maybe I should give the speech another listen. Perhaps others can weigh on with their recollections.
I like your suggestion that lender of last resort activity should be provided, but carefully rationed to parties relatively distant from poor decisionmaking like money market funds, and that more comprehensive guarantees as were provided to several of the larger banks should be explicit and accountable rather than implicit and deniable, as they were via the “no more Lehmans / SCAP” approach.
I wish I had heard Gary Gorton use his considerable intellect and rhetorical skill to make that case. But that is not at all what I heard.
-SW
The hand-wringing about the US dollar is rather late to the party.
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