S. HRG.

110712

WALL STREET TO MAIN STREET: IS THE CREDIT

CRISIS OVER AND WHAT CAN THE FEDERAL
GOVERNMENT DO TO PREVENT UNNECESSARY
SYSTEMIC RISK IN THE FUTURE?

HEARING
BEFORE THE

JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE

CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION

MAY 14, 2008

Printed for the use of the Joint Economic Committee

(
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON

44539 PDF

2009

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JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE

[Created pursuant to Sec. 5(a) of Public Law 304, 79th Congress]
SENATE
CHARLES E. SCHUMER, New York, Chairman
EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts
JEFF BINGAMAN, New Mexico
AMY KLOBUCHAR, Minnesota
ROBERT P. CASEY, JR., Pennsylvania
JIM WEBB, Virginia
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas
JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire
JIM DEMINT, South Carolina
ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York, Vice Chair
MAURICE D. HINCHEY, New York
BARON P. HILL, Indiana
LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
LLOYD DOGGETT, Texas
JIM SAXTON, New Jersey, Ranking Minority
KEVIN BRADY, Texas
PHIL ENGLISH, Pennsylvania
RON PAUL, Texas

MICHAEL LASKAWY, Executive Director

CHRISTOPHER J. FRENZE, Republican Staff Director

(II)

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CONTENTS
MEMBERS
Statement of Hon. Charles E. Schumer, Chairman, a U.S. Senator from
New York ..............................................................................................................
Statement of Hon. Sam Brownback, a U.S. Representative Senator from
Kansas ...................................................................................................................
Statement of Hon. Kevin Brady, a U.S. Representative from Texas ..................
Statement of Hon. Carolyn B. Maloney, Vice Chair, a U.S. Representative
from New York .....................................................................................................

1
3
5
6

WITNESSES
Statement of Hon. Paul A Volcker, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve
Board of Governors, Washington,DC ..................................................................
Statement of Dr. Douglas W. Elmendorf, senior economic fellow, Brookings
Institution, Washington,DC ................................................................................
Statement of Ellen Seidman, director, Financial Services and Education
Project, Asset Building Program, New America Foundation, Washington,
DC ..........................................................................................................................
Statement of Alex J. Pollock, resident fellow, American Enterprise Institute,
Washington, DC ...................................................................................................
SUBMISSIONS

FOR THE

8
33
35
38

RECORD

Prepared statement of Senator Charles E. Schumer, Chairman .........................

Prepared statement of Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Vice Chair ............
Prepared statement of Senator Sam Brownback ..................................................
Prepared statement of Hon. Paul A Volcker, former Chairman of the Federal
Reserve Board of Governors, Washington,DC ...................................................
Prepared statement of Dr. Douglas W. Elmendorf, senior economic fellow,
Brookings Institution, Washington,DC ..............................................................
Prepared statement of Ellen Seidman, director, Financial Services and Education Project, Asset Building Program, New America Foundation, Washington, DC .............................................................................................................
Prepared statement of Alex J. Pollock, resident fellow, American Enterprise
Institute, Washington, DC ..................................................................................

52
54
55
56
58
63
65

(III)

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WALL STREET TO MAIN STREET: IS THE

CREDIT CRISIS OVER AND WHAT CAN THE
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DO TO PREVENT
UNNECESSARY SYSTEMIC RISK IN THE FUTURE?
WEDNESDAY, MAY 14, 2008

CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES,

JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met at 9:30 a.m., in room SH216 of the Hart
Senate Office Building, the Honorable Charles E. Schumer (Chairman of the Committee) presiding.
Senators present: Klobuchar, Webb, and Brownback.
Representatives present: Maloney, Hinchey, Brady, and Paul.
Staff present: Christina Baumgardner, Heather Boushey, Chris
Frenze, Tamara Fucile, Nan Gibson, Rachel Greszler, Colleen
Healy, Bob Keleher, Israel Klein, Tyler Kurtz, Michael Laskawy,
David Min, Robert OQuinn, Jeff Schlagenhauf, Christina Valentine, and Jeff Wrase.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CHARLES E. SCHUMER,
CHAIRMAN, A U.S. SENATOR FROM NEW YORK

Chairman Schumer. Good morning, everyone. The hearing will

come to order, and were going to get started unusually and atypically, right on time here.
First, I want to thank you, Chairman Volcker, as well as our
other witnesseswe have a second panel todayfor coming to this
hearing about the financial system and the steps we need to take
to reform our regulatory structure.
Our discussion will be a broader one. Were not going to get into
specifics. Thats the real province of the Banking CommitteeI
serve on that, as well, and some of us on this Committee dobut
rather, the broader regulatory questions that we face, given everything thats happening in our new financial world.
Im worried that because things do not seem as bad as they did
a month ago, were already starting to become complacent about
the critical need to address the regulatory and market failures that
have had much to do with the troubling economic situation we find
ourselves in.
The past year has been a stark reminder of the direct link between Wall Street and Main Street, between the health of financial
markets, and the economic well-being of all Americans.
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A year ago, most of us had never heard of CDOs and CMOs, and
SIVs and of option ARMs and credit default swaps and auction-rate
securities. Now we know that those who knew about those complex
financial instruments clearly didnt know enough to protect consumers, investors, and our economy from them.
And weve learned too much about the central role these financial tools have played in the worst housing crisis since the Great
Depression, the freezing of credit markets worldwide, and the onset
of the current economic slowdown which probably more than half
of all economists call a recession.
Financial innovation is vital, both for the health of our financial
system and our economy, but its just as vital that financial regulation keep up with innovation. Unfortunately, it has not.
In my view, this credit crisis is as much a failure of regulation
as it is a failure of the marketplace.
The goal of regulation should always be to encourage entrepreneurial vigor, while ensuring the health of the financial system. We
have, indeed, found that balance in the past, but it seems to have
been lost.
We have a 21st century global financial system, but a 20th century national set of financial regulations, and that has to change.
To begin, we have to acknowledge that consolidation has transformed the financial industry. We no longer have any clear distinctions between commercial banks, investment banks, broker-dealers,
and insurers that we did 60 years ago, or even 20 years ago.
Instead, there is a large number of financial institutions surrounded by many, many more smaller institutions, such as hedge
funds and private equity funds with their own specialties. Its as
though we have a handful of large financial Jupiters that are becoming more and more similar, encircled by numerous small asteroids.
A regulatory structure has to recognize that change, as large investment banks have come to act more like commercial banks, and
especially now that they can borrow from the Feds Discount Window, they need to be supervised more strictly.
We need to think very seriously about moving toward more unified regulation, if not a single regulator. We have too many financial regulators each watching a different part of the financial system, while virtually no one can keep an eye on the greater threats
of systemic risk.
In the United Kingdom, they have a single strong regulator who
has responsibility for the entire system and the authority to act
when necessary.
Maybe a regulator with that authority could have prevented a
debacle like the collapse of Bear Stearns, by acting quickly and
forcefully before things unravelled.
In a certain sense, the regulatorthe prime regulator of Bear
Stearnswas the SEC. Theyre interested in investor protection
and transparency, whereas the Fed, which has the primary jurisdiction over systemic risk, really didnt have much knowledge or
ability to go look at Bear Stearns, so you had mismatched regulators for what needed to be done.
We have to figure out how to regulate the currently unregulated
parts of financial markets as well.

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For example, credit default swaps are a multi-trillion-dollar industry, almost completely outside the purview of regulators. Recently, theres been talk about creating a clearinghouse for credit
default swaps.
I think this is an excellent idea and the sort of innovation we
should be thinking about more broadly. I also believe we need to
think about whether a unique exchange for these swaps might be
an even more effective way to bring about greater transparency
and limit systemic risks.
We must have greater transparency in the financial systemperiod. The credit crunch has been as much a crisis of confidence as
it has been a real economic crisis.
Financial markets operate on trust and on the belief that participants havethat they can rely on the people they are entering into
contracts with. As long as so many black holes remain in the financial system, its going to be hard for that trust to be restored.
We also must involve our international partners. National regulations can achieve only so much in a global financial market. It
does us no good to enact new rules here if other countries remain
lax in their regulations or their enforcement.
The global financial regulatory system should not be the arithmetical equivalent of the lowest common denominator. This crisis
and the complexity of our system requires much more.
And finally, we must put aside the laissez-faire, no-governmentis-good-government mantra that we too often hear from this Administration and from many of my friends on the other side of the
aisle.
Clearly, the market does not solve all problems by itself, and of
course, neither does Government. Thats why we need firm, forward-looking regulation to prevent the sort of crises were facing
now from occurring in the future.
I share with Treasury Secretary Paulson and Chairman
Bernanke the hope that the worst of the credit crisis is behind us,
but Im not convinced that its over. Whatever calm has been
brought to financial markets today has been the result, largely, of
extraordinary actions taken by the Federal Reserve.
Chairman Bernanke deserves credit, but the actions he has had
to take are a sign of just how unprecedented and how troubling
this credit crisis has been.
We cannot sit back, relax, and hope for the best. The American
people, our economy, and the global financial system cant afford it.
[The prepared statement of Senator Schumer appears in the Submissions for the Record on page 52.]
Chairman Schumer. Id now like to call on Senator Brownback
for an opening statement.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. SAM BROWNBACK, A U.S.
SENATOR FROM KANSAS

Senator Brownback. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Welcome, Chairman Volcker. Good to have you back. Its always a
pleasure to see you.
I was talking to some individuals the other day, who had had
some comments or had heard a speech you had recently given, and

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4
I wanted to follow up in questioning, in the time period that I have
with you, about that.
Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the topic. Its quite a broad one: Is
the credit crisis over and what can the Federal Government do to
prevent unnecessary systemic risk in the future? It sounds suitable, I think, for a well-planned series of broad-based hearings.
I certainly hope that we can take the time in the Committee to
examine this subject in much more detail. It certainly seems like
its ripe for a discussion and something that we can work on collectively.
Obviously, much of the current economic slowdown can be attributed to dysfunctional financial markets over the past year, caused
by turmoil in markets for asset-backed debt securities and obligations.
We have witnessed the collapse of a major investment banking
firm, or near-collapse, but for the unprecedented action of the Federal Reserve Board.
Well, theres been general praise for the actions of the Federal
Reserve, which I have joined. Questions have been raised about
how close to, or how far outside the boundaries of the its authority
the Federal Reservess actions were.
Id like to note that the Fed took onto its balance sheet, and
therefore the taxpayers balance sheet, risky, private-sector assets
inherited from an investment bank, over which the Fed did not
have direct regulatory oversight as part of the takeover of Bear
Stearns by J.P. Morgan Chase.
Well, the Fed has the power to do so under a 1932 provision of
the Federal Reserve Act, allowing the Fed to lend to non-banks
under, quote, unusual and exigent circumstances. It isnt entirely
clear what constitutes such circumstances.
The Feds recent actions introduce serious issues of moral hazard
by signalling to risk-takers and financial markets, that if the dice
do not turn up favorable, the Fed, and hence taxpayers, will provide a backstop.
The Federal Reserve has also created new ways of lending to depository institutions and to investment banks by setting up a new
term auction facility and term securities lending facility.
The latter allows primary dealers to exchange less liquid securities at an auction-determined fee for some of the Feds Treasury securities.
Recently, the Fed has allowed private-sector asset-backed securities as securities eligible for such transactions.
So, the Fed has basically been conducting some of its monetary
policy by rearranging its, and therefore, the taxpayers balance
sheet, trading Treasury securities for securities that include risky,
asset-backed private securities.
While I believe that the Feds recent actions and activities have
been creative and may have helped reduce tensions in domestic
and global credit markets, I also take seriously the responsibility
that Congress has in its oversight role regarding the Fed.
I think that we need to know more than we currently do about
recent actions. For example, to my knowledge, we dont have a
clear accounting of the assets that the Fed took onto its balance

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5
sheet in the Bear Stearns J.P. Morgan Chase deal, or an accounting of the value of those assets.
Given the Feds recent emphasis on transparency, it would be
useful to know, but interesting that we dont.
One of our witnesses today, former Federal Reserve Bank Board
Chairman, Paul Volcker, is certainly eminently qualified to offer
perspectives, not only on the broad topic of avoiding system risk,
but on the more narrow questions of whether or not the Federal
Reserve acted appropriately.
Mr. Chairman, I look forward to the discussion and the questions
with our witnesses.
[The prepared statement of Senator Brownback appears in the
Submissions for the Record on page 55.]
Chairman Schumer. Thank you. I think well call on Mr.
Brady, Congressman Brady, before Congresswoman Maloney, so
that Congresswoman Maloney can get settled.
Congressman Brady is taking the place of Congressman Saxton
today.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. KEVIN BRADY, A U.S.
REPRESENTATIVE FROM TEXAS

Representative Brady. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, very much.

