S. HRG.

111110

RESTORING THE ECONOMY: STRATEGIES FOR

SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM CHANGE

HEARING
BEFORE THE

JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE

CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION

FEBRUARY 26, 2009

Printed for the use of the Joint Economic Committee

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WASHINGTON

50107

2009

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office

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JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE

[Created pursuant to Sec. 5(a) of Public Law 304, 79th Congress]
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York, Chair
MAURICE D. HINCHEY, New York
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
VIC SNYDER Arkansas
KEVIN BRADY, Texas
RON PAUL, Texas
MICHAEL C. BURGESS, M.D. Texas
JOHN CAMPBELL, California

SENATE
CHARLES E. SCHUMER, New York, Vice
Chairman
EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts
JEFF BINGAMAN, New Mexico
AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota
ROBERT P. CASEY, JR., Pennsylvania
JIM WEBB, Virginia
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas, Ranking Minority
JIM DEMINT, South Carolina
JAMES E. RISCH Idaho
ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah

NAN GIBSON, Executive Director

JEFF SCHLAGENHAUF, Minority Staff Director
CHRISTOPHER FRENZE, House Republican Staff Director

(II)

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CONTENTS
MEMBERS
Hon.
Hon.
Hon.
Hon.
Hon.
Hon.
Hon.

Carolyn B. Maloney, Chair, a U.S. Representative from New York ..........

Sam Brownback, Ranking Minority, a U.S. Senator from Kansas .............
Amy Klobuchar, a U.S. Senator from Minnesota .........................................
Kevin Brady, a U.S. Representative from Texas .........................................
Michael Burgess, a U.S. Representative from Texas ...................................
Elijah Cummings, a U.S. Representative from Maryland ..........................
Ron Paul, a U.S. Representative from Texas ...............................................

1
2
4
4
5
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6

WITNESSES
Hon. Paul A. Volcker, Chairman, Presidents Economic Advisory Board and
Former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Board of Governors, New York,
New York ..............................................................................................................
Hon. Roger C. Altman, Chairman and CEO, Evercore Partners, Inc., New
York, New York ....................................................................................................
Dr. Adam S. Posen, Deputy Director, Peterson Institute for International
Economics, Washington, DC ................................................................................
Dr. Joseph Mason, Louisiana Bankers Association Endowed Professor of Finance, Louisiana State University and Senior Fellow, The Wharton School,
Berwyn, PA ...........................................................................................................
SUBMISSIONS
Prepared
Prepared
Prepared
Prepared
Prepared
Prepared
Prepared

statement
statement
statement
statement
statement
statement
statement

of
of
of
of
of
of
of

FOR THE

7
35
38
40

RECORD

Representative Carolyn B. Maloney ................................

Senator Sam Brownback ..................................................
Representative Kevin Brady ............................................
Paul A. Volcker .................................................................
Roger C. Altman ................................................................
Adam S. Posen ..................................................................
Joseph Mason ....................................................................

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54
56
57
59
62
71

(III)

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RESTORING THE ECONOMY: STRATEGIES FOR

SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM CHANGE
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 2009

CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES,

JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE,
Washington, DC.
The committee met at 10:00 a.m. in Room 106 of the Dirksen
Senate Office Building, The Honorable Carolyn B. Maloney (Chair)
presiding.
Representatives present: Hinchey, Cummings, Snyder, Brady,
Paul, and Burgess.
Senators present: Schumer, Klobuchar, Webb, Brownback,
Risch, and Bennett.
Staff present: Nan Gibson, Gail Cohen, Marc Jarsulic, Colleen
Healy, Justin Ungson, Andrew Wilson, Jeff Schlagenhauf, Jeff
Wrase, Rachel Greszler, Chris Frenze, Bob Keleher, and Robert
OQuinn.
OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE CAROLYN B.
MALONEY, CHAIR, A REPRESENTATIVE FROM NEW YORK

Chair Maloney. The Committee will come to order. I want to

welcome my colleagues, and I particularly want to welcome former
Chairman Volcker and all of our other outstanding witnesses, and
thank you all for your testimony today.
Chairman Volcker, when it comes to understanding the economy
and financial markets, you are in a league with only one player.
We are tremendously honored that you are the first to testify before the Joint Economic Committee this Session.
Over the past two days, we have heard rather sobering testimony
from Fed Chairman Bernanke, that even under the best of circumstances, our economy remains perhaps a year away from making a full recovery.
The problems plaguing the real economy and the financial system, are intertwined, so it is critical that we act as swiftly as possible. At the core of the ongoing liquidity crisis, is the decline in
home prices. Home prices continued their free-fall at the fastest
pace on record, in December.
Since the beginning of this crisis, Congress has been working on
keeping families in their homes. Today, the House will consider
and pass the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, which will
help families stay in their homes, and will help stabilize communities by spurring loan modifications and avoiding bankruptcy.
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2
Strong indications are that this downturn could be the worst in
the postWorld War II period, and, Mr. Chairman, you have indicated such yourself.
The current recession, which began in December of 2007, has
caused massive job loss and decline in economic growth. Congress
recently passed the nearly $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which provides fiscal stimulus in the form of aid
to state governments, infrastructure spending, increased breaks to
middle-class workers and families.
This package is designed to stem the real human costs and our
economic losses, by creating millions of jobs, helping families in
need, and investing in the future.
The concern, though, is that the effects of our recovery package
may be blunted, if the financial crisis lasts too long. The Federal
Reserve has taken extraordinary steps to maintain the operation of
our financial and credit markets, but, clearly, we need a comprehensive plan to return to well-functioning markets.
In his address to Congress on Tuesday night, the President
pledged to work with Congress to adopt new rules of the road, a
reformed financial regulatory structure to prevent future crises and
hold financial executives accountable.
Our entire regulatory system is in serious need of renovation. It
failed to properly identify the risks in the mortgage-related assets;
it did not recognize that these risks were being concentrated in
highly-leveraged and important financial institutions; and it failed
to anticipate the dangers posed to the financial system as a whole.
It also failed to provide mechanisms for dealing with the failure
of important, non-depository financial firms. These shortcomings
must be addressed, regulators must obtain better information, better measurement of system vulnerabilities, and the authority necessary to head off threats to financial stability.
It is obviously too costly to leave the regulatory system as it is.
As the winter turns to spring, my hope is that these efforts will
break the downward spiral of our economy and bring about a thaw
in credit markets, but, even more may be needed to be done, and
thats what we will be finding out about today.
I look forward to our witnesses views on reviving our economy
and restoring our financial markets. Again, thank you very much,
Chairman Volcker, for coming, and the Chair recognizes Ranking
Member Brownback for five minutes.
[The prepared statement of Representative Maloney appears in
the Submissions for the Record on page 54.]
OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE SAM BROWNBACK, RANKING MINORITY, A U.S. SENATOR FROM KANSAS

Senator Brownback. Thank you very much, Chairwoman

Maloney. I appreciate that. Chairman Volcker, its good to have you
here. I look forward to your comments and your thoughts.
I picked up the Wall Street Journal this morning, and, boy, I
dont like what I see headlining things: $318 Billion Tax Hit Proposed, and an article right underneath it, Pair Live Large on
Fraud, saying they misappropriated $553 million; lavish homes,
horses, and even an $80,000 collectible teddy bear.

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3
I dont know where you find a teddy bear of who pays something
like that, but my point in raising that, is that while were trying
to put gas into the tank of the economy, to put a $318 billion tax
hit, doesnt seem to be the mixture of medicines were talking
about.
That seems to be hitting both the accelerator and the brake at
the same time. And then the fraud thats in the system, really
drives people nuts, crazy.
I want to read to you, a letter that a medical doctor at the University of Kansas facility just had published in the Economist Magazine. I think he summarizes what most folks calling into my office
say. This is Dr. Frederick Holmes, Kansas City, Kansas, who said
this, quote:
Responsible people and responsible institutions have not hurled
themselves lemming-like, into the abyss of ruin. Despite the death
knell sounded throughout the media, most people and most banks
did not encumber themselves with mountains of unsecured debt.
In the conservative heartland of America, weve avoided the razzle-dazzle of sophistication and computerized modeling when managing our finances. I have entrusted a locally-owned bank in Kansas City with my money for more than 40 years, and it has been
a good steward of my modest wealth.
Last year, the Chief Executive posted a brief notice on the banks
website, to reassure depositors. It read, When the siren song of the
subprime mortgage market came along, we took the long view and
turned a deaf ear.
Im going to leave my money with the folks at this bank for the
next 40 years, for they seem to have the intelligence and common
sense largely absent in the leadership of large banks.
Now, that summarizes a lot of what I get, calls in my office, and
then they see articles like this in the Wall Street Journal and other
newspapers, and they think that this has not been handled right,
its big money center banks that are doing this to us; it hasnt been
appropriately reviewed, regulatory-wise, and now theyre going to
take more money out in taxes.
This doesnt seem to be the prescription for us to come out of a
deep recession. Its been and is a very difficult recession, theres
just no question about it. People are hurting. Were getting people
laid off in a number of industries and places across my state. It has
not been good.
But it doesnt seem like the idea of raising taxes, is a good idea
at this point in time. It doesnt seem like that this has been properly regulated in the big money center banks, in particular, and it
seems like Wall Street has driven this onto Main Street, more than
anything else thats been seen.
What I hope to hear from you, is, are these accurate, and how
is it that we get at the big center bank issues that dont make people across the country pay for it, that didnt do some of these sophisticated investment techniques that have driven us down so
hard and far, and dont require them to pay the bill, the people
that are on Main Street paying the taxes.
Now, I appreciated, over the years, your thoughts and your
writings and your comments, and I hope they are full of wisdom,

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4
as well, today, as they have been in the past. Thank you, Chairwoman.
[The prepared statement of Senator Sam Brownback appears in
the Submissions for the Record on page 54.]
Chair Maloney. Senator Klobuchar, for one minute.
OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE AMY KLOBUCHAR,
A U.S. SENATOR FROM MINNESOTA

Senator Klobuchar. Thank you very much, Madam Chairwoman. Thank you, Chairman Volcker, for being here.
I just want to follow up on something that the Senator said,
which is that there are banks that are solid, including some large
banks, including many of the banks in Minnesota. I wrote the other
day that some of these credit unions and the smaller banks in my
state, are sort of clutching their sensible briefcases, trying to keep
their feet planted in the heartland, with all the debris swirling
around them, saying, Toto, were not in Kansas anymore. I thought
youd appreciate that, Senator Brownback. [Laughter.]
Senator Klobuchar. But the truth is, how do we restore the
confidence in the market, when we know that some of these major
banks, many out of Wall Street, are in such trouble, when others
arent? So much of this, to me, seems that we need to restore the
trust in the market, the confidence in the market, because we know
that the current situation doesnt just hurt banks; it hurts people
who cant get a mortgage or people who cant get an auto loan or
kids that cant get a student loan.
So, thats what Im looking forward to hearing about today, as
well as the changes to the financial regulation of the market that
we need to make.
Thank you very much.
Chair Maloney. Thank you. I recognize Congressman Brady
from the House, for five minutes.
OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE KEVIN BRADY, A
U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM TEXAS

Representative Brady. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Id like

to welcome Chairman Volcker, as well. I think its widely agreed
that nothing else we do will matter much, until the issue of how
to dispose of toxic bank assets is resolved.
Neither the Bush nor the Obama Administrations has devised a
solution to this admittedly difficult problem. The recent Treasury
proposal has not been well received, because it did not clearly address this issue.
The Economist Magazine, for example, said it looked depressingly like TARP Itimid, incomplete, and short on detail. The
lack of specifics has undermined confidence and contributed to financial market instability. A better approach is needed to help foster recovery.
Madam Chairman, in the interest of time, Id like to insert my
complete statement. I do believe, as Senator Brownback does, that
the dramatic increase in the deficit, our record-setting and dangerous debt, along with the inability to really address the core of
this crisis, is really moving us into terribly risky areas, and Im

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eager to hear Chairman Volckers guidance on how we move forward.
[The prepared statement of Representative Kevin Brady appears
in the Submissions for the Record on page 56.]
Chair Maloney. Thank you very much. Congressman Snyder for
one minute, and welcome to the Committee.
Mr. Snyder. Thank you, Madam Chair. I hear myself talk all
the time, I look forward to hearing Chairman Volcker.
Chair Maloney. Congressman Burgess, for one minute.
OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE MICHAEL
BURGESS, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM TEXAS

Representative Burgess. Thank you, Madam Chairwoman. I

hear myself talk all the time, too, and I cant get enough of it.
[Laughter.]
Representative Burgess. Chairman Volcker, I appreciate you
being here with us this morning. I appreciate you sharing your testimony with us beforehand.
I was struck by the paragraph toward the end of the second
page, where you talked about repeating the story of how we got to
where we are today. I need to say that the fundamental lesson of
the crisis is that future policies should be alert to and take appropriate measures to deal with persistent economic imbalances.
Mr. Chairman, I just hope youll address, when you give us your
testimony, does theand I wont go through the entire litany, because Chairman Brady just did,but the $700 billion on TARP, the
$787 billion of the stimulus, the $650 billion healthcare down payment were going to be required to approve, the $75 billion you paid
for housing, the $75 billion thats coming for Iraq, does this represent, in and of itself, a persistent destabilizing effect on the economy?
Is this, in fact, a deficit bubble that were going to have to witness the carnage that occurs when that, in fact, bursts? The most
fundamental thing that people back in my District want to know,
is, you can have so much regulation, but if nobody enforces the regulation, what good is it?
Theres malfeasance out there. How are we going to demonstrate
to the American people, that once and for all, someone is going to
be held accountable for what has been the greatest train robbery
in American history? I yield back.
Chair Maloney. Mr. Cummings, for one minute.
OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE ELIJAH
CUMMINGS, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM MARYLAND

Representative Cummings. Thank you very much, Madam

Chairlady, and, welcome, Chairman Volcker. Im anxiously looking
forward to hearing your testimony.
I represent a District like my colleagues, where so many people
are losing their homes, theyve lost their savings, theyre losing
their houses, cant get loans, businesses going out of business, and
I know thatIm sure that you wont say that you know all the answers, but your opinion is well respected.
We need to try to figure out a way to use the money that we are
spending, effectively and efficiently. I think the American people

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6
will be patient, but they will be patient, only if they know that we
are good stewards of their money.
I hope that you will shed some light on what you think will help
us, the kind of policies that will help us become or be efficient and
effective with their funds. With that, I yield back.
Chair Maloney. Thank you. Mr. Paul, for one minute.
OPENING STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE RON PAUL, A U.S.
REPRESENTATIVE FROM TEXAS

Representative Paul. Thank you, Madam Chairman. I, too,

hear my voice all the time, and Im sure the rest of you are tired
of hearing it.
But, nevertheless, I will take a moment. In California, they
worry about the big one, the big earthquake, and I think, financially, the big one is herethe very big one.
And nobody seems to know what to do about it, and I think its
because they dont quite understand how it came about. Its been
building, the bubble has been building since 1971, but it has exploded.
I visualize it as we in the Congress and the Federal Reserve are
there with a tiny little pump, pumping into a bubble that has a
huge hole, and the longer you pump, the poorer this country is
going to get, and there will be no solution. Even a bigger pump is
not going to solve the problem.
In the past year, we have run up a debt of an additional $1.5 trillion. Weve created about $9 trillion worth of credit in the financial
system, and it hasnt done any good.
We have to reassess what were doing, because I think were on
the wrong track.
Chair Maloney. Thank you very much. Senator Bennett, for one
minute.
Senator Bennett. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Volcker, you were one of the architects of our recovery
from the Great Inflation, you are a student of the Great Depression, and I look forward to hearing what you have to say now, with
the great whatever it is we ultimately decide to call this mess.
Thank you.
Chair Maloney. Thank you. I would like to welcome Chairman
Volcker. Paul Volcker is a man who needs no introduction.
He has an impressive record of achievement and service. Its very
long, but let me just say he is very important. He is currently the
Chairman of the Presidents Economic Advisory Board, and the
former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
In the course of his career, Mr. Volcker worked in the Federal
Government for almost 30 years, culminating in two terms as
Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, from 1979 to 1987.
He divided the earlier stages of his career between the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York, the Treasury Department, and the
Chase Manhattan Bank.
Educated at Princeton, Harvard, and the London School of Economics, Mr. Volcker is a Professor of International Economic Policy
at Princeton University, and was the first Henry Kaufman Visiting
Professor at the Stearn School of Business at New York University.

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Thank you very, very much for coming, and please proceed with
your testimony.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE PAUL VOLCKER, CHAIRMAN, PRESIDENTS ECONOMIC ADVISORY BOARD, AND
FORMER CHAIRMAN, FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD OF GOVERNORS, WASHINGTON, DC

Chairman Volcker. Thank you very much, Madam Chairwoman, Members of the Committee. Its aI hesitate to say a
pleasure to be here, given the circumstances, but I welcome the
chance to testify before you.
Theres no secret that we live in a difficult time of enormous
complexities, complications and risks, and a depressed economy.
Youve set out a very ambitious title for these hearings, Strategies
for Both ShortTerm and LongTerm Change, and I will try to address that a bit, and then look forward to the conversation.
But Im sure we all agree that the purpose of all this, is to develop approaches that will not again leave markets so vulnerable
that a breakdown can again threaten the national and world economies. That is what has happened now and its what we dont want
to happen in the future.
But in approaching this, I want to step back from the immediate
financial crisis, to emphasize that this is not just a financial crisis;
it is an economic crisis, in the sense that this country was proceeding for some yearsI dont know as I want to go back to 1971,
Mr. Paul, but we can go back a decade or so, when we began
spending, as a nation, much more than we were producing and
much more than we were able to produce.
The inevitable result of that, was heavy reliance on borrowing
from abroad. It took place in an atmosphere where personal savings in the country disappeared, and that process, which was supported by a lot of cheap imports from China and elsewhere in Asia,
also supported by the willingness of those countries to buy U.S. securities, so interest rates were low, we didnt have any inflation, we
were spending like crazy, whats so bad about that?
You know, everybody likes to consume, and there wasnt any
strong urge to do something about it. But graduallyor not so
gradually, it built up more and more debt, inevitably, and that debt
eventually had weaker and weaker foundations, partly because of
the great art of financial engineering, and, in particular, in the
housing market, the debt was built up on weaker and weaker mortgages.
That all came back to haunt us, in effect, when the economy
turned, house prices were no longer going up; they leveled off and
came down, and the mess that were in, was triggered.
So I just want to emphasize that this is not just ait is, indeed,
a crisis of Wall Street; its a crisis of financial markets, but it reflects the fact that we had a tremendous buildup of debt, a lack of
savings in the country, and too much reliance on fragile debt.
Now, I noted that this buildup in debt was facilitated and extended by the modern alchemy of financial engineering. People
went into financial markets and made a lot of money. They developed mathematical techniques that were supposed to diffuse and
limit risk. It turned out, in practice, in the end, in many cases, to

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magnify and ensure risks, and that was certainly true in the
subprime mortgage market.
We lost transparency, risk management failed, and at the same
time, I think, highly aggressive compensation practices encouraged
risk-taking, right in the face of misunderstood and almost incomprehensible debt instruments.
That was the dynamic of this processa combination of tremendous incentive to take risk, and complexities and obscurities as to
what those risks were.
So, obviously, as we look ahead, we need more discipline, financial management, better risk management, and reform of compensation practices.
Now, let me say that as this crisis has evolved, its exposed all
sorts of other weaknesses, weaknesses in accounting, weaknesses
in credit-rating agencies, weaknesses in other market practices.
I wont go into detail, but I think its fair to say that fair-value
accounting rules were inconsistently applied. They have contributed to a downward spiraling of valuations in our liquid markets.
Credit-rating agencies clearly failed in analyzing some of these
complex new instruments.
We have weaknesses in clearance, settlements, and collateral arrangements for obscure derivative contracts that grew up very rapidly in recent years.
These are technical issues that are very difficult to deal with
through legislation, but we have to pay attention to them and they
do need to be resolved.
Youve already pointed out the concern, the legitimate concern
about lapses in financial regulation and supervision. They certainly
permitted institutional weaknesses to fester, the regulators failed
to identify exceptional risks, they failed to deal adequately with
conflicts of interest, and as was pointed out in the press again this
morning, they did not expose largehuge, personal scandals, even
after warnings.
So thats going to require close attention by the Administration
and the Congress, and I will be surprised if you do not conclude
that very substantial changes have to be made.
Taken together, the need for change is both obvious and wideranging. In approaching the challenge, I do urge that all these matters be considered in the context of a considered judgment about
the appropriate role and functioning of the financial system as a
whole, in the years ahead.
At the most general level, Im certain we would all like to see a
diverse, competitive, predominantly privately-owned and managed
institutions and markets able to efficiently and flexibly meet the
needs of global, national, local businesses, governments, and individuals.
That sentence is a mouthful, but I took it directly from the recent
report of the Group of 30, setting out a framework for financial stability, which you and your staff may have seen. We issued it recently. It does point out the extent of the challenges ahead, if were
going to end up with a reformed financial system, and I recommend
it to you.
It makes a lot of recommendations18 general recommendations, some of them with a corollary. It does not cover all the spe-

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9
cific things we could talk about. It doesnt make recommendations
at this stage, about how the administrative structure should be reformed, what the Federal Reserve should do, what the Comptroller
of the Currency should do, the SEC, and so forth.
Thats important, but I think the most important thing is that
we have some judgment about what the system should look like,
so we know what were aiming for and what should be regulated.
I do think the report makes some points that are common ground
among almost all people that have looked at this. There is agreement that all banking organizations have to come within the
framework of an official safety net.
The natural corollary is regulation and supervision, and, beyond
that, its also recognized that a few of the banks, and possibly some
other financial organizations, are so large and their operations so
intertwined in complex relationships with other institutions, as to
entail systemic risk.
In other words, the functioning of the financial system, as a
whole, could be jeopardized in the event of a sudden and disorderly
failure. Consequently, those institutions should be subject to particularly high international standards, directed towards maintaining their safety and soundness.
Now, as I see it, and as the philosophy of the report represents,
these banking organizations should be predominantly relationshiporiented. Their function is to provide essential financial services to
individuals, businesses of all sizes, and government.
To help assure their stability and continuity, and to limit potential conflicts of interest, strong restrictions in risk-prone capital
market activities, hedge funds, equity funds, proprietary trading,
and the like, would be enforcedstrong restrictions.
At the same time, trading- and transaction-oriented financial institutions that operate primarily in the capital markets, could be
less intensively regulated, although I think there is a need for
stronger registration and reporting requirements.
In instances where the institutions are so large or otherwise so
complex as to be systemically relevant, capital leveraging and liquidity requirements would be imposed.
Now, implicit in this approach, is the need for strong cooperation
and coordination among national authorities and regulators. Some
approachesaccounting standards, capital liquidity requirements,
registration and reporting proceduresshould be internationally
agreed and consistent in application. Thats necessary to minimize
regulatory arbitrage and any tendency by particular countries or financial centers, to seek competitive advantage by tolerating laxity
in oversight.
Now, all of this will take time, if the necessary consensus is to
be achieved and a comprehensive, rather than piecemeal approach
is taken. I also recognize that a coherent vision of the future should
help guide the emergency responses to the present crisis, and, even
more important, the steps, difficult steps that will be taken as the
truly extraordinary measures now in place, are relaxed and ended.
So I hope that will proceed, and I welcome the opportunity to
participate in your deliberations.
[The prepared statement of Paul Volcker appears in the Submissions for the Record on page 57.]

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Chair Maloney. Thank you so much, Chairman Volcker, for
your testimony. Chairman Volcker, before we get to our questions,
could you just comment on any positive aspects that you see in our
economy? Do you have any good news for us in economic recovery?
Governments been working very hard.
Chairman Volcker. Some silver lining is behind all those dark
clouds, and, in fact, there are a few. In recent weeks, we have seen
some relaxation of the tensions in the securities markets, broadly
defined.
Interest rates have come down in those areas, a number of corporations have successfully been able to finance in the long-term
markets. The short-term market, where the authorities have been
very active, have been showing some signs of life, resuscitation in
the commercial paper markets, so, in those areas, a certain amount
of confidence seems to be returning.
In the banking area, obviously, you still have a lot of tension,
concern, declining stock prices, and so forth, so Im not beginning
to say that the crisis is over, but in some areas of the market, you
can see a relaxation of the tension, which is very helpful.
Now, you do, as I read in the papersChairman Bernanke was
testifying yesterdayyou can get this kind of spiraling situation
where the weakness of the economy itself brings more pressure on
the banks. The more pressure the banks have, the less they can
lend or are willing to lend, which weakens the economy, so we still
have to deal with that threat.
Chair Maloney. Thank you. Yesterday, Chairman Bernanke
testified before the Financial Services Committee, and he testified
that he considers nationalization to occur when the government
wipes out the shareholders, 100 percent, and takes over a bank,
and that he did not envision taking such draconian measures with
respect to any financial institutions in the United States.
Could you comment on what lessons we learned from history
about the effectiveness of government investment in private financial institutions, short of nationalization, such as in Japan, as compared with examples of countries that have gone 100 percent, such
as Norway or Sweden, and just your general comments on nationalization?
Chairman Volcker. Well, nationalization has kind of become
a dirty word, a very emotional word, anyway, and people use the
word without defining very carefully, what they mean. Chairman
Bernanke had one definition yesterday, of 100 percent ownership.
But let me say, in general, nobodyvery few people are in favor
of government ownership of businesses or financial institutions. I
certainly am not and I dont want to look towards that kind of an
organization of the marketplace.
I dont think thats at issue. The question is, what degree of government support is necessary at this particular point in history?
Some of these institutions, some of the banking institutions, have
clearly got a capital problem. Theyve got some bad loans, their
capital has been depleted. The best thing that could happen, is
they go into the markets and recapitalize themselves.
Right now, that is not really feasible in many cases. Because
they have to be recapitalized, I think we ought to look to the private markets to do it, to the extent possible, but if thats not pos-

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sible, Im afraid we have to look to the government to fill the gap,
temporarily.
We have to haveI would not call that nationalization; I would
call that capital restructuring, which is necessary and which the
government may, and already has participated.
Youd like to see that as little as possible, but if its necessary,
I think that is an approach that has to be understood and not only
tolerated, but, in a sense welcomed as a way of temporarily maintaining the stability of the system.
Some of these institutions are already subject to substantial governmental control; you see that every day. The government is so involved in guaranteeing assets and guaranteeing liabilities and controlling what they do in some respects, what they sell, what they
buy, were living with more government control and influence than
we would like to see, and we want to get away from that when we
can.
Chair Maloney. One of the problems is the so-called toxic assets
that the financial institutions have. There are a number of approaches that have been put forward, such as public/private partnerships to address this. Do you have any comments on how you
feel this challenge should be handled?
Chairman Volcker. Well, I think, in some cases, some way of
removing or isolating the bad loans, is desirable and necessary to
restore confidence and the full-scale effective operation of these
banking institutions.
Now, its very easy for me to make that sweeping statement, and
then you asked me how to implement that and you have questions,
which I do think can be dealt with, but it will take government
support and participation.
But I think there are various methods that have been discussed
for removing some of those assets from a bank, at a determined
price, which is obviously going to be less than their initial value,
and you get those assets removed and into what is sometimes
colloquially called the bad bank.
You develop a technique for financing that bank, dispose of the
assets over a period of time, and then leave the rest of the bank,
the bank itself, the so-called good bank, in a position where it
may be able to raise capital on its own, because its bad assets or
some of them, a large proportion of them, will be taken out.
If they cant be, the question of some government participation
in the capital restructuring, naturally enters. I think thats the essence of some of the proposals and programs put out yesterday by
the Treasury.
Chair Maloney. My time has expired. Senator Brownback?
Senator Brownback. Thank you very much Chairwoman.
Thank you very much, Mr. Volcker, and I appreciate your historical
knowledge and perspective.
Yesterday, Chairman Bernanke talked about this negative feedback loop, and you mentioned it today. Do you see particular weak
points in the feedback loop, that we should try to target in on, to
break it?
Because thats what Im seeing now, as well, is that weve got one
is feeding the other, downward in this spiral. Are there places that
you can look at to go to break that feedback loop?