Its a pleasure to join in welcoming the witnesses before us today.
The recent financial turmoil and the consideration of appropriate
responses are key concerns of policymakers, and I thank Chairman
Schumer for calling this hearing.
Id like to also express my appreciation for the service of Paul
Volcker as Federal Reserve Chairman. His perspective is invaluable.
He was appointed by President Carter, in 1979, to deal with the
serious and growing inflation problem that was wreaking havoc on
the economy.
The magnitude of the problem can be seen in a number of statistics from 1980. That year, inflation was 13.5 percent. It pushed interest rates up, with mortgage rates well over 10 percent and rising.
A recession caused the Gross Domestic Product to decline, while
unemployment averaged over 7 percent for the year. With inflation
and unemployment both rising, the notion that higher inflation
could lead to lasting reduction of unemployment was finally discredited.
As Fed Chairman, Mr. Volcker had the difficult task of sharply
reducing inflation and restoring price stability, thereby laying a
foundation for sustainable economic growth.
The Fed has maintained the policy of price stability since the
early 1980s, leading to an era of low inflation, low interest rates,
and low unemployment.
The economic growth of the last 25 years would not have been
possible without the cornerstone of price stability laid down under
Mr. Volckers tenure.
More recently, there have been concerns about whether inflation
may be a rising threat to future economic growth. There have been
concerns that earlier policies may have contributed to the housing

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6
bubble and resulting debacle in mortgage-backed securities and related investments.
In addition, a variety of new financial instruments have been
created, generating risks that were poorly understood, even by the
most sophisticated bank executives on Wall Street. As a result,
after the bubble burst, banks have had to make massive
writedowns, and then in response, the Fed has loosened monetary
policy and resorted to a series of innovations and extraordinary actions, including the rescue of Bear Stearns last March, amid serious distress in the financial markets.
I will conclude with this: Financial innovation and the recent financial turmoil have made clear the need for financial regulatory
reform. The issues are very complex, and the debate about regulatory reform will likely go on for many years.
As a layman, it seems to me that our financial markets and their
instruments tend to move with the speed and agility of the matrix,
yet Government regulation, by nature, and regulators tend to move
with the speed and agility of John Madden, whom I love by the
way.
But the point is thatmy concern is that whatever direction we
head, that our regulators not micromanage each instrument and
each market, but put in place the transparency and the standards
that better allow investors and the public to monitor and short-circuit such crises before they occur again. That is our challenge before us. Mr. Chairman, I yield back.
Chairman Schumer. Thank you, Congressman Brady. Last, but
not least, Vice Chair Maloney.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. CAROLYN B. MALONEY, VICE
CHAIR, A U.S. REPRESENTATIVE FROM NEW YORK

Vice Chair Maloney. Thank you so much. I first thank the Senior Senator from the great State of New York for his leadership on
this issue, and New Yorkers are equally proud of Chairman
Volcker and his distinguished service to our country.
We are thrilled to have you here today. We all look forward to
your advice and your statements and your wisdom.
At the core of the ongoing liquidity crisis is the decline in home
prices which is causing banks to readjust their balance sheets and
to buildup capital.
Congress is currently focusing its attention on keeping families
in their homes and stemming the deepening decline in home prices.
The crisis in the housing market has brought to light the inability
of some of our most sophisticated and respected institutions to
measure their exposure to opaque assets and manage the risks associated with them.
Untangling the DNA of assets has become increasingly difficult
for investors. We clearly need greater transparency for complex investment products to assure a smoothly functioning market.
Our entire regulatory system is also in serious need of renovation
because financial innovation has surpassed our ability to protect
consumers and hold institutions accountable.
In our rather fragmented system, financial regulators do not
have authority to broadly address systemic risk. The Financial

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7
Services Committee will soon turn its attention to rethinking financial services regulation.
Meanwhile, the Treasury Secretary has a sweeping proposal for
revising the Federal regulation of all financial institutions. That
plan would grant the Federal Reserve power to serve as an overreaching market stability regulator, with the ability to collect information and require corrective action across the broad spectrum of
financial services.
Our current system of multiple regulators does leave big holes
that a super regulator could plug. For example, the unwillingness,
up to this point, of the Federal Reserve and the SEC to require
working capital limits has been criticized as adding to risk-taking.
Only now has the SEC joined other Federal regulators in working with the Basel Committee to extend the capital adequacy
standards to deal explicitly with the liquidity risks.
The Bear Stearns rescue also exposed the lack of Federal regulatory authority to supervise investment bank holding companies
with bank affiliates, as the Fed supervises commercial bank holding companies.
Thus, investment bank holding companies dont have to maintain
liquidity on a consolidated basis. In the wake of the Bear Stearns
debacle, SEC Chairman Cox has said that investment banks can no
longer operate outside of a statutorily consolidated supervision regime.
Giving investment banks access to the Feds discount window
which was created for depository institutionscreates challenges,
since they are not regulated like depository institutions. In particular, they have no restrictions on how highly leveraged they can
be.
We need reforms, but the Treasury plan is so sweeping that it
risks possibly being disruptive, while we are working so very hard
to stabilize our economy. Moreover, it risks eliminating regulatory
voices that should be heard.
The American system of Government relies on checks and balances, and we can all think of instances when the lone voice of a
Federal regulator has pushed the group to an action that was unpopular, but proved to be right.
We should focus first on targeted reforms with maximum effect.
Improving the transparency and accountability of trading and credit default swaps and derivatives is one possible example.
A key factor that apparently pushed the Fed to rescue Bear
Stearns was concern about a domino effect from the interlocking
relationships between thousands of investors and banks over credit
default swaps, which are presently traded by investment banks off
any exchange and without any transparency.
Requiring the use of exchanges and clearinghouses for credit default swaps and derivatives is possibly worth exploring, and I look
forward to your comments on it.
Mr. Chairman, I thank you again for holding this hearing and
for your leadership for New York and for our economy and so many
creative ways. And again, it is a great honor for this Committee to
have Chairman Volcker here today.
Everyone is asking me in New York, what does Chairman
Volcker have to say about what is happening; so today, we get an

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8
opportunity to hear from you. We are delighted by your presence,
and thank you again for your service to our Nation.
[The prepared statement of Representative Maloney appears in
the Submissions for the Record on Page 54.]
Chairman Schumer. Thank you, Vice Chair Maloney. Now to
our first witness; Paul Volcker is truly one of the most esteemed
public servants in American recent history, a giant of financial regulation.
He is a former Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, where he served from 1979 to 1987. After retiring as chairman of Wolfenson and Company, Mr. Volcker served
as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the International Accounting Standards Committee from 2000 to 2005.
He chaired the independent inquiry into the United Nations OilFor-Food Program in 2004, and hes also professor emeritus of
international economic policy at Princeton University. Chairman
Volcker, were delighted youre here, and thank you for going out
of your way to come.
STATEMENT OF HON. PAUL A. VOLCKER, FORMER CHAIRMAN
OF THE FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD OF GOVERNORS, WASHINGTON, DC

Chairman Volcker. Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman, ladies and

gentlemen. We had a couple of conversations about coming here,
and you emphasized that you looked forward to informality in this
hearing.
Chairman Schumer. Correct.
Chairman Volcker. And I appreciate that. Ill just make a few
brief comments, if I can, which duplicate some of the things youve
been saying, to kind of help set the stage; but I would emphasize
at the beginning, I do not see any reason for complacency about recent market developments, however much, we can welcome a little
bit more calmness at the moment.
Now, we are in most difficult and complicated economic and financial circumstances, and we shouldnt doubt that.
I would emphasize a point that we often lose sight of, that, in
the background, this is not just a financial problem; it is an economic problem.
We have had an unbalanced economy. This country has spent
some years spending a lot more than its been producing. Its carrying out a higher level of consumption, relative to GNP, than we
could sustain, and that adjustment had to be made sooner or later.
I think were probably in the midst of making it, but it is a difficult question.
Thats in the background. In the foreground is the new financial
system that a number of you commented on: less reliant upon
banks, more reliant upon the open market, a more fluid system. Its
certainly heavily engineered.
You and others have said, Mr. Chairman, that you look toward
more transparency, and its hard to argue against transparency,
but I have to tell you, this new financial system, with all its enormous complexity, gives rise to a certain opaqueness that it is almost impossible to penetrate, so I dont think were going to find
all the answers in transparency.

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9
Theres kind of a symbiotic relationship between this new financial system and the unbalanced economy. The new financial system
was so fluid and so effective in some ways that it enabled us to finance the excess in spending.
We didnt have to save when people thought they had other ways
of finding money. The subprime mortgage phenomenon is the prime
example of financial engineering leading to a way to finance consumption.
Well thats broken down, and to oversimplify, I think we are seeing a system in which the mathematicians, basically, have taken
overthe financial engineers. Combine that complexity and
opaqueness with a supercharged compensation system, and you
had great incentives for risk-taking.
And at the same time, you had a basic breakdown, I think, in
the discipline of credit analysis: The system developed in a way
thats trading-dominated. People didnt worry so much about the
quality of the paper, so long as you could pass it off on somebody
else in a hurry.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Chairman Volcker. And there was a lesser sense of vulnerability.
As a general, sweeping conclusion, I would have to say that,
under stress, this new system has really failed the test of the marketplace. We are here because the new system has, in effect, broken down.
That put the Federal Reserve front and center in dealing with a
crisis. Its obviously reacted in unprecedented ways, as has been
mentioned here, with considerable success, but it leaves us with
some big unresolved issues which you have all already mentioned.
What is the proper role of the lender of last resort? The traditional framework has been the banking system, heavily regulated,
on the one side, has access to the lender of last resort, as a protection mechanism. Now we have the lender of last resort, rescuing
sectors which are not subject to heavy regulation, and thats an incongruity that I think has to be corrected.
A little more subtle, but also mentioned by one of you, the Federal Reserve has taken on its balance sheetnot just the Federal
Reserves, its other central banks in Europe. They have become, in
particular, supporters of the mortgage market.
Theyve done it in order to react to the current crisis, but we
have to ask ourselves, what are the implications for a central bank
getting involved in supporting particular sections of the market?
I understand that there are demands now, that they get into the
student loan market, which is under stress, and maybe some other
year, it will be some other part of the market. That has not been
in the tradition of central banks, and I think whats at issue here,
in the long run, is the independence of the central bank.
If it is going to be looked to as a rescuer or supporter of particular sectors of the market, that is not a strictly monetary function in the way its been interpreted in the past.
And then there is, of course, the question of the Federal Reserves role, or anybodys role in supervision. I know from experienceits obvious that regulation has inherent problems; its awk-

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10
ward, arbitrary, backward-looking often. Apart from that, the life
of a regulator is not a happy one.
When things are going well, nobody wants to be regulated.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Chairman Volcker. And the resistance of the market to being
regulated is transmitted quite readily into the political process
when things are going well.
When things are going bad, everybody asks the regulator, where
were you? Well, he wasnt there, in part because of the inherent
difficulty of effective regulation when things are going well.
There have been breakdowns in supervision and regulation here;
I dont think theres any doubt about it.
But beyond the Federal Reserve and beyond supervision and regulation, let me just make my own list. There are other issues involved here: Credit rating agencies; accounting; the role of markto-market and fair-value accounting.
I wonder, in this situation, going back months ago, where were
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Here are institutions that have been
created to support and facilitate the mortgage market, and in pursuit of their private property objectives, they strained themselves
to the point that when the crisis comes, their ability to act is limited.
How do we restore credit analysis? What about the compensation
system?
These are not very easily soluble problems, and I would conclude
with the point that you just made, Mr. Chairman, that were not
going to solve these problems by domestic action alone. This is an
international market, and were going to have to work together
with others.
I dont think thats an impossible challenge. Theres been a lot of
progress in that area recently.
This crisis clearly goes beyond the boundaries of the United
States. Its clearly recognized in Europe; I think its recognized in
Japan, and there is a lot of basis for hope that we can get together
on reasonable regulatory approaches, as we already do in some
areas, with other major financial centers.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Paul A. Volcker appears in the
Submissions for the Record on page 56.]
Chairman Schumer. Well, Mr. Chairman, thank you. I recall,
in my House days on the Banking Committee, when you were Fed
Chairman. Theres only one thing thats changed; your acuity and
your being able to summarize succinctly, but with just laser-like
analysis, is still there.
But the rules have changed and you dont have your big cigar,
so you dont have all the smoke coming in front of you.
Chairman Volcker. I dont even miss it, which is something I
never thought was possible.
Chairman Schumer. See, regulation moves onward.
[Laughter.]
Chairman Schumer. But, in any case, it is great to hear you,
and I have so many different questions.
Your analysis is troubling and sort of puts us in a different way.
You know, when I look at this, I sometimes say the international

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aspects are the most difficult, but youre saying, no, weve had good
progress there.
The difficulty here is just the complexity of these markets and
the inability of regulation to almost catch up. Transparency doesnt
solve the problem, because, in a sense, the markets are fragmented
and opaque in themselves.
Thats worrisome and troubling, and something were going to
have to think about a lot.
Chairman Volcker. I have, just as a homely example, looked at
a couple of annual reports of major financial institutions, recently.
They are very thick.
And if you can keep awake while reading them and understanding them, youre a better man than I am, and it reminds you
that the executives of these companies, I think, to put it mildly,
have great difficulty in really understanding the amount of risk
and complexity involved in their organizations.
Chairman Schumer. Right. I agree with you. Firstand you
can give a relatively quick answer herethe Federal Reserve did
take the radical step you talked about it, to prevent the collapse
of Bear Stearns.
Some people have said theyve overstepped their authority. Do
you think they had any choice? Could they have done it differently?
Do you basically agree with what Chairman Bernanke did, given
his limited abilities ahead of time?
Chairman Volcker. I was not there, but I can imagine that
they were faced with a problem, and with a very short timeframe,
worried about the contagion from the loss of Bear Stearns which
was thrust upon their consciousness with suddenness, very quickly,
and the interaction of a major investment banking firmits interesting that it was the smallest of the major investment banking
firmsnonetheless created the possibility of a severe systemic crisis and difficult circumstances, so I can certainly understand why
they felt they had to act.
Chairman Schumer. Do you think we have to follow up now,
and does this almost, by definition, require us to re-examine how
regulation is done?
Chairman Volcker. Absolutely. In a way, this crisis forced attention to what existed, in fact, already. The banking sector, which
was protected and regulated, had gotten relatively smaller. The
other sector had gotten larger and larger, but legislation and banking regulations had not caught up with that fact. Now, youre
forced to look at it.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Chairman Volcker. Thats easy to say.
Chairman Schumer. Hard to do.
Chairman Volcker. What is an investment bank? Who is protected; who is not protected? Its put in stark contrast, when you
think back to long-term capital management. This wasnt even an
investment bank; it was a hedge fund.
My God, there are 40,000 or 50,000 hedge funds in the world,
and this was supposed to have been a very sophisticated one. Have
we got a financial system that cannot stand the particular loss of
one hedge fund, with a relatively concentrated number of creditors?

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That is a pretty sad commentary on the basic framework of the
financial system.
Chairman Schumer. Right, and frightening, in a certain sense.
The interconnectedness and, as you say, the complexity and
opaqueness, allow a small flea on a tail of a dog, to have the whole
system sort of collapse.
Let me ask you about two specific issues and just get your
thoughts on them. I have been moving in the direction and talking
about consolidating the system of regulation. When you have the
combination that youve talked about, to have the regulators all
chopped up in 25 different pieces, doesnt make much sense. What
do you think of that?
Second, these swaps and derivatives, in general, as you say, are
as opaque as could be, and difficult, and transparency may not
solve much, but there is a lot of talk about having some kind of
clearinghouse, so that trades dont just occur among two parties,
but at least a larger number of parties who are in the general area,
get to see whats going on.
What do you think of each of those ideas?
Chairman Volcker. Well, let me take the second one, first, because I can give you a briefer answer. Im not an expert in these
kinds of things, but this is one of the weak points, I think, in the
present financial system, that you do not have a clearinghouse
where a potential loss can be absorbed over a large number of participants.
Until recently, the settlement arrangements for this explosion in
derivatives, have been very uncertain, in my understanding. Thats
been cleaned up, fortunately, to some extent, but by and large,
theres no clearinghouse for most credit default swaps, in particular, which is, I think, the biggest point of vulnerability, so, yes,
I think that is a priority.
Now, I wont say much more about it, because Im not an expert
in that area.
Chairman Schumer. Good enough.
Chairman Volcker. On consolidated regulatory authority, of
course, this is a big issue. The English thought they got it right
some years ago. They put it all in one big agency, had some liaison
with the Central Bank, but not apparently, close enough.
As soon as it was tested, it didnt pass the test very vigorously,
and the admiration for that system is somewhat diluted and leaves
open the question.
Ill illustrate the difficulty, I guess, without an answer: From my
point of view, its always seemed rather clear, maybe even obvious
to me, but Im biased, that the Federal Reserve ought to be the
principal financial supervisor, given its broad responsibilities.
Partly because of its responsibilities as lender of last resort, but
also because of its independence, I think its in a better position to
resist political pressures on regulation. It also has a sense of continuity and the place of regulation within the broader economic
context.
So, I would say, yes, we need more uniformity, and it looks like
the Federal Reserve seems to be the logical candidate.

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Chairman Schumer. So, one place you might look to is, give
them more authority over holding companies of so-called investments.
Chairman Volcker. That is one way to do it, but now I have
a certain hesitancy. How much do you want to give to the Federal
Reserve? If you make them, to go to the extreme, the sole regulator
of financial stability considerations, which would include what
youre saying, it becomes an even more powerful agency in the
United States.
Its getting into areas that are not typically thought to require
the degree of independence that monetary policy does, so what does
that mean for the structure of the Federal Reserve? Im sure it
means one thing, administrativelythe Federal Reserve is not
equipped to do it now.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Chairman Volcker. And it would have to be reorganized and to
the degree the Federal Reserve takes on more responsibility, and
even without that, I would urge the Congress to make some arrangement where within the Federal Reserve there is an official,
presumably subject to, I guess, Congressional confirmation; that is
the chief supervisory regulator.
Now, maybe hes on the Federal Reserve Board. It could be the
Vice Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.
But there has to be somebody there whos accountable, more directly than is the case at the moment when you begin combining
these agencies, at least in my view. Youve got to have stronger
staff, youve got to be able to pay some of these mathematicians
and experts to get it on your side, instead of on the other side, or
at least to match the other side.
So, there are all kinds of interesting questions, including whether the Federal Reserve really needs to be the sole supervisor.
Theres something to be said for the Treasury outline. I think it
was interesting.
Chairman Schumer. Which outline?
Chairman Volcker. The one announced by Secretary Paulson
where they want to divide up the supervision by function. Take
business practice, consumer protection, investor protection and give
that to a new super SEC, I guess; create a super safety and stability regulator, and then have the Federal Reserve oversee it in
some sense.
The obvious question that many people have pointed out to that
is, if the Federal Reserve is going to oversee it, it better get more
involved than just coming in after a crisis.
So I dont think that resolves the problem, but its an interesting
suggestion.
Chairman Schumer. Thank you.
Representative Brady.
Representative Brady. Thank you, Chairman, and thank you,
Chairman Volcker.
I worry a bit about piling too much on the Federal Reserves
plate for fear that they will lose sight of their core mission. I know
that in Federal agencies when Congress tends to create that mission for them, they often are ineffective in actually doing what we
sent them up to do. Thats a concern.

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The reason I really appreciate you being here today, is, I think
weve really reached the point where we ought to be applying
Noahs principle, which is, we need fewer people telling us its raining and more people picking up a hammer and helping us build an
ark.
Your perspective is, I think, to help us identify the types of reforms that can help us build a regulatory environment that maximizes the up side of capitalism and helps prevent the problems we
have today.
Forgetting for a moment, who would be the regulator, or if it
would be a consolidated regulator, in your view, what is the most
important reform that Congress and the executive branch could
bring to bear on this ever-changing, complex, international financial market? Whats the most important? Where would you start on
the regulatory side on this issue?
Chairman Volcker. Well, I would start from the Congressional
perspective, I think, to decide what we were just discussing. What
should be the broad framework for that regulation? Should it be
one agency? Should it be maybe two agencies along the lines of the
Treasury proposal, one for business practices and one for safety
and soundness?
Thats kind of an alluring suggestion to me, but then as we just
discussed, you cant or should notanyway, in my view, remove it
all from the Federal Reserve. They have to be rather intimately involved.
Whether they have to be the operating regulatory agency in all
detail is a question that needs to be resolved. But dont separate
them, dont insulate the regulator from the lender of last resort.
I think the British experience is relevantand its not just that.
There was an incident in Canada some years ago, where the most
important regional banks in Canada, together, were in danger of
failing. The Bank of Canada was called in for a rescue, and they
had no supervisory authority, were obviously unfamiliar with the
situation, but yet they were deemed responsible for maintaining
the stability of those institutions.
That is not a sensible system, in my view.
Representative Brady. In part of the discussion of how best to
regulate and who should do it, what is the goal we want them to
accomplish? Where do we want them to start?
You mentioned that the current opaqueness in the system is a
great contributor to the problem. And you sort of inferred transparency is not necessarily the solution, but is it your point that
transparency would help.
When youve got CEOs of major financial institutions who dont
understand the complexity of their own purchases and risk-taking,
surely we need to have more transparency, so that average investors understandand regulators and Members of Congress, can
understand what is happening in the market at a given time, dont
you?
Chairman Volcker. Well, yes, but I dont know how you get it.
Take these CDOs that have been mentioned. These are big packages of mortgages and other forms of debt that some transformer
has put into a big package.

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They may or may not individually have some credit ratings, but
a lot of them have not had much credit discrimination these days,
because the originator doesnt take any risk, so hes not worried
about the credit. The transformer doesnt take much risk because
hes going to sell it.
Theyre put into a huge package, turned over to a credit rating
agency that is going to use the same mathematical formulas and
algorithms for evaluating the package that the originator used.
Representative Brady. Sure.
Chairman Volcker. Because those are the ones that exist. They
havent looked at the individual credits, and then they sell it in the
market. They may sell it to some municipality in Norway or whatever, to UBS in Switzerland, or obviously, to pension funds in California or wherever.
And nobodys really looked at it. You know, transparency, all
right, whats the transparency? Youre going to list 6,000 individual
mortgages that are in the package? Whos going to look at them?
Nobody really has, now, responsibility for them, or cares, in some
sense, so long as you can sell it. Theyve been told that, you know,
mathematical analysis says its not likely that more than 5 percent
are going to go bad, and another 10 percent will have difficulty,
and the other 70 percent are going to be triple-A credits.
Well, thats fine, until somebody begins questioning whether
thats true, in the middle of a crisis, and you have a mess.
Representative Brady. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate
it.
Vice Chair Maloney [presiding]. Thank you. What should the
Fed have done differently, if anything?
Chairman Volcker. Pardon?
Vice Chair Maloney. What should the Fed have done differently with the Bear Stearns situation?
Chairman Volcker. I cant say how it could be done differently.
They were faced with a situation to which they reacted, and they
reacted by drawing on emergency powers and interpreting existing
law in a way that permitted them to act, and act forcefully.
The more relevant question, I suppose it seems to me, is could
more effective supervision by the Federal Reserve, or by other
agenciesearlierhave avoided the crisis in the first place? Well
that is a proposition to be examined. My answer would be: Not entirely, because supervision and regulation is not always that effective.
But I think there are lessons to be learned in supervision and
regulation in this case, and some parts to me seem fairly obvious.
How did these banks why were they permitted to set up these
off-balance sheet entities which may or may not have had some formal relationship to the bank? They certainly had enough relationship to the bank, so when they got in trouble, the banks felt responsible for them, but yet they were not regulated and they did
not hold any capital against them, or adequate amounts of capital
against them. Why did that happen against the experience in another area of Enron, WorldCom, and all these other places that had
similar off-balance sheet accounting entities?
Vice Chair Maloney. Thank you.