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12
Chairman Volcker. Yes, there are. Now, how effective and how
workable they are, obviously, were seeing in practice, but there are
really three areas that are important:
The first was the stimulus bill that tried to keep the economy
higher than it otherwise would be, and, therefore, slow down the
adverse feedback loop that you describe.
The second is, and where we have not been successful so far, is
going directly to the mortgage problem where this crisis really centered at the beginning, and the problem if declining house prices
and failures of the mortgages and the inability of many people to
maintain surface on their mortgages.
Heres where you have, obviously, a very real human problem coinciding with the market problem of a general threat to the financial system.
Now, you have a new program there proposed by the Administration. Well see how that works. I hope it works with some success.
Then, finally, we get to what were talking about, which is, can
you break the loop by defending the stability of the institutions
that are threatened by the slowdown in the economy and the impact on their own assets, and thats what were talking about in recapitalizing the banking system.
Senator Brownback. You broke the big inflation period, and
you were one of the key architects of that. By the way, I was one
of the key persons dealing with the pain from some of that.
I shouldnt say oneI was one of the very small people dealing
with much pain. I was a young lawyer
Chairman Volcker. Short pain, I hope, for long benefit.
Senator Brownback. I mean, it was a very real thing, because
I was representing a number of farmers and small banks, and they
had borrowed money at high interest rates and the land continued
to inflate underneath them, and all that broke, and, boy, there
waswe lost over 100 banks across Kansas in that decade.
It worked, but it was very painful in the process. But my point
on asking this and about the Depression, is, whats the historical
model that you look at, that says its most akin to where we are
now?
Chairman Volcker. Well, in terms of the banking situation, for
better or worse, in fact, quite a few examples.
The big one, I suppose, was in Japan, where they had a situation
very similar to ours, in that they had an economy that had been
operating at a very high level with great confidence, but they built
up both very high stock values, as we did in the 1990s, and then
even higher real estate values.
They both collapsed, in their case, at the same time.
And they had even sharper declines that what weve had, both
in stock prices and in real estate values, where real estate values,
I think, there, went down by 75 percent, at least in urban areas.
And they struggled with that for some years, because it was a
great shock to the banking system, they did not have highly-engineered open markets; they didnt have a subprime mortgage market, but they had a banking system that was reliant on loans that
were backed by assets, particularly real estate assets.

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13
The assets collapsed, so the banks came under great pressure.
The government had to eventually come in and provide them with
new capital.
They did not take as forcible action as we were just talking
about, in terms of taking out the bad assets and in recognizing the
failures of a lot of companies. A lot of people have said thatpointed out that thats not an example we want to follow.
I would also point out that they had a lot of intervention, and
the economy, while it did not do well, did not go into a Great Depression, either, or a great recession. We just kind of sat there
sluggishly for a decade.
So
Senator Brownback. And I dont think theydid they increase
taxes in that period of time?
Chairman Volcker. I think at one point, they did. They got
very worried about the budget deficit, and increased
Senator Brownback. Is that a way for us to go?
Chairman Volcker. I would think not, in general, but Iyou
know, you can talk about specific taxes, and you might want to
make changes, but if youre talking about a broad-based tax increase, I dont think anybodys talking about a broad-based tax increase at this point.
Senator Brownback. That was the headline in the Wall Street
Journal today.
Chairman Volcker. Well
Senator Brownback. A large increase in taxes, which
Chairman Volcker. That startled me when I saw the headline,
too, but then I saw the next sub-headline, and it said, over ten
years. So thats dividing $800 billion or whatever it is, by ten,
thats $300 billion. What was it? I cant remember.
Whatever it was, you divide by ten and it doesnt look quite so
formidable.
Chair Maloney. Your time is expired. Congressman Snyder?
Mr. Snyder. Thank you, Madam Chair. I also think that the
proposal was not a broad-based tax increase; I think its very targeted to those who have done very, very well in this last decade.
Chairman Volcker, I wanted to ask you, every once in awhile, we
see news footage of a volcano that decides to put out a massive
amount of lava, and the lava flow is coming down the mountain
and the pitiful efforts of humanity to try to stop a lava flow, and
the lava always wins, it seems to me that the lava in this particular situation, is our helper, that the lava flow thats coming, is
the drive of people to support themselves, to make a living, to
produce products to sell to other people, and that thats whats coming down the mountain, if we can just figure out a way to make
the changes we need, the lava flow will take care of itself.
My question is, do you see anything in the list of items you went
through in a very articulate manner this morning, anything out
there thats not solvable?
Chairman Volcker. No, but I think some of it is, indeed, very
complicated. It certainly is solvable, but its going to takeit has
taken much more government intervention than we would ordinarily like to see, quite obviously, and its going to takeI think
we at least have to be prepared for the fact that its going to take

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14
more government money, particularly in helping with the recapitalization of these financial institutions.
But, yes, I certainly think it is solvable, and I think we can do
it in a way that we emerge from this with a more solid financial
system that, for many, many years, Im inclined to say, for my lifetimeand thats not very impressive anymore; its not as impressive as it used to befor your lifetime, a lifetime of anybody in this
room, we wouldnt be faced with this kind of crisis once again, revealing structural weaknesses in the financial system. We ought to
repair itnot just repair it; we ought to reorganize it.
Mr. Snyder. With the result being not that we just somehow get
through this, but that we set the table
Chairman Volcker. Absolutely.
Mr. Snyder.for potentially remarkable economic growth, not
only here, but around the world and see more than few hundred
million people lifted out of poverty.
Chairman Volcker. The one thing I would plead in that respect, is, we have to take emergency actions. Were taking emergency actions, were going to take more emergency actions, but
when it comes to reorganizing the financial system, lets take our
time.
Now, I dont want to overemphasize that. I dont think we should
do it piecemeal. We ought to have some vision of what the financial
system ought to look like, and its not entirely in the control of this
country. I a globalized world, its going to have to besome parts
of it are going to have to be uniform, more or less, some more, some
less, but around the world, and we ought to come to some kind of
vision that is reasonably shared.
Then we can put the pieces together, and I hope we can do that
fairly soon, but we cant do ityoure not going to do it in the first
half of this year, and I dont think we should try.
Mr. Snyder. You had mentioned several things in your written
and oral statements that you describe as technical issues and some
accounting rule things that I think you stated and most of us
would agree, would not be appropriate for legislative solutions.
Do you have any apprehension that we may, indeed, try some
legislative solutions in some areas that we should stay the hell out
of?
Chairman Volcker. Yes.
Mr. Snyder. Are you going to let us know when you see that
coming?
Chairman Volcker. Well, I think accounting is one area where
the temptation is to kind of march in and sweep away, I dont
know, mark-to-market accounting or something. Its a complex
technical area and I think changes have to be made.
Im a bit prejudiced here, organizationally, because I used to be
Chairman of the International Accounting Standards Committee,
which appoints the Board, which makes the accounting standards,
and I dont necessarily agree with all those standards, and I think
they have to be looked at, but they have to be looked at in a kind
of professional way, that maybe isnt very conducive to the immediate political process.
So I hope thats one area where you would keep the gun in the
holster.

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15
Mr. Snyder. Stay away.
Chairman Volcker. Yes.
Mr. Snyder. I think there has been a remarkably smooth transition in our national security apparatus from one Administration to
the other. I think probably Secretary Gates staying on, was a key
to that, but my impression is that it has gone very, very smoothly
throughout the Pentagon and in the military.
My question is, are you satisfied with how smooth the transition
has been in these areas that were talking about today, from one
Administration to the other, or are there things that could be done
with more alacrity?
Chairman Volcker. Well, in general, I think its been smooth
in the sense that some of the key positions were filled soon with
competent people, and people well understood the problem.
There is an area that I think isI dont know, but shameful
is the word that comes to mind. The Secretary of the Treasury is
sitting there without a Deputy, without any Under Secretaries,
with noso far as I know, no Assistant Secretary responsible in
substantive areas, at a time of obviously very severe crisis. He
shouldnt be sitting there alone.
Now, various things have contributed to this, I guess, including
vetting procedures, but it really is an unfortunate situation that I
believe the Treasury Department, which I was once in and I
thought it was the best job I ever had and have great pride in that
institution, but just in recent years, has been weakened before the
transition, and it deserves some attention and rebuilding, and new
strength.
You cant be the leading economic power in the world, with all
the problems we have, and have a weak Treasury.
Chair Maloney. Thank you. Your time has expired. That was
an excellent point, Mr. Chairman. Congressman Brady?
Representative Brady. Thank you, Chairman, and thank you,
Mr. Chairman, for being here today.
I have two questions. Your comment in your opening remarks,
was that this was an economic crisis, brought upon us by spending
more than we are producing, a tremendous buildup of debt, lack of
personal savings, and reliance on foreign debt.
All of those we seem to be doing more of on steroids. If that was
the path to the economic crisis, how does running down that road
faster solve the problem?
Chairman Volcker. Well, it wont, thats for sure, but you have
a very difficult balancing to do. We werent saving enough, we were
spending too much.
Now, you get into this crisis, and people flip right to the other
direction, understandably. Theyre worried, theyre concerned,
theyre losing their jobs, so, suddenly, they stop spending and are
trying to save more, and in terms of a smooth economic adjustment, theres a risk of going too far in the other direction.
Weve got to build up the savings, weve got to have less consumption, relative to economic activity, and not less consumption
in absolute amounts.
And these changes tend to come in spurts. This spurt is downward. So, youve got to take action that somehow looks contrary, as

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16
you say, to hold it up so that it doesnt go too fast in the wrong
direction.
Representative Brady. Does that same scenario apply to government, when were spending far more than we are producing,
when we are building up a tremendous amount of debt, when were
relying on foreign debt, does the same risk that applies in the private market, apply in government?
Chairman Volcker. Yes. I think its less fragile at this point,
with the government building up the debt. Its a byproduct, I guess,
of the support that the private economy needs, but you are emphasizing, I think, what I would certainly agree with, that during this
period, weve got to pay attention to how we get the federal spending back into some reasonable relationship with what were willing
to tax.
And I think the President is conscious of that. He had some
meetings about that earlier this week, but, you know, itsthat
may be one area where this Board that I have been appointed
Chairman of, that we could start and may want to look at. What
can we do to reinforce a sense that we really can get spending back
on track as this emergency recedes?
Representative Brady. Well, I would certainly like to help with
any of those measures.
Let me ask you about TARP II. You know, when the initial plan
was laid out, it was not well received by economists or the financial
markets. It may have, in fact, added to turmoil.
You were named shortly beforehand, as head of the Presidents
Economic Recovery Advisory Board. Did your panel have enough
time to thoroughly analyze it and evaluate it?
Chairman Volcker. That was before we were appointed, the
first TARP, but, anyhow, we have not been active yet. Were just
getting active. We had nothing to do with that.
Representative Brady. Is it important that the Administration
start clarifying that? I mean, do you have any insight today on details? How are we going to take those, isolate those bad loans, remove those toxic assets?
That seems to be what everyone knows needs to be done; the
question is, what is going to be done?
Chairman Volcker. My impression is, thats under very active
discussion in the Administration, as well as outside the Administration. The question is, there are complexities beyond my particular knowledge, in terms of law and authority and so forth and
getting it done.
I believe it can be done, and I hope it will be done expeditiously.
And that will require, when you talk abouttalk to or whatever
I think it is quite possible and may be desirable, in doing it cleanly
and effectively, to provide a certain amount of government capital
to make that process possible.
Its difficult to do it, I think, without government support, either
in the form of guarantees or cash, or maybe both. Weve got to get
some organization able to hold those assets, and theyre not going
to get financed, unless there is some feeling that they are
financeable.

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Representative Brady. I think many of us were hoping that
you had had some impact on that financial plan, or are having
some impact on it.
Chairman Volcker. Well, I think that, you know, discussions
are ongoing. I think that the quicker it gets resolved, the better.
Representative Brady. Right, thank you, Chairman, very
much.
Chair Maloney. Thank you. Congressman Cummings?
Representative Cummings. Thank you, Madam Chair. Chairman Volcker, yesterday, it was reported by Bloomberg News, that
Chairman Bernanke said that if the government ended up with a
substantial share of Citibank stock, adequate oversight of Citi
could be accomplished by the government, through the regulatory
process and through the exertion of shareholder rights.
Chairman Bernanke is quoted as saying It may be the case that
the government will have a substantial minority share in Citi or
other banks, but again, we have the tools, between supervisory
oversight, shareholder rights, and other tools, to make sure that we
get the good results we want in terms of improved performance.
If the government were exerting shareholder rights to accomplish
its objectives, Chairman Volcker, would that constitute a form of
nationalization, and would it be adequate to protect taxpayers investments in these institutions?
Chairman Volcker. Well, my own feeling is, calling that nationalization, which is an emotive term, apparently, may be misleading, in terms of what is really going on.
There is undoubtedly government influence and there will be
government influence and there will be more government influence.
Thats true, the influence, is true today and its going to continue.
But it isI would put it in a characterization as government
support for recapitalization.
That sounds less threatening, somehow, than nationalization.
It doesnt imply were doing this as a permanent, desirable method
of running the economy or running the financial system. It is not.
We want to do it to speed the return to a privately-capitalized
system.
Representative Cummings. And if the regulatory process and
the exertion of shareholders rights, are truly adequate to accomplish the good results we want in terms of improved performance,
why is the regulatory oversight not apparently working now to increase lending and to prevent banks from receiving aid from doing
things like going on these junkets and paying for Cheryl Crowe and
things of that nature?
Chairman Volcker. Well, in terms of the lending, I think the
principal problem is that an insecure bank faced with what it sees
as insecure borrowers, is not a very eager lender. Its a problem of
lack of good borrowers, confident borrowers, as well as weak banks
and worried bankers.
And so you can attack one end of this by cleaning up the banks,
the way we described, some key banks, and I think that will help,
but its part of a general economic problem to create an environment in which people want to borrow and demonstrably can show
the kind of support that makes it justifiable to lend.

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Im sure there are instances now where perfectly solid borrowers
are unable to get money. But there arent as many of those as
there used to be.
And there are weak banks that dont want to go back in the hole,
so to speak.
Representative Cummings. Mr. Chairman, that leads me to
this point: You know, a lot of our constituents dont understand
what you just said. They dont understand that.
They look at all of this money flowing into these banks, and they
believe that there should be a connection between their hardearned taxpayer dollars flowing into their banks, and their ability
to get credit to educate their kids, to, you know, keep their businesses going or whatever, and are you saying that its unreasonable
for them to assume that there will be a connection there?
Chairman Volcker. I think there is a connection, but its a connection that will work out over time, by strengthening the banks,
as well as the economy. There is not an easy connection to say, you
know, a million dollars is going into Bank X, and, immediately, directly related, that a million dollars is going out to borrowers of
Bank X.
You know, the money all goes into the bank, generally. You cant
tag those dollars.
Representative Cummings. I understand that, and my time is
running out, but I think this is it; I think people are notI dont
think they expect that million dollars to be loaned out, but they expect maybe $250,000 to be loaned out, and they can hold on to the
750.
Chairman Volcker. Well, fair enough, but I cant trace that, either. But you want that money to be lent out over time, but its
got to be part of a process of stabilizing the bank.
Until you get the bank stabilized and confident, the money isnt
going to flow very well, so the whole object is to restore some stability to the banking system and some confidence to the banking
system, and youve got to do it in an atmosphere where the economy out there isnt very good, to say the least.
I think thats the basic object. Going to people, going to your constituencies and saying its kind of a vague, just hold on a bit and
we hope to get on top of this, isnt the best story you can give them.
I think thats, unfortunately, the reality.
And I think its understandable that to get those bank loans
made, youve got to get the banks in better shape.
Representative Cummings. Thank you very much.
Chair Maloney. The gentlemans time has expired. Congressman Burgess?
Representative Burgess. Thank you, Madam Chair. Chairman
Volcker, let me just pick up on what Mr. Cummings was asking
you because theres no question theres a crisis of credibility. We in
Congress deal with very low approval ratings, certainly bankers
right now have very low approval ratings.
As the Administration knew, the public is stipulating confidence
in the Administration, but Bill Moyers recently introduced Simon
Johnson, formerly the Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund, and Mr. Moyers said that the new Treasury Chief of
Staff was formerly a lobbyist from Goldman Sachs, and Im quoting

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now, The new Secretary of State, was, until last year, an executive
of Citigroup; another CFO from Citigroup is now an Assistant to
the President, and the Deputy National Security Advisor for International Economic Affairs and one of his deputies, also came from
Citigroup. One new member of the Presidents Economic Recovery
Advisory Board, comes from UBS, which is being investigated for
helping rich clients evade taxes, end quote.
Now, Mr. Johnson noted that most of these appointees were well
intentioned but with backgrounds that will make it hard for them
to be totally objective about the bank bailouts.
Now, to Mr. Cummingss point, if our constituents ask us why so
many former bank officials should be given these important positions in the Administration, what do we tell them?
Chairman Volcker. Well, youve got to tell them that, obviously, to deal with this very complex situation, you have to have
people that deal with financial markets and have experience in financial markets.
Im not going to get into which particular individuals those
should be or which banks they come from, and I think they should
come from a variety of sources, for, partly, the reasons you suggest,
to give a sense of confidence and rounded judgment.
But, beyond that, I dont know what I can say. These are areas
of difficulty and complexity that are recent enough, so you dont
have a lot of people out there that are necessarily very imbued
with all the problems that exist, and theyre going to have the best
ideas of getting out of it. But you hope to get the best you can.
Representative Burgess. And I would certainly agree that you
dont want to exclude people who have the expertise. We see that
all time in the energy industry and the pharmaceutical industry
where we seem to have
Chairman Volcker. It may be thatyou know, I referred to the
problems of getting a Treasury man, that the rules about backgrounds and conflicts of interest and so forth, is probably one of the
factors inhibiting getting the Agency speedily manned.
So, you know, its kind of a hard balancing act.
Representative Burgess. Well, with the crisis in confidence,
though, its important to get those things right.
Chairman Volcker. I agree with that.
Representative Burgess. Now, when Senator Brownback was
asking you questions, I think he referenced the crisis in the economy in the 1980s, shortly after your tenure, when the savings and
loans collapsed around the country.
I was a young physician in North Texas at the time, and it was
a very, very painful time, as I recall. But you pointed out that it
was relatively short, I mean, as far as episodes of pain go, and that
there was a significant prolonged benefit in North Texas, probably
25 years of sustained economic growth and really only until the
last couple of months, where the recession in the rest of the country caught up with North Texas.
You also outlined the situation in Japan, where a similar set of
circumstances and the recovery and the growth just never happened, because of perhaps some differences in approach.
So I would just ask, at this point where our approach seems to
be more like Japans today, should we be perhaps more like your

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approach and the person who followed you at the FDIC, the approach back in the 1980s, to the savings and loan problem?
Chairman Volcker. Well, let me tell you what I think the big
distinction is between the problem we have now and those incidents that you referred to earlier. The Texas crisis, if I may call
it that, certainly began on my watch. It wasnt quite completed on
my watch, but it was there.
The Texas banking system collapsed, as you recall. The four or
five big Texas banks, didnt exist after the crisis, and the savings
and loans subsequently came under great pressure.
Now, what happened? It was a tough time for Texas for awhile,
but it wasnt a tough time in the United States, and Texas is a big
state, but its not the whole United States.
And the crisis took place in the environment of a growing environment and a pretty stable economy, and that helped to get out
of the crisis relatively quickly.
Japan is a big country and it was more difficult, but, still, Japan
is not the United States. Now you have a crisis that goes right
across the United States, and the problem is not just across the
United States; its in the whole world.
Production is declining outside the United States, from a high
level; its declining more rapidly than anything Ive seen in my lifetime. Now, the level of activity is still pretty good, but they are in
recession and were in recession.
So when everybodys in recession, its much harder to get the momentum to get out. Theres no other place you can grab to to hang
on, so to speak, theres no big sea of stability out there, its rough
seas all over.
And that isI think its unique in the postWorld War II period,
to have this degree of recession right around the world. I think
youre going to have a decline in GNP around the world this year,
which will be a small decline, because China and India are still
growing, but its very unusual to have a decline in economic activity right around the world.
That makes it harder for us to climb out. Thats why it takes so
much force, so much money, so much effort here, because were
fighting the headwind.
Chair Maloney. Thank you. Congressman Paul?
Representative Paul. Thank you, Madam Chairman. Chairman
Volcker, some of your comments sort of frighten me, not because
you remind us that were in an economic and financial crisisand
Im satisfied that you admit that, especially since its a reflection
of the monetary and financial system that weve been working with
for so longbut some of the suggestions you make give me some
concern.
But I did date our current problem from 1971. I wont quibble
over the dates, but 1971, to me, was significant, because it ended
the monetary order of the Bretton Woods Agreement, and that was
a major, major event. That was a gold exchange standard and it
was flawed and it failed.
In 1971, we, as a nation and as a world financial system, we accepted a paper dollar as the reserve dollar of the world. And I
think thats related to a concern that you have and I have, and
every single economist Ive ever talked to in Treasury or in the

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Federal Reserve, have expressed the same concern, and that is the
current account deficit, which, again, didnt start in the 1970s, as
much as exploded in the 1980s and the 1990s.
Were the biggest debtor nation in the history of the world, and
we recognize that, but where the difficulty comes, is to understand
why we got there. I put the blame on the dollar standard, because
we became the privileged nation, that we were allowed to print the
gold. The world accepted it and they still do, to a large degree, and
theyre still taking our dollars.
But I think the handwriting on the wall now, is that that system
has ended and all the inflating and all the manipulation and all
the spending, will not put that system back together again.
So theres a lot of people now thinking about coming up with that
replacement, and thats what Im concerned about. I want to study
and understand and maybe have some influence on it.
Theres a few of us, and theres a growing number who believe
in the free market, sound money, and national sovereignty, and believe that you can have a world economy without violating any of
those principles.
But in your next to the last paragraph, is where I find some
frightening things, because you talk about a strong coordination
among national authorities, unified accounting standards and liquidity requirements, and internationally-agreed to, and it has to
be comprehensive and not piecemeal.
Now, that invites a lot of questions, to me. Is this going to be a
super IMF? Are we going to revive the SDRs? Whos going to issue
the credit? What will happen to the Dollar? Who has the authority?
These are major things. Id like to know what kind of discussions
are going on internationally right now, to devise a standard, and
are you a participant in these international negotiations to come up
with this new system?
Chairman Volcker. Well, I think the answer to that question
is, no, no. I mean, I dont know of any coherent or regular discussions going on officially and a very few going on unofficially, in
terms of the construction of the monetary system.
Now, the comments that you quoted from my testimony, are directed toward, I suppose what you might think of as secondary considerations, how you regulate whatever system you have, how you
regulate banks and other institutions and financial systems. Its
kind of a lower level of generality.
The questions that you raise, are relevant questions. I agree with
much of your description. We may not agree upon remedies, but Ill
tell you, I dont think anybody is very seriously thinking about that
right now. Nobodys talking about a super IMF.
They have been talking, until recently, about the IMF not having
much to do. We suddenly changed that in the regulatory area,
where they may have some responsibility.
I would like to see the questions youre raising, debated. Thats
not what I meant to raise in this statement.
Representative Paul. But do you think theyreso you think
there is a need. Do you think the system we have today is over and
done with and that we cant patch it together and just more trillions of dollars of credit by the Fed and more debt by the Congress
is going to solve this problem?

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Chairman Volcker. I think there are problems with the present
international monetary system that have not received sufficient attention. Ill leave it at that.
Representative Paul. Thats ducking it a little bit.
Chairman Volcker. Yes, yes, I agree, because I cant tell you
the answers are apparent, but make no mistake about it; this is a
unique moment in economic history, where the world is going on
the basis of fiat currencies. Thats what economists like, and they
thought it was a good idea, and let currencies float up and down,
and dont get constricted by gold or other artificial arrangements.
But its a little tricky.
If youre going to run on a world of fiat currency, you better pay
attention to the stability of that currency and the maintainability
of the currency, and I think we are inclined to forget about that.
Representative Paul. It just may be that
Chair Maloney. The gentlemans time has expired. Senator
Bennett?
Senator Bennett. Thank you very much, Madam Chairman.
Chairman Volcker, were going to great lengths to try to remove
the toxic assets from the balance sheets of the various institutions,
or, failing thatthat was the first description of what TARP would
dofailing that, substitute capital in these institutions, so that
their balance sheets look stronger.
Let me walk through an alternative scenario thats presented to
me, and get your reaction. And I will reduce it to the smallest possible example, a single mortgage.
And lets put a dollar figure on it of $400,000, and its a mortgage
thats going bad, and whether it goes into foreclosure or whatever,
its under water, and the most that it could be refinanced for,
would be $300,000.
And if it goes into foreclosure, it probably gets sold on the open
market, if its sold at all, for $150,000 to $200,000.
And then the problem comes that bits of that mortgage are now
in packages that are in London and Los Angeles and Chicago and
Kuala Lumpur and wherever all else, so that all through the system, no one knows what their package is worth.
Now, if that mortgage were refinanced, and, therefore, retired,
all of those institutions that own a bit or piece of that mortgage,
suddenly get well, as far as the value of that mortgage is concerned, because its gone.
Is that a true statement?
Chairman Volcker. Well, are you saying that that mortgage
disappears?
Senator Bennett. If the mortgage is refinanced.
Chairman Volcker. Refinanced.
Senator Bennett. In other words, its paid off.
Chairman Volcker. Yeah, well, the creditor, presumably, is getting less than he expected when he made the mortgage.
Senator Bennett. Yes.
Chairman Volcker. He might be making more than he can reasonably expect now.
Senator Bennett. But the mortgage is paid off by a refinancing.
Chairman Volcker. Right.

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Senator Bennett. Does that mean that the toxic assets disappear on the balance sheets of all of the institutions, that particular toxic asset?
Chairman Volcker. Well, I dont think so. You may end up with
good assets, if you did that, generally, but the value of those assets
would be less than the stated value of the so-called toxic, so you
would have lost capital someplace along this line.
Senator Bennett. Okay, now, let me follow through on my time
here and get it right. Lets say the mortgage is refinanced at
$400,000, but at a vastly lower interest rate, so that the individual
paying the mortgage could now afford it.
That means that the original mortgage disappears completely
and no one down the chain loses any money; is that not true?
Chairman Volcker. Well, they lose money, because theyre
making lower interest than the other than what they thought they
were going to make.
They may be gaining compared to the present situation, yes.
Senator Bennett. A 30-year mortgage is traditionally retired in
seven years, so somewhere, the mortgage disappears.
The thing that is intriguing to me, is the possibility that by making housing mortgages available at a significantly lower rate, let us
say three percent, so that the homeowner who is currently under
water, says, okay, I can keep paying on the $400,000 mortgage at
three percent, so I will refinance, so the original mortgage is paid
off, therefore, the toxic asset disappears from everybodys balance
sheet, and were now in a situation where everybody has paper
whose value they know. Wouldnt that have a significant impact on
stabilizing banks balance sheets?
Chairman Volcker. If you could do that amid all the technical
and legal complications of dealing with these mortgages that are
buried, as you point out, in big instruments where there are thousands and thousands of mortgages in every particular security, and
you get through all the restrictions on how those mortgages can be
refinanced under the rules under which the big securities are put
together, yes. Now youve got a political problem. Who are you
going to help?
Are you just going to help those in trouble, or are you going to
help everybody? And if you help everybody, its getting pretty expensive.
You probably get as many as I do, but at least twice a week,
somebody writes me about a scheme for how to, one way or another, do the kinds of things youre talking about.
And some of them look very attractive to me, so I send them off
to somebody whos supposed to know more about it than I do, and
the Administration, as you know, came up with their judgment as
to how to approach this.
And they have come up with a scheme which they think is less
costly and more effective, by dealing directly with reducing interest
rates on particular mortgages, according to some formula as to
whats affordable.
Is that best way to do it?
They concluded, thats the best way to do it. I havent got any
reason to question that at this point, but its not the most sweeping
thing that could be done.

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24
What youre suggesting, is much more sweeping, also much more
costly.
Senator Bennett. My time has expired, but, I, too, asked somebody whos smarter than I am, because I just asked you. Thank
you. [Laughter.]
Chair Maloney. Thank you, Senator. We are very pleased that
the Vice Chairman, Senator Schumer, has joined us, and the Chair
recognizes him for five minutes.
Vice Chairman Schumer. Well, thank you, Madam Chairperson, and first let me wish you luck. You wont need it; I know
youre going to do a great job as Chair. I thoroughly enjoyed my
tenure as Chair, and Im very confident that youre going to do a
great job at a time when this Committee is more important and
more relevant than ever before.
Thank you, Chairman Volcker, for your years of service to the
country and for everything else that you have done.
My first question is a broad question. You know, were all looking
to point a finger of blame at this particular person or that particular person, for this crisis.
I think theres plenty of blame on individuals, but in the broad
theres plenty of blame that should go to individuals, no question.
But in the broad brush, you could look at this crisis and say the
following, the broadest brush, at least, that I see it: When a country, year after year, consumes more than it produces, imports more
than it exports, borrows more than it saves, the chickens always
come home to roost.
You may not be able to predict how they come home to roost, but
they do, because it is unsustainable to continue to do that, if economics means anything.
And so my question to you, is this: When, lets hope and pray we
get out of this financial mess that were in, how does America get
back to those old values?
Is it inevitable that in an affluent society, we lose and we just
become, in a sense, a giant, stuffing our face with cake all the time,
so to speak?
Are there government policies that we should be looking at now,
that help us get back to that?
Will the pendulum just swing back inevitably and get us there?
I mean, this, to me, I think, is the fundamental question for
America, even deeper, and while not immediately more important,
in the long run, more important than how do you get out of this
economic crisis that were in.
If we go back to our old ways, well be in another economic crisis
soon enough.
Chairman Volcker. Well, I sit here and I listen to you and the
thought that comes to mind, is, you put the point that I was trying
to put, quite eloquently, and the reason youre a Senator and Im
not, is that you can put it more eloquently and understandably
than I can.
But you have identified
Vice Chairman Schumer. Thank you. Out of the more simple
minds, who knows?
Chairman Volcker. Not at all. At this level, it is a simple problem which needs to be understood.

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25
Now, part of getting back to a sustainable trend and equilibrium,
is simply having gone through this horrible experience, I think people, for a while, anyway
Vice Chairman Schumer. For awhile.
Chairman Volcker.will not return to where they were. In
fact, the dangers we discussed a little bit earlier, in one context,
you may swing too far, and we probably will swing too far for
awhile, and weve got to get back into something sustainable.
The other stuff isits not just window dressing; its important,
but what protections can we build into the system, when those animal spirits become a little bit too buoyant in the future?
I think there are protections we can build in, and this is the time
we ought to do it, while the memory is very fresh. Now, I say that
this is the time, but I dont want to do it next month, as I said;
I want to take a little time to think about it.
But that is the aim of this whole reform effort. How do we develop a free and open financial system, but nonetheless one that
more effectively puts the brakes on in a timely way, which we obviously missed this time around.
Vice Chairman Schumer. Do you have any more specific
thoughts on some of the things we ought to do?
Chairman Volcker. Well, I
Vice Chairman Schumer. And I may have missed them, and
if I
Chairman Volcker. No, but there are so many, but what I
Vice Chairman Schumer. Give us three of the most important.
Chairman Volcker. Yeah, well, my personal philosophy, which
is reflected in this report that the G30 put out, is, banks ought
to go back into the banking business.
That maybe is a very old fashioned idea, but I think we ought
to have a corerecent events show how dependent we are on banks
as kind of custodians of they system, keepers of the system, and
lets not get the distracted by the glamour of speculating in the
capital markets, and so they go back to banking.
Interestingly, Citibank seems to be saying that.
Vice Chairman Schumer. Yes.
Chairman Volcker. That they now realize they went off in
some area of Wonderland, and they want to go back to the basics,
and theyve got a great franchise in commercial banking.
So I would like to see that put into the system pretty firmly. We
have a lot of room for innovation and flexibility, outside the banking system, but lets keep the core of it solid, active, competitive,
and I think that would help in terms of what youre talking about.
Make those banks self-reliant on their own credit appraisal, instead of blaming it all on Standard and Poors and Moodys or
whatever. Thats the cultural change thats necessary.
Now, there are a lot of things. What do we do about the credit
rating agencies?
We talked about accounting, we talked about, you know, some of
the plumbing of the system.
Vice Chairman Schumer. What about things likeand my
time is up, but leverage?
Any limits on leverage?

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Chairman Volcker. Well, we certainly think those banks are
going to be regulated, and leverage would be one area where that
would show up. I also think weve got a leverage problem outside
the banking system, when you get the hedge funds and maybe equity funds. Some of those have gotten pretty far and wild, too, and
may need some leverage requirements there and capital requirements there.
Vice Chairman Schumer. Right. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Chair Maloney. The gentlemans time has expired. Some of the
Senators indicating that they were voting and wanted to return, so
if the Chairman would allow us, we could go to another set of questions. Do you have the time?
Chairman Volcker. Yes.
Chair Maloney. Id like to follow up on Senator Schumers question on the bank of the future, and how do you see the bank of the
future, given the fact that we are part of a world economy and have
to be part of their international banking standards, and do you
think that the European style of universal banks that are mixing
banking and commerce, that are the big megabanks, will become
the dominant model, or do you think it will be more like Citibank,
our original megabank, which has sold off brokerage and insurance
and is now back to Citibank with a more focused attention on commercial banking?
And how do you see the bank of the future, and do you think we
need to regulate that to make that happen, and could you just
elaborate further on the bank of the future in America and internationally?
Chairman Volcker. Well, you raise the phrase, universal
bank, which means different things to different people. If universal bank means what you described, that they can also have
commercialbe part of a commercial firm, and operate throughout
the capital markets and be pretty free to do pretty much anything,
thats not what Im talking about.
Im talking about more going back something like the traditional
commercial banks.
Im not talking about going back and putting on GlassStiegel.
I think at this stage, the ability of a commercial bank to do underwriting for its clients and to give advice, is not an unreasonable activity, and they should be able to do that.
The distinction I make, is, are they serving the customer or not?
Are they playing in the market, speculating in the market,
transacting in the market, in a kind of impersonal market, where
the particular person theyre transacting with, doesnt mean much;
its just a transaction, its not a customer relationship?
The banks ought to be devoted to their customer relationships,
primarily, and then the other people can go and do their thing in
the capital markets.
If you combine the two, they becometheyre both big and diversified to the extent theyre doing all these capital market activities
at the same time theyre doing a more traditional banking business. They are so hard to manage, nobodys been very successful
at managing them.

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And they are filled with conflicts of interest, and I want to reduce the conflicts of interest and I would like to make it more manageable.
Chair Maloney. Thank you very much. Congressman Burgess?
Representative Burgess. Thank you. Chairman, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently said that the things are being
turned around and were getting very close to stabilizing the banking industry. Do you think that was an accurate assessment?
Chairman Volcker. Who said that?
Representative Burgess. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority
Leader, Harry Reid.
Chairman Volcker. Well, I think how close we are to stabilizing
the banking system, will turn on things that are happening in the
next few weeks, perhaps. You know that the Treasury made a proposal yesterday, which is a step in that direction.
But we did a lot of talking about how to take the bad assets out
of the banking system, and I think we need to take some steps
there, before we say that were really on track toward stabilizing
the banking system.
Representative Burgess. Some of the discussion weve had this
morning, has centered around the amount of debt that the country
is taking on. A couple of weeks ago, I took a trip down to the Bureau of Public Debt.
I didnt even know it existed. I watched the auction of three-year
Treasury Bills, and I think there were $32 billion worth of Bills
that were sold in about 30 minutes that afternoon.
It was certainly startling revelation when you realize that our
paper is being sold all over the world. I guess the good news is that
its still selling and that the interest rate is reasonable.
But, recently, our Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, visited
China and asked the Chinese to continue investing in United
States Treasury securities. I think we had another story from the
Financial Times, a couple of weeks ago, where one of the Chinese
ministers said, we dont really like you, but we have to keep buying
your Treasuries, because thats safest place to go.
So are we on kind of a path where, just like in the Cold War,
we were worried about mutually-assured destruction, the Chinese
still have to buy our Treasuries and we still have to sell them on
the world market?
Chairman Volcker. Well, the signs that you arethe anecdotes
that you are repeating here, are a sign of a stressed financial system. We shouldnt have to have a Secretary of State asking people
to buy Treasury securities; we want people buying them because
they want to buy them, not because of some political quid pro quo.
And to the extent we are extended, it is a sign that we are
stressed and we ought to take that as a warning and reinforce
what weve been saying this morning about basic policies that have
to be followed to get rid of some of this debt or limit some of this
debt and get the banks back on a solid footing, so that people are
lined up to buy Treasury securities, because they continue to think
its a best bet.
Representative Burgess. Would that include a serious reassessment of the amount of federal spending that were undertaking?

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Chairman Volcker. Yes, without question, that is an important
symptom that people are looking at. They understand that were in
exceptional circumstances now that takes some spending. We need
a stimulus program, we need all this money to help the banks and
other institutions.
Dr. Burgess please show us how we can, over a three-, four-, fiveyear period, get back into a sustainable budgetary position with a
reasonable flow of taxes.
Thats a great challenge for President Obama. Clearly, he recognizes it, and thats why he called this meeting the other day.
But to demonstrate it, to make it fully credible, you know, some
action has to be taken. I would like to see some attack on one element over this, over a long period of time, over years, which is Social Security, which has been sitting around. I think it is a solvable
problem.
If we got at it, I think that would be reassuring. Thats just one
element that people worry about.
But there are others, and we ought to have a good review of federal spending and get rid of the programs we dont need anymore.
But there are a lot of things in civilian programs and certainly in
the Defense Department, that probably deserve a good housecleaning.
Representative Burgess. Thank you.
Vice Chairman Schumer [presiding]. Mr. Snyder?
Mr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Volcker, I
wanted to ask a two-part question, and this is my only questions,
because Im going to have to run to go vote.
You mentioned the worldwide nature of this problem and the
challenges that we have. We have examples of large economies
around the world, that are not doing well right now, that are export-driven, and exports have dropped off dramatically. Japan
comes to mind.
Anotherin contrast, India, which has, obviously, a large economy, a lot of their economic growth has been driven by their huge
domestic market, and they obviously are having some dropoff, too,
perhaps not ascertainly not as dramatic as other nations.
I think the United States is somewhere in the middle of that. We
have both a big domestic market, but were also very export-driven.
Id like you to comment on how the solutions may impact differently, a domestic-driven, versus export-driven economy, and
then any thoughts you may have aboutthere are some members
of Congress now that are advocating that this is the time to rewrite
trade agreements and probably not in their words, but, I would
say, become more protectionist. What are you thoughts about that?
Chairman Volcker. On the first question about export-driven,
as compared to more domestic-driven economies, I think, as a
broad generalization, the globalization of finance and economics,
has led to more exports and more imports. The more dependent you
are on exports, the nature of this particular economic crisis is
youre in more trouble than those countries that arent so dependent upon exports. We see that over and over again. India is one
major example, as you cited of less export dependence.
I do not think, by the nature of this problem, youre going to get
anyplace by putting on trade restrictions. I keep saying this is an

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international problem and everything we do, reflects on others and
what they do, reflects on us.
Trying to get out of this, by an individual country cutting down
on imports, youre going to find your exports are going to be damaged, directly or indirectly, too, and the temptation is to do that,
but I dont think youre going to make much progress, and its
going to have very strong inflammatory political repercussions as
well.
So, I would urge the Congress to be very careful about putting
on import restrictions. Its much harder now than it used to be. Its
much more troublesome to put on the restrictions, simply because
the world economy is so much more integrated.
There isnt much we produce in the United States that doesnt
depend on imports at some place along the line, and vice versa; our
exports depend upon a variety of imports. So its a veryI dont
like to think of it as being fragile, ordinarily its not fragile, but its
a very interconnected world that is very hard to improve by trying
to jump in and put restrictions on exports of imports, generally, or
even in particular industries.
Mr. Snyder. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman [presiding]. Ive returned, Chairman Volcker.
Senator Bennett?
Senator Bennett. Thank you very much. Chairman Volcker,
youve touched on this a little bit, but lets return to it.
We will get out of this and what do we want as our regulatory
framework, when we do?
As I understand Secretary Paulsons template that he laid down,
there were three primary goals: One was the stability of the structural viability of the system as a whole.
The second one was the safety and soundness of individual
banks, and the third one was the transparency and efficiency of
markets. And, moving next, the assumption is, the primary responsibility of the first, would fall to the Fed, the second to the FDIC,
and the third, to the SEC.
Now, thats easy to describe in a single paragraph. The devil is
not only in the details, but the details are devilish.
So would you address that whole question?
Do you agree that those are the three areas we should start trying to fill, and then, to the degree that you can, from your own experience, the suitability of the Fed, the FDIC and the SEC, or if
there is another regulatory regime, in your view, that might be created to deal with this, or if some of the other regulatory structure
that might disappear, if we went to those three big ones, that you
think would be a mistake and that they should be saved?
Just kind of range over this whole subject and visit it with us,
if you would.
Chairman Volcker. Its a very relevant question, and I must
say, a very unfair question, Senator. Ive been trying to avoid pronouncing on that particular subject. We wrote a whole report that
evaded those issues, but let me give you some comments.
I am rather attracted by Secretary Paulsons broad philosophy
here, although it was not very clear, deliberately, as to how you
would apply it in practice. I describe it maybe slightly differently
than you do.

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You put the third category as transparency, and thats part of it.
I think of that as a variety of what I would call business practicesthe Truth in Lending rules and Truth in Mortgages that the
Federal Reserve has, all the traditional concerns of the SEC, the
CFTC, transparency.
You know, one thing that people comment on, is these big CDOs
that you referred to earlier, are sold in the market like a security,
but theyre not subject to the normal security laws.
So that is one area. The safety and soundness thing, is the other
area, and I think theres something to be said by that being conducted by a different agency, rather than all one agency. Theyre
all mixed up and jumbled up now.
The SEC, I think its fair to say, has not done a very good job
on the safety and soundness side, but that hasnt been their bag
over the years, and they like to concentrate on the other side.
And I dont know that the banking agencies have done as good
a job as they can do on what I call business practices.
Where you fit the systemic regulator in that picture, is not so
clear. I understand the concept, I understand the need, but its one
of the reasons why I havent wanted to put out my own plan or
thought, because I think there are different ways you can do it, and
I think we ought to have some debate on how best to do it.
And some of it, at least, gets involved, I think, in international
considerations, so we want to work with other countries on it. So
Im not ready to reveal my secret, inward thoughts on how that
might look in the end, but I do think that framework is an interesting way to approach it.
Senator Bennett. I think its where we start, but, clearly, we
need all of the kinds of details, and Im delighted that youre willing to think about it.
Chairman Volcker. What I would like to do, you know, I really
think Im a little afraid the Congress will go ahead and legislate
on that, without thinking through what kind of a system they
want, and Id rather have it go the other way, that we reach some
consensus on what kind of a system we should have, and then this
is the way were going to regulate it.
Senator Bennett. Thank you.
Senator Klobuchar. Senator Bennett, since you asked such a
stellar question, if you want to do one more, its fine, then Ill go
ahead.
Senator Bennett. Since you just arrived, you go ahead.
Senator Klobuchar. Okay, all right. Well, Chairman Volcker, I
was listening with great interest yesterday when the President outlined his principles and what he wants to get done, and then to
your answer about doing this comprehensiveI dont want to put
words in your mouth, but you would prefer to have sort of the regulatory system set up first, and then you look at how you regulate
it.
Chairman Volcker. Right.
Senator Klobuchar. Okay.
Chairman Volcker. I would not call it the regulatory system,
but the financial system.
Senator Klobuchar. Right, right, the financial system.
Chairman Volcker. Right, exactly, yes.

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Senator Klobuchar. So do you think one financial institution
should be taking the lead in developing and implementing this new
regulatory framework, or should the oversight be distributed
among agencies, or how would you most like it to look?
Chairman Volcker. Im going to give an advertisement here for
the Group of 30. We issued a report on that subject without a recommendation, earlier. Were just describing what different countries do, and it is very different.
One approach is putting everything in one agency, and the British are the exemplars of that, and that, for awhile, was considered
the direction in which to go. That was the preferred direction.
The shine has been taken off that a bit, given the problems that
the British have had, and, particularly, the problems they had in
coordinating a response to the crisis.
The other possible way, is more along the lines that Secretary
Paulson proposed; have a separate safety and soundness, prudential regulator for everybody, and a separate regulator, SEC, CFTCtype for what I call business practices.
And there are several countries that have adopted that. The
American system is by far the messiest; its the biggest; weve got
more agencies involved with conflicting and overlapping responsibilities than anybody else.
I used to think that was something of a strength. I still think so.
It makes life very difficult at times, but there is some point and
a little competition among agencies, so that they dont become overbearing.
There is a problem, if you have one agency, even on the prudential side, should that be the Federal Reserve?
This is why I dont want to reach a judgment. If its the Federal
Reserve, youve got a very different Federal Reserve than weve had
historically, where the focus has been on monetary policy and,
above all else, protecting its independence and so forth.
Well, its a little different, if theyre going to have thousands and
thousands of bank examiners crawling over all financial institutions around the United States, and Im not sure we want that.
Thats why Im reluctant to give the answer to Senator Bennett
at this point, but those are the issues, we should talk about it, and
you arrive at a different answer.
Im just repeating myself, but you arrive at a different answer,
depending upon how you think the financial system should look.
Senator Klobuchar. Right, and I completely understand this
idea of taking our time to decide how we want it to look, and then
how it should be regulated.
But one of the issues that I confront, is that our financial institutions, the confidence issue and the trust in them, is eroding, and
some of it, as I pointed out in my brief, one-minute opening there,
is unwarranted. You know, some of our small banks are doing well,
our credit unions.
We have some healthy large banks out there, as well, and theyre
actually being brought down by this uncertainty right now, whether its about the stress test or about the way things are going to
be regulated, and Im just curious about that urgency of making
things clear, versus trying to look at this so comprehensively.

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32
How can we, as we look at this comprehensively and say it takes
awhile to set up this new regulatory system, how can we in the
meantime, try to bring back that confidence in at least our healthy
banks and healthy credit unions?
Chairman Volcker. Well, again, you know, Im being maybe totally unrealistic, but when we take these particular actions of saving particular institutions, recapitalizing particular institutions, or
guaranteeing particular institutions, lets be careful in doing that,
that were not doing things that were going to be sorry about in
the future.
Now, one area that just happens to have been a longtime hobby
horse of mine, I dont want to combine banks with commercial
firms. Which is longstanding American policy.
There are some exceptions, but they are relatively small exceptions. Now, the temptation isand I think weve reached that a little bit nowyou take emergency action that seemed to be nice to
permit some institutions to become part of the Federal Reserve or
part of the safety net, even though they are connected with commercial institutions.
And there are non-banking institutions that are very heavily engaged in commercial operations, that apparently would like to control some banks, and they say, weve got money, so let us do it.
Well, thats great, but were violating
Senator Klobuchar. Yes.
Chairman Volcker [continuing]. The way we want the system
to develop over time.
Senator Klobuchar. And thats why Im so concerned about
some of the stock going down in some of these healthier banks,
that that will be the end result, if we dont clarify what the rules
are and act somewhat quickly to get this done.
Chairman Volcker. Now, we can qualify those rules for the moment, without deciding who the regulator is going to be.
Senator Klobuchar. Thats true, through this stress test and
getting it done quickly, so that would be, to characterize what
youre saying, to get that done, so we can sort of set some sanity
in the market.
Chairman Volcker. For the time being, we have to live with the
institutions we have, and weve got banking. Theyre working together, I think, pretty well, thats my impression.
Senator Klobuchar. Well, the other piece of this, which is an
easy answer, is that you put different people in charge, and sometimes things can improve, you put bigger emphasis onand this is,
again, in the meantime, because I do think we have to make structural changes, but the whole Madoff scandal, the fact that that
wasnt caught, its a combination of structure, but sometimes it can
be other peoples emphasis, who are in charge of the agencies.
Chairman Volcker. I think thats right; its a failure of supervision that had nothing to do with whether you had a unified regulator or a lot of separate regulators, and there, the responsibility,
the agency involved, is pretty clear.
In other cases of lapses, it might be a different agency, but were
not going to cure that by moving around the pieces on the chess
board.

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Senator Klobuchar. I wanted to just go back toIm going to
ask maybe one or two more. The Group of 30s report for laying out
a financial framework for financial stability that you chaired, the
report included a conclusion that a few banks will still need to be
so large that their failure would pose a systemic risk, or in other
words, they would be too big to fail.
And while the report calls for elevated oversight and regulation
of the big banks, you believe it is an acceptable level of risk, to
have institutions operating, whose singular failure can trigger this
kind of collapse that we were so fearful of?
Chairman Volcker. Well, we want to have a system that minimizes the threat of collapse, so you dont have to take these extraordinary measures. But it means theyre going to have, I think,
an extraordinary degree of supervision.
And the danger will be that supervision will become too heavyhanded, and that those institutions wont be able to compete effectively. Now, this is one reason why we want to get some consensus
internationally.
There are two things you can accomplish internationally: You
can get some consensus, I hope and believe, on how you supervise
these mega-institutions, because they are operating all over the
world.
Senator Klobuchar. Yes, theyre operating internationally.
Chairman Volcker. And also, I think you now have some possibility of doing something that hasnt been possible, of dealing with
the tax havens and the regulatory havens. The Europeans are pretty hot on that, and we ought to be pretty hot on it, and between
the us, I think we can do something about that.
Senator Klobuchar. Exactly. So those are two areas you think
we could accomplish something internationally?
Chairman Volcker. Right.
Senator Klobuchar. How about the credit rating agencies and
what happened with them here when they were rating things as
gold, and then the next day, they went under; what do you think
we could do about that?
Chairman Volcker. Youve got Mr. Altman testifying here?
[Laughter.]
Chairman Volcker. Im going to turn that question over to him.
Senator Klobuchar. Okay.
Chairman Volcker. You know, its a very difficult area, and Ive
been scratching my head. I think its fair to say that that is one
area where our recommendations in this report, were rather obscure, because we didnt come to any very definite conclusion as to
how to deal with that.
There are obviously things you can do in the realm of transparency and so forth, but I dont think theres an easy answer, by
saying you have a different model for how theyre paid. Maybe
youd want to do that, but its not easy.
There are a number of approaches that can be taken. Do we
want more competition?
I think the answer is probably yes. Do we want to facilitate more
credit rating agencies of a different type, that are paid by the lenders, rather than the borrowers?

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I think the answer to that is yes, too, but Im not sure its viable,
economically, so I am demonstrating that I dont have settled views
on this area.
Senator Klobuchar. You know, early on inand this will be
my last question here, and then I think were going to recess for
the Chair to return, and shell be here shortly.
But when I spoke, I talked about these small banks that have
been, for the most part, staying out of these high-flying deals, and
then you have some of the large banks that are, by all accounts,
much healthier than some of the other banks, that not all banks
are the same, not all banks made the same kind of decisions.
Do you envision that we could have a situation where small
banks are doing fine, youve got some of the large banks that can
rely on the private capital; that maybe theyd take some of the
TARP funding in the past, because they were asked to, but thats
not necessarily they did it because the other ones or they were told
to, but they basically can stand on their own legs, while you have
certain of these institutions, a select few, that are either under
temporary receivership or are just getting more of these funds on
loanis that possible to imagine there could be differences between
these large banks?
Chairman Volcker. Well, I dont know about the difference between large banks, but I think there are differences between the
small banks and the large banks, in the sense that the FDIC has
kind of established procedures that work pretty well for dealing
with small banks.
When it gets to be a very big bank, it kind of taxes the resources
and methods of the FDIC, and so they need, to some degree, different treatment, and I think thats what will emerge here.
Senator Klobuchar. Right, and I understand that. Im just
looking at, as we go forward with this stress test, as the Administration does, Im one to believe, just knowing some of the banks in
our state, that there are differences between the large banks, you
know.
There are banks that didnt have the pavement crumple under
them, and go to Washington with a tin cup, when all of this happened, and then there are other banks that made some really bad
decisions that there may be a good reason to decide to keep them
going, because theyre too big to fail, as was pointed out before.
And I just would like some acknowledgement that there are differences between these large banks
Chairman Volcker. Well, youre certainly right about that, but
just in the small banks, an obvious point, but when the small
banks get in trouble, its much easier to merge a small bank, than
it is to merge a big bank.
Senator Klobuchar [presiding]. Thats for sure. All right, very
good. Well, thank you, Chairman Volcker.
Were going to temporarily recess this hearing, unless you have
more questions or comments, Senator Bennett?
[No response.]
Senator Klobuchar. Well recess until the Chairman returns.
Thank you very much. The hearing is temporarily recessed.
[Recess.]