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Chairman Volcker. There are lessons to be learned here, without any question.
Vice Chair Maloney. Can you elaborate on the question that
you posed in your testimony about whether it is wise for such farreaching responsibilitiesoversight of commercial and investment
bankingto rest within a single organization like the Fed?
And related to that, how do you think vesting all of these regulatory responsibilities at the Fed would impact its ability to conduct monetary policy and also maintain its independence?
Chairman Volcker. Well let me draw a distinction; it may be
subtle, but I think it is reala distinction between regulatory and
supervisory responsibility, and a willingness or demands to intervene in particular sectors of the credit markets.
The Federal Reserve, as are other Central Banks, is obviously
taking into its balance sheet a lot of mortgages these days. One of
the critical elements of this crisis has been a freezing up of the
mortgage market. So the reaction has been,all right, lets try to
unfreeze the market, and well buy a lot of mortgages.
Well the creators of the Federal Reserve System would be rolling
over in their graves thinking that the Federal Reserve is buying
mortgages. In those days, they couldnt do anything except buy
short-term commercial paper. They couldnt even buy a Treasury
Bond, much less a Mortgage Bond.
And when I look at it I say: Look, the mortgage market was a
problem. There is no doubt about it. But where were Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac? These are two Congressionally created agencies
with the specific responsibility for encouraging the stability and
flexibility of the mortgage market.
A crisis comes along, and they say: Well, we are already overstretched; our capital exposure is already strained; we cant do anything to help.
Well what kind of a system have we got when the agencies who
are supposed to be reflecting the public interest in the mortgage
market are out serving the interests of their stockholders? As they
see it, thats understandable
Vice Chair Maloney. Thats a very good question, a very, very
good question.
Are we justcould you comment on our place in the world economy and the need for flexibility for our financial institutions to remain the leaderswe hopein the world economy, or certainly one
of the powerful voices in it, and a complaint that I hear sometimes
that more supervision and regulation would stymie our creative
ability to be
Chairman Volcker. Yes, I know.
Vice Chair Maloney. You have heard the same thing?
Chairman Volcker. Yes, I have heard that.
Vice Chair Maloney. Would you comment on it, please? And
then my time is up.
Chairman Volcker. No, but I think youve just got to look at
this from the other direction, that these problems are common to
developed markets all over. The United States may have been in
the lead in some of this market development, but it is not alone.

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Some would argue the principal capital of the world capital markets these days is in London, not in New York. I hope thats not
true, but in any event, its international.
And you cant have certain types of regulation anyway, effectively in the United States because the business can be done elsewhere. Its already being done elsewhere. But I do think there is
a common interest among developed countries with developed markets to approach this together. And that is not new.
People told me 20 years ago when we started out uniform capital
standards for commercial banks, it couldnt be done. Forget about
it. Well, it got done. And you do have relatively uniform capital
standards today.
We now have, remarkably, the approach of uniform accounting
standards around the world, another area where 10 years ago people in the United States said, forget about it; our accounting
standards are good; the rest of the world can follow our accounting
standard.
Well that is not the view anymorequite correctlyand a lot of
progress has been made in those areas. There are efforts toward
standardizing and improving auditing standards around the world.
There are other examples of this kind of cooperation. Some people came in to see me the other day from the European Parliament
where they are working hard on regulation supervision of hedge
funds and private equity funds. They are ahead of us in terms of
eagerness to get some sensible regulations.
So we have to work with these people because I think there is
a definite common interest. And in this crisisthe biggest bank in
Switzerland has been in an epicenter of this crisis. Do you think
the Swiss are not going to be interested in developing some common standards? Well I think they are going to be.
So I think you have to look at it from that direction. This is a
global problem.
Vice Chair Maloney. Thank you so much. My time has expired.
Congressman Paul.
Representative Paul. Thank you, Madam Chair.
Welcome, Chairman Volcker. Its good to see you again. Like
Chairman Schumer, I remember well the discussions we had back
in the 1970s and early 1980s regarding another financial problem
at the time. But back then, we also dealt with the Monetary Control Act that we debated rather vigorously, and I was concerned
about Reserve requirements going down to zero, as well as the Fed
being able to buy just about anything to hold as an asset and as
collateral.
I think the ongoing problem we have today is related to that attitude, because not only does the Fed now buy housing securities
which keep going down in value, but now they are talking about
buying credit card securities, car loan securities, student loan securities. I mean, that does not reflect a very sound economy.
I think if we do not address that subject some day, we cannot
just claim that all we have to do is have more regulations. I think
we have to define some of the issues rather well, and how do we
get in the trouble. What is the problem?
One thing I dont think we ever do is define capital. We talk
about capital, but in capitalism in the free markets, capital comes

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from savings. Well we dont have any savings. Capital comes out
of thin air. And we have had the luxury of creating as much socalled capital as we want because we were able to issue the reserve
currency of the world.
You mentioned the problem that we have is over-consumption.
Well that wouldnt occur if you had a commodity standard of money
because it holds you in check. You know you have to pay your current-account deficit routinely. But now there hasnt been. And this
of course, in my estimation, leads to the gross distortion, the gross
malinvestment, and the huge amount of debt that we have.
So the consensus seems to be what we need, without asking the
question how did we get here, is we need more regulation. And everybody said, well, bailing out Bear Stearns was just wonderful.
Well that to me is sort of like saying, you know, if you have a
drug addict having a withdrawal symptom, you give him another
fix and he feels good; then everything is going to be OK.
So I dont think that can be that reassuring to us because we
have so many problems that we still face. I believe in regulation,
but I dont believe for a minute that its the lack of Government
regulation that is our problem. It was the fact that the Government
had license through the Federal Reserve to distort the market, create capital out of thin air, distort interest rates, cause the
malinvestment, and the excessive debtand the market is a good
regulator.
The market, through interest rate changes, gives us signals that
we should follow. But we dont have that anymore. But just to say,
well, we need more regulation, I think it is sort of like saying that
we need regulations for something thats unregulatable because the
system is so artificial and has nothing to do with the market economy.
So I really fear when I hear statements: Well, its the free market that is the problem, and rather than asking, where did the bubble come from? I think it is very, very precise and very clear where
financial bubbles come from, and we have to deal with that.
But I have one very minor question. You might not want to comment on this, but I had read one time, many years ago, that you
might have had some reservations about the breakdown in the
Bretton Woods Agreement. If you can make a brief comment on
that.
The other question that I have is: Could you compare the crisis
we face today to the one that you faced in 1979? Because you did
have a huge crisis which required saving the dollar. That could
have gotten out of hand. Interest rates were up to 21 percent.
In todays prices of gold, gold was like $2,500. It was huge. Yet
today, I see some conditions that may well be worse when you look
at our foreign indebtedness, our domestic debt. So are there any
similarities, or are there any comparisons? And what kind of shape
are we really in?
Chairman Volcker. Well in your passing question about
Bretton Woods, I did have my reservations about it. I was in the
middle of that breakdown. It doesnt mean I was happy about it.
The way it all came out didnt meet my hopes at the time, but
changes had to be made. But I did have reservations.

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Look, supervision and regulation is not going to solve all these
problems. Youre quite right. You have to get the basic structure
of the system right.
One point of concern which I think touches upon what you are
saying is you cannot lose sight of the fact that if people get used
to the notion that financial institutionsthe creditors of financial
institutionsare going to be protected, that will affect their behavior, and they will take more risk than they otherwise will take.
That is what is at issue in the whole question of the lender-oflast-resort.
Now I cant conclude from that that because that risk exists, and
the more you extend the lender-of-last-resort the greater it is that
we shouldnt have a lender of last resort. Because the risks of the
breakdown on the other side are too great.
But how do you achieve a balance? That is partly where regulation and supervision has to help. If you are going to protect those
institutions, they will take risks and their creditors will take risks
that would not take place in a different kind of market.
So the supervision and regulation has to come in and balance
that by insisting that you have to keep higher capital than you
would otherwise keep. Youve got to keep more liquidity than you
would otherwise keep. And you want to do this in a way thats obviously least awkward and least obtrusive, but youve got to do it
because otherwise people will run to extremes.
Theres financial volatility in all these markets, whether theyre
protected or not. Thats the history of financial capitalism. But you
want to restrain as much as you can the excesses, and that does
require if youve got protection on the one side youve got to have
supervision on the other side.
Representative Paul. Thank you.
Vice Chair Maloney. Senator Klobuchar.
Senator Klobuchar. Thank you.
And thank you, Chairman Volcker. You were talking, at the beginning of your testimony, about how this isnt just a financial crisis, it is an economic crisis as well.
Could you comment a little bit on the weak dollar and how you
see that fitting in? On the one hand, it has helped with our export
market. Ive seen that in my own State of Minnesota where the papermills in Canada have shut down and were going great guns in
Minnesota.
On the other hand, the weak dollar has been blamed for skyrocketing oil prices and for triggering a foreign capital flight and
draining U.S. credit markets.
So what do you think? And do you believe there are policies we
should pursue?
Chairman Volcker. Its a perfectly ambiguous situation because
weve gotten ourselves in a situation whereI dont think its going
to cure it; a depreciation of the dollar against some currencies anyway, was probably necessary to get our economy rebalanced. And
that is going on.
I think underneath the surface of all this, consumption is being
restrained, as it has to be. Exports are doing very well, as they
must do if were going to deal with the external balance. And wed
like to have an economy that can move ahead with a stronger ex-

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ternal position and a more balanced consumption, and lay the base
for a sustained recovery.
But the dollar is important not only because of its inflationary
implications in the United States at a time when there obviously
are concerns about inflation, and should be, but because the dollarto go back to Mr. Pauls questioninghas been the linchpin of
the world international monetary and financial system. And if
there is a real loss of confidence in the dollar, I think we are in
trouble in terms of sustaining open markets, free trade, continuing
economic advance generally.
So, that is something that has to be watched. We have to accept
the fact that some depreciation has taken place, but we dont want
it to get out of hand.
Senator Klobuchar. We had a hearing on sovereign-wealth
funds earlier here. Are you concerned about the foreign capital?
Chairman Volcker. Well, you know Mr. Paul said we havent
got any savings here. Well, where is it? Its in Singapore; its in
China; its in Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, and Kuwait, and we are in
a position where we have to go to these countries and their sovereign wealth funds to recapitalize our financial system. Not a very
happy circumstance, but well take it where we can get it, I guess
for the moment, and that is the attitude of the financial institutions.
But we dont want to be in that position, and weve got to restore
a kind of equilibrium where we are not in that position.
Senator Klobuchar. What role do you see the price of oil and
our dependency on foreign oil, and our lack of developing our own
energy policy, playing here?
Chairman Volcker. Well, you know, were dependent. Im afraid
theres nothing we can do about it in the short run. And all this
talk about energy independence is pie-in-the-sky for the moment.
We are heavily dependent upon oil imports, which leaves us at the
mercy of whatever squeeze there is in the market for economic reasons or other reasons.
Senator Klobuchar. But if we did develop a long-term policy
like some other countries have done, do you think we could change
that?
Chairman Volcker. Well, I am certainly in favor of developing
both short- and long-term policies. I would be in favor of developing
policies. But of course, there we are. That is a real nice issue for
the Congress and for the next President
Senator Klobuchar. Good. Thank you.
Mr. Volcker [continuing]. No question about it.
If I may just come back to something Mr. Paul said, which I
think is relevant: How did this compare with the crisis in the late
1970s?
There the enemy, in my view, but I think in the countrys view,
was quite clear. There was an overpowering concern about inflation, and the country was ready toit may not have been delighted, but there was a sort of acceptance of extraordinarily tough
measures.
We also had a financial crisis in the midst of all that, but that
financial crisis involvedwas centered in the banking system. And
a crisis that was centered in the regulated banking system was

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frankly easier to deal with and contain than the present crisis,
which is so diffused and involves big institutions not under the direct control of the Federal Reserve.
Senator Klobuchar. All right. Thank you very much.
Chairman Schumer [presiding]. And now, Representative Hinchey.
Representative Hinchey. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Volcker, thank you very much. I am a great admirer
of yours, and I want to express my appreciation for everything that
you have done publicly, and the work that you have done since you
left the Federal Reserve as well, which has been very substantial.
I very much appreciate your being here.
I think that what you mentioned about the leading by example
I think is very, very important. The best way to lead is always by
example. And of course the worst way to lead is by example. That
is what we have seen recently, leading by example in some of the
worst ways by creating this huge national debt, devaluing the dollar so substantially and sort of debilitating our circumstances domestically, particularly with regard to the average familythe average person and the average family.
The Consumer Federation of America, for example, has estimated recently that the average household now has about $7,500
in credit card debt, and that the Government Accountability Office
has said that the top six credit card issuers have charged recently
$1.2 billion each in penalty fees.
Now that was 212 years ago, back in 2005. That is the latest
the last time we have the numbers. So that is about $7.2 billion
in penalty fees which were charged on credit cards to consumers
around the country. And credit card debt is going up very, very
substantially. And because credit card debt is going up, it is impacting on the spending of median-income people.
As we know, the Gross Domestic Product of this country, about
23 of itmore than 23 of itis driven by the spending of medianincome people, median-income households.
So these are the things, frankly, that concern me the most. One
of the things that you dealt with was the issue of stagflation where
you had a downturning economy and growing inflation, and I think
we are in danger of seeing that come back.
So these are the things really that I believe we have to deal with
here. We have to provide some regulation. One of the issues I think
with regard to the banking company wasbanking industry, ratherwas the repeal of Glass-Steagall back in 1999, and the impact
that that has had on the creation of things like these hedge funds
and other forms of investment.
Now that was done intentionally. It was done purposefully by the
Congress back in 1999, and I think it has had disastrous consequences.
So, I would appreciate it if maybe you could comment on those
issues and perhaps give us some direction as to how we might proceed.
Chairman Volcker. Youve raised some, obviously, very broad
issues. My own feeling about the repeal of Glass-Steagall was that
the formal repeal was probably catching up to the realities in the

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marketplace. Because of technology, banks were able to do things
they werent traditionally able to do, and other institutions were
able to do things the banks were doing, and it got increasingly hard
in practice to separate the functions in many cases.
So in a way you can either glory in it or regret it, but it was
probably inevitable that the old Glass-Steagall got eliminated.
Whether it had to go all the way, you know, you can debate the
details, but broadly I think it was inevitable, and you cant turn
back the clock on it.
But some of the other comments you make, I think, are only specific reflections of the fact that this financial crisis is tied in with
an underlying economic imbalance where we have been too dependent upon consumption supported by the kind of credit card debt
youre talking about, and also the kind of mortgage debt that is in
so much trouble in the market today. And somehow that has to
change.
You could argueI made a speech a few years ago saying this
is going to have to change. It could change by policy, but I thought
it would be very unlikely that policies would be changed because
it involved things that people dont like, like raising taxes to reduce
budget deficits and that sort of thing, and it is much more likely
to change in response to a financial crisis.
Well that was a pretty good prediction. Thats where we are, in
a financial crisis that is forcing lower consumption, more restrained
consumption, and I think will end up with increasing savings in
the country. With the decline in the dollar increasing exports, we
will make the underlying economic adjustments. But thats a kind
of a rough ride while its happening, and the whole effort isI
think whether people admit it or notto have it happen, but try
to avoid some of the more severe consequences of the financial crisis.
Let me sayjust returning to the dollar and stagflation, and so
forthI think there is some resemblance of where we are now in
the inflation picture to the early 1970snot to the full-blown inflation of the later 1970s when you had an underlying tendency for
inflation to increase, and then you had a big increase in oil prices;
you also had a big increase in agricultural prices for a while. The
price indices went up very sharply and while the extremes receded,
I think the policy response was not forceful enough; the monetary
policy response was not forceful enough in those years.
If we lose confidence in the ability and willingness of the Federal
Reserve to deal with inflationary pressures and to sustain needed
underlying confidence in the dollar, we will be in real trouble. And
that has to be very much in the forefront of our thinking. If we lose
that, we are back in the 1970s or worse.
Representative Hinchey. Well I wish this conversation could
go on, but my time is up, and I thank you very much for those answers.
Chairman Schumer. Senator Webb.
Senator Webb. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Volcker, I appreciate your being here. Again, I feel like
Im a prisoner of the clock. You may feel otherwise having sat there
for quite some time, but 5 minutes is a very small amount of time
to be able to address these issues.

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As a quick follow-onI have a larger question to ask you; I have
had a number of people who work in the financial sector and who
do this for a living say to me that the present Consumer Price
Index dramatically understates actual inflation, if you look at the
components which hurts people on fixed incomes who rely on Cost
of Living adjustments, but actually works to the advantage of people in the financial sector.
Is that a correct evaluation?
Chairman Volcker. Well I dont know whether its correct or
not. I must confess that in my old age, Im like the little old lady
I used to hear about some years ago who kept saying, when I was
in the Federal Reserve, theres a lot more inflation than youre telling me in those figures.
[Laughter.]
Chairman Volcker. Im now the little old lady, and I think
theres a lot more inflation than those figures are telling me. But
I think it is kind of strangeIm not saying its dishonest; its the
way we calculate the figurethat housing is a big part of the Consumer Price Index, and we had this great increase in housing
prices, and the Housing Cost Index in the Consumer Price Index
hardly moved at all.
You know, there are reasons for that. It is based upon a very
small sample relative to home ownership in the United States of
rents, and thats imputed to the whole thing. There were artificial
reasons that rents were being held down.
And of course this idea of excluding food and energy prices on the
basis of volatility, which is certainly understandable in the short
run, but when the food and energy prices are running high, not for
a couple of months and then dropping, but running high for years,
it doesnt sound quite right. It doesnt feel quite right.
Senator Webb. Your speech at the Economic Club of New York
on April the 8th was a true breath of fresh air, if I may say, and
I had it sent to me by a number of people. I want to ask you a
question that I think relates to the key concern that many, including myself, up here have about basic economic fairness in the
United States.
You said at one point that there are cross-cutting bureaucratic
and political concernspolitical concerns at a high level regarding
the proper use and allocation of Government power and the low
level of embedded economic interests.
You said a little later, It is equally compelling that a demonstrably fragile financial system that has produced unimaginable
wealth for some, while repeatedly risking a cascading breakdown
of the system as a whole, needs repair and reform.
Then later on you mentioned, Perhaps most insidious of all in
discouraging discipline has been pervasive compensation practices.
I have watched these numbers and spoken about them, the percentage ofor the multiplier of executive compensation versus the
compensation for average workers in this country. It is off the
charts from 20 years ago. It is off the charts from any other country. So it cant simply be the result of the globalization and internationalization of American industry.
Obviously, Government policies can protect existing aristocracies.
They can actually help create aristocracies in some form. With this

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vast migration of wealth to the very top in this country, while other
people are struggling, to what extent could you attribute this undeniably vast migration of wealth to the very top to Government policies? And what would you suggest that we think about doing about
it?
Chairman Volcker. It strikes me as an extremely difficult area,
and Im not, I guess, imaginative enough to know how the Government can effectively deal with it.
It is partly ingrained in what we were talking of earlier about
the incentives to start taking risks in this new financial system.There is a big payoff from success in the short run, and not
much penalty, financially, anyway, over time, if the risks go the
other way, and how you deal with that basic imbalance. There are
obviously things that can be done and should be done, in the realm
of corporate governance and the responsibility of compensation
committees.
They seem to be overwhelmed by the argument that if we dont
do it for our executive, some other company will do it and steal our
executive away.
And everybodyits like the Lake Woebegone Syndrome; everybody wants to be in the top quintile. I dont know if its a bill of
goods, but its been sold to business boards of directors in a way
that, so far, has been unstoppable.
I think it reflects a weakness in corporate governance. I can say
that, but how to correct it?
Senator Webb. Its one thing to take high risk and high reward,
and we all appreciate that. In this country, were built on it. But
its another thing to take a very, very reduced risk
Chairman Volcker. Obviously, there are techniques, though,
that people with stock options or otherwise could not claim the
great rewards immediately, but have to wait and see how things
evolve over a period of time before they can accept the rewards,
and some of thats being built into current compensation practices,
but I think, a little too slowly, and not rigorously enough.
Senator Webb. For instance, the margins that are allowed for
investing in oil futures, which are very low, and as a result, have
low risk. Senator Levin had a very revealing chart that he used on
the Senate floor a few days ago, talking about the percentage of oil
futures and options contracts that were speculative, compared to
just 10 years ago.
I think the number has gone up 12 times, when you can buy in
for 3 or 4 percent on a margin, causing a lot of people to say that
the price of oil is overpriced by perhaps $50.
Chairman Volcker. I know its very hard to make judgments in
that area. Speculators do serve some purpose in markets, but if it
gets to be one-sided, I suppose that, fundamentally, going back to
the earlier problem, people think theyre going to be rescued on the
down side, theyre more inclined to take risks on the upside.
Thats part of the problem we have. The statistic that often gets
quoted is the number of credit default swaps outstanding. This is
an instrument that hardly existed 5 years ago and the latest figure
I have seenand I dont know who counts this upis $60 trillion
worth of credit default swaps which must be 5 or 6 times the total
amount of credit outstanding.

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How can you have more protection against defaults than if everything defaulted? It shows theres a lot of trading in the market that
isnt directly the kind of basic insurance policy that the credit default swap is supposed to represent.
Senator Webb. Thank you for your testimony.
Chairman Schumer. Well, Chairman Volcker said he had to go
at 11; since youre such a great person for us to ask questions of,
Im going to try to have a second round for people who want to ask
a question or two, and Ill take the prerogative of the Chair.
First, I mean, your testimony is incredible, and basically it says
that were in a brave new world here, and we dont quite know
what were doing, and thats kind of frightening, and thats probably one of the reasons we had such worry.
I think that even the people who deal with these credit default
issues, or trading or whatever else, sort of know that were in this
brave new world, and thats why you have a crisis of confidence in
credit, which has been one of the big problems here.
But let me ask you two quick questions related to that. First, we
were talking about how to restructure and your worry about having
one regulator, would be that it would have too much powerI understand thatand not enough independence.
Parts of itwhat about separating the central bank function
from the overall regulatory function? Could the Fed be a good central banker, if it didnt have the regulatory ability to reach into
these banks and other institutions and know whats going on, or
have some degree of separation from that?
Chairman Volcker. Well, this is what youve got to struggle
with, theres no doubt about it, but you cant completely separate
them. In my view, you cant come close to completely separating
them. That is what the United Kingdom did.
Now, they didnt do it completely because there was some liaison
between the Bank of England, but suddenly they had a crisis in a
secondary bank. This was not a major British bank; it was kind of
something like a savings and loan.
Chairman Schumer. Yes.
Chairman Volcker. A sizable savings and loan. And the central
bank suddenly felt it was faced with a crisis, in a sense, not of its
making, and not of its observation.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Chairman Volcker. And it reacted very strongly by saying
talk about unprecedented moveswell, on behalf of the Governmentand that gets to your political questionthey didnt do it on
their own.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Chairman Volcker. They saidI dont know if it was under orders or in consultation with the Chancellor of the Exchequerwe
will guarantee the deposits, guarantee the creditors.
And what was really surprising then, is that the Chancellor of
the Exchequer, not the central bank, said we will protect all the
creditors of all the institutions in London for the time being if they
are in a similar situation.
Now, I dont know quite what that means, but it was a very
sweeping statement. And I feel quite certain that the central bank
felt a little left out or a little abused, if I may say so, because it