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Chair Maloney. Id like to convene the second panel. I apologize; we had votes, but thats where many of the members are.
They are on their way back. I see Congressman Hinchey arriving.
I want to thank very much, the distinguished members of the
second panel. Roger Altman has had an outstanding career in both
the public and private sector.
He served two tours of duty in the U.S. Treasury Department,
initially serving President Carter as Assistant Secretary for Domestic Finance, and later serving President Clinton as Deputy Secretary during a time of great economic positive actions.
Since 1996, Mr. Altman has served as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Evercore Partners, which is now the most active investment banking boutique in the world, with offices in the U.S.,
Europe, and Latin America.
Previously, he was Vice Chairman of the Blackstone Group, and
responsible for its investment banking business, and his initial
Wall Street career involved Lehman Brothers, where he eventually
became co-head of investment banking, a member of the firms
Management Committee, and of its Board of Directors.
He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He received
an AB from Georgetown University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. Welcome.
Dr. Adam Posen is Deputy Director of the Peterson Institute for
International Economics in Washington, D.C. where he has been a
Senior Fellow since 1997.
His research focuses on macroeconomics, policy, and performance, European and Japanese political economy, and central banking issues. He is a widely-cited expert on monetary policy.
He has been a visiting scholar at central banks worldwide, including, on multiple occasions, at the Federal Reserve Board and
the European Central Bank.
From 1994 to 1997, he was an economist at the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, where he advised senior management on monetary strategies, the G7 economic outlook, and European monetary
unification.
Dr. Posen received his PhD and his AB from Harvard University,
where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow.
Dr. Joseph Mason is the Herman Moyse, Jr. Louisiana Bankers
Association Chair of Banking at School of Business of the Louisiana State University, Senior Fellow at the Wharton School, and
a financial industry and monetary policy consultant.
Dr. Mason formerly taught at Georgetown University and at
Drexel University, and before that, was a financial economist at
the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency here in Washington,
D.C.
Dr. Masons research primarily investigates liquidity in thinlytraded assets and illiquid market conditions.
I welcome all the panelists and recognize Mr. Altman. Thank you
all for coming.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE ROGER C. ALTMAN, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, EVERCORE PARTNERS, INC., NEW YORK, NY

Mr. Altman. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for inviting me to testify this morning. Im going to try to make five simple

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points, which essentially summarize my testimony and keep my remarks brief:
First, one point about the origins of this financial crisis: One
reads constantly that the housing collapse and the subprime mortgage crisis were the cause of this problem, and I dont think thats
correct.
I think those were a symptom, and, rather, the combination of
extremely low interest rates and extremely high levels of liquidity,
actually were the root cause.
We had extremely low interest rates following 9/11 and the subsequent recession, with the Federal Funds Rate remaining around
one percent for three years.
We had enormous liquidity on account of the so-called global savings glut, to quote Chairman Bernanke, which particularly built up
in certain developing countries like China, Singapore, and the Persian Gulf oil states, and the combination of those two, if allowed
to continue long enough, always is lethal, and here, also was lethal.
So the point is that the authorities will have to be much more
vigilant in the future, when this combination of extremely low interest rates for a long period of time, and extremely high liquidity
for a long period of time, again presents itself, because that is at
the bottom of all of this.
My second point is that this financial collapse has ushered in the
first balance sheet-driven recession in 60 years. Unfortunately, the
nature of that means that we are consigned to a sub-normal recovery. It is, unfortunately, axiomatic.
Its a balance sheet-driven recession in the sense that American
households lost so far, about a quarter of their net worth from the
peak of only less than two years ago, in other words, around $13
trillion.
Its a balance sheet-driven recession, because we all know whats
happened to the balance sheets in the financial sector of our economy. And even the federal balance sheet, after this interim period
of stimulus and monetary ease, will have to be adjusted towards
contraction, in order to avoid causing unease amidst the public,
amidst the world financial markets, the foreign exchange markets,
and so forth.
So, if you ask yourself how long will it take for the consumers
balance sheet to be made healthy again, for the financial sectors
balance sheet to be become healthy again, as it relates to normal
lending, the answer, unfortunately, is a fairly long period of time,
and not consistent with any recovery, other than something approaching a U-shaped recovery.
The third point, on the credit crisis itself, I want to echo a small
point that Chairman Volcker made, which is, there is some good
news. If you divide the credit markets into two parts, just to oversimplify it, and say one is the enormous public credit markets,
which, of course, trade every day and so forth, and the other is the
banking system, the public credit markets have show some signs
of thaw.
There is some good news there. The commercial paper market
has struggled to begin to function again, the so-called high-grade
corporate market, the same, some of the key spreads in the shortterm public credit markets have narrowed a lot.

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And I think the Fed is particularly to be commended for beginning to thaw out that market. The banking system, on the other
hand, is going to remain incapacitated for some time, surely
through 2009, as we all know.
The fourth point, the federal policy response so far, I really think
it has been close to heroic. Of course, it isnt perfect, and if you
gave the authorities a chance to redo their decisions on Lehman
Brothers, on AIG, perhaps on the original rollout of the TARP, I
think they might do those differently, but, in general, I think the
federal response has been quick, large, and rather creative.
After all, $9 trillion of liquidity and guarantees, have been provided to the credit markets through a whole host of instruments,
as you know, and I do believe that history will judge us rather
well, even though it will take quite awhile to work this out, as it
did judge us well, in retrospect, on the working out of the savings
and loan crisis 20 years ago.
Finally, on the Obama initiatives themselves, theyve only been
in office for 38 days, I believe, and theyve rolled out four of the
biggest initiatives weve ever seen. Of course, the stimulus program, we all know about it, but if you step way back, this was
passed very quickly and it does meet all the necessary tests of
speed, size, temporary and targeted.
The improvement that they have made in the TARP, which they
are now calling the Capital Assistance Program, I think are important, such the advent of the stress test, the requirement for specific
lending targets, the limits on buybacks, dividends, acquisitions,
and compensation.
Then the core of this is the public/private partnership. We dont
have the details yet, but this is an important idea; its a rather courageous idea, Madam Chair, because it will not be a popular one.
Why wont it be popular? Because it probably, as well see in the
details, involves the Federal Reserve making term loans to investors like hedge funds and private equity firms, in order to try to
enable them to purchase distressed assets or toxic assets from the
institutions that have too many of them.
Thats a difficult idea, but its the right idea. And I might say
that with all the talk about nationalization, Im happy to see that
it seems to be cooling down a little bit, because that is not a particularly attractive idea.
Of course, there are cataclysmic circumstances under which it
might be the very last resort, but, fundamentally, our government
is not equipped to manage institutions of this size. Nationalization
would cause the weak to get weaker, because business customers
and talent, among other things, would be hard to retain.
It would take, I think, a lot longer than people say, to re-privatize them. There would be a temptation to conflate policy goals
with fixing these institutions, which would delay their reprivatization.
A Swedish example is not comparable, and, finally, you dont
need to nationalize the institutions to change the managements or
boards of directors.
Ill stop there, in an effort to keep it short, but those are the
main points I would like to make this morning.

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[The prepared statement of Roger C. Altman appears in the Submissions for the Record on page 59.]
Chair Maloney. Thank you for your testimony and your public
service. Dr. Posen?
STATEMENT OF DR. ADAM S. POSEN, DEPUTY DIRECTOR,
PETERSON INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS,
WASHINGTON, DC

Mr. Posen. Thank you, Chairwoman Maloney, for the invitation.

Its a great honor to be able to go on after Paul Volcker.
I think I have to have a much more narrow focus, which will end
up putting me much more in opposition with the last two points
of the previous testimony, and which I hope will be useful to the
Committee. And the reason I go on this narrow focus, is partly because the staff asked me to, but partly because I think the previous
discussion ignores whats really going on, which is that we are in
the midst of a real banking crisis and talking about what will happen in the future, some years down the road or even some months
down the road, is insufficient.
And it is costing our people national wealth and jobs and security
right now, and it is within the power of both Congress and the Administration, to stop it right now, and there are proven ways to do
this.
The good news is that Sweden is relevant, Japan is relevant, the
savings and loan crisis is relevant. Theres a core dynamic to every
banking crisis, and we know what that dynamic is and we know
how to respond to it.
So let me try to recap for you, what those aspects are, and make
some notes on the places where I think the Obama Administrations proposals so far do and do not live up to best practice.
The first point is, we do have to recognize that the money is gone
from the banking system, and right now, were in a very strange
private/public hybrid state.
And in this situation, Paul Volcker spoke about how much government intervention there already is. We cant pretend that
theres a choice between government not knowing how to manage
institutions, government already is backing and guaranteeing these
institutions to an extraordinary degree.
And what we know from the experience with Fannie and
Freddie, among many other countries and many other times, is,
these kinds of public/private hybrids are worse than the institutions that are cleanly public or cleanly private.
Basically, the managers and shareholders who remain in control,
play games with the publics money. If they win, they retain the
profits and they retain their jobs and they retain their shares, and
if they lose, the losses go to the taxpayer.
So when the Secretary of the Treasury says these banks will
then have six months after another two months of stress testing to
get new capital, they are putting us all at risk for an extended period and we are likely to see much larger losses, as well as a drag
on the economy, as well as an ongoing risk of a collapse, unplanned, by one of these institutions.
These are half measures, and we should not settle for that.

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The second point is, therefore, we should take what is being
called the stress test, and without hesitation, go through the
banking system and mercilessly decide who shall and who shall
die.
Here, I agree very much with the written testimony of Mr. Altman. Theres a standard way to triage banks. You basically say,
there are some that either have enough capital or very close to it;
you give them a little pat on the back and you send them on their
way, and they generally get a boost from being shown to be better
than the others.
There are some that are small, short of capital, but clearly viable, with relatively clean bad assets. You sell those off quickly, you
may merge this company with another one, and thats doable.
The third category are the banks that are truly insolvent, and
here, theres two subcategories: There are small ones, like Indy
Mac, you close them.
Theres large ones that are systemically important. Those are the
ones that are, of course, the problem, and those are the only banks
that we should be talking about nationalization.
Now, what do we mean by nationalization? As has been said,
its a red-flag word, people get very scared of it, we can go into that
in the discussion.
Essentially, it means the government, on behalf of the taxpayers,
takes control of the voting rights and the profits, and probably replaces many of the current board and top management.
And the reason you do this, is the same logic as when you do a
merger or acquisition in the private sector. You have a company to
restructure and youre putting up the capital, you want control and
you want the upside on the other end. The American taxpayer deserves no less.
It is actually relatively feasible to do that, and you can talk
about temporary nationalization. No one in their right mind, wants
governments controlling banks for a length of time. Ive been criticizing the Europeans about this for a long time, but it also is not
so unprecedented, and if we can determine the world price for corn,
because of ethanol, if we can bail out GM and Chrysler, we can
manage to deal with a couple of banks.
Finally, we should be moving forward with an RTC model, and
this actually is the other point where I must differ with Mr. Altman and my friends in the Administration. This attempt to create
this complex private/public, non-bad, aggregator, pseudo-bank-bank
to get through the banking system, problems and bad assets, is too
clever, by half.
I appreciate the motivations. They want to make sure theres less
taxpayer money up front, in part, because they dont want to go to
you all, and they want to get what they call price discovery,
which is, accurately, get some basis for pricing these assets.
It, however, will not work. They are not fundamentally changing
the nature of any of these assets, if they do not own them. So the
only value of these assets, the change, is whatever subsidy the government transfers by guarantees to these private investors.
Therefore, youre basically subsidizing them to take the stuff. To
whatever degree there is limited price discovery, there will be what
economists call lemons problem; the private actors will buy the

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good stuff and they will leave the taxpayer and the government
with the bad stuff, which then will have less of an up side, and we
will have given away the up side on the good stuff.
There is also an additional advantage, if we keep it as a whollyowned government RTC, because there are all these sliced-anddiced securitized mortgages and other things out there, and that is
the real reason many of these securities are toxic, because youre
so removed and its un-transparent from those, and only the government, by buying a majority or supermajority share of the outstanding assets in these various classes, can then go through the
laborious work of putting them back together.
The analogy is, when the EPA buys a Superfund site. That real
estate is useless to people, they cant live on it, but if you send in
the right people and detoxify it, that real estate is then worth
something again.
But you actually have to do the cleanup; you cant say, Im going
to give you a mortgage on this toxic waste dump and youre going
to want to live there. That is effectively what is being proposed at
present, with this private/partnership scheme, which forgoes much
else.
I will skip over a remark about the size of banks. That was
raised earlier. Im happy to talk about this.
I would just say one more thing in terms of urgency. It is clear
that whatever the good intentions of the Obama Administration
are, they are not proceeding with the level of urgency regarding the
banking crisis that I think we need.
Essentially, it can be done within a couple of years; it can be
done if we start now, probably mostly within 18 months. The fact
is, we have 18 months till the stimulus package runs out.
The only way the U.S. is different from all these other countries
banking crises, is, were able to borrow money to offset the misery
of doing a bank cleanup. The banking crisis is the same, and if we
dont get the banking crisis fixed before the stimulus runs out,
were just going to be more miserable at the other end. Thank you
very much for the time today.
[The prepared statement of Adam S. Posen appears in the Submissions for the Record on page 62.]
Chair Maloney. Thank you very much. Dr. Mason?
STATEMENT OF DR. JOSEPH MASON, HERMAN MOYSE, Jr./LOUISIANA BANKERS ASSOCIATION ENDOWED PROFESSOR OF
FINANCE, LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY, AND SENIOR FELLOW, THE WHARTON SCHOOL, BERWYN, PA

Dr. Mason. Thank you, Chairman Maloney, Ranking Member

Brownback, Members of the Committee.
My testimony outlines three primary suggestions for short- and
long-term change. The macroeconomic understanding of financial
crises that were dealing with here, is that they dont cause recessions, but they prolong and deepen them.
So, until the crisis is resolved, fiscal and monetary policy will
merely push on a string. Among the key weaknesses Im going to
discuss, are classic problems like too-big-to-fail, insufficient accounting transparency, and textbook asset market overhang.

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The unifying theme of all these, is restoring credibility of the
U.S. financial system.
On the subject of too-big-to-fail, the too-big-to-fail doctrine has
yet to be resolved for nearly 20 years now. The latest incarnation
has been justified by what were now calling systemic importance
of some institutions over others.
Systemic importance, however, is a specious and potentially dangerous concept. In fact, the systemic nature of todays problem lies
only in the degree to which large banks managed to enter business
arrangements that they themselves and regulators were reluctant
to monitor.
Merely ignoring risk, does not make it justifiably systemic. In
fact, the systemic risk debate is distracting from the real issue.
Too-big-to-fail hinders economic growth when it embeds value-destroying lending in our financial system.
Theres a lot of talk about the banks lately. There are three
classes of banks in the system right now, as Dr. Posen discussed:
The insolvent, the marginally solvent, and the solvent.
Insolvent banks, regardless of their purported systemic importance, are value-destroying institutions that need to be closed. If
insolvent banks were car companies, they would be relying on worn
machinery and ill-trained staff, to produce East German Trabants
that break down as soon they leave the production line.
In fact, the loan products these banks created, did break down
almost immediately after they were produced, exhibiting early payment defaults and often involved payments and fees that a borrower could not afford.
The mortgage delinquencies we see today, are, therefore, the result of faulty management, bad supervisory systems, faulty proprietary software, and ineffective employee training at these institutions, not mere exogenous economic shocks. The banks that produced those products, are insolvent as a result, and need to be broken up, not supported.
While the economy does need loans to fuel economic growth, it
needs high-quality, value-creating loans, that borrowers stand a
chance of repaying. Government recapitalization programs with appropriate limits on management and insistence on institutional reform, can possibly benefit marginally-solvent institutions that
present the possibility of supporting economic growth by creating,
rather than destroying value.
Still, while marginally-capitalized banks can be stabilized, their
mere stability will not significantly fuel economic growth. Policy,
therefore, needs to focus on relieving the economy of the value-destroying loans produced by the now insolvent banks, financially
and operationally restructuring the marginally-solvent banks, and,
thirdly, building economic growth upon the lending platforms of
value-creating, solvent banks that are still open.
But that leads to the issue of transparency. Who are these solvent banks? We cant tell. Commonly produced, standardized financial ratios, are meaningless in todays markets, and, without information, investors dont know the value of their holdings, they cant
sell those holdings, and they cant rationally allocate funds derived
from those sales, if they could.

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Without funds, firms cant invest in new projects that create economic value, that is, jobs, income, and growth.
Nonetheless, FASB continues to adhere to a policy of reporting
a single value for every asset. But in a off-balance-sheet world of
contingent claims backed by fuzzy reputational risk and statistically modeled values for Level II and III mark-to-market assets,
a single value is not only inadequate for accounting purposes; its
grossly misleading.
Investors want to know the entire exposure to off-balance-sheet
items and the range of statistical model values that can be reasonably expected to apply to Level II and III assets, that is, the standard errors of the estimates.
Such information allows investors, including all manner of bank
counterparties, to truly stress-test firms financial characteristics
on their own in a transparent way, without being filtered through
Treasurys secrecy and interpretation.
That still leaves the problem of market overhang. Asset market
overhang is today being perpetuated by a dogmatic policy approach
to home ownership and archaic bank regulations that stand in the
way of quick recovery.
If we view the housing crisis as merely one of occupancy, rather
than ownership, policy solutions are readily at hand. The common
understanding of the problem, is that foreclosed homes are dumped
on the market at fire sale prices, and those prices push values
down in surrounding neighborhoods.
But while focusing on the foreclosure part of the problem, were
missing the important part: the fire sale that pushes down asset
prices. Fire sale prices result not because lenders want to sell at
a loss, but because they are forced to do so. They do not have the
legal ability to manage real estate and that ability could greatly relieve pressures on home pricing.
But even without such pressure, we still have a big hole in the
loan servicing market. Loan servicing is a wildly subjective industry. Right now, forthcoming research and news reports are already
showing that many companies claiming to be special servicers are
really run by the same managers that owned the failed subprime
mortgage companies, entering the business to fleece borrowers further and collect the thousand dollars per head fee offered under the
most recent housing plan.
Even worse, modification frauds have been reported to be proliferating throughout the country, praying on the same uninformed
consumer that got the unaffordable subprime loan.
The fact is, servicing quality matters; its crucial to loan value,
and, of course, borrower success in repaying the loan. But the servicing industry needs to be kept in check.
Investors and borrowers alike, are at the mercy of a servicer
whos making a judgment call as to whether a mortgage is salvageable or not. Moreover, that judgment call is made with virtually no
direct oversight.
So, as regulators are learning, servicer accountability and reporting is woefully inadequate and, unfortunately, absent from the discussion right now. It needs to be paid a great deal of attention.
But in closing, I want to say that its very fitting today to have
Chairman Volcker before us on the first panel. The Chairman pre-

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sided over a Federal Reserve at a time when we first learned of
natural rates in the economy.
We learned then that attempts to push unemployment below natural levels, created perverse economic effects. The recent push to
drive home ownership rates to 100 percent, and substitute debt for
income, has had similar perverse effects.
As before, the only way out, is to move through the downturn.
I only hope we can learn from Chairman Volckers example, and
exhibit the courage to do so. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Joseph Mason appears in the Submissions for the Record on page 71.]
Chair Maloney. Thank you very much. I thank all of the panelists for your very important testimony.
Mr. Altman, as the former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury during the RTC challengeand I believe you managed the RTC challengecould you share with us, some insights between that challenge and the challenge we confront now, any differences, and if
you could respond to some of the points that Dr. Posen put forward, that taxpayers may be called upon to assume too much of the
loss in the toxic assets, and his particular proposal that is similar
to the Sweden approach, and your response to it? Again, thank you
very much for your time and for being here.
And thank you for giving us some positive indicators from the
private sector. That was very good to hear.
Mr. Altman. The RTC case, first of all, is one we can learn a
lot from and probably has not been delved into as much as it
should as a guide to what we may be doing now from a public policy point of view.
You may remember, and other Members may remember, that at
the time the RTC was the most popularexcuse me, unpopular organization ever created. It was hugely unpopular. Absolutely no
one liked it. And it was the object of not just criticism but investigations, and so forth.
Now the conventional wisdom at least is that the U.S. addressed
the savings and loan crisis in general, and also through the RTC,
swiftly, effectively, and that it is a model for how to address a financial crisis of that type.
I said in my testimony that I think that despite the enormous
challenges we face today in the depths of this crisis, I do think that
the United States, if you step away back and think of this in broad
historical terms, is addressing this crisis swiftly and creatively and
that ultimately history will render a similar verdict as it has now
done mostly on the S&L crisis.
However, what are the cautionary lessons from the RTC experience? First of all, it took the RTCand this is partially a response
to Dr. Posens point on a bad bankit took the RTC, Chairwoman
Maloney, a long time to get up and running because that is the nature of things. If someone said to me: Well, how long did it take?
And I was not there in the early two or three years. You know the
Clinton Administration came into being in 1993 and the RTC was
formed some time around 1990. But it took about three years for
it to become fully operational. Because it was building a large institution from scratch.

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So if we were to go the bad-bank routeand I think it is a close
debate; I mean, I want to say that Dr. Posen made good points, it
is a close debate as between for example the public/private partnership approach the Administration has put forward and a more aggressive approach towards a so-called bad, or aggregators bank
but if we were to do that, it would take, it would simply take a long
time to make that operational.
You would be talking about building an enormous financial institution from absolutely ground zero. It does not mean it is a bad
idea, it just means that it is not something that would come into
being effectively very quickly.
I think the other point I would make about the RTC is that it
was very widely criticized at the time for the first several rounds
of auctions where it sold, quote, bad assets into the market as it
was statutorily charged to do, and some of those who purchased
them in the early auctions ended up making a lot of money.
You probably remember that controversy. But in retrospect, was
that really a problem? The assets were auctioned. In the early
going there were not many buyers because the market for those assets that were so distressed had not developed very well. And so
the early buyers who took considerable risk ended up doing very
well.
In general I do not think that is a huge problem. And so if we
were to set up this public/private partnership and, yes, the nature
of it is that the investors will receive preferential financing in order
to incentivize them to participate. And if the investors ultimately
do well, as long as the ground rules are clear and the restraints
are sufficient, I do not think that is something to be feared or to
beor to do everything possible to avoid.
But I would basically say in regard to the points that Dr. Posen
made, it is a close argument. If we go the public partnershippublic/private partnership route, the taxpayer will have to participate
very strongly in the profits. So if this turns out to be, as I believe
it will, that the Federal Reserve provides term financing to investors, and those investors or organizations like hedge funds and private equity firms and so forth, the taxpayer will have to be eligible
for a high percentage of the profits that those organizations get.
That is the only fair way to do it.
I think that is how it would have to be set up, and that is how
I would answer Dr. Posens point on that.
Chair Maloney. Thank you very much.
Congressman Brady.
Representative Brady. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
I do think the RTC looks much better today than it did when it
existed. I was in Texas running a Chamber of Commerce. We had
many of the banks that failed in the community, and I will tell you
the RTC in my view, in real-life, delayed the economic recovery of
our communities.
They had no real knowledge of the value of the properties they
were holding. They were very slow to respond. We brought purchasers, we brought investors, couldnt get answers for literally, I
do not exaggerate, years on properties.
And there was no transparency. It was like a black hole. I do
think, having gone through it once, I think if it were to be revived

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45
there are some dramatic lessons that we can learn from how it can
be applied.
Because the end result was the taxpayers did not lose dollars,
and eventually those properties got transferred. But there is a lot
to learn from that experience.
I do thinkI agree with all of youthe sooner we force these assets, bad assets, to the surface the quicker we are going to get consumer confidence back in the economy.
I really appreciated the testimony from all three witnesses. Dr.
Mason, you talked about how existing policy proposals have been
all about suppressing information, information about bank conditions, other sources of risk, even about government programs. And
you talk about the fact that investors want more. They want more
information here, and you talk about investors wanting to know
the range of statistical model values.
In other words, investors want to stress-test financial characteristics on their own. They want the ability to determine this value.
How do you go about doing that? And rather than having the government apply a stress test and then, do certain actions, you are
talking about increasing information dramatically, significantly, so
investors can run those stress tests.
How do you do that?
Dr. Mason. Well to get at this, Ill start by saying I testified previously on FASB reform and I made the point there that unlike
previous crises the assets that we are dealing with here are structured finance assets. Over the last two years we have learned kind
of Securitization 101 which involved the idea that the bank sells
loans into a pool, and then the pool funds its purchase of the assets
from the bank via securitized bonds.
That is Securitization 101. We need to get to Securitization 102,
which is that that sale was never really complete; that there were
side agreements. There were contractual agreements, too, but the
additional side agreements that could never be contracted to stipulated that, if anything happens adversely to this loan pools performance, I as the bank will take it back and Ill make it good for
investors.
That is incredibly important. Because over the years from the
mid1990s on bank regulators allowed this over and over again in
violation of their own regulatory policies. FASB enshrined us in
their own rules such that a greater degree of this activity could go
on.
So at the end of the day you get a ratings agency who comes in
and rates this. And quite rationally they look at it and they say,
well, the condition of the loans in this pool doesnt really matter;
what matters is whether this bank is going to support it at the end
of the day. And since the bank always will because it wants to
issue next month, and the month after that, and the month after
that, and the month after that, then we can call it whatever we
want to: AAA. And this is all just a big farce.
So finally we have come home to the end game in this where the
bank does not support it anymore. So now both the bank investors
as well as the asset-backed securities investors want to know, Mr.
Bank, how much did you sell? How much do you have out there
that people want supported?

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If youre not going to be able to sell any more, which banks cannot right now, then how much does your capital support both in
your contractual obligations to support these pools, and any additional obligations you have to the government under TARP to increase lending or anything else?
Banks do not have the capital ability to expand. When you live
in a world where you make a loan and you sell it out the back door,
you do not keep the capital on your balance sheet to make a loan
and keep it in the bank. And that is why we are at a standstill
right now.
You cannot reasonably expect these banks, when you give them
capital to shore them up just to basic solvency, to lend if they cannot push the loan out the back door. The Fed facilities are for secondary market securitizations. There really is no market to sell
this into.
If we wanted to talk for an hour, I could give you example after
example from securitization history from the early 1990s to the
present where we have seen this demonstrated time and again. It
is not unknown to the industry.
Representative Brady. Thank you, Madam Chairman.
Dr. Mason. But this is the way the world works.
Chair Maloney. Thank you. Congressman Hinchey.
Mr. Hinchey. Thanks very much. And thank you, gentlemen, for
being here and for the very interesting testimony and the comments and responses to questions that you have given. I appreciate
it.
It is a very interesting problem that we are dealing with, and
one that is very serious and very difficult. Over the course of the
last several months there have been some shifting changes in ways
in which this needs to be dealt with, and focusing on this wide
spread and worsening financial crisis. It is not getting better. It is
continually getting worse, as you pointed out.
Last September of course we remember the Bush Administration
and Secretary Paulson came in and asked for $700 billion to deal
with the banking crisis and thought that, in their expression to the
Congress, that that would be a major contribution to taking care
of the problem.
But it was not very long after that bailout legislation was passed
that they shifted the strategy and started something called the
Capital Purchase Program, and several other capital infusion programs.
The effect of that has been very interesting. Over the past few
months the Federal Reserve, for example, engaged in huge lending
facilities, and over the course of the last year and a half they have
expanded the balance sheet from just underjust over, actually,
just over $900 billion to now almost $2 trillion.
With the new lending program the Fed announced over the past
few months that we are likely to see the assets expand by an additional $1.6 trillion. At the same time we are still afraid that the
major banks left standing will continue to become insolvent.
The crisis they are facing affecting credit and credit variously, in
various ways, and of course a general way, has a general effect on
the economy.

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So what we are seeing now is the impact on households and
small businesses. They cannot borrow. They cannot borrow, they
cannot spend. They are having a direct effect on output, economic
output, and obviously an economic effect on employment.
As the incomes of households and firms are going down, and they
are continuing to do so, default rates on existing debts are going
up, and potential borrowers are becoming less credit worthy.
So we need to really face up to this issue, not just specifically
with regard to individual aspects of it but we have got to look at
this whole thing very, very carefully. So I am wondering what you
might suggest to us is the root cause of the general financial crisis,
and what Congress should do to address and solve the crisis that
the banks are facing and the impact that the bank crisis is having
on the economy generally.
What are the orders of priority perhaps that we should be dealing with?
Mr. Altman. Well, Congressman, I said it in my testimony that
I thought the root cause of it was not, as so many people say, the
twin housing and mortgage collapse, but rather that that was a
symptom, and that the root cause was a combination which I would
argue would always be lethal if allowed to continue long enough
and in this case it didof extremely low interest rates and extremely high levels of liquidity.
Because if you think about it, if you have enormous liquidity
which we saw build up in locations like China, Singapore, and the
Persian Gulf oil states and then recycled back to the West, particularly the U.S., and that liquidity is facing very low yields because
the levels of interest rates were so low given the Federal Reserves
stance, it is like water running downhill. It seeks out higher yields.
And the way you find higher yields is to look for weaker credits,
because the weaker the credit the higher the rate that credit has
to pay. It is one of the iron laws of finance.
So these giant amounts of money were seeking out weaker credits. Well, they sought them out everywhere but the easiest way to
find them was in the mortgage market, which is one of the deepest
and most liquid in the world, and of course the weak part of the
mortgage market is subprime.
But it was that combination of very low interest rates and high
liquidity which drove this crisis through. So housing prices, which
had averaged 1.4 percent rates of appreciation for 30 years, because of the huge amounts flowing into the mortgage market which
then allowed so many homes to be acquired which might not otherwise have been, rose ultimately to 11 percent. We had an 11 percent increase in home price appreciation at the peak. And of course
it was not sustainable, and the rest is history. So that is my view
on what the root cause was.
As for how we should address it, I happen to think that in the
past yearand particularly the Obama Administration in the past
month and a halfis addressing it very, very aggressively. These
four stepsthe Stimulus Plan, the Adjusted TARP, its been substantially adjusted; the proposed public/private partnership, and
well have to see the details on that; and then the attack on the
mortgage and housing problem which has been laid out nowrepresents a very aggressive program. And I think it is a good one.

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Is it perfect? No, it is not perfect, but it is a sound and good one
which, to lay out in 38 days is a pretty Herculean achievement in
my book.
Mr. Hinchey. Well I appreciate what you just said in response
to that, and I think that the example that you use in the answer
to the question is consistent with what you said in your testimony
which I think is very factual and seriously a part of the problem.
We have seen it in the past. We see it now.
But we have also seen major manipulations of investment, and
falsification of information in the context of bonds, huge ones, huge
falsification, huge bonds, and a lot of that has to do with the repeal
of the GlassSteagall Act and the way in which the whole manipulation of financial investment then was just brought into play.
So I am just wondering. Maybe Dr. Posen might want to comment on that and give us some insight.
Mr. Posen. Thank you, Congressman.
If you ask a central banker like me what is wrong, I will say
monetary policy was right, regulation was wrong. If you ask a private banker or a Treasury person, he or she will tell you monetary
policy was wrong and regulation was right. So obviously you have
to sort your way through the biases.
But essentially unbidden from that I would have started out with
a variant of what you said as the root cause. It was not so much
we deregulated excessively, it was that regulation was not allowed
to keep up with financial developments for the last 15 to 20 years.
And supervision was actively discouraged for much of that time.
Ned Gramlich, the late former Federal Reserve Governor, has
documented this very clearly in how the Federal Reserve let us
down in the mortgage market. There has been good reporting about
the opposition to having any sort of regulation over derivatives.
There was the failure to decide to let SIVs, various off-balancesheet vehicles be taken seriously as part of the mandate. I mean,
essentially what happened was you had the Sandy Weills of the
world coming to see Alan Greenspan in the mid1990s and saying,
look, there is an uneven playing field. It is what Krugman now
calls the Shadow Banking System. Here (indicating one level) and
we are here (indicating another level), and I want to compete. Give
me an even playing field.
And the way that could have been dealt with was to bring it
more into line, and including putting more regulations on the advantaged part of the field, the nonbanks.
Instead what happened was everything was done to use Federal
Reserve and supervisory discretion to ease the regulations on the
traditional banks. And so that ultimately was the core of the problem.
Monetary ease certainly helped. But if there had not been monetary ease you would still have had much of the same outcome. It
is only if there had been extreme monetary tightening could you
have prevented that.
So where do we go from here? Actually it is funny, given the differences in analysis. I actually very much agree with Mr. Altman
in terms of what are the components of the prescription.
We have the Stimulus. I commend the Congress and the Administration for getting it through. It is not perfect, but it is good. That

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will put some check on how far down things go, and that buys us
time.
We are going to do some kind of asset assessment on the banks,
and we are going to have some form of getting the bad assets off
the books. Again, we can disagree about the particular ways. My
concerns are more about what the taxpayer gets in return, and
what is the accountability. But in the end, if you do a bad job of
it it is only money. But the important thing is getting that stuff
off the banks.
Another piece of it, I am less concerned frankly about direct
interventions in the housing market. Another piece of it though is
we do have to do the kind of long-term down payments other Members on this committee were talking about to Chairman Volcker
and that the President spoke about the other night, because that
is what allows us to keep the interest rates anchored so we can
fund the things we need to fund.
So in point of fact, the disagreements matter a great deal for
what happens when you all sit down to restructure the system
going forward, but there is a very wide range of economists and
policymakers and business people from right to left who largely
agree on the prescriptions, and there is a good reason for that.
Chair Maloney. Thank you.
Mr. Hinchey. Thank you.
Chair Maloney. Secretary Volcker talked about moving forward
and how we would face this financial restructuring, and he mentioned it should not be done in a piecemeal way, but in an overcomprehensive way, and how possibly capping leverage, or restricting
leverage, and having functional responsibilities of banks returning
to their primary responsibility, whether it is commercial banking,
insurance companies just doing insurance.
Would you comment, starting with Mr. Altman, on how you see
the restructuring that we confront going forward?
Mr. Altman. Well Chairman Volcker I thought made a very,
very important point, which was that we need a broad overhaul of
all financial regulation. And I might say it seems to me that the
Administration and the Congress are going to put one in place.
But, that we should start from a full-fledged blueprint rather
than try to do it, as he said, piecemeal. Because this is regulatory
reform of the most complex and most important order.
Chair Maloney. Um-hmm.
Mr. Altman. There are a series of proposals, or frameworks
which have been put forward, most particularly the Group of 30
Framework with Chairman Volcker himself chaired and the report
that he had with him today, which I am sure my fellow panelists
also have readit is a really good starting pointbut Tim Geitner
testified on this extensively a couple of times here before the Congress as President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and
his testimony really provides an important blueprint there.
And of course Secretary Paulson laid out a blueprint himself almost a year agoit was March of 2008under very different circumstances, but some parts of that, like merging some of the regulatory agencies will still stand the test of time.
This is going to be a very big job, I would think the number one
job for the two Banking Committees, and it is probably going to be

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tough and long, because there are so many vested interests at
stake, and it is very complicated. But if you stop and think about
it, we have had the greatest regulatory failure in the modern era
here, the single greatest.
Put aside any other regulatory example, this is the greatest failure we have ever seen. And it is really quite across the board. And
it is the greatest cry, so to speak, for regulatory overhaul any of
us will ever see.
So we need to do this right. I suspect it will take most of 2009
to do this, from a legislative point of view. It could even slip into
2010. But we really need to do it right. And it is a big, difficult job.
We have nine separate financial regulators. That does not make
sense.
We ended up having two banking systemsone what we think
of conventionally as the banking system; one, as Dr. Posen referred
to, as the Shadow Banking System, that ended up being just as big
as the other one, but it was unregulated. It was highly leveraged.
It financed itself primarily on a short-term basis. And it was the
source of most of these problems, not all of them but a lot of them.
Investments banks, mortgage finance companies, and so forth. So
we need to have, as Mr. Volcker and others have said, for institutions that are, you can call them systemically important, you can
call them important participants in the money market, they need
to be subject to the same regulatory framework from the point of
view of prudential supervision, and they need to be subject to the
same regulator.
That is probably the single starting point. But this is going to be
very complicated and very, very important, because we cannot
allow a collapse like this to occur again.
Chair Maloney. Thank you.
Dr. Posen, and then Dr. Mason, for your comments.
Mr. Posen. Thank you, Chairwoman Maloney.
I want to pick up exactly where Dr. Altman left off, Mr. Altman
left offSecretary Altman, whateverRoger [Laughter.]
Mr. Posen. Very gracious. This being the biggest regulatory failure and it cutting across a wide range of points, and I may actually
preempt a bit Professor Mason because I want to pick up on a couple of things he said in his opening remarks.
Which is, a lot of this had to do with too-big-to-fail, or too-systemic-to-fail, and fears about that.
And (b), a lot of this had to do with the central bank and the
supervisors having too much discretion. I mean, that was sort of
the underlying theme of many of the questions asked of Chairman
Volcker before and being asked now, which is:
Okay, we have a lot of rules in place. Some of them were not enforced. We had a lot of inconsistency across regulatory agencies. We
had a general sentiment over a certain number of years not to
overregulate, or oversupervise, and whoever was in office adhered
to that.
And so I think moving forward the Congress and the Administration have to think about a very fundamental change not just in the
structure but in the nature of it.
We have to move even more, to my mind, to a rules-based system
with very simple, very clear rules: that you do not get a lot of dis-

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51
cretion to enforce in some black-box way. And we can go into the
value and risk models and all these things that the banks were allowed to do for self-enforcement.
In addition, I think one of the things which was raised in the G
30 Report, which I also commend, is the idea that if you take toobig-to-fail seriously you have to take seriously the fact that you do
not want to have banks that are necessarily that big.
I think in the end there is a sentence there, and Chairman
Volckers testimony today where he backs off that a little bit and
says, well, but you will inevitably have a certain number of very
large institutions, systemically important institutions and you just
have to watch them extra carefully.
I am not entirely sure that we have to make that compromise.
I think, no, there are not anti-monopoly reasons to break up large
institutions, but if, God forbid, as I fear may happen, the U.S. Government ends up owning significant shares of a number of systematically important institutions, it is going to have to make a choice
about the structure anyway. And it may be possible to break those
up as part of the reselling them back to the private sector.
Chair Maloney. Thank you. Professor Mason.
Dr. Mason. Thank you. I am going to pick up on a little bit of
both, what both of you said with respect especially to rules and to
functionality.
Really I view the source of this crisis as originating back with
the imposition of Basel I and attempting to regulate by a rule
which we called a regulatory capital ratio.
When that happened, in fact on the tail end of a recession, a lot
of banks could not make that regulatory capital cutoff and they
also could not find new capital so they found securitization as a
very handy way to reduce assets instead to manage the regulatory
rule.
So any time government lays down a rule, Wall Street immediately puts to work thousands if not millions of attorneys to figure
out how to get around that rule and arbitrage that somehow. And
I think that is a very important element that needs to be built into
any new regulatory framework, just the admission that millions of
minds are going to think about how to arbitrage this and they
probably will figure it out. And so the new regulatory system has
to be flexible and dynamic in order to keep pace with the Street.
In terms of functionality, I see functionality as beginning with
what Chairman Volcker talked about, which is really going back to
First Principles and really, really basic First Principles.
Imagine if we are setting this system up for the first time. We
think of a financial system as having an array of institutions, some
of which take a lot of risk and operate unregulated and do whatever they want, and others are very constrained in the public interest.
We need to decide who those institutions are and what they are
going to be called. Once we set that up, then we have certain gravitational conditions you can call them, basically risk can travel from
regulated to nonregulated firms but it probably should not be flowing the other direction; otherwise, you are setting up a regulatory
arbitrage and the kind of problems that got us to the current crisis.

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So identify what those risks are and how they are supposed to
flow. Then, when you have a regulated commercial banking system
that is funding itself in an unregulated market system, you know
risk is probably flowing the wrong way and you stop it.
This also gives us a way to think about fungibility of risk. Risk
can transform. In fact, in what I described earlier about
securitization, we had risk being transformed from contracted credit risk claims to uncontracted reputational risk claims.
We need to think really hard about, again, how financial institutions are working to get around the rules so that we can always
at least keep pace with them in the debate.
One thing I noticed through my years at OCC is that the Street
has many more attorneys than the regulators do. They are always
going to be out in front. That is fine. But we can still do a much
better job of keeping pace. Looking back through the industry we
can point to industry expressing concerns with all the weaknesses
that are faced with us today to regulators who refuse to listen.
Thanks.
Chair Maloney. Thank you very much. I just would like to announce that Members may submit their statements and questions
for the record.
I thank all the panelists, and the meeting is adjourned. Thank
you.
[Whereupon, at 1:08 p.m., Thursday, February 26, 2009, the
meeting was adjourned.]

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SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD

(53)

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PREPARED STATEMENT

OF

CAROLYN MALONEY

Good morning. I want to welcome former Chairman Volcker and our other witnesses and thank you all for your testimony today. Chairman Volcker, when it
comes to understanding the economy and financial markets, you are in a league
with only one player.
Over the past two days, we have heard rather sobering testimony from Fed Chairman Bernanke that, even under the best of circumstances, our economy remains
perhaps a year away from making a full recovery. The problems plaguing the real
economy and the financial system are intertwined, so it is critical that we act as
swiftly as possible.
At the core of the ongoing liquidity crisis is the decline in home prices. Home
prices continued their free-fall at the fastest pace on record in December. Since the
beginning of this crisis, Congress has been working on keeping families in their
homes. We are now working closely with the new Administration to reverse the
deepening decline in home prices. Today, the House will consider H.R. 1106, the
Helping Families Save Their Homes Act, which is designed to spur loan modifications and avoid bankruptcy for homeowners.
Strong indications are that this downturn could be the worst in the post-World
War II period. The current recession, which began in December 2007, has caused
massive job loss and a precipitous decline in economic growth. Congress recently
passed the nearly $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA),
which provides fiscal stimulus in the form of aid to state governments, infrastructure spending, increased unemployment insurance and food stamps, and tax breaks
to middle class workers and families. This package is designed to stem the real
human costs and our economic losses by creating millions of jobs, helping families
in need, and investing for the future.
The concern is that effects of our recovery package may be blunted if the financial
crisis lasts too long. The Federal Reserve has taken extraordinary steps to maintain
the operation of our financial and credit markets, but clearly, we need a comprehensive plan to return to well-functioning markets. In his address to Congress Tuesday
night, the President pledged to work with Congress to adopt new rules of the
roada reformed financial regulatory structure to prevent future crises and hold
financial executives accountable.
Our entire regulatory system is in serious need of renovation. It failed to properly
identify risky mortgage-related assets. It did not recognize that these risks were
being concentrated in highly-leveraged and important financial institutions. And it
failed to anticipate the dangers posed to the financial system as a whole by these
concentrations of risk. It also failed to provide mechanisms for dealing with the failure of important non-depository financial firms.
These shortcomings must be addressed. Regulators must obtain better information, better measures of systemic vulnerability, and the authority necessary to head
off threats to financial stability. It is obviously too costly to leave the regulatory system as it is.
As winter turns to spring, my hope is that these efforts will break the downward
spiral of our economy and bring about a thaw in credit markets, but even more may
need to be done.
I look forward to our witnesses views on reviving our economy and restoring our
financial markets.
PREPARED STATEMENT

OF

SENATOR SAM BROWNBACK

Thank you Chairwoman Maloney for arranging todays important hearing and
thank you Chairman Volker and members of our second panel for testifying today.
Our economy is in the midst of a serious recession and many Americans are suffering from job losses, home losses, and uncertainty about their retirement savings,
their jobs, and their childrens future. Unfortunately, in addition, our financial system remains a problem.
I would like to begin by assuring every American that I am acutely aware of the
pain and suffering that they feel. I also would like to assure them that, as always
before, we will join together to confront our challenges head-on and emerge strong.
Given the severity of the economic downturn that we face, and efforts already
under way to try to offset the downturn, it is absolutely clear to me that the very
last thing we want to do is raise taxes. We know from experiences in the Great Depression and elsewhere that moves to stimulate an economy can easily be overwhelmed when the government also tries to raise taxes to shore up its budget. Unfortunately, in the midst of our current economic difficulties, there are those who
wish to raise taxes using class-warfare rhetoric.

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We cannot afford tax cuts for the rich, according to the rhetoric. Yet, we know
that, because of complexities in our tax code, there are many small business owners
who declare business income as personal income, and many of those fall into the
category of the rich. Those small business owners often plow their incomes back
into their businesses and, by most definitions, are hardly people you would think
of as rich. By increasing taxes on those business owners under the guise of taxing
the rich, we are going to end up taxing small business owners who will respond
by reducing their business activities, reducing their employment of workers, and reducing their investments necessary to keep their businesses running and growing.
We also cannot afford, under the rhetoric of eliminating tax cuts for the rich,
to increase taxes on income from capital, such as dividends. It might be comforting
to some to think that increasing dividend taxes will somehow get even with rich fatcat stockowners. But we know that higher dividend taxes will hurt many people not
ordinarily thought of as rich, like a retired couple counting day-to-day on dividend
income from stock investments that they made over a lifetime of work.
It is not the time to increase taxes, but the looming financial imbalances in our
entitlement programs and significant spending aimed at stimulus and financial
stability mean that we continue to pile up debt, which threatens long-run economic
growth. Overconsumption, indebtedness, and speculation contributed to the current
crisis, and yet the government is currently traveling down the same road with massive amounts of deficit-financed spending, speculating on success of an expansion of
government and long-term spending under the guise ofstimulus. We need to cut the
rate of growth of government spending and live within our governmental means.
In the face of a severe downturn in the economy, and a downturn that has accelerated in recent months, and in the face of significant declines in stock values and
homeowner wealth, it is almost inconceivable that there are those who wish to raise
taxes. What will increased taxes on small business owners do to job creation? What
will increased taxes on dividends and other forms of capital income do to stock values and the portfolios of every American family? Now is clearly not the time to increase taxes.
In our financial system, the time has come to restructure the system and our regulations to prevent recurrence of a crisis like the one we are experiencing. One thing
seems clear: we need to prevent speculative and highly leveraged excesses from
threatening the stability of our entire national and global financial system. We are
currently grappling with institutions that are deemed too big to fail. They have
become so big, and so complex, and so intertwined with more stable institutions that
we fear that they cannot be allowed to fail or the entire system will collapse.
The large institutions engaged in highly leveraged, complex, and risky investments with the understanding that: on the upside, they win; on the downside, they
will be backstopped by taxpayers because their institutions are too big to fail. That
means private gains on the upside and public losses on the downside. And that is
not a desirable or acceptable system.
I am interested in what Chairman Volker and other panelists have to say on how
we can restructure the financial system to avoid the heads we win, tails the taxpayers lose situation that has developed.
I would also like to close by noting a recent letter sent by a medical doctor on
the University of Kansas faculty to The Economist magazine regarding speculation
in banking. Dr. Frederick Holmes of Kansas City, Kansas writes that:
. . . responsible people and responsible institutions have not hurled themselves, lemming-like, into the abyss of ruin. Despite the death knell sounded
throughout the media, most people and most banks did not encumber themselves with mountains of unsecured debt. In the conservative heartland of
America we have avoided the razzle-dazzle of sophistication and computer-modelling when managing our finances.
I have entrusted a locally owned bank in Kansas City with my money for
more than 40 years, and it has been a good steward of my modest wealth.
Last year the chief executive posted a brief notice on the banks website to
reassure depositors. It read, When the siren song of the subprime-mortgage
market came along we took the long view and turned a deaf ear. I am going
to leave my money with the folks at this bank for the next 40 years, for they
seem to have the intelligence and common sense largely absent in the leadership of large banks.
There are many people in the heartland who are genuinely and rightly upset that
they are now being asked to support the highly leveraged speculative bets placed
by the big institutions that are too big to fail. I am interested in determining how
we can prevent this from happening again.

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56
PREPARED STATEMENT

OF

REPRESENTATIVE KEVIN BRADY

I would like to join in welcoming the witnesses appearing before us today. Current
financial and economic conditions pose serious challenges to policy makers.
It is widely agreed that nothing else we do will matter much until the issue of
how to dispose of toxic bank assets is resolved, but neither the Bush nor Obama
administrations have devised a solution to this admittedly difficult problem. The recent Treasury proposal has not been well received because it did not clearly address
this issue. The Economist magazine, for example, said that it looked depressingly
like TARP I: timid, incomplete, and short on detail. The lack of specifics has undermined confidence and contributed to financial market instability. A better approach is needed to help foster recovery.
The collapse of the credit boom and fall in related asset values has already wiped
out many trillions of dollars of wealth held by both households and financial institutions, while plunging the economy into a deep recession. It also appears that the
financial position of the federal government will deteriorate sharply over the next
decade. The Congress has passed a partisan stimulus bill that relies heavily on deficit spending to boost the economy. However, as economist John Taylor noted in a
recent paper presented at the annual American Economic Association meetings,
there is little empirical evidence that government spending is a way to end a recession or accelerate a recovery.
The 2009 budget situation was projected to deteriorate dramatically, but the stimulus legislation makes the situation even worse. Federal spending is expected to increase to at least $3.7 trillion, an increase of $685 billion or 23 percent in a single
year. Federal spending as a percentage of GDP is set to increase from 20.9 percent
to 25.7 percent, a post WWII high. The huge increase in federal spending, along
with a fall off in revenue, will push the deficit to at least $1.4 trillion in 2009, a
record level and a staggering 200 percent increase over its level of the previous year.
The real budget outlook is actually considerably worse because the CBO calculations
do not include a number of items that will further enlarge the deficits.
The enormous increases in deficit spending will push the publicly held debt from
$5.8 trillion in fiscal 2008 to $7.4 trillion in 2009. The publicly held debt as a percent of GDP is expected to increase from 40.8 percent in 2008 to 51.8 percent in
2009, a large 11 percentage point increase in only one year. Moreover, the added
spending of the stimulus bill will push this debt-to-GDP ratio to about 60 percent
by 2011. One recent paper released by the Brookings Institution suggested that $1
trillion annual deficits could persist for each of the next ten years under what the
authors consider to be optimistic economic assumptions.
The prospect of borrowing over a trillion dollars for questionable programs thrown
together with little procedural deliberation has rightly given the American people
pause. However, bailouts for the financial sector, auto industry, and others could
add trillions to the projected debt in coming years. According to a recent Bloomberg
report, . . . the stimulus package the U.S. Congress is completing would raise the
governments commitment to solving the financial crisis to $9.7 trillion, enough to
pay off more than 90 percent of the nations home mortgages. . . . Nearly $8 trillion
of this total reflects lending and guarantees provided by the Federal Reserve and
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). Clearly, trillions of dollars of exposure to distressed borrowers does not enhance the financial position of the U.S. government.
In a recent influential paper, economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff
examine the history of financial crises. Among their findings is that the debt of the
central government jumps an average of 86 percent in the years following a financial crisis. This would translate into a level of $11 trillion for U.S. publicly held debt
in a few years. Unfortunately, current trends suggest we are well on our way to this
kind of outcome.
The U.S. Treasury is expected to raise as much as $2 trillion in 2009 to finance
the extraordinary financial demands placed by recession, growing bailouts, and
stimulus measures on the government. Similar steps by other major countries will
intensify the upward pressures on interest rates. The recent increases in long-term
mortgage rates are especially troubling given the condition of the housing sector.
Furthermore, the looming retirement of the baby boom generation will cause entitlement spending to accelerate faster and faster in coming decades. It is widely recognized that without policy changes, long-term imbalances in entitlement programs
will cause publicly held federal debt to balloon out of control. In 2007, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected under an extended baseline scenario that publicly held federal debt will eventually climb to 239 percent of GDP without policy
changes.

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One risk is that the high levels of deficit spending and debt accumulation may
signal to global financial markets that the United States is unwilling to resolve its
long-term budgetary problems. As a result, U.S. interest rates could increase significantly. As the recent paper released by Brookings notes, . . . Recent trends in credit
default swap markets show a clearly discernable uptick in the perceived likelihood
of default on 5-year U.S. senior Treasury debt, a notion that was virtually unthinkable in the past . . . although fiscal policy problems are usually described as
medium- and long-term issuesthe future may be upon us much sooner than previously expected.
The bottom line is that the fiscal position of the federal government is deteriorating significantly and the outlook is fairly grim. The looming possibility of large
bailouts could add trillions of dollars to the national debt. The truth is that this
country simply cannot afford to make further spending commitments and must consider entitlement reforms and other measures to restrain the growth of runaway
deficit spending. American families cannot afford policies that ignore surging federal
spending, lay the groundwork for higher taxes and inflation, and undermine the
prospects for future economic and employment growth.

PREPARED STATEMENT

OF

PAUL A. VOLCKER

Madame Chairwoman and Members of the Joint Economic Committee:

It is no secret that we are living in a difficult time for the economy, with unprecedented complexities, complications and risks for financial markets and financial institutions. You have entitled this hearing Restoring the Economy: Strategies for
Short-term and Long-term change. I appreciate the invitation to address those
issues, but I am sure you understand that any brief statement may elicit as many
questions as answers. In the circumstances, I will proceed by making a few points
that I consider highly relevant in the effort to achieve recovery, greater stability,
and protection against a future financial crisis. We must not again leave the markets so vulnerable that a breakdown will again threaten the national and world
economies.
1. My first point is to emphasize an essential longer-term reality.
The present crisis grew out a serious and unsustainable imbalance in the United
States and world economies. Specifically, over recent years, until the outset of the
recession, Americans spent more than our country produced or was capable of producing at full employment. That spending, reflected in exceptionally high levels of
consumption generally and in housing in particular, was made possible by a high
level of imports, a collapse in personal savings, and large trade and current account
deficits. The consequence was the nation became dependent on borrowing abroad
hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
For a while it was all quite comfortable. Imports from China and elsewhere satisfied our strong consumption proclivities without inflationary pressures. China,
Japan and other countries were eager to export and willing to acquire and hold trillions of U.S. dollars, keeping our currency strong and helping to keep our interest
rates low.
The trouble was it could not last. The process came to be dependent upon an enormous build-up of domestic as well as international debt, facilitated by the low interest rates and sense of easy money. The bulk of that debt came to be mortgagerelated. It was supported by the strong increase in housing prices, giving the illusion of wealth creation. When housing prices leveled off and then declined, the
weakest mortgagesso-called subprimecame under pressure, and the highly engineered over-extended financial structure began to unravel. As the financial crisis
broadened, the recession was triggered.
I repeat that story because the first and most fundamental lesson of the crisis is
that future policy should be alert to, and take appropriate measures to deal with,
persistent and ultimately destabilizing economic imbalances. I realize that is a large
and continuing challenge of international as well as domestic proportions, but it is
the essence of prudent economic management.
2. Secondly, I turn to the problem in financial markets.
The rising debt, particularly mortgage credit, was facilitated and extended by the
modern alchemy of financial engineering. Mathematic techniques that have developed in an effort to diffuse and limit risk turned out in practice to magnify and obscure risks, partly because, in all their complexity and opacity, transparency was
lost. Risk management failed. At the same time, highly aggressive compensation
practices encouraged risk taking in the face of misunderstood and sometimes almost
incomprehensible debt instruments.