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didnt have a good handle on what should have been a relatively
small problem with a savings type bank.
Chairman Schumer. It worked once, but it may not work
again.
Chairman Volcker. Thats right. And once you say that, I mean
again, there is a moral hazard question. Once you say youre going
to protect all the creditors in a crisis, theyre going to expect you
to do it the next time.
Chairman Schumer. Exactly.
Chairman Volcker. Look, you said theres some question about
what the Congress can do. Let me make one appeal to you:
Dont push all this health of particular credit markets off on the
Federal Reserve. I mean, its very convenient not to provide assistance in the budget directly; its very convenient not to do it by direct executive action and instead push it off on the Federal Reserve.
But thats the way to destroy the Federal Reserve in the long
run, because it does need independence. So thats why I get a little
concerned about, you know, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac not playing their part.
But back in the Depressionor not just in the Depression, but
in the late 1980s, early 1990s, the savings and loan crisisyou had
a big problem in the mortgage problem. The Government set up a
separate institution to deal with that.
Chairman Schumer. The RTC.
Chairman Volcker. They didnt tell the Federal Reserve to go
out and buy all the savings and loans.
Chairman Schumer. Thats a great point. One final question,
and this is a more practical one. Recently, Treasury Secretary
Paulson claimed the worst of the credit crisis is over. Chairman
Bernanke, yesterday stated, While the current situation is far
from normal, turmoil in the financial markets has eased.
It has, obviously, temporarily. On the other hand, we have all
the issues of complexity, opacity, new instruments, untested. Do
you agree with their basic statement?
The worry, I guess, that everyone in the markets has is that another shoe will drop and then all hell will break loose.
Chairman Volcker. Let me say, first of all, even if were over
the worst of it and it gradually gets better, all the questions that
you just raised are relevant, those on capacity and all the other
things in supervision policy.
I think that when you look ahead, the outlook for the financial
markets is going to be dependent upon the outlook for the economy.
If the economy goes into a real recession, you could easily have another wave of defaultsyou would, because thats the nature of it,
and then all these strains and pressures would be reemphasized.
If the economy somehow moves along flatly for awhile, but then
gradually improves, youve got a different picture. But you cant exclude the possibility that the economy is going to do worse, and
that would have clear repercussions for the financial system.
Chairman Schumer. Congressman Brady, do you have any
questions? Dont feel obligated, but if people have other
questions

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Representative Brady. Yes, if I may, two quick questions, Mr.
Chairman.
You expressed concern about the incentives on the top end from
CEOs and managers dealing with risk. On the front end, with lenders, does securitization, in your view, adversely affect the incentives for lenders to screen those borrowers? In other words, if
youre able to pass the hot potato on, clearly youre doing less due
diligence at the outset.
Chairman Volcker. No question. And one of the approaches you
could takeI guess I mentioned in my earlier speech, and I think
it should be practicalis when you get these regulated lenders, the
banks, potentially the investment banks, if youre going to package
this stuff and sell it to other people, you better keep some yourself.
And so youre going to have to eat your own cooking, so to speak,
at least to some degree.
And that might make a big difference. Banks would have to
think about strengthening their credit departments again. So thats
at least one approach.
Representative Brady. Second question, just on inflation. Because of your experience, you warned recently that we ought not
to allow inflationary expectations to become embedded in prices
once again.
Whats your current assessment of the inflationary outlook?
What variables do you look at in making that assessment?
Chairman Volcker. Look, Im an inveterate worrier about inflation, so I see it all the time. Behind every silver cloud, theres a
dark cloud of inflation.
This situation reminds me, as I said earlier, a bit about the early
1970s when we had an explosion in oil prices, an explosion in food
prices, against a background of growing underlying inflation.
And it was not dealt with very forcefully because of the concern
about the economy and it will go away and so forth. And I think
thats a danger now.
So, I think the Federal Reserve needs all the reinforcement it
can get, psychologically and otherwise to deal with inflation.
And the question about the price index, we have changed the
price indexes in a way that for a given change in market prices,
they show up less in the index. We are much more inclined to say
there are improvements in quality, and therefore when the nominal
price of say, an apple goes up, the apple orchard is better, well
take account of the fact that a Fuji apple is crisper than a
McIntosh or something.
Chairman Schumer. A New York State apple is crisper than a
Washington State apple.
[Laughter.]
Chairman Volcker. My mother came from upstate New York
and I spent Mothers Day driving through Wayne County to see the
apple orchards. And there arent many left in New York State.
Representative Brady. Beyond food and fuel, are there some
variables you pay special attention to?
Chairman Volcker. Pardon me?
Representative Brady. Beyond food and fuel prices, are there
other variables that you

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Chairman Volcker. Well, I think one of the danger points here
which is beginning to be evidentonly beginningis that prices or
tradeables have been held down. The prices of the kind of thing
that the consumer buys a lotclothing, household materials that
we import en masse now from China and Asiahave either held
steady or, in some cases, gone down for a decade. But now theyre
beginning to go up, I dont know how much is yet reflected in the
stores, but its reflected in the import prices because of the depreciation of the dollar and the growing inflation in China and elsewhere.
And so this is one point of concern. If the dollar got a lot weaker,
that concern would increase.
But I think the bias here clearly is toward more inflation, offset
now by the weakness of the domestic economy at the momentflatness, at least, of the domestic economy.
Now, if the domestic economy began growing more rapidly, which
you would like to see in time, then those inflationary pressures Im
referring to would become more overt.
So I think there is a problem, and we shouldnt be relaxed about
it.
Representative Brady. Thank you, Chairman for your perspective.
Chairman Schumer. Vice Chair Maloney.
Vice Chair Maloney. In your testimony, you talked about financial engineering, and some universities are now having courses
in financial engineering; yet engineering is a very precise science
and financial engineering is not, and maybe we should not use this
term. Your thoughts on that?
And also, Id like comments on the fact that there is no entity
that can evaluate the safety and soundness of investment banks
now because they dont have to report the necessary data. There
is no single source of data on the safety and soundness of all of our
financial institutions, and without this information, the regulators
are less able to take proactive steps that might avoid the need to
resort to dramatic rescue efforts.
Could you elaborate a little more on the structure that we might
look at in reorganizing and maintaining the independence of the
Federal Reserve? What is the role of the SEC? Do you think we
should create a new, consolidated, regulatory authority? If you
could just expand a little more?
And then also, your statementwhich was rather astonishing
that we now have $60 trillion outstanding in so-called credit default swaps
Chairman Volcker. For the world, not just for the United
States.
Vice Chair Maloney. OK, for the world, but still, the idea that
has been given to me by some of representatives of Wall Street is
that the use of exchanges and clearinghouses for credit default
swaps and derivatives, as a form of getting some type of control on
what is happening, and the risk that is out there, again, again, we
are deeply honored
Chairman Volcker. The Chairman mentioned this initially, and
I agree, thats an important area for work, and I think at least

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some preliminary work is going on now within private markets
themselves, and its important for the reasons you suggest.
But I cant resist one comment about financial engineering,
which is not my favorite subject. Given the problems in the financial system, on the one side, and given the problems with our infrastructure, on the other side, I think a strong case can be made that
our universities are turning out too many financial engineers and
too few civil engineers.
[Laughter.]
Chairman Volcker. And that imbalance ought to be corrected.
The glamorous subject is financial engineering.
Chairman Schumer. It makes the most money.
Chairman Volcker. I have to tell you, when my oldest grandson
told me he wanted to become a financial engineer, my heart sank.
[Laughter.]
Chairman Volcker. Anyway, on the question of consolidated
regulatory agency, I think the issue is here. Were a big country;
its a big world; one consolidated financial regulatory agency is a
very powerful instrument for good or for bad, and I actually would
like to retain at least a little competition, if we could, between regulatory agencies, which is an argument for giving the Federal Reserve a good deal of authority, but somehow letting somebody else
into the game, too.
Thats a tough balancing act. We have too much of it now, I
think, but how can we re-jigger that a bit?
And I think youd have to have a certain consistency in regulation around the world. I dont think you have to have the same regulatory structure all over the world. Different countries will find
different administrative arrangements suitable, and so I dont
think thats a requirement, so long as you have some consistency
in capital standards and liquidity standards and so forth.
Vice Chair Maloney. Do you think the Basel Accords will provide that?
Chairman Volcker. Well, the Basel Accords alreadythe old
Basel Accords certainly have. That is a greatIm a little bit prejudiced, but I think that was kind of a triumph of international regulation, because crude as it wasarbitrary as it was and we knew
thatit did accomplish the purpose of getting international discipline on capital standards. I dont think theres any question that
bank capital now is significantly higher than it would have been,
without Basel I.
And if we hadnt had that, we really would be in a mess, because
for all the pressures on the market, all the losses of commercial
banks, they have by and large, stoodfirm is the word that
comes to mind, but maybe thats too strong a wordbut the Federal Reserve did not have to rescue a commercial bank.
And that was partly because of those standards.
Chairman Schumer. It took 10 years; it took a long time. I
worked with you on those, and it took a very long time to get everybody to agree.
Chairman Volcker. People said that was impossible, but it
wasnt impossible. And now I think thats Basel II, and the problem
with Basel IIand Im out of touchis that is very complicated,
so thats not so transparent anymore.

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Chairman Schumer. Youre right. Last round of questions for
Congressman Hinchey, and well be 5 minutes over the 11, if thats
OK with you, Mr. Chairman.
Representative Hinchey. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Volcker, I cant help being somewhat pessimistic about
the future of this economy, and I think that in part, that is because
of the sort of laissez-faire attitude that the Fed has had with regard to the way in which the financial industry has been operating
and the kind of manipulation thats been going on.
I mean, we see countless examples of that kind of manipulation,
and we see examples of how that manipulation has had a direct
impact on the economic circumstances of the average American
family, and thats the part of it that worries me the most.
Weve seen for example, as Senator Webb mentioned a few moments ago, how the rise in oil prices has been driven up, maybe
as much as somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 percent by the
manipulation of investments, falsification of investments, people
not buying anything, but stipulating their investment and driving
the price up, so that poor people have to pay more at the pump
than they would.
Thats just one example of the declining dollar and how we need
to deal with that. All of these things need to be addressed.
There are the dire circumstances that the average family has
now: Their consumer debt dramatically went up by $15.3 billion
back in March. Its now up by more than $2.5 trillion. Now thats
debt outside of household debt, mortgages, things of that nature.
Most of it is credit card debt. And the way in which the credit
card companies are now manipulating this situation, pulling more
and more money in, raising the interest rates and putting more
penalties into effect in various sorts of ways is taking more and
more money out of the hands of people who are struggling and
using those credit cards for so many buying practices.
Thats for food; thats for gas; thats for so many things that the
credit card is being used, and that drives up the price that people
are paying.
It seems to me that were going to have to do something about
this. And, as you say, I think the Fed doesnt have all the answers
here, but the Fed does have some authority with regard to the way
in which this manipulation is going on, and it hasnt really exercised that authority.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are coming back with regard to
housing now, but theyre still not where they used to be, and
theyre coming back from a time when they got beat up after a lot
of sort of negligence in the way that they were overseeing.
That, I think, has to be addressed, as well.
Chairman Volcker. Well, one of the implications of what youre
saying is clearly a deficiency of the present system. Whether the
Federal Reserve did rather poorly in supervision and getting after
some of this manipulation, it is very difficult to do it, if youre just
looking at banks.
But theres another set of big institutions out there that are not
under your control, and the institutions you do have influence over,

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will say, well, how can you do that to me when this guy Im competing with every day doesnt have the same rules?
So that is another strong reason why this regulatory and supervisory tent has to be broadened.
Let me say in terms of manipulation, one thing that doesnt get
much attention, but I think its true, is these big financial institutions are now with or without Glass-Steagall; they are hotbeds of
conflicts of interest.
One arm of the organization wants to create new mortgages and
sell them to anybody, and do they sell them to their own investment management clients, or not? Theyre arranging a merger on
the one side and financing or not financing participants on the
other side.
I think theres a questionit wont solve the problem, but should
these financial institutions, whether banks or investment banks,
should they be running hedge funds at the same time? Should they
be running equity funds at the same time?
They lead to direct collisions of conflicts of interest, and the bigger they get, the more complicated they get, the more systemic risk
there is, so I think thats an area that deserves some looking at,
too.
Representative Hinchey. Well, I think youre absolutely right,
and I think that which were experiencing right now flows from the
repeal of Glass-Steagall, back in 1999. They wouldnt have been
able to do those things; these hedge funds wouldnt be able to manipulate in the same way theyre manipulating now.
Chairman Volcker. Well, the banks wouldnt have been able to
do it, maybe, although the banks could haveyou know, theres
nothing in Glass-Steagall that said a bank couldnt have a hedge
fund.
The Federal Reserve may have interpreted it that way, and I say
that without thinking through all the law, but I think thats true.
So its a matter of interpretation. You cant blame it all on GlassSteagall, but they have become widely diversified institutions and
the diversification creates more conflicts of interest.
Representative Hinchey. One of the things you said earlier,
was that what were seeing now is the kind of thing that we saw
in the early 1970s, the kind of situation that were dealing with
now.
And that tells me that if we dont deal with this set of circumstances, the situation is going to get increasingly worse.
And the main reason for that is the impact that its had on median-income consumers, on the average household across the country. They find themselves in deeper and deeper debt, more dire circumstances, more trouble functioning on a daily basis, more trouble
buying fuel for heating the home, or gasoline to get to work, or
food, and a whole host of other things that, as you said, now are
going up as a result of the situation in China and other places
around the world.
Our economic circumstances are negatively impacting other countries in a very dire way. And all of that right now is influencing
the median-income people.
Weve got to deal with that. Weve got to deal with that effectively, and if we fail to do so, I think that this edge of recession

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that were experiencing now is likely to get progressively worse and
worse and worse over the course of the next several years.
Chairman Volcker. I dont know what to make of it, but the
point youre making and the point Senator Webb made earlier
about the distribution of income and the pressure on the median
incomes or the lower incomes, all this bright new world of financial
markets and financial engineering, maybe co-incidentally, has not
been accompanied by much growth in real income for the lower half
of the economy or the lower three quarters of the economy, really.
Chairman Schumer. Ninety percent.
Chairman Volcker. And I hesitate to say that its cause-andeffect, but its an observation, anyway.
Chairman Schumer. Well, with that, Mr. Chairman, we thank
you very much again for your erudition, your practicality, your
ability to sort of synthesize issues and see both sides and then yet
still have strong views. They have never ceased to impress, and
weve missed you and even your cigar.
Chairman Volcker. Thank you very much.
Chairman Schumer. Were going to take a 5-minute break and
then well get the second panel.
[Recess.]
Chairman Schumer. OK, we will resume.
We have lost our House colleagues because they have a vote.
Some of them may be back. Let me introduce our panel who are
very distinguished and we very much appreciate them all being
here, and having a chance to listen to Chairman Volcker, which is
a treat.
Dr. Douglas Elmendorf is a Senior Fellow at Brookings where he
specializes in issues of macroeconomics and fiscal policy. Prior to
joining Brookings, Dr. Elmendorf was an Assistant Director and
Senior Economist at the Federal Reserve. He has also served as a
Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Treasury Department, and
as an economist on the Council of Economic Advisors. He holds a
Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
Ellen Seidman is director of Financialof the Financial Services
and Education Project in the Asset Building Program of the New
America Foundation. Ms. Seidman also serves as executive vice
president in National Policy and Partnership Development at
ShoreBank Corporation. From 1997 to 2001 she was the director of
OTS. She was also Director of FDIC and chairman of the Board of
the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation.
Alex Pollock is currently a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where hes been since 2004 focusing on financial policy issues, including Government-sponsored enterprises, housing finance, and corporate finance. Before joining AEI, he spent 35 years
in banking, including 12 years as president and chief executive of
the Chicago office of the Federal Home Loan Bank.
With that, we are going to read your entire statements into the
record. We would ask each witness to take 5 minutes and then we
will go to questions. Thank you for being here.

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STATEMENT OF DR. DOUGLAS W. ELMENDORF, SENIOR ECONOMIC FELLOW, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION, WASHINGTON,
DC

Dr. Elmendorf. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity.

The current financial crisis in the United States poses two separate challenges for economic policy.
One, to resolve the immediate problems; the other, to reduce the
likelihood that these problems recur.
My testimony focuses on the latter challenge. The diagnosis and
prescriptions I will offer come from a report I am writing with my
Brookings colleagues Martin Baily and Bob Litan.
The U.S. financial system remains in a perilous state. I share the
view of other observers and some people you have heard today that
the worst of the credit crisis is probably behind us, but that is
hardly certain. And even if it turns out to be right, the return to
normal financial conditions will be slow and uneven. Billions of dollars of mortgage-related losses have yet to be declared by financial
institutions, and risk spreads remain elevated.
Moreover, an absence of dramatic events does not imply that
intermediation has returned to normal. Weakened bank balance
sheets mean that banks will be reluctant to lend to households and
businesses for some time to come.
Meanwhile, data on spending, employment, and production suggest that the economy is very likely in recession. The ongoing drop
in housing construction, further predicted declines in house prices,
tighter lending standards and terms, and rising oil prices are all
exerting downward pressure on economic activity.
To be sure, not all the incoming data are bad and powerful economic stimuli have been sent in motion by the Federal Reserve
Board and this Congress.
Therefore, I agree with the consensus of economic forecasters
that a mild recession is the most likely outcome. But a more serious downturn is quite possible.
Thus, the experience of the past year vividly demonstrates the
need for financial regulatory reform. Let me offer four principles to
guide reform, and some specific recommendations that follow from
them.
Principle number one is that financial regulation should try to
keep pace with financial innovation. Innovation has been a positive
force in our economy, as several people have said today, extending
opportunities further down the income scale, improving the allocation of capital and distribution of risk, and helping to stabilize the
economy.
Yet, innovation also creates problems. New products and institutions are usually more complex and less transparent. They generally boost leverage and risk-taking, and they tend to skirt existing regulation and supervision.
Financial innovators and regulators are in a race, and the regulators will lose. But it matters how much they lose by. If regulators
do not try to keep up, or if regulators are completely outclassed in
the race, much of the benefit of financial innovation will be offset
by the cost.

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Principle number two is that mortgage origination should have
simpler disclosures for everyone, and some limits on offerings to
subprime borrowers. Having more choices may not improve peoples
well-being, if they are choosing among complicated products without enough information and understanding.
Evidence demonstrates that people do not fully understand the
financial arrangements. An innovation that offers more options can
make that problem worse. Martin Baily and Bob Litan and I recommend simpler mortgage disclosures, in fact, taking something
put together by one of my fellow witnesses this morningpre-mortgage counseling for subprime borrowers, and perhaps a default
mortgage contract from which people could opt out.
Also, further restrictions on the design of mortgage contracts
under the HOEPA rules, and a broadening of HOEPA coverage
along the lines proposed by the Federal Reserve. And Federal oversight of State regulation of mortgage originators.
Principle number three is that financial institutions and instruments should be more transparent. Self-interest is a powerful economic force, and smart regulation harnesses that force. By increasing transparency, we can give investors better tools to monitor financial risk-taking themselves.
The private sector is moving in this direction, and better regulation can help. We recommend for credit ratings agencies, greater
clarity in presenting ratings across asset classes reporting of the
rating agencies track records, and disclosure of the limitations of
ratings for newer instruments.
For commercial banks, clearer accounting of off-balancesheet activities. And for derivatives, a shift toward trading on exchanges
which will encourage standardization of instruments.
Principle number four is that key financial institutions should be
less leveraged and more liquid. As Chairman Volcker said, clearly
more transparency is not enough. Even if private investors had
perfect information, they would take greater financial risks than
are optimal from societys perspective. The reason is simply that
risk-taking has spillovers, in part because of contagion in the financial system, and in part because of the Governments safety net, including deposit insurance and the lender-of-last-resort role of the
Fed.
To counteract this tendency toward excessive risk, we recommend for commercial banks capital requirements for offbalancesheet liabilities; required issuance of uninsured subordinated debt; and closer supervision of risk management. For investment banks, we recommend closer regulation and supervision. And
for bond insurers, higher capital requirements and closer supervision of underwriting standards, especially for new and untested
products.
Let me conclude by observing that financial markets will always
experience swings between confidence and fear, between optimism
and pessimism, but effective regulation and supervision can reduce
the frequency, the magnitude, and the broader consequences of
those swings.
Thank you, very much.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Elmendorf appears in the Submissions for the Record on page 58.]

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Chairman Schumer. Thank you, Mr. Elmendorf.
Ms. Seidman.
STATEMENT OF ELLEN SEIDMAN, DIRECTOR, FINANCIAL
SERVICES AND EDUCATION PROJECT, ASSET BUILDING
PROGRAM, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION, WASHINGTON, DC

Ms. Seidman. Thank you, Senator Schumer, and thank you for
giving me the opportunity to testify before you concerning the regulatory implications of and guidance we can take from the current
market failures.
As you have mentioned, I have had a variety of jobs and experiences recently, and all of themmy project at the New America
Foundation, my work with ShoreBank, and my tenure as the director of the Office of Thrift Supervision and the seat on the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporationall are what I draw on for many
of the points and recommendations I make today.
Before I get to recommendations, I want to step back for a
minute and consider how we got here. I think there are three root
causes, and these can be stated in a number of ways: The
unsustainable buildup of system risk; an antiquated, uneven, and
frequently ineffective regulatory system; and a loss of alignment
between serving customers well and standard business practices.
First, we have allowed systemic risk to build up to what has obviously become an intolerable level. The risks include those that
were known, but hidden from consumers, from investors, from participants in the system, from regulators; risks that were unknown,
often because firms had created such a degree of complexity that
even the best efforts at ferreting out risks would have failed; and
risks that were unknowable, the model failures that Chairman
Volcker talked about in his Economic Club of New York speech.
Excessive leverage and reliance on short-term funding to support
long-term assets exacerbated the impact of these risks.
Second, we have both tolerated and allowed to grow a regulatory
structure that has two major failures. First, entities performing the
same kinds of functions are regulated very differently, with the
general effect that business practice has flowed downhill to the
practices of the least regulated.
But second, we have not focused our regulatory attention tightly
enough on what really matters. Is finding every last SAR violation
really more important than making sure that the implied recourse
on SIVs is adequately capitalized, or that borrowers have an ability
to repay?
Our regulatory system has become simultaneously unduly complex, ineffective where it counts, and excessively burdensome on
some of the least risky and most consumer-friendly elements of the
system.
Now getting this balanced right is hard. In my tenure at OTS I
know we sometimes got it right, as when we stepped in early to
keep thrifts from funding payday lending; sometimes we got it
wrong, most spectacularly in the Superior Bank failure; and sometimes we did things that seemed right at the time, but had in retrospect some unintended negative consequences, and I think these
are the most difficult.

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An example of this is the subprime guidance that all the regulators issued in 2001. Sure it helped keep the banks from getting
in even more deeply than they did, but what it also did was push
subprime lending outside of the banks, making our current problem
worse.
But the fact that we sometimes get it wrong does not mean we
are excused from trying.
Third, we have lost incentives for financial institutions to provide
high quality, consumer-friendly products that provide long-term
value. This is a result with many causes:
The originate-and-sell business model that especially when tied
to the brokering at the front and CDOs at the back, has separated
the interest of borrower and lender and of principal and agent.
Not extending the affirmative service mandate of CRA beyond
banks and thrifts.
The manner in which CRA and other consumer protections were,
or frequently were not, enforced.
Failure of financial literacy to keep up with the fast-paced fastchanging financial world, and not focusing our imagination and creativity on ways to help consumers gravitate to products and services that are beneficial to them while also profitable to providers.
Now this is not just being nice to consumers. As should be obvious from the mess we are in now, the financial viability of institutions is inextricably linked to that of their customers, including
consumers.
So what do we need to do?
In the face of the problems that families, communities, companies, and markets now confront, I believe the critical question is
how can we re-establish in our financial markets and the companies a long-term quality-oriented culture that incents all parties to
focus their attention on products and services that benefit both
sides; complete and accurate transparent risk assessment and management; and profitability and growth that is sustainable over the
long run.
This is not a job solely for a regulatory system, and it is just as
obviously not easy, but I think if we set it as a goal, we will have
a standard to measure our thoughts and proposals against.
I suggest six critical strategies:
First, effective enforcement. The will and financial wherewithal to
enforce laws and regulations we establish. Without this we are not
only allowing bad things to grow, we are fooling ourselves into believing we have resolved problems. And this is an issue not only
at the Federal level, but also at the State level where regulatory
agencies are frequently starved for resources.
Second, risk assessment. Namely, concentration on enhanced risk
knowledge and transparency within organizations, among organizations, for the public, and to and among regulators both domestically
and internationally. We can no longer afford to have institutions
that do not know their own level of risk and that of their
counterparties and regulators who are also in the dark.
Third, capital adequacy, with increased capital all around. This
has three critical effects. First, capital is the penultimate guard
against institutional collapse. Second, because capital is at risk it
serves to mitigate against excessive and foolhardy risk taking of

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the heads-I-win/tails-you-lose variety. And third, if all entities in
the system are required to hold a greater amount of capital, demand for returns based on financial leverage should diminish. And
I think it is time to recognize that in an uncertain world, loan reserves are in practice part of the capital structure, and to allow
them to serve a counter-cyclical function by building up during
good times so they can be drawn down in the bad that will inevitably follow.
Fourth, enhanced responsibility. A system where all players have
skin in the game. Realigning the interests of borrowers, lenders,
and all those in the chain between money provided and money
used. For institutions, in part it is capital. But an explicit continuing residual interest in sold assets whose value depends on future performance should also be considered. And certainly we need
to do something about compensation systems, both individual and
institutional that do not recognize back-end risk. In this connection, I urge Congress to move ahead with consideration of the two
sets of bills related to the mortgage crisis that are pending, those
dealing with the regulation of the market and those dealing with
the response to the crisis for homeowners, communities, and markets.
Fifth, regulatory consistency across entities that are performing
the same tasks, such as providing consumer credit or brokering significant financial services for consumers, and/or have access to the
same kinds of benefits.
At the same time, we need to be cognizant of actual risk and relate it to actual burden. Regulation is a fixed and a hidden cost and
smaller institutions both have fewer options for dealing effectively
with regulators, and smaller budgets within which to absorb the
costs.
Finally, aligning incentives with practices that treat customers
fairly and equitably before, during, and after their purchase of financial services. There are many ways to do this, including not
only consumer protection legislation and regulation, but also the
establishment of a suitability standard for those selling or
brokering significant consumer credit products; enhancing and
making more broadly applicable the Community Reinvestment Act;
public disclosure systems that extend beyond the Home Mortgage
Disclosure Act to enable the public and the media to see who is
being served, who is doing it well, and who is doing it badly; improving financial literacy; and barrier removals and incentives to
help consumers do the right things, such as the opt-out provisions
that were incorporated into the Pension Protection Act of 2006.
As markets begin to stabilize, or we reach what I suspect will be
temporary lulls in foreclosures or house price declines, it will be
easy to fall back into believing that the status quo is acceptable;
that changing it is too hard; or that enhanced regulation of consumer products will hurt consumers by limiting choice.
Such a result would be not only dangerous and a mistake, but
also a waste of the trauma and turmoil we have been through. We
instead need to use this experience to learn, to think creatively,
and to act.
Thank you, very much.

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[The prepared statement of Ms. Seidman appears in the
Submissons for the Record on page 63.]
Chairman Schumer. Thank you, Ms. Seidman.
Mr. Pollock.
STATEMENT OF ALEX J. POLLOCK, RESIDENT FELLOW,
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE, WASHINGTON, DC

Mr. Pollock. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for the
chance to be here today.
Well, here we are, as we know, in the deflation of a classic asset
bubble, this time of houses and condominiums. We keep having
these financial adventures no matter how great our technological
advance, our theoretical advance, or our regulatory reorganizations.
We keep having them because the human nature behind the bubbles and busts doesnt change.
So the bust continues. Large losses of the housing bust are now
being recognized in the general Main Street banking system. I
think it is quite important in this context that 48 percent of the
total loans of insured depositories are based on real estate and for
the vast majority of banksthose which have assets of less than
$1 billion67 percent of the loans are based on real estate.
From this, we know that a real estate bust is a serious matter
for the old-fashioned banking system, just like it is for the newfashioned banking system.
Now political actions also played a role in the housing bubble.
Politicians of both parties cheered increasing home ownership rates
and expanding so-called access to lower quality credit.
On top of this, bubbles are notoriously hard to control because
so many people of all kinds make money from the bubble while it
lasts, and everybody likes the bubble while it is still expanding.
But of course, all bubbles come to a sad end, and I cant resist this
story: Retreating eastward after the collapse of the bubble in Kansas land prices of the 1880s, financed by mortgage money from the
East Coast, defaulted farm mortgage borrowers who had abandoned their farms to the lenders had the sign on their wagons: In
God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.
Today we can say: In house price appreciation we trusted, with
house price depreciation we busted.
Some current discussions give the impression, Mr. Chairman,
that there used to be a time when highly regulated banks dominated the credit system and so we didnt have any problems because we had all these regulated entities. This we could think of
as the old financial system.
Well, as the discussion of earlier this morning made clear, there
never was such a time. There never was such a golden era of regulation.
In my written testimony I go through in some detail the severe
credit crunches of the 1960s, the financial disasters of the 1970s,
the giant bust of the 1980s, all of these taking place in the old financial system when all of the assets were on the balance sheets,
of banks and thrifts.
The old financial system was also utterly opaque. Nobody knows
less about the actual risk being undertaken than a depositor in a
bank, at least a typical depositor.

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So following the 1980s bust, the Secretary of the Treasury said
about the reforms of 1989 and the early 1990s, they have the motto
of Never again. And those are the mottos of every reform, Never
again. Yet, Mr. Chairman, here we are again.
We even had the enormously expensive Sarbanes-Oxley Act to
manage and limit corporate risk, and it was so successful weve
nearly had a global financial collapse. And as Chairman Volcker
said, we watched the consolidated British regulator, the FHA, separated from the Bank of England, be involved in great troubles trying to deal with the Northern Rock situation.
In sum, we have to be realistic about the limitations of all interventions. I am against utopian hopes for what financial regulation
can achieve, but I am for sensible improvements.
My written testimony makes eight suggestions for such improvements, of which I will discuss the first three and the last one briefly.
First thank you very much, Dr. Elmendorf, for mentioning the
one-page disclosure. I have previously testified to you and this
Committee that we should have a clear, straightforward one-page
disclosure.
And, Mr. Chairman, you introducedand thank you very
muchS. 2296
Chairman Schumer. As a result of your testimony, Mr. Pollock.
Mr. Pollock. Thank you, sirwhich would implement this idea.
Everybody should be able to agree on this idea, and I certainly
hope it will be included in any final mortgage legislation coming
out of the Congress.
Second, we have the issue of rating agencies, which we all know
are an issue. Rating agencies are, they say, in the business of publishing opinions about the future. I think theyre right about this.
One implication of that is of course, such opinions will inevitably
prove to be mistaken some of the time, and even disastrously mistaken.
More opinions and more competition are likely to uncover new
insights into credit risks and methods of analysis, and as many
people have said, a particularly desirable form of this competition
would be from rating agencies solely paid by investors.
But here is a larger question I would like to pose today.
Since all opinions about the future are liable to error, and opinions based on financial engineering and modelsas we have
learned to our sorroware liable to disastrous error, why should
the U.S. Government want to enshrine certain opinions as having
preferred, preferential, indeed mandatory status among others?
I think it should not. And I suggest that all regulatory requirements to use the ratings of certain preferred agencies should be
eliminated.
Third is the topic of encouraging credit risk retention by mortgage originators. As some other speakers have touched on, I think
this is a key idea.
One of the lessons of the savings and loan collapse was that for
the depository institutions to keep long-term fixed-rate mortgages
on their own balance sheet was extremely dangerous in terms of
interest-rate risk.

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You have to smile, Mr. Chairman, when you hear certain people
say, well, those were the good old days. The savings and loans
made the loan and kept itas if they couldnt remember that by
doing that, they put themselves out of business.
So the answer was to sell the loans to bond investors through
securitization and divest the interest-rate risk to those better able
to hold it.
As a side effect, not really intended, the credit risk was also divested. Well, now weve learned in the wake of the mortgage bubble
and bust that it has problems of its own when you split the incentives of those making the credit decision and the ultimate investor
which actually bears the credit risk.
So I think the right synthesis of the historical lessons is for
securitization to continue to address interest-rate risk, while encouraging at the same time the retention of significant credit risk
by the original mortgage lenders.
Now there are numerous regulatory and accounting obstacles to
getting this done, but it seems to me that the obvious superiority
of the structure makes it worthwhile to try to overcome them. I
suggest that Congress ought to give, as an assignment to an appropriate group of financial regulators, figuring out how we could
make the synthesis happen and remove the obstacles.
Finally, Mr. Chairman, as the great financial writer, Walter
Bagehot said, the mistakes of a sanguine manager are far more
to be dreaded than the theft of a dishonest manager. In other
words, nothing is more destructive than confidence and optimism.
The best protection against excessively sanguine beliefs is the
study of financial history with its many examples of how easy it
is to be plausible but wrong, both as financial actors and as policymakers. We all ought to be studying the recurring bubbles, busts,
foibles, and disasters of financial history to gain perspective, and
with luck, even wisdom.
Thank you for the chance to be here.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Pollock appears in the Submissions for the Record on page 65.]
Chairman Schumer. Well thank you. I want to thank all three
of you. These were outstanding testimony, and I just hopeI would
like all my colleagues to be able to see it as we begin to enter this
brave new world. There is a brave new world out there in the financial markets, and now there is a brave new world in terms of
regulation, because nobody says the present system works.
First a quick question for Mr. Elmendorf. You talked about false
dawns we have already seen in the credit crisis. Can you elaborate?
Where do you see other weaknesses that might creep up on us?
Dr. Elmendorf. The false dawns I mentioned are last October,
and then again earlier this year when it appeared that conditions
had stabilizedor were stabilizing.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Dr. Elmendorf. Much as it does today. So I am hopeful, as Ive
said, that this is really the dawn. But I think the biggest risk is
that there are losses out there that have not been declared.
We dont know how big the total losses in the world on mortgagerelated securities will be. We dont know how much is held by U.S.
institutions, but the best estimates I have seen suggest that there

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are tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage losses
that have not been declared. And until they are declared, we dont
know who bears them and who will suffer.
Chairman Schumer. So in the mortgage area itself, not a separate or not
Dr. Elmendorf. Thats right. Not only do we not know, but the
other institutions who would do transactions with them dont know,
and that uncertainty is what keeps the risk spreads high and creates other problems.
Chairman Schumer. I see. Mr. Pollock, just on credit rating
agencies, which you touched on, as you know now, there are two
companies that do get involved inor use the model that you suggest, which is investor-rated.
You dont think that competition is enough now to spur things
on?
Mr. Pollock. I think that competition is excellent, particularly
to have the competition, as you and I have discussed before, between the models, between the issue-pay model and the investorpay model, is a definite step forward.
As I suggested in my testimony, there is another step I would
take.
Chairman Schumer. Which is just to get rid of the Government
imprimatur
Mr. Pollock. Yes.
Chairman Schumer And let it rip. What do you folks think of
that? Dr. Elmendorf, Ms. Seidman? Ms. Seidman, youve had the
expertise in that area.
Ms. Seidman. Right. I must say that as we were working on
what has become Basel II, and this question came up, front I was
very uneasy about enshrining the rating agencies in the regulations concerning the capital system.
I think the problem that we face is the famous compared to
what? problem. Because the response was always, well, if its not
the rating agencies, then youve got essentially two other potential
players. One is the regulators themselves, which I think is the
most desirable solution. But as weve discussed earlier today, given
that the regulators are almost always behind the innovations, and
in good times can never compete for sufficient talent, that is extraordinarily difficult.
And the other is the option that has in fact been enshrined in
Basel II, which is to let the institutions themselves make the decisions.
So I think my preference would be strongly for a much more
competitive, more broadly based transparency out of ratings agencies, but I am not sure that that is in fact the answer. I do know
that what weve