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As we look ahead, the obvious lesson is the need for more disciplined financial
management generally and better risk management in particular. Plainly, review
and reform of compensation practices are particularly difficult matters that defy
rigid specification.
3. As the financial crisis evolved, weaknesses in accounting, credit rating agencies
and other market practices were exposed.
Fair value accounting rules were inconsistently applied and have contributed to
downward spiraling valuations in illiquid markets. Credit rating agencies failed to
analyze collective debt obligations with sufficient vigor. Clearance, settlement and
collateral arrangements for obscure derivative contracts created uncertainty and
need clarification.
These are all highly technical issues, not readily dealt with by legislation. They
do need to be resolved as part of a comprehensive reform process.
4. More directly of governmental concern are the lapses in financial regulation
and supervision that permitted institutional weaknesses to fester, failed to identify
exceptional risks and deal adequately with conflicts of interest, and did not expose
large personal scandals after warnings.
This area will require, and Im sure will receive, close attention by the Administration and the Congress in the period ahead. I will be surprised if you do not conclude that substantial changes will need to be made in the administrative structures
for oversight of the financial system.
Taken together, the need for change is both obvious and wide ranging. In approaching the challenge, I do urge that all these matters be considered in the context of a considered judgment about the appropriate role and functioning of the financial system in the years ahead.
At the most general level, I am certain we all would like to see a diverse, competitive, predominantly privately owned and managed institutions and markets,
able to efficiently and flexibly meet the needs of global, national and local businesses, governments, and individuals.
Those words are taken directly from a recent report of the Group of 30 setting
out a Framework for Financial Stability. It points up the challenge of making those
broad generalities a strong and lasting operational reality. I chaired that effort and
naturally recommend it to you.
The Report makes some eighteen broad recommendations, touching upon most of
the points I enumerated earlier. One area it does not cover are specific proposals
for restructuring the agencies responsible for regulation and supervision. I believe
judgment and legislation in that area should logically follow and not proceed judgment about the overall design of the financial system.
The G-30 Report recognizes what I believe is common ground among most analysts. Specifically, all banking organizations should come with the framework of an
official safety net, with the natural corollary of regulation and supervision. It is also
recognized that a few of the banks (and possibly some other financial organizations)
will be so large, and their operations so intertwined in complex relationships with
other institutions, as to entail systemic risk. In other words, the functioning of the
financial system as a whole could be jeopardized in the event of a sudden and disorderly failure. Consequently, those institutions should be subjected to particularly
high international standards directed toward maintaining their safety and soundness.
Taken together these banking organizations should be predominantly relationship-oriented, providing essential financial services to individuals, businesses of all
sizes, and governments. To help assure their stability and continuity and limit potential conflicts of interest, strong restrictions on risk-prone capital market activitiese.g., hedge funds, equity funds, and proprietary tradingwould be enforced.
At the same time, trading and transaction-oriented financial institutions operating primarily in capital markets could be less intensively regulated, although
stronger registration and reporting requirements would be appropriate. In instances
where the institutions are so large or otherwise so complex as to be systemically
relevant, capital, leveraging and liquidity requirements would be imposed.
Implicit in this approach is the need for strong cooperation and coordination
among national authorities and regulators. Some approachesaccounting standards, capital and liquidity requirements, and registration and reporting proceduresshould be internationally agreed and consistent in application to minimize
regulatory arbitrage and any tendency by particular countries or financial centers
to seek competitive advantage by tolerating laxity in oversight.
All this will take time if the necessary consensus is to be achieved and a comprehensive rather than a piece-meal approach is taken. I also recognize that a coherent vision of the future should help guide the emergency responses to the

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59
present crisis and, even more important, the steps taken as the truly extraordinary
measures now in place are relaxed and ended.
Let that debate proceed. I will, of course, welcome the opportunity to participate
in your deliberations.
PREPARED STATEMENT

OF

ROGER C. ALTMAN

Madam Chair and Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to testify
before you this morning.
This is a historic and deeply challenging moment in the annals of finance and
public policy. It is historic because the Western financial system is experiencing
shocks which virtually no one foresaw, no one imagined, and few truly understand.
It is deeply challenging because, while the finance and monetary authorities have
launched very aggressive interventions over the past year, it is not yet clear whether these will successfully stabilize the financial system. My view is that these efforts
have been well-conceived and will prevail. It may not be evident that they have
done so, however, until 2010.
True Origins of the Crisis
We all have read and heard endless analyses of how this collapse occurred. But
one widespread misperception still persists.
Conventional wisdom attributes the current crisis to the twin collapse of housing
prices and the subprime mortgage market in the U.S. This is not correct. The underlying cause was an invariably lethal combination of extremely low interest rates and
extremely high levels of liquidity.
Low interest rates reflected the Federal Reserves overly accommodative monetary
policy after September 11, 2001 and the recession of 2001 and 2002. The federal
funds rate was held to 1% for nearly three years.
The extreme liquidity reflected what Chairman Ben Bernanke has called the
global savings glut. Namely, enormous financial surpluses realized by several developing countries, most notably China, Singapore, and the Persian Gulf oil states.
Facing low yields, this mountain of liquidity naturally sought higher returns and
this led it to weaker credits. Huge amounts of capital thus flowed into the subprime
mortgage sectorthe 2005 and 2006 volumes were six times the long-term historical
averageand towards weak borrowers of all types in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere around the globe. As with all financial bubbles, historical default rates on
these poor credits and other key lessons of history were ignored.
The flood of mortgage money pushed home prices up at unprecedented rates. The
30-year average annual appreciation rate had been 1.4 percent, but soared to 7.6
percent by the middle of the decade and ultimately reached 11 percent at the peak.
The rest is history. But, my point is,that low interest rates and high liquidity
caused this bubble, not home prices and subprime mortgages.
A Subpar Economic Recovery
This is the first balance sheet-driven recession in over sixty years and, unfortunately, that factor mandates a sub-normal recovery.
In the modern era, recessions have typically reflected a sequence of overheating,
inflationary pressures, monetary tightening, a slowdown in the credit-sensitive industries and then a broader slowdown.
However, the current downturn reflects plummeting asset values, which have injured household balance sheets, financial sector balance sheets, and ultimately will
harm even the federal balance sheet. The net worth of consumers has fallen so dramatically that they cannot spend; the capital of banks and like institutions has fallen so sharply that they cannot lend; and the federal balance sheet has now been
stretched to the point that the government will have no choice but to eventually undertake contractionary actions to repair it.
The reason the recovery will be delayed and lengthyU shapedis that these
balance sheets cannot recover quickly. First, the consumer balance sheet. Households have lost nearly $15 trillion since mid-2007, or a fifth of their net worth. They
have retrenched by cutting discretionary spending, which is why personal consumption expenditures have been dropping so fast. In turn, the savings rate has risen
and now stands at approximately three percent. In the long run, a higher savings
rate is desirable. But, right now, it is accelerating the downward spiral of job losses
and falling incomes that is driving people to save in the first place.
An important psychological element also applies. In recent years, household incomes were stagnant, but spending rose anyway in proportion to the so-called positive wealth effect. Consumers knew that their home and financial asset values were

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higher and felt flush. Now, this perception has reversed sharply. It will take a long
time for consumer balance sheets and consumer confidence to be restored.
A second factor mitigating against a normal recovery is the damaged balance
sheets of our banking sector. Since the peak, losses among U.S. financial institutions and investors have reached nearly $1 trillion. But, there could be another $1
trillion in losses to come. This is why financial institutions are not lending. Adjusted
for such losses, they have little or no true capital.
Eventually, the federal balance sheet will also become a restraining factor. Weakness in revenues, the stimulus bill and continued financial rescue spending will likely move the fiscal 2009 deficit over $1.5 trillion, or more than 10% of GDP. In addition, the Federal Reserve is pursuing a zero interest rate policy, as it should. But,
such growing deficits and extreme monetary ease can only be maintained for so long
without provoking anxiety in world capital markets, foreign exchange markets, and
among the American public. As a result, the U.S. government will likely shift to deficit reduction strategies and monetary tightening by 2011, which will then have a
contractionary effect on the economy.
The Continuing Credit Crisis
The credit freeze outside the banking system has begun to thaw slightly. But, the
crisis within the banking system may be at its low point.
Beyond the depository and lending system, the public markets seem to have
passed their lows: the TED spread has fallen 350 basis points since its October
peak, commercial paper issuances have improved modestly, and both high grade corporate bond spreads and high grade corporate bond issuances are slowly recovering.
But, this represents only a small thaw, as the securitization and high yield markets
are still frozen.
The banking system continues to deteriorate. A rare, severe downward spiral is
currently in motion; as the value of financial assets fall, institutions must further
mark down their held assets. These losses reduce their underlying capital and weaken their balance sheets. The so called holethe deficiency of tangible equity compared to the true market value of those assetsonly grows. This explains why the
market equities of Citigroup and Bank of America have shrunk to $10 billion and
$19 billion, respectively. For example, with residential real estate, commercial real
estate, and business values themselves continuing to fall, there is little tangible equity in Citigroup. As long as these values continue falling, its balance sheet will continue to weaken.
As a result, the amounts of capital needed to properly shore up the banking system are still growing. This system may well remain incapacitated through the end
of 2009, even if public credit markets continue to experience gradual improvement.
The Federal Policy Response to Date
The actions of the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve over the past
18 months have been commendable. They have not been perfect, of course. Given
a second chance, they might make different decisions on Lehman Brothers, AIG,
and the original presentation of the TARP. But these two agencies, together with
the FDIC, have provided strong leadership.
First, they have injected or guaranteed a total of $9 trillion in credit market support. Second, they have responded with creativity, from the Feds guarantee for
money market funds and commercial paper, to the rescues of Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac, to the nearly 400 separate institutions that have received TARP funds
to date, and to the FDICs guarantees of large swaths of Citigroup and Bank of
America assets.
It is worth noting that the RTC was a very unpopular institution during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s. But, in retrospect, the government established it swiftly and managed it expeditiously during those years. Now,
the U.S. approach to that crisis is considered successful. This time, the challenge
is greater, and the recovery will be slower. But, in my view, history will render the
same verdict.
The New Obama Initiatives
Although the new Administration has held office for only 38 days, it has already
launched four new initiatives to attack this economic and financial crisis.
The first was the $787 billion stimulus package. It wasnt perfect and could not
have been. But few argue with the necessity for big fiscal stimulus under current
conditions. Yes, with the economy likely declining for the first three quarters of
2009, and possibly all four quarters, it will be hard to discern an impact this year.
But, most economists forecast that GDP will decline materially less this year than
had the stimulus package not been enacted. We dont yet know, of course, whether

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this $787 billion will turn out to be a sufficient amount. If it isnt, a second round
of stimulus may be necessary, perhaps in mid-2010.
The second initiative is the Capital Assistance Program, the new term for capital
infusions into financial institutions from the TARP. The Administration has made
a series of improvements relative to the Bush approach. For one, banks with assets
exceeding $100 billion will be subjected to a financial stress test to determine their
financial condition in a downside scenario. Presumably, this will have the effect of
dividing them into three categories: those healthy enough to forego federal capital;
those too weak to survive even with federal assistance; and those who need assistance but can be stabilized as a result. The Obama Administration will also designate clear lending requirements in exchange for federal capital, as well as place
limits on dividends, buybacks, acquisitions of other wealthy institutions, and executive compensation. Finally, the new program will purchase convertible preferred
shares, not straight preferred shares. This allows it to turn its investment into pure
equity for the benefit of the assisted institution.
Thirdly, the new Administration has decided to pursue a Public/Private Investment Fund to incentivize private capital to acquire toxic assets. This is both the
right financial approach and a courageous idea, because it will not be popular. We
do not yet know the details, but it likely involves providing federal loans to hedge
funds, private equity funds, and similar investors. These loans will likely come from
the Federal Reserve, thus not requiring legislative approval. They will likely be provided on a non-recourse basis to investors at an initial amount of $500 billion, with
the potential to expand to $1 trillion as needed. It will likely take three to four
months for this complex partnership to become operational. For example, the TALF
facility, which was announced in November is just now commencing operations.
The public/private approach addresses two key needs. First, it removes distressed
assets from the balance sheets of weakened lenders, and second, it allows the private market to price those assets. But structuring this facility correctly will be a
challenge. Taxpayers must share strongly in the profits realized by investors. The
financing provided must be large enough to allow for active bidding on the toxic assets but not so large as to encourage overpricing them. And private investors will
likely require floor protection from the FDIC and Treasury on any assets purchased.
Furthermore, it is also unclear whether subsidized bids on toxic assets will be sufficient to induce a healthy volume of selling on the part of lenders, or whether those
sale prices would trigger even larger losses, requiring additional capital infusions
from the Treasury.
This approach is preferable to nationalization, which has been so widely discussed
in recent days.
It is important to define nationalization, before a true discussion of its pros and
cons can properly be had. The right definition, it seems to me, is 100% federal ownership of a financial institution.
It is also important, given the enormous uncertainties of the moment, to avoid
categorical statements. At this moment, the U.S. cannot categorically rule out nationalizations. There are possible circumstances which are so cataclysmic as to leave
no other alternative.
But, that is the only circumstance in which we should resort to this step. Heres
why:
Our government is not equipped to manage large financial institutions. For example, post-nationalization, most envision transferring an institutions toxic assets to a new formed federal institution: an aggregator bank, or bad bank.
But, twenty years ago, it took years for the RTC to become fully operational.
It would take a similarly long time here.
Any nationalized institution would be further weakened by virtue of that step.
Retaining business customers and key talent would be difficult during a period
of federal ownership. Those institutions which remains in private hands would
benefit, at the expense of the federalized ones.
The temptation to direct nationalized institutions towards public policy goals,
however commendable, would be severe, e.g., green lending. Such a focus
would be inconsistent with the goal of swiftly returning a nationalized entity
to profitability and financial soundness.
It would take longer to re-privatize a nationalized institution than many estimates that I have seen. Once taken over, our capital markets will see the institutions as weakened. Such markets will be slow to embrace efforts to re-sell
them to investors, except at fire sale prices.
The oft-cited Swedish example of bank nationalization is not particularly comparable. By American standards, Sweden is a small country, and these were
two small institutions.

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It also is not necessary to nationalize in order to change senior management
or the Board of any federally assisted institution. The Treasury has that power
today. If it has furnished substantial TARP funds, it can simply request that
the management or Board, or both, be replaced, as a condition of continuing the
investment. Any institution would comply.
The final initiative is that towards the mortgage and foreclosure crisis. This was
long overdue.
The new plan is designed to make three impacts: (1) more flexibility for Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac to acquire and to restructure mortgages; (2) greater overall
capacity to restructure existing mortgage loans and ease debt service for distressed
homeowners; and (3) the ability to write down principal amounts of mortgages in
the context of bankruptcy.
The Fannie and Freddie changes would permit refinancings where the mortgage
value exceeds 80% of the underlying home value, provided that it doesnt exceed
105% of the value. This could allow several million homeowners to refinance at
lower rates, lower their mortgage debt service and stay in their homes. We should
see a considerable increase in related refinancings.
Further, the Obama proposal provides cash incentives for mortgage servicers to
restructure mortgages. The goal is to lower the debt service to income ratio, in as
many cases as possible, to the low 30% range, including through principal reductions. It is not clear how many servicers will participate in this plan but it is the
right step because it addresses borrowers who are at risk but may not yet be delinquent.
The mortgage and foreclosure crisis is difficult to address because millions of individual loan modification transactions are required. Unfortunately, it is just as time
consuming to restructure a small mortgage, as it is to modify a huge one. Therefore,
we face a big retail problem. Namely, how to actually interact with such a large
number of homeowners and their mortgages. There is no magic solution here, and
even the impacts of this new initiative may take some time to be felt. But, it was
necessary.
PREPARED STATEMENT

OF

ADAM S. POSEN1

Chairwoman Maloney, Members of the Committee, thank you very much for inviting me to testify today at this critical juncture in American economic policymaking.
I am especially honored to be following the testimony of Paul Volcker, one of the
greatest public servants this country has had in the economic sphere, to whose wisdom we all would do well to listen.
Today, we face extreme financial fragility and as a result serious risks to our
economys prospects for a sustainable recovery from its current troubles. Congress
must grapple with difficult choices about Americas banks, and make those choices
soon. Making the right choices now will require money upfront, large amounts of
taxpayer money, and thus it is necessary as well as right for Congress to lead on
this issue. But making the right policy choices now will restore US economic growth
much sooner, at much lower cost, on a more sound basis, than trying to kick the
trouble down the road or waiting for events to force the issue. Members of this committee are well-familiar with such warnings, usually with respect to far off economic
problems. This time and this problem, however, are costing our citizens jobs and
homes and hard-earned savings right here and now. And the correct policy response
right now will make all the difference.
Luckily, although the scale of the banking problem that we now face is unfamiliar
to us, the kind of banking problem we face today is familiar, and in fact well-understood. We have seen this before in the US in the mid-198os Savings and Loan crisis,
in Japans post-bubble Great Recession of the 1990s, in the Nordic countries from
19921995, and many times in many other countries. It is reasonable to ask why
these kinds of crises keep happening, and how to prevent them in futureI would
be happy to discuss that, but that is of lesser importance to our current circumstances. It is also reasonable to ask why economists who did not foresee the current crisis can be trusted to give advice with great assurance now that the crisis
has hit. I would say this is analogous to the doctor who does not foresee that his
1 Adam Posen is Deputy Director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. He
is a member of the Panel of Economic Advisers to the Congressional Budget Office, and has been
a consultant to the US Council of Economic Advisers, State, and Treasury Departments, to the
IMF, and to central banks worldwide. The views expressed here are solely his own. Contact:
[email protected].

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patients common cold will turn into pneumonia (or at least saw it as quite unlikely), but knows how to treat the pneumonia once it occurs.
So today I would like to advise you on how to cure our financial pneumonia, rather than letting it runs its course, before it causes permanent damage or leads to
hospitalization of our economy. And the prescriptions I will give are based on many
prior cases, particularly what worked to bring financial recovery in the US in 1989
and in Japan in 2001, which are the ones most similar to our current condition.2
In brief, I would urge the Congress to have the US government:
Recognize that the money is gone from the banking system, and banks already
are in a dangerous public-private hybrid state;
Immediately evaluate the solvency and future viability of individual banks;
Rapidly sort the banks into those that can survive with limited additional capital, and those that should be closed, merged, or nationalized;
Use government ownership and control of some banks to prepare for rapid resale to the private sector, while limiting any distortions from such temporary
ownership;
Buy illiquid assets on the RTC model, and avoid getting hung up on finding the
right price for distressed assets or trying to get private investment up front,
which will only delay matters and waste money;
When reselling and merging failed banks, do so with some limit on bank sizes;
And do all of this before the stimulus packages benefits run out in mid-2010.
This set of decisive actions is feasible and can be rapidly implemented, and follows a proven path to the resolution of banking crises. Implementing this program
should spare us the fate of squandering additional national wealth and of postponing recovery for years that resulted from policy half-measures in Japan in the
19905 and in the United States in the 1980s. Similar policy frameworks were adopted and resolved those crises in the end, but only after delay cost dearly.
Recognize that the money is gone from the banking system, and banks already are
in a dangerous public-private hybrid state. There are statements in the press of late
by bank managers and unnamed administration sources that some major banks currently under suspicion of insolvency actually have sufficient capital, or, slightly less
dubiously, would have sufficient capital if only they were not forced to mark their
assets to current low market values. These statements should treated with extreme
skepticism if not disdain. There are certainly some American banks that are either
solvent, or sufficiently close to solvency that they can be returned to viability at little cost, despite the severe recession and market declines. But I agree with the vast
majority of independent analysts and the obvious market verdict that sadly for
many of our largest banking institutions solvency is but a far-off aspiration at
present.
And it is the present condition that matters. In the mid-1980s in the US and most
of the 1990s in Japan, bank supervisors engaged in regulatory forebearance, meaning they held off intervening in or closing banks with insufficient capital in hopes
time would restore asset values and heal the wounds. One can easily imagine the
incentives for the bank supervisors, well-documented in historical cases and the economic data, not to have a prominent bank fail on their watch. The problem, also
evident in these historical cases and in the economic data, is that top management
and shareholders of banks know that supervisors have this interest, and respond
accordingly. The managers and shareholders do everything they can to avoid outright failing, which fits their own personal incentives.
That self-preservation, not profit-maximization, strategy by the banks usually entails calling in or selling off good loans, so as to get cash for what is liquid, while
rolling over loans to bad risks or holding on to impaired assets, so as to avoid taking
obvious losses, and gambling that they will return to value. The result of this dynamic is to create the credit crunch of the sort we are seeing today, and to only
add to the eventual losses of the banks when they get recognized.3 The economy as
a whole, and non-financial small businesses in particular, suffer in order to spare
the positions of current bank shareholders and top management (and on the firing
line bank supervisors).
2 I draw on a wide range of research by myself and others. A good overview is given in Japans Financial Crisis and Its Parallels with US Experience, eds. Ryoichi Mikitani and Adam
Posen, PIIE, 2001.
3 Arguably, repeated forebearance of this kind when major American banks previously made
poor decisions about emerging market lending and regional real estate booms, also contributed
to getting us in to the terrible situation of today, by encouraging the largest banks to believe
that they would always be bailed out without having to take the worst losses.

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The guarantees that the US government has already extended to the banks in the
last year, and the insufficient (though large) capital injections without government
control or adequate conditionality also already given under TARP, closely mimic
those given by the Japanese government in the mid-1990s to keep their major banks
open without having to recognize specific failures and losses. The result then, and
the emerging result now, is that the banks top management simply burns through
that cash, socializing the losses for the taxpayer, grabbing any rare gains for management payouts or shareholder dividends, and ending up still undercapitalized.
Pretending that distressed assets are worth more than they actually are today for
regulatory purposes persuades no one besides the regulators, and just gives the
banks more taxpayer money to spend down, and more time to impose a credit
crunch.
These kind of half-measures to keep banks open rather than disciplined are precisely what the Japanese Ministry of Finance engaged in from their bubbles burst
in 1992 through to 1998, and over that period the cost to the Japanese economy
from bad lending quadrupled from 5% to over 20% of Japanese GDP. In addition,
this convoy system, as the Japanese officials called it, punished any better capitalized and managed banks that remained by making it difficult for them to distinguish themselves in the market; falsely pumping up the apparent viability of bad
banks will do that. That in turn eroded the incentive of the better and more viable
banks to engage in good lending behavior versus self-preservation and angling for
government protection.
I believe, regrettably, that is what is happening now in the US under the current
half-measures. This is why further government intervention in the banking system,
based on recognizing real losses and insolvencies is to be welcomed, not feared. So
long as American banks have partial government guarantees and public funds to
play with, but retain current shareholders and top management, they have perverse
incentives and losses will mount. Think of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac gambling
with taxpayer dollars when having government guarantees but private claims on
the profits and thus incentives for management and shareholder self-preservation.
Hybrids are a good technology for autospublic-private hybrids are a terrible form
for financial institutions. Thus, bending over backwards to keep all of the banking
system in private hands without changing their management, while extending further government guarantees and investments is a recipe for disaster on the publics
accounts.
Immediately evaluate the solvency and future viability of individual banks. The
first step to ending these perverse incentives, and getting us away from the destructive undercapitalized private-public hybrid banking we now suffer under, is to get
the books in order without hesitation about declaring banks insolvent based on current valuations. It was that kind of aggressive, intrusive, and published honest evaluation by Japanese officials of their banks in 2002 that was the first policy step in
finally ending their banking crisis. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has acknowledged the need for evaluations, and will shortly be implementing stress tests
on the 20 largest US banks. Unfortunately, it remains to be seen whether the supervisors and regulators sent in to make these evaluations will be sufficiently merciless
in discounting the value of current assets. The administration has given conflicting
signals on this point so far. Much of the opening rhetoric in the Secretarys statements on the matter is tough, which I applaud.
The statement that the stress tests will be implemented in a forward-looking
manner, however, potentially opens the door to backsliding. We are in the midst of
a very severe recession, and a huge asset price decline, when most things that could
have gone wrong have gone wrong. So it seems reasonable that the current situation
is about the most stress that bank balance sheets could be expected to come under;
and why bother considering worse situations, since all too many banks will fail the
tests under the present stresses. In the US in the 1980s with the savings and loans,
and in Japan in the 199os with all their banks, forward-looking (by other names)
assessments ended up being forms of forebearance. When the assessments took into
account future periods when conditions would be calmer and asset values would be
higher than they were during the crises, they gave the banks an unjustified reprieve.
Granting such a self-defeating lifeline would also seem to be consistent with the
repeated administration statements that they wish to keep the examined banks not
only open and lending, but under continued privateand thus currentshareholder
and management control. If this is the case, and I hope I am worrying unduly, it
would be a grievous mistake. The fact that bank shares for many suspect banks
have stopped dropping with the announcement of these programs, however, is another signal that many believe the stress tests will be beneficial to current bank
shareholders. This stabilization if not bump in bank share prices cannot be based

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on a belief that the suspect banks will be revealed by the stress tests to be in truly
better shape than the market believed them to be up until now, for then the private
money sitting on the sidelines would be moving to acquire the (in that case) undervalued banks.
Another red herring, that I also fear indicates reluctance to do what is needed,
are the occasional statements that the process will take several weeks or more, and
will be difficult to implement given staffing constraints and complexity of the balance sheets. There is no shortage of unemployed financial analysts looking for consulting work, and there is no need to be all that caught up in getting precisely the
right price on various distressed assets (as I will explain). The implementation difficulties of such evaluations are surmountable, as they were in other countries such
as Japan that had a new unproven Financial Services Agency in place when it got
tough in 2002, and here at home when the first Bush administration took on the
S&L crisis in 1989-1991. Furthermore, what have the bank supervisors of the FDIC,
the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, et al, been doing for the last several years
if not getting some sense of these banks balance sheets? The Treasury cannot make
public claims that the banks balance sheets will be revealed to be better than expected, based on supervisory information, at the same time that it claims that making the evaluations of the balance sheets will be daunting.
So strict immediate evaluations of bank balance sheets are agreed upon in at least
form. Regrettably, there is some risk that the forward-looking stress tests may indeed be yet another transfer of taxpayer dollars to current bank shareholders. The
peoples representatives in Congress should not stand for this. If it turns out that
Congressional insistence on tough love for the banks merely stiffens the spine of the
Treasury, FDIC, and Federal Reserve to do what they intended to do anyway, so
much the better. Their apparent reluctance to pull the trigger on tough evaluations
may be based on fears in the administration that such forced write-offs would require the unpopular steps of another injection of public funds and/or round of closures, either way involving some government ownership of those banks. Those fears
can be forestalled through your committee clearly stating that this kind of tough
evaluation is in the public interest, and the benefits outweigh the costs. You and
your colleagues can and should make the stress tests work.
Rapidly sort the banks into those that can survive with limited additional capital,
and those that should be closed, merged, or temporarily nationalized. Banks think
with their capital. As discussed, when their capital is too low, the incentives for
their top management and shareholders are perverted, and contrary to the public
interest. Simply giving capital to all the banks that are judged to need some, however, is a mistake. It spends taxpayer money we do not need to spend, and it rewards bad behavior by treating all banks equally, no matter how much capital they
squandered. It is better to triage the banks quickly into categories by their viability
on the basis of capitalization.4 This is what the Swedish government did rapidly
with great success in 1992, when their banking crisis hit, and is what the Japanese
government got around to finally doing in 2002, when their banking resolution became serious.
The capitalization criteria should not be simply whether the net position after
strict balance sheet evaluation is above or below zero, i.e., solvency. As we learnt
during the Savings and Loan crisis, and as therefore reflected in FDICIA, which allows supervisors to take over banks which have capital ratios of 2%, by the time
you get to zero it is too late (of course, right now, the problem is that capital ratios
will already be well below zero for many of the largest banks). So the three categories should be:
1. Banks with clearly positive capital that only need a topping-up to return
to health and healthy behaviors;
2. Banks with low or slightly negative capital where removal of limited bad
assets could restore viability; and,
3. Banks with clearly negative capital and large, difficult to unwind, portfolios of bad assets.
The first category should receive their capital topping up from public fund injections through preferred shares or other loans of liquid non-voting capital. This format, combined with a clean-bill of health from credible inspections, should lead to
rapid repayment of these banks public funds. Yes, this is what was tried in the
early days of the crisis and TARP; that did not work because it was wishful thinking at best to do so for all the major banks indiscriminately before credible balance
4 We are already sorting banks on the basis of systemic risk by virtue of stress testing the
largest, and thus probably most systemically important, banks first. No one worries about closing small banks, usually.

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sheet evaluations were completed. But for those banks within striking distance of
solidly positive capital ratios, this is the right way to go.
The second category of banks likely includes many of the mid-to large-size, but
not the largest size, banks in our system. These are banks that cannot get back to
clearly positive capitalization, once their bad assets are fairly written off, but whose
balance sheets can be rapidly cleaned up by bad asset sales and whose capital needs
are not overwhelming. Banks in this category are usually sold off, in part or whole,
to other banks, or are merged with stronger banks combined with some injection
of public capital. As part of this process, current top management is usually replaced (perhaps naturally in a merger process), and current shareholders equity
is diluted (though discounted purchases of bank components, public minority ownership of some common equity, or both).
It is the third category that grabs the political attention, and that unfortunately
is likely to include some of our most systemically important banks. Clearly insolvent
banks with no rapid way to sell off their assets at a discount would be unwound
in an orderly fashion under FDICIA, but in essence liquidated over time if they
were small and did not present a systemic risk. That has already happened during
this cycle to a few American institutions, such as Indymac, and even in Japans lost
decade, some minor institutions (like Hokkaido Tokushokku bank, Japans number
19 or 20 by size in 1998 when it was allowed to fail) were wrapped up in this fashion, despite the general reluctance to close banks. Obviously, the issue is what to
do about systemically important large institutions with difficult to unwind balance
sheets. And this is the category for which temporary nationalization of the insolvent
banks is the right answer.
In short, nationalization is only relevant for a part of the banking system under
crisis, even for only a part of the technically insolvent banks, but it is necessary
for the most systemically important banks that are insolvent. These banks must be
kept in operation and have their positions and bad assets unwound in deliberate
fashion. They also must have top management replaced and current shareholders
wiped out. This is because the amount of capital required to restore them back to
functionality is so large, and the process of restructuring their balance sheet so complex, with both having the potential to influence markets for other banks equity
and asset prices, that only the government can do it. There will likely be private
buyers a plenty for such a bank when the recapitalization and unwinding process
is complete, but not before the restructuring begins.
In a corporate takeover that requires significant restructuring of the acquired
company, new private owners will always demand majority voting control and removal of current top management who are accountable for the accumulated problems. The American taxpayer would be ill-served to receive anything less for putting
in the vast amount of money needed to restructure and recapitalize these failed private entities. And the American taxpayer, just like any acquirer of distressed assets,
deserves to reap the upside from their eventual resale. That basic logic is why failed
banks that are too systemically important to shut down should be nationalized temporarily. That is what the Japanese government ended up doing with Long Term
Credit Bank and Nippon Credit Bank, two of Japans systemically most important
banks at the start of the 1990s, and thus unable to be simply shut down.
Use government ownership and control of some banks to prepare for rapid resale
to the private sector, while limiting any distortions from such temporary ownership.
Nationalization of some banks is solely the damage-limiting option under the current crisis circumstances. It beats the alternative of taxpayer handouts to the banks
without sufficient conditionality, leaving financial fragility undiminished. Nationalization has its costs, however, beyond the upfront money provided and risks assumed by the government. No one in their right mind wants the US or any government owning banks for any longer than absolutely necessary.5 The Mitterand government nationalized French banks in the early 1980s as a matter of socialist ideology, not necessity, intending to keep the banks in the public sectorand that was
a huge mistake. The resultant misallocation of capital interfered with innovation
and discipline in the French economy, and reduced the annual rate of growth in productivity and GDP by a three or four tenths of a percent, which compounded over
5 I have been on the record attacking state ownership and subsidization of banks in Europe
for years. See, for example, Adam S. Posen, Is Germany Turning Japanese?, Peterson Institute
for International Economics Working Paper # 03-5 (condensed version published in The National
Interest under the title Frog in a Pot, Spring 2003). That is completely different than temporary bank nationalization.

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several years makes a huge difference.6 But that was an unneeded governmental
takeover of viable banks kept in place for a long period. The key is that government
control is kept temporary, with sell offs of distressed assets and viable bank units
back to the private sector to commence as soon as possible, some of which can begin
almost immediately.
The historical record suggests that this kind of turnaround is not so difficult to
achieve. That is what was seen with what became Shinsei bank in Japan (purchased
by American investors after Long-Term Credit Bank was nationalized and cleanedup) as well as with the top five banks in Sweden in 199295. In both Japan and
Sweden, most nationalized banks were re-privatized within two years, all within
three. And in all these cases there were private buyers when the governments were
ready to privatize the banks, something that did not exist for these failing institutions before the government undertook restructuring. As is well-known, in these
cases the responsible governments made back at least 80% of their costs, in the
Swedish case turning significant profits for the taxpayers.
Furthermore, these banks continued most of their day-to-day operations during
the nationalization period, retaining most personnel except top management. Given
government majority ownership, it is possible to set up independent management,
just as boards representing owners, public or private, always delegate to managers
of complex organizations. New managers could be easily brought in from the
amongst the many bank executives who specialized in traditional lending and banking, and ended up on the outs when American banks emphasized investment banking and other bonus-based securities businesses in recent years. The new managers
could even be incentivized properly, the way we should consider incentivizing all
bank managers: with long-term stock options instead of annual bonuses (some combination of public service motivations, very high upside potential, and facing unemployment would yield sufficient numbers).
Of course, there will be some pressures for politically-driven lending, but transparency arrangements could go a long way to limiting thatand it is difficult to
imagine that remaining shareholders and top management of banks in the current
public-private hybrid situation would not have every (destructive) incentive to politically pander in hopes of keeping their job and their stake. The difference in efficiency and politicization of lending between the current situation and full nationalization of some banks will not be all that great (which is what was seen with the
zombie banks in Japan in the late 1990s, and our Savings and Loans in the midto late 1980s, just pandering to politically connected borrowers in order to stay open
as private concerns).
Importantly, the existence of nationalized banks in banking systems that still had
private banks operating as well did not lead to excessive pressures on their private
competitors, let alone significant shifts of business or deposits away from those private banks. This can be seen today in the United Kingdom where the governments
large ownership stakes in some major banks such as RBS and HBOS has not led
to closures of or runs on the remaining private banks; in Switzerland, where the
de facto public takeover and guarantee of UBS has not noticeably harmed still private Credit Suisse; and in Germany and France, where private banking firms have
continued to operate despite the ongoing presences of Credit Lyonnais and the
Sparkassen as government subsidized and part-owned entities.
Again, nationalization is not cost free, for over time such public ownership arrangements do eat away at the private banks profitability and proper allocation of
credit, which in turn hurts productivity and income growth. But additional inaction
today regarding the fragile US banks leaving current management in charge has the
prospect of rapidly adding several full-percentage points of GDP to the total of bad
loans and losses in just the span of months, which is a much bigger cost. It also
risks a failure of a major financial institution without warning, before the government can respond, which would have large negative repercussions in the current environmentnationalization wins out on the stability criteria as well, versus our status quo, in the short-run. Japan in 1998 demonstrated the unfortunate lesson that
half-measures stopping short of nationalization backfire, when it gave the private
banks more capital, only to find them running out of money and having accumulated further bad assets when a new more actively reformist government took power
three years later.
Buy illiquid assets on the RTC model, and avoid getting hung up on finding the
right price for distressed assets or trying to get private investment up front, which
will only delay matters and waste money. To complete the full restructuring of the
6 There is a vast and empirically robust literature on the effect of differing financial systems
on economic growth, led by the contributions of Jerry Caprio, Stijn Claessens, and Ross Levine,
with their numerous co-authors, from which I take this simplified estimate.

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nationalized banks, or for that matter even the more minor capital topping off of
the viable banks, when starting from honest evaluations of balance sheets, someone
has to get the bad assets off of the banks books. The utility of so doing is widely
recognized. The Treasury has proposed setting up a complicated not-bad- butaggregator public-private entity to serve this purpose. As with the stress tests, if
the current US Treasury only says such things to sugar coat a tougher less passive
intent in practice, so much the better. The American government should be benefitting the taxpayer by paying as conservatively low price as possible for our banking
systems distressed assets, and if that means having to increase the capital injections on one hand to make up for the write-offs from low prices on the other, in
terms of net public outlay it is little different, but more of the future claims on the
bad assets value is kept in US taxpayers hands. As Alan Greenspan has observed,
if we nationalize the banks, we do not need to worry about the pricing.7
The Treasurys proposal for creating a complex public-private aggregator bank instead of a wholly publicly-owned simple RTC-like bad bank is motivated by two aspirations: to mobilize smart money currently sitting on the sidelines to share the
upfront costs of buying the bad assets; to generate price discovery about what the
bad assets are really worth, particularly for illiquid assets for which there is no
market. These are well-motivated aspirations, but in my opinion penny wise and
pound foolish with taxpayer funds at best, and simply unattainable at worst. It is
worth noting that there is no historical precedent for making such an attempt for
price discovery and costs sharing with the accumulated bad assets. Simple publiclyowned RTC-like entities sufficed in the Swedish and Japanese cases, and of course
in the US Savings and Loan case that set the precedent. A new and clever approach
always could be an improvement in theory, but this particular one seems to share
with the reverse auction ideas of the initial TARP proposal a desire to be too clever
by half.
It is just as arbitrary to set prices for the bad assets by deciding how much guarantee or subsidy the private investors receive from the government to induce them
to get back into the game, as it would be to go into the banks and just pay what
the markets are offering or zero right now. There will not be any price discovery
through private sector means by undertaking such a program because the only difference between these assets unwanted now and then is the value of the government guarantee (subsidy) on offer. Private investors are obviously not buying the
distressed assets now, which they could at the current low price, so the price will
be set by the amount of the US governments transfer to these private buyers. At
best, this gets the toxic assets off of the various banks balance sheets, but at a far
higher eventual cost to the taxpayer than would arise if the government purchased
them outright and recouped the entire upside when there is eventual restructuring
of and then real demand for these assets later. It is again Congress role to stand
up for the American taxpayer, to say to the administration that they should not fear
having to put up more money upfront if in the end it will save the taxpayer significant money to do so now.
At worst, employing such a complicated scheme trying to hold restructuring up
until meaningful prices somehow emerge (when the only change in the assets is a
government subsidy with purchase) leads to a worse outcome. Uncertainty hangs
over our banking system for longer, with all the noted perverse incentives for good
and bad banks that induces. Possibility of a disorderly outright bank failure persists
since the illiquid assets are not rapidly moved off of the balance sheets of some of
the most vulnerable banks. The US government ends up overpaying for some assets
in terms of guarantees and subsidies versus simply buying them at todays low values, but only manages to sell the more liquid and attractive upside assets to the
voluntary private participants. In short, the US taxpayer gets left with the lower
future return lemons, while paying for the privilege of having private investors get
the assets with the most upside potential. Eventually, there has to be a wholly public RTC-type bad bank anyway, but now only for the worst remaining parts of the
portfolio.
A wholly public simple RTC-type bad bank approach not only avoids these risks,
but offers an advantage that the public-private hybrid (again a bad idea) aggregator
bank does not. In fact, the additional complexity, and thus toxicity or illiquidity, of
todays securitized assets versus what our original RTC or Japans or Swedens faced
is an additional argument for having them all be bought by the US government outright: If the US government buys most or all of entire classes of currently illiquid
assets from the banks, it would have a supermajority or i00% stake in most of the
securitized assets that have been at the core of our problems in this area. That
would make it feasible to reassemble sliced and diced securities, going back to the
7

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underlying investments (such as mortgages). This would detoxify most of these assets, making them attractive for resale by unlocking their underlying value, removing the source of their illiquidity, and thus offering the possibility of significant upside benefit entirely for the US taxpayer when sold back to the private sector. It
would be an actual value-added transformation, not just an attempt to game the
pricing.
In theory, a set of private sector investors or public-private partnership also could
do this kind of reassembly voluntarily, but in practice the coordination problems are
insurmountable, as seen in the complete lack of market for these assets at present.
The use of the word toxic to describe these assets leads to an apt and valid analogy:
Just as the EPA can go to a Superfund site, one on which no one can currently live
and no private entity is willing/able to clean up, it can literally detoxify that real
estate by changing its underlying nature, and then have it come back on the market
at a good value. The Treasury and FDIC can do the same with these currently toxic
securitiesif the US government has ownership and puts up the funding and effort
to do the clean-up. Without a wholly public RTC initially owning the supermajorities, such a literal detoxification of the assets is impossible. And without that kind
of fundamental change in the nature of the bad assets on the banks books, it is
difficult to see any reason for private smart money to buy them except to pick up
a sufficiently large government subsidy. A hedge fund or sovereign wealth fund or
private equity firm with cash is not staying out of these markets for distressed assets at present just because the prices have not yet fallen enough; such investors
are staying out because the assets are indeed toxic with indeterminate prices.
When reselling and merging failed banks, do so with some limit on bank sizes. One
aspect of the financial crisis so far is that it has put pressure on banks and supervisors to increase concentration in the US banking system. When the government
for understandable reasons will treat bigger banks as systemically important, and
thus subject to bailouts and guarantees, it advantages them over smaller banks in
the eyes of some potential depositors and borrowers. In addition, in each successive
wave of banking fragility we have had up until now, US bank supervisors have
tended to encourage stronger banks to merge with or buy up weaker bankswhich
is indeed in line with the standard crisis response best practice I outlined above,
but also has contributed to greater concentration of the US banking system into
fewer bigger businesses. The deregulation of interstate branching has also played
a role. In each case, concentration was a side effect of well-motivated policies, and
never became a major problem on its own terms (obviously many smaller and community banks continue to do business just fine).
We now approach a situation, however, where the US government will have capital stakes in a large portion of the US banking system, biased towards larger investments in the bigger institutions, and where there will be additional instances
after triaging the banking system that seem to require mergers. Given that structural leverage over the US banking system inherent in upcoming decisions, and the
sheer scale of the potential upcoming further consolidation, it is time to consciously
put a limit on4his process. As Paul Volcker has pointed out in the recent G30 Report, if we get into trouble with banks being simultaneously too big to manage their
portfolio risks and too big to be allowed to fail, we probably should not have banks
that big.8 This is not a matter of the normal anti-trust consumer protection against
monopoly, since these developments have largely benefitted consumers on the usual
pricing and choice criteria, but of other public interests at stake.
Economically speaking, there is no clear logic to encouraging banks to be as big
as possible. Years and years of empirical research by well-trained economists in the
US and abroad have been unable to establish any robust evidence of economies of
scale or of scope in banking services. In other words, banks do not perform their
key functions more efficiently or cheaply when they produce them in greater volume, and banks do not gain profitable synergies by expanding their range of services and products.9 There was another reasonable theory that larger banks might
be able to diversify their risks across a broader and more varied portfolio than
smaller banks, and thus be more stablethe developments of the last two years in
the US, United Kingdom, Switzerland and elsewhere, as well as those seen in Ja8 Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Gary Stern has been calling attention to
this potential problem for some years now. More recently, my PIIE colleague William Cline has
written about it as well.
9 In some trivial sense, back office consolidation of certain types of processing of transactions
could yield economies of scale, but even attempts to find evidence for these have proven unsuccessfulperhaps because so many of those services are available on an outsourced and competitive basis these days.

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pans highly concentrated banking system in the 1990s, however, reject that hypothesis rather dramatically (as do more formal econometric studies).
Finally, some people concerned with US economic competitiveness have argued
that larger banks confer advantages, either because they allow for easier large-scale
funding of US export industries, or because they allow US banks to compete better
for market share in global finance, and thus export financial services. Unlike the
previous two testable hypotheses, which were confronted with rigorous data analysis, these competitiveness claims have not been seriously studied. But the major
threat to financing for American non-financial companies is market disruption
caused by systemic bank failures, not limits on the credit available to them in normal times, and the export of financial services has been no more in the US national
interest than picking any other single strategic industry, a thoroughly discredited
practice.10
So the Treasury, FDIC, and Federal Reserve should show some regard for excessive bank size and concentration in the US banking system when they are required
to make decisions about banking structure upon returning parts of the system to
fully private control. They cannot duck this, for even a non-decision to go with the
likely outcomes of other priorities would result in defaulting to greater bank concentration at the end of the process. Unfortunately, unlike with regard to other aspects of the banking crisis resolution framework I have outlined, there is no wellestablished practice for how to deal with this issue.
I would suggest that two guidelines be employed: First, when any of the fully nationalized banks, which are likely to include among them some of the largest of current US banks, are brought back to market from public ownership, they be broken
up, whether along functional or geographic lines. This has the additional advantage
of allowing some parts of the temporarily nationalized banks to return to private
hands sooner, and the return of investment to the US taxpayer also to arrive sooner.
There will be some component operating units of the largest failed banks whose own
sub-balance sheets can be cleaned up rather quickly. Second, preference be given
to mergers of equals for the publicly recapitalized but not nationalized banks that
normally would be encouraged by regulators to be merged or taken over by other
banks. Since this group of banks is likely to be of a smaller average size than the
nationalized group, this should be feasible. While it remains for Congress to pass
regulation to determine the rules of how the US banking system should be structured in future, I believe that current law does give our bank supervisors enough
authority and discretion over mergers of banks, especially for those involving a distressed institution, that this guideline can be followed when the bank clean-up
moves forward in the near term (as it must).
And do all of this before the stimulus packages benefits run out. Implementing the
preceding framework for resolving the US banking crisis will restore financial stability, as quickly as possible, at the lowest cost possible (though still high) to American taxpayers.11 The experience of other countries, notably of Japan in the 1990s,
but also of the US itself in the 1980s, is highly relevant to todays dangerous situation. Those historical examples show not only the right way to resolve our banking
problems, but also that the rapidity and sustainability with which the US economy
will recover from its present financial crisis is directly dependent upon our willingness to tackle these problems aggressivelyincluding in some instances temporarily
nationalizing banks. When the US government engaged in regulatory forebearance
with undercapitalized S&Ls in the mid-1980s, and when the Japanese government
similarly pandered to its bankers and dawdled through the entire 1990s, the losses
grew larger, and the problems persisted. When the US government truly took on
the Savings and Loan crisis in 1989-1991, and when the Japanese government truly
10 Some top US economic officials during the 19905 and earlier this decade sincerely believed
that financial liberalization was in the economic self-interest of developing countries and thus
was in the foreign policy interest of the United States. That is probably valid, and I am broadly
sympathetic to that view, subject to some important cautions raised by Dani Rodrik, Joseph
Stiglitz and others. But some of these officials then took that to mean that promoting the export
of financial services by US financial institutions, and opening of foreign markets to US financial
institutions investment and sales were in the US foreign policyas well as exportinterest.
This was an unnecessary step, and one that is backfiring on the US reputation now that our
financial model and aggressive advocacy thereof is being blamed (excessively, but not entirely
unfairly) for the current global crisis.
11 See for example what I recommended for Japan in 2001, which was largely and successfully
implemented by Japanese financial services minister Heizo Takenaka in 2002-03 (Japan 2001:
Decisive Action or Financial Panic, http://www.iie.com/publications/pb/pb.cfm?ResearchID=72).
Many current senior US economic officials, such as Treasury Secretary Geithner and NEC Chair
Summers, advocated the same for Japan and for the Asian countries during the 1997-1998 financial crisis there.

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confronted its banking crisis in 20012003, following this framework, the financial
uncertainty was lifted and growth was restored.
The only thing that makes the US different from other countries facing banking
crises has nothing to do with the nature of our banking problems. What is special
about the US in this context is the fortunate fact that we as a nation we are rich
enough, with enough faith in our currency, to be able to engage in fiscal stimulus
to soften the blow to the real economy while the bank clean-up is done. Emerging
markets and even most smaller advanced economies generally have to engage in
austerity programs, further cutting growth, at the same time that they tackle their
banking crises in order to be able to pay for the clean-up. This gives us a window
of opportunity, but the clock is ticking.
If we can resolve the US banking crisis in the next 18 months before the stimulus
runs out of impact on the economy, the private sector will be ready to pick up the
baton from the public sectordemand will grow, and recovery will be sustained.
And following the common framework I have set out, it would be feasible to resolve
most of our financial problems, if not return the entire banking system back to private ownership, within that time frame if we start right now. If we fail to move aggressively enough on our banking problems, this window will close because even the
United States cannot afford to engage in deficit spending indefinitelyas President
Obama rightly explained to Congress and the nation on Tuesday night. In that case,
when the fiscal stimulus runs out, the private sector will be unable to grow strongly
on its own, because the banking problems will prevent it from doing so. Japan
showed us that fiscal stimulus indeed works in the short-term, but growth cannot
be restored to a self-sustaining path without resolution of an economys banking
problems.
I ask the members of this Committee to carefully scrutinize and oversee the proposed programs of the US Treasury for banking crisis resolution. If those programs
live up to their associated rhetoric, and are thus tough enough on the current shareholders and top management of our undercapitalized banks, we can in 2011 be like
Japan in 2003, at the beginning of a long and much needed economic recovery. If
unneeded complexity of the bad bank construct, excessive reliance on and generosity
to private capital, and unjustified reluctance to temporarily nationalize some US
banks, turn the proposed bank clean-up programs into only half-measures, then we
will be like Japan in 1998squandering national wealth and leaving our economy
in continuing decline, only to have to take the full measures a few years down the
road when in greater debt. I am hopeful that the Obama Administration with strong
congressional oversight will do what it is need in time.
PREPARED STATEMENT

OF

JOSEPH R. MASON

Thank you Chairman Maloney and members of the committee for the opportunity
to testify on this very important topic. I am pleased to appear before you to discuss
Restoring the Economy: Strategies for Short-term and Long-term Change. I am Joseph Mason, Hermann Moyse, Jr./Louisiana Bankers Association Professor of Finance at Louisiana State University and Senior Fellow at The Wharton School, and
these are my personal views.
The Committee asked panelists to opine on both short- and long-term changes
that can help restore the economy. The written testimony that follows outlines three
primary suggestions in each regard, focusing on financial market reforms that set
the stage for economic growth. The macroeconomic understanding of financial crises
is that they do not cause recessions, but merely prolong and/or deepen them. Recessions are therefore possible without a financial crisis, but once an economy is in recession, recovery is virtually impossible with a financial crisis. Until the crisis is resolved, therefore, fiscal and monetary policies push on a string.
In the short-term, resolving the crisis will require humility and hard work. The
United States still has the most advanced financial system in the world, but the crisis resulted because the system got too far in front of regulatory capabilities. Among
the key weaknesses that caused the crisis are classic problems like banks that consider themselves too-big-to-fail, insufficient accounting transparency to support regulatory and investment needs, and textbook asset market overhang in housing markets. Luckily, those problems are relatively easy to resolve in the short run, even
if doing so will take courage and flexibility. While existing policy attempts to address some of these issues get close to helping, slight changes in approach can
achieve success in a much more straightforward and effective manner.
The long run will be much harder, requiring significant efforts to fix old and build
new regulatory structures and set the stage for U.S. economic growth. Much of the
work will not be glamorous. Before one brick can be laid in the new financial struc-

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ture, there needs to be a discussion of basic regulatory principals that will serve as
the mortar of the construct. Much additional work will lie with international bodies,
wherein I expect participants will build upon existing unitary principals of oversight
laid down nearly two decades ago to develop standards and procedures for resolving
failed financial institutions, providing bridge financing and oversight, and disposing
of their assets. Global imbalances in economic growth potential are already spurring
the development of trade blocs and agreements worldwide, presenting both opportunities and threats to U.S. markets. U.S. diplomacy abroad will go a long way toward
smoothing some of those sentiments, and regulatory changes at home can help U.S.
businesses adapt strategically to fast-moving changes in global markets and stay
competitive.
The unifying theme of all of my suggestions is restoring credibility to the U.S. financial system. Out of every crisis, it must be recognized, arises an opportunity to
improve. The objective at the end of the exercisewhich may be decades away
must always be kept in sight: set a firm foundation for improved financial markets
and economic growth potential so that the necessary restructuring becomes known
more for its own success than the crisis that spurred us to action.
I. Restoring the Economy in the Short-run: Resolving the Financial Crisis
As mentioned above, the key problems of the current credit crisis are banks that
consider themselves too-big-to-fail, insufficient accounting transparency to support
regulatory and investment needs, and textbook asset market overhang in housing
markets.
A. End Too-big-to-fail
The too-big-to-fail doctrine has been around for some twenty years now and has
yet to be resolved. The latest incarnation has been justified by systemic importance of some institutions over others. Systemic importance, however, is a specious
and potentially disingenuous concept. There is no accepted definition of systemic
risk, save that which points to a fundamentally unquantifiable transmission of risk
through the financial system, akin to contagion.
Unlike contagion, however, there need not be a non-fundamental mechanism at
work in systemic riskmerely one that is left unmonitored so that it passes risk
to the entire financial system. Hence, to an aggressive systemic risk regulator, everything is likely to look like systemic risk. Moreover, markets with systemic risk
protection will find little need to monitor counterparty exposures, creating severe
moral hazard conditions. (See, for instance, Peter J. Wallison, Casting the Fed as
a Systemic Risk Regulator, AEI Financial Services Outlook, February 24, 2009).
Indeed, the systemic nature of todays problems lies only in the degree to which
large banks managed to enter business arrangements that banks and regulators,
alike, were reluctant to monitor. Today, there are two big impediments to placing
insolvent banks in receivership, thereby prompting claims of too-big-to-fail. First,
regulators would have to acknowledge that they did not understand the extent or
importance of bank off-balance sheet commitments. Regulators expressly allowed
contracts to be written that are triggered by receivership, but now does not know
which and how many or who will gain and, especially, who will lose if the institutions fails. In reality, the situation may be more similar to that of Continental Illinois in 1984, when the OCC said it feared spillover that would cause many banks
to faila fear that was later revealed to be grossly exaggerated. Regulators today
do not have the necessary information not because it is impossible to obtain, but
because they have not heretofore sought such information, reasoning that off-balance sheet arrangements did not matter. Future crises are therefore probably not
best avoided by allowing a systemic risk regulator to stand ready to make excuses
for regulatory laxity.
Second, and equally important, regulators today have not yet managed to transfer
servicing rights successfully out of a failed institution. Mortgage bank failures in the
late 1990s followed an almost identical path to the larger-scale disruptions we are
seeing today. Failure typically occurred at the end of a chain of events wherein
subprime mortgage providers lowered underwriting standards to fuel growth. The
resulting diminished loan quality, however, hurt their securitizations and resulted
in financial losses in both on- and off-balance sheet arrangements. Struggling to survive without securitization, firms flooded the whole loan sale market, causing precipitous declines in whole loan prices. Stock prices of subprime lenders plummeted
and highly leveraged companies could not repay debt. Without funding sources other
than securitization, financially stressed issuers had no alternative but to file Chapter 11. By the end of the decade, few subprime originators remained. (Moodys, Bullet Proof Structures Revisited: Bankruptcies and a Market Hangover Test
Securitizations Mettle, 20020830 at 12.)

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Both off-balance sheet risks and servicing rights transfer difficulties are knownunknowns, known by the industry but unknown by regulators. Merely ignoring
risk does not make it systemic once the denial becomes evident.
Today we all know a great deal more about bank operations and values than we
did previously. Even without resorting to custom-designed stress tests (which cannot
be developed to deliver any useful degree of accuracy in a matter of weeks, but take
years to parameterize), we know that there are three classes of banks in the system
right now: the insolvent; the marginally solvent; and the solvent. Policy needs to
focus on relieving the economy of the value-destroying loans produced by the nowinsolvent banks, financially and operationally restructuring the marginally solvent
banks, and building economic growth upon the lending platforms of value-creating
solvent banks.
Insolvent banksregardless of their purported systemic importanceare value
destroying institutions that need to be closed. If insolvent banks were car companies, they would be relying on worn machinery and ill-trained staff to produce EastGerman Trabants that break down as soon as they leave the production line. In fact,
the loan products these banks created did break down almost immediately after
they were produced, in that they exhibited early-payment defaults and often involved payments and fees that the borrower could not afford. The mortgage delinquencies we see today are therefore the result of faulty management, bad supervisory systems, ineffective proprietary software, and ill-targeted employee training,
not mere exogenous economic shocks, and the banks that produced those products
are insolvent as a result. Insolvent institutions therefore need to be shut down in
the public interest: while the economy needs loans to fuel economic growth it needs
high-quality value-creating loans that borrowers stand a chance of repaying, not
value-destroying loans that disrupt economic activity even further.
Marginally solvent banks face difficulties, but maintain some redeeming assets
that suggest they possess going concern values worthy of being maintained. That
is, the majority of marginal bank portfolios consist of value-creating loans that benefit economic growth. Government recapitalization programs with appropriate limits
on management and insistence on institutional reforms can possibly, therefore, benefit marginally solvent institutions and present a chance of supporting economic
growth by creating, rather than destroying, value.
Still, merely stabilizing marginally solvent banks will not support growth. To fuel
growth, solvent institutions needing neither government assistance nor intervention
can utilize government funds to finance the purchase of failed-bank assets to relieve
asset market overhang as well as make new loans. To deny solvent institutions additional capital to address the economic situation is to penalize them for creating
economically value-creating assets. Policy needs to focus, therefore, on relieving the
economy of the value-destroying loans produced by the now-insolvent banks, restructuring the marginally solvent banks, and building upon the existing value creating
business platforms of solvent banks to foster sound economic growth.
In summary, it is crucial to dismantle the too-big-to-fail doctrine for the good of
the American banking system. No firm is ever too-big-to-fail. While some firms may
be too misunderstood for regulators to effectively manage the failure and subsequent
disposition of assets, the misunderstanding is fundamentally different from too-bigto-fail and not an excuse worth of justifying a lasting or fundamentally irreconcilable systemic risk exemption. Hence, other short-term policies address transparency
so that the firms can be better understood and flexible means of asset disposition
policy that have been heretofore overlooked.
B. Increase Investor and Regulatory Transparency
The key problem with financial markets right now is that commonly-produced
standardized financial ratios are meaningless. Without information, investors do not
know the value of their holdings, cannot sell those holdings, and cannot rationally
allocate funds derived from those sales if they could.1 Without funds, firms cannot
invest in new projects that create economic valuethat is, jobs, income, and economic growth. Nonetheless, existing policy proposals have all been about suppressing information: information about bank conditions, about other sources of risk,
and even about government programs meant to address the situation.

1 . . . and with interest rates near zero have no incentive to look very far for opportunities
to sell, anyway.

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Unfortunately, financial reporting is thought of as an excruciatingly boring policy
topic.2 More unfortunately, however, financial reporting is crucial to any well-functioning financial system. Without restoring financial reporting, we cannot hope to
end too-big-to-fail (nay, too-misunderstood-to-fail) and we cannot expect to reinvigorate investment and economic growth.
The breakdown of financial reporting began with off-balance sheet regulatory
arbitrages affected in the early 1990s in response to Basel I.3 As bank conditions
began to be evaluated on the basis of a capital/asset ratio on the tail end of a recession, banks seeking to raise their capital/asset ratio faced with the dilemma of
whether to raise capital or reduce assets at a time when capital was prohibitively
expensive. Hence, most sought to reduce assets through securitization, instead.
Often, however, the lions share of risk was not transferred in the securitization.
Rather, sellers retained first-loss residual and mezzanine interests in the loans and
offered further representations and warranties supporting the sale. Some of those
representations and warranties were explicit, some implicit. Implicit representations
and warranties are now referred to by the industry as reputational risk, which has
been cited as the reason some sellers repurchased entire deals of SIVs and ARSs,
as well as other investments, in the past year.
As discussed in my Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee (Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment) testimony from September 18,
2008, as early as 1987, Moodys pointed out that, . . . the practices developed by
the accounting and regulatory world . . . do not fully capture the true economic risks
of a securitized asset sale to the originators credit quality. (Moodys Investors Service, Asset Securitization and Corporate Financial Health, December 1987, p. 3)
Hence, long ago market insiders fully realized that standard accounting rules do not
apply to securitizing firms.
In 1997, Moodys Investors Service wrote that, . . . the simple act of securitizing
assets can affect the appearance of the income statement and balance sheet in a
profound manner without, in many cases, significantly altering the underlying economics of the [seller]. (Alternative Financial Ratios for the Effects of Securitization,
Moodys Investors Service, September 1997, p. 1) With securitization, therefore, reported earnings are overstated and reported balance sheet leverage is understated
while there may be little, if any, risk transference.
Moreover, it became common over time for sellers to voluntarily provide informal
support to preserve the performance and bond ratings of their structured transactions. (Moodys Investors Service, The Costs and Benefits of Supporting Troubled Asset-Backed Securities: Has the Balance Shifted? January 1997) As the
practice became accepted by regulators and the marketplace, ratings agencies could
indeed rate any of these bonds AAA without reference to fundamental loan pool
characteristics or securitization structure because any seller with going concern
value would support the pool to maintain its reputational risk so it could issue
again next period. Of course, it would be egregious to maintain that securitization
transfers no risk at all. As we have seen recently, in the event of catastrophic asset
quality problems the seller may choose NOT to support a troubled deal, notwithstanding even any legalmuch less reputationalresponsibility to do so. That is
why investors right now want to know how much more is out there in off-balance
sheet exposure that can still threaten the firms ability to reputationally support
their securities. Unfortunately, those answers are not easily found, even for professional investment analysts.
Those off-balance sheet arrangements were also the first to utilize mark-to-market
(really, mark-to-model) accounting features under the guise of gain-on-sale accounting. Gain-on-sale accounting led to tremendous industry disruptions in the late
1990s. FASBS August 11, 2005, Revision of Exposure Draft Issued June 10, 2003,
Accounting for Transfers of Financial Assets, an amendment of FASB Statement
No. 140, (Financial Accounting Series No. 1225-001), explains gain-on-sale roughly
as follows: In order to facilitate gain-on-sale accounting, the firm (1) estimates the
value of the thing they want to sell with a financial model. Then, the firm (2) receives some money and other items in the actual sale of that thing. Next, in what
is the really arbitrary aspect of gain-on-sale accounting, the firm gets to (3) record
the difference between their own valuation of the thing that they sold and the value
of the cash and other items received in the sale as cash revenue.
2 Only the chair and ranking member attended Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs
Committee, Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment hearings on FASB reform
on September 18, 2008.
3 Some also note the use of securitization to avoid interest rate risk in the 1980s. While that
purpose was certainly useful, securitization did not really take off until the regulatory arbitrage
became valuable.

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Difficulties in the high-LTV home-equity loan crisis of the late 1990s were largely
attributable to aggressive gain-on-sale accounting. According to Moodys:
In the late 1990s, several subprime home equity and auto lenders encountered financial difficulty arising in part from explosive growth patterns, in
part from using securitization as a source of funds, and in part from overly
aggressive use of gain on sale accounting. Such accounting methodology
made these companies look much stronger financially on paper than they actually were. Companies that used gain on sale accounting included, among
subprime mortgage issuers, Contifinancial Corp., Southern Pacific Funding
Corp., Cityscape, and United Companies Financial Corp. . . . Once the effect
of gain on sale accounting was removed from financial statements, leverage
ratios were often high. These companies also had weak capital positions
compared to more diversified finance companies. (Moodys Investors Service,
Bullet Proof Structures Revisited: Bankruptcies and a Market Hangover
Test Securitizations Mettle, August 30, 2002, p. 14)
The problem with gain-on-sale accounting, therefore, is that the revenue booked
is not real cash. Hence, many recently-failed mortgage companies and similar firms
associated with previous securitization fiascos have never been cash-flow positive in
their entire corporate lives. When firms, realizing the risks of gain-on-sale accounting and the false earnings conditions they represented to investors, sought to pull
back from gain-on-sale and become more conservative, they were told by FASB that
any willing conservatism would be considered earnings manipulation. Thus, the financial world was recently littered with hundreds of firms with exceedingly high
stock values that had never actually earned positive cash profits in a manner typical
of a classic bubble.
Both off-balance sheet exposures and mark-to-market accounting argue for a more
robust financial reporting environment than is that envisaged by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB). In the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, Subcommittee on Securities, Insurance, and Investment hearings
on FASB reform on September 18, 2008, FASB abjectly refused to even consider advocating any deviation from an accounting system based on a single value for any
particular item or firm. But in an off-balance sheet world of contingent claims and
statistically modeled values for level 2 and 3 mark-to-market assets, a single value
is not only inadequate, it is grossly misleading.
Investors want to know the entirety of off-balance sheet exposures right now
knowing that the commercial banking industry is leveraged not at the 12:1 reported
on balance sheet, but at roughly 185:1 off balance sheetbut are not able to get
the information from existing sources.4 That does not mean that FASB should reverse policy and disallow off-balance sheet treatment, putting off-balance sheet exposures completely back on-balance sheet, only that the off-balance sheet exposures
need to be completely and systematically reported somewhere in the financial statements.
But investors also want more. Investors also want to know the range of statistical
model values that can be reasonably expected to apply to level 2 and 3 assetsthat
is, the standard errors of the estimates. Such ranges will allow investors to stress
test firm financial characteristics on their own, in a clearly transparent way without being filtered through Treasurys secrecy and interpretation.
It is important to realize that the investors I have been talking about include all
bank counterparties. Outside investors today can evaluate banks no better than
banks can evaluate one anothers counterparty risk. Hence, transactions have shut
down in todays opaque financial reporting environment. Guarantees and other second-best solutions will only alleviate counterparty risk concerns as long as the guarantor (even the Federal government) remains willing, credible, and solvent. Hence,
the key objective has to be to restore financial market transparency as soon as humanly possible so that markets can once again work without the aid of outside guarantees.
C. Deal with Asset Market Overhang
The above discussion of financial reporting suggests that even if financial market
prices are well-established, they are not presently communicated through credible
financial reporting mechanisms. In todays housing markets, however, values of
4 Even SEC Regulation AB was arbitraged when banks hid the required information on the
internet. Try working with the following link (not linked to any of Countrysides corporate web
site and with no main page to change reporting periods or otherwise run scenarios an investor
might be interested in) for some of the data behind Countrywides deals: http://
www.countrywidedealsdata.com/RegABDealList.aspx?CWDD=01200804.

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foreclosed and vacant houses are far from certain. Hence, alleviating the stock of
unsold and unoccupied homes in todays housing market should be a key concern.
Unfortunately, dogmatic home ownership policy and archaic bank regulations
stand in the way of quick recovery. If we view the housing crisis as merely one of
occupancy rather than ownership, policy solutions are readily at hand.
The common understanding of the problem is that foreclosed homes are dumped
on the market at fire sale prices and those prices push values down in surrounding
neighborhoods.5 But while focusing on the foreclosure part of the problem we are
missing the important part: the fire sale that pushes down prices. Fire sale prices
result not because lenders want to sell at a loss, but because lendersusually commercial banksare prohibited from managing the real estate except for the brief period of time during which it is on the market.
Consider what would happen if the bank could rent the home out and wait for
market recovery. The bank would replace the cash flow from the loan with a slightly
lower cash flow from rental income. While the bank would still book losses from
legal costs and a lower rental income cash flow, fire sale losses could be avoided.
Lastly, the bank can sell the home in the market upturn several years hence and
possibly recoup some of the losses in the failed loan.6
Consider the additional social advantages if the bank could rent the home to the
existing occupants. If the financial conditions of the renter improved with economic
recovery, the bank may also have a ready buyer in the existing occupant, as well.
Occupants would have more of an incentive to maintain the property and foreclosed
owners would have less incentive to destroy the property in reaction to bank actions.
Occupants would most likely buy the house back from the bank at a market-determined value later on, relieving the need for government guess work in the middle
of a crisis.
Such regulatory changes are a simple way to ensure that home owners affected
by the crisis do not get hurt again, something current modification proposals do not
adequately address. In fact, forthcoming research shows that many companies
claiming to be special servicersbut really run by the same managers that owned
failed subprime mortgage companiesare already entering the business to fleece
borrowers and collect the $1,000 per head fee offered under the most recent housing
plan. Even worse, modification frauds have proliferated throughout the country,
preying on the same uninformed consumer that got the unaffordable subprime loan.
The fact is servicer quality matters, and servicer quality matters even more when
loans become distressed. A defaulted borrower that re-establishes payment on their
loan usually does so because of some element of trust between them and the
servicer that leads to establishing a payment plan the borrower believes is advantageous to both parties. The servicer may work on the borrowers behalf as part of
that plan, assembling a program combining elements of bankruptcy, selling other
assets, or consolidating other loans. If the borrower is still unable to make the payments, the servicer maintains a good relationship with the borrower through the
foreclosure process to preserve the value of the home and liquidating the collateral
to collect money owed to the investor. (Fitch, Scratch & Dent: This Is Not Your Fathers MBS, 20051213 at 8)
But the servicing industry already has a checkered past. In the 1990s subprime
mortgage servicers were plagued with problems: aggressive growth strategies led to
expanded underwriting guidelines; a significant increase in correspondent lending
led to inflated property appraisals; and predatory practices both in underwriting
and servicing led to rampant lawsuits. Many of the players that were market leaderssuch as ContiMortgage, IMC Mortgage, United Companies, and The Money
Storewent out of business long ago. (Fitch, Rating U.S. Residential Subprime
Mortgage Securities, at 1)
According to Elizabeth McCaul, former Superintendant of Banks for the State of
New York, some areas of weakness in the servicing industry in recent years leading
up the present crisis included . . . a lack of focus on the strength of the originator/
servicer, and improper analysis of the substitution of good loans for bad. We have
seen re-aging policies not being properly analyzed. In fact, investment in this area
has been largely driven by mathematical formulations without enough qualitative
analysis of operations and financial strength. For example, we have conducted reviews of portfolios and seen residuals on balance sheets that do not reflect enough
financial strength to continue operations effectively. If the shop is closed, the Trust5 Although I do not need to go into it here, the common understanding is flawed: a foreclosed
home is often of lower value than an occupied home because it has deteriorated in condition
due to lack of maintenance and sometimes willful destruction of the previous occupants.
6 Bank ownership could be limited to seven years to ensure that banks do not end up being
primarily real estate development companies.

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ee comes in, the re-aging practices (and other practices) are halted. . . delinquencies
roll in, and the rest, as you know, is history. (McCaul, Elizabeth, Whats Ahead
for the US Residential Mortgage Market, Speech at ASF 2007 conference by Elizabeth McCaul of Promontory Capital, former Superintendent of Banks for the State
of New York, February 2, 2007 at www.SIFMA.org)
According to Bank of America, Payment deferral will not help people who inflated incomes or recklessly bought properties they could not afford (by some estimates, 70% of stated income loans contain inflated by 50% or more). (Bank of
America, Subprime Mortgage Finance Weekly: Subprime Loan Modificationsnot
a Panacea, May 25, 2007, p. 4.) Deferring payments for such borrowers may just
squeeze the last pennies out of the borrowers pockets. If the borrower has no true
hope of owing the home, even with the deferment plan, the program may be judged
to be predatory. Even if such remedies are targeted across the pool of borrowers
evenly, if protected class members adversely select to participate in such programs
the outcome could be judged to harbor disparate impact. Worse yet, if the borrower
does not maintain the house or destroys the house knowing that they cannot truly
afford the home, the ultimate loss in foreclosure is larger than if the lender had
foregone the mitigation. (Mason, Joseph R., Mortgage Loan Modification: Promises
and Pitfalls, October 3, 2007. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1027470)
Hence, according to Moodys, modifications that are used properly are obviously a
very good tool. But, . . . the one thing you dont want to do is to defer the inevitable.
The investor (and borrower) is therefore at the mercy of the servicer who is making a . . . judgment call as to whether a mortgage is salvageable or not, and that
varies depending on market conditions, as well as personal conditions of the borrower and their intentions. (Moodys, Sub-Prime Mortgages: An Integrated Look
into Credit Issues Today and What to Expect, Transcript of a teleconference held
on Friday, 9 March 2007 at 16; Mason, Joseph R., Mortgage Loan Modification:
Promises and Pitfalls, October 3, 2007. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/
abstract=1027470)
Moreover, that judgment call is made with virtually no direct oversight. In most
cases, prior to a servicers default, the is trustee not required to investigate accuracy
of information stated in any document it receives, unless it receives a written request from insurers or holders of minimum percentage of outstanding certificates to
do so. Of course, a conundrum arises because insurers and investors have little reason to assume such a written request is necessary without some investigation of the
accuracy of information in the documents. The point is the investor has to completely trust the servicer to act on their behalf, often in substantially unverifiable
dimensions. (Heller-Ehrman, The Subprime Mortgage Crisis-Overview of Civil Litigation Claims, Presentation from Navigating the Credit Crisis Conference, Wednesday, March 5, 2008)
Even if the trustee were to undertake such an investigation, however, the standard of service required of the contractual arrangements is vaguely defined. Typical
provisions require the servicer to follow accepted servicing practices and procedures
as it would employ in its good faith business judgment and which are normal and
usual in its general mortgage servicing activities and/or certain procedures that
such servicer would employ for loans held for its own account. (Heller-Ehrman, The
Subprime Mortgage Crisis-Overview of Civil Litigation Claims, Presentation from
Navigating the Credit Crisis Conference, Wednesday, March 5, 2008)
Servicing, therefore, is a crucial aspect of value to all consumer loan
securitizations but it is not very well understood by regulators or investors. The
problem is that servicer accountability and reporting to investors and regulators is
woefully inadequate. Adequate information to evaluate servicer quality rarely exists,
and where it does it is not consistently or widely distributed. Hence, regulators can
do a great service to both the industry and borrowers in todays financial climate
by insisting that servicers report adequate information to assess not only the success of major modification initiatives, but also overall performance. The increased
investor dependence on third-party servicing that has accompanied securitization
necessitates substantial improvements to investor reporting in order to support appropriate administration and, where helpful, modification of consumer loans in both
the public and private interest.
II. Restoring the Economy in the Long-run: Building Tomorrows Growth
While the key challenge to implementing the short-term elements above are primarily inflexible dogma and courage, the challenge to long-term elements will be
that of staying focused on the problems long after the crisis has passed. Nonetheless, fundamental changes to domestic and international regulatory structures will
be key to maintaining U.S. financial market competitiveness, and policies that can

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streamline productivity gains through removing outmoded regulations and other impediments to growth can help increase U.S. economic competitiveness overall.
Again, however, I cannot stress enough that focus will be the key. Hence, the shortand medium term need to be devoted to setting a foundation of shared bipartisan
understanding of the issues the policies that need to be addressed. Only with a
foundation of genuine shared understanding and agreement can the policy discussion last long enoughmost likely this will take several political administrations
to reach meaningful solutions.
A. Lay Down a Firm Foundation for Domestic Regulatory Structures
Using the analogy of the financial architecture, the primary foundation lies in
the fact that even the best architects cannot expect to create buildings that plumbers, electricians, and carpenters cannot build. Certain physical limitations of the financial system need to be addressed on a mundane fundamental level before we can
think about the form of the regulatory system that we expect to arise. Changing titles of key regulatory officials, in the manner of a typical corporate reorganization,
will not lead to effective change. As James Aitken of UBS is fond of saying, start
with the plumbing. To that I would add that not only is the plumbing the hardest
thing to change afterward, but flow is a natural concept that is impossible to fight
and back-ups really stink!
The starting point is the basic concept of and appropriate role for financial regulation. There will always be a portion of the financial system in which highly risky
products are traded with freedom and there should always be a portion where risk
is kept within certain well-monitored acceptable levels. Hence, there will always
exist a continuum of regulated and unregulated institutions (whether we like it or
notblack markets work, too). If we push regulation to hitherto unregulated institutions, new unregulated institutions will be developed to operate in the unregulated portion of the continuum. Hedge funds arose in this regard, and new institutions will develop behind them.
That starting point leads to the recognition that one key principal violated in the
recent crisis is akin to the gravity that causes water to flow downhill: while it is
fine for non-regulated financial institutions to invest and fund themselves via regulated institutions, if the system allows regulated institutions to fund themselves and
invest in non-regulated products you have a recipe for disaster. We should want risk
to travel from regulated to non-regulated firms, but we should try to prevent risk
from travelling the other direction. When banks funded lending via private unregulated securitization markets, banks began to rely crucially on a set of unregulated
financial institutions that were not fully developed and are therefore prone to volatility and upsetthe recipe for the disaster we are seeing.
That leads to a second observation: risk never goes away. Pooling loans to serve
as collateral for a securitization does not create diversification any more than buying more shares of the same firm. Tranching mortgage- or asset-backed securities
also does not reduce risk, it only moves it to the most junior bond claimantsusually the banks, themselves, that hold the residuals and mezzanine stakes.
The point is that in a world based on financial engineering, risk is increasingly
fungible. For instance, where risk seems to disappear on a contractual basis, it reappears on a reputational basis. It is straightforward, therefore, to propose that
reputational risk is valuable. Moreover, however, reputational risk is fairly easily
defined in terms of game theory: reputational risk exists when there is a cost of cooperating and that cooperation is necessary to continue the game to the next period
(i.e., bailing out securitized investors like those in SIVs and ARSs). It is straightforward to propose, therefore, that firms should hold capital to cover the probable
cost of cooperation.
The starting points of acknowledging roles for risky and less risky institutions
and the evolution of institutions to meet market needs also lead to an acknowledgement that financial innovation will always be with us. Hence, we need a system
flexible enough to monitor new developments and relate their importance to the
gravity and fungibility conditions discussed above. From 2001 through 2008, Mark
Adelson (now at S&P) archived panel notes at structured finance industry conferences around the world that described how the industry has long been concerned
with many of the issues that are causing the present crisis. (see http://
www.adelsonandjacob.com/publications.html) Regulators, however, failed to listen to
discussion within the industry, choosing instead to ignore the developments until
the scale of difficulties rose to a national economic crisis that demanded their attention.
This failure to monitor financial innovation and new financial institutionsalong
with the specious nature of the currently proposed systemic risk regulatory approachleads to consideration of a much more effective monitoring role for all regu-

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latory agencies, tracking innovation and new financial institutions to ensure that
they do not move unregulated risk into regulated institutions by transforming it
into previously unmonitored forms.
Finance is a fast-evolving field. Financial regulators therefore need to be proactive
in their approach, so that they are not surprised enough for unmonitored risks to
become anything that could even loosely be considered systemic in the first place.
B. Start Building a More Comprehensive International Regulatory Structure
Currently, other dogmatic and inflexible approaches are driving a wedge between
European and U.S. regulation, and both are leaving the rest of the world behind.
Instead, it makes sense in an increasingly global world to work with other countries
to further develop unified standards set under the Foreign Bank Supervision Enhancement Act of 1991 (FBSEA) that can deal not only with prudential supervision
of banks in particular, but financial institutions and their failures more generally.
According to the Federal reserve Bank of New York, foreign banking institutions,
which include foreign bank branches, agencies, and U.S.-chartered bank subsidiaries, hold approximately one-fourth of all commercial banking assets in the United
States. In December 2006, foreign banking organizations operated or controlled 188
branches, 133 agencies, 62 U.S. commercial banks, and 8 Edge or Agreement corporations. Foreign banking institutions held about $216 billion in commercial and
industrial loans, roughly 18 percent of the total in the United States.
FBSEA laid down responsibilities for prudential supervision of foreign banking institutions largely in response to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International
(BCCI) scandal, in which it was found that no regulatory agency took responsibility
for BCCIs prudential supervision. FBSEA laid down rules of assigning prudential
supervision authority among different countries. FBSEA also stipulated that although branches may receive deposits of any size from foreigners, they may accept
deposits only in excess of $100,000 (wholesale deposits) from U.S. citizens and residents.7 Similar provisions exist across European countries, limiting domestic deposit
insurance liabilities to foreign depositors.
Unfortunately, FBSEA has remained frozen in time as the global financial system
has changed. In fact, we have learned from the current crisis that while it is important to limit deposit insurance fund liability across borders, it is equally if not more
important to deal with asset resolutions across borders. For instance, with some 18
percent of U.S. commercial and industrial loans, the failure of a foreign bank can
have dire ramifications for U.S. businesses. Furthermore, in the event of a deposit
insurance payout at the foreign bank, foreign deposit insurance authorities dealings
with U.S. borrowers could be important to U.S. regional or national economic performance. Even more complex, will foreign bank U.S. asset proceeds be used to pay
amounts due to U.S. depositors, or do those satisfy foreign bank home country insured depositors first?
Resolving global financial crises in a global marketplace means coordinating regulatory approaches to sell banks and bank assets across borders. Hence, we need to
develop a Foreign Financial Asset Resolution Enhancement Act to effectively deal
with other countries regulatory systems that manage both bank and non-bank assets and smooth regulatory frictions that can interfere with orderly resolutions of
financial assets, worldwide. This initiative becomes more crucial day by day, as toobig-to-fail becomes too-big-to-save when financial institutions become larger than
not only their safety nets, but also their home country domestic economies.
C. Increase U.S. Economic Competitiveness
All of the above initiatives ultimately increase U.S. economic competitiveness. Increased international diplomacy regarding foreign bank resolutions can also create
ties that break through foreign nationalist pressures and nascent trade blocs that
are developing as countries try to insulate themselves from the global crisis. Those
diplomatic efforts will help to maintain trade patterns that foster U.S. manufacturing and therefore economic growth.
Smart regulation in the financial sector will reduce unnecessary impediments to
growth in U.S. financial markets, maintaining U.S. preeminence as having the most
transparent and efficient markets in the world. Undertaking a broad-based review
of the U.S. financial reporting will reveal obvious avenues for improvementsuch
as changing bank regulatory call report classifications for brokered deposits and de7 Furthermore, as a result of the FBSEA, deposits in any foreign bank branch established
after December 19, 1991, are not covered by U.S. deposit insurance; deposit insurance is now
offered only to U.S.-chartered depository institutions. Foreign agencies specialize in making
commercial loans to finance international transactions, and they may accept only short-term deposits related to such transactions.

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veloping increasingly relevant consolidated bank holding company-level Y-9 reports
of off-balance sheet riskthat will lead to more sensible regulatory rulemaking in
the new financial marketplace.
III. Summary and Conclusions
This written testimony offers three primary suggestions for short- and long-term
strategies to restore the economy and fostering long-term growth. Again, my testimony focuses primarily, but not exclusively, on financial market reforms. The reason for that focus lies in the macroeconomic understanding that financial crises do
not cause recessions, but merely prolong and deepen them. Recessions are therefore
possible without a financial crisis, but once an economic is in recession recovery is
virtually impossible with a financial crisis ongoing.
As stated above, in the short-term, resolving the crisis will require humility and
hard work. The United States still has the most advanced financial system in the
world, but over the last several decades the growth of that system outpaced U.S.
regulatory capabilities. Among the key weaknesses that caused the crisis are relatively well-understood shortcomings like too-big-to-fail, insufficient accounting
transparency, and asset market overhang. We already have several decades of economic research that we can use to resolve those problems in the short run, even
if doing so will take courage and flexibility. Nonetheless, while existing policy attempts to address some of these issues get close, slight changes in approach can
achieve success in a much more straightforward and effective manner.
For instance, the House introduced Bond Rating legislation as HR 6482 last summer, but that bill was not put to vote due to the financial market crises of the period. Such legislation will be crucially important to moving the industry forward.
But even dogmatic shifts such as focusing on the far more obtainable goal of housing
occupancy instead of home ownership can help get our economy moving quickly
again with a lower probability of home buyers getting hurt again.
As stated above, reform in the long run will be much harder, requiring significant
efforts to fix old and build new regulatory structures and set the stage for U.S. economic growth. Much of the work will not be glamorous. Before one brick can be laid
in the new financial structure, there needs to be a hard discussion of regulatory
principals that will serve as the mortar of the construct. Much additional work is
necessary to develop international diplomatic relations around existing unitary principals of oversight to develop standards and procedures for resolving failed financial
institutions, providing bridge financing and oversight and disposing of their assets.
Global imbalances in economic growth potential are already spurring the development of trade blocs and agreements worldwide, presenting both opportunities and
threats to U.S. markets. U.S. financial diplomacy abroad will go a long way toward
smoothing some of those sentiments, and U.S. businesses will have to adapt strategically to fast-moving changes in global markets to stay competitive.
The binding principals of any regulatory reform processwhich is a large part of
what we have at hand hereare do no harm and leave the industry cleaner than
when you arrived. Hence, we have before us both the opportunity and motivation
to improve our economy and our nation. Let us embark on setting a firm foundation
for improved financial markets and economic growth potential so that the necessary
restructuring becomes known more for its own success than the crisis that motivated the changes.
In conclusion, it is fitting that todays panel includes the Honorable Paul Volcker,
who Chaired the Federal Reserve at a time when we first learned of natural rates
in economics. We learned then that attempts to push unemployment below natural
levels creates perverse economic dynamics, like stagflation. The recent push to drive
home ownership rates to one hundred percent and substitute debt for income has
had similar perverse effects. As Chairman Volcker showed us back then, the only
way out of the perverse dynamics is to move through the downturn. I hope we learn
form Chairman Volckers example and exhibit the courage to book the losses, learn
our lessons, and move back to meaningful and robust economic growth.

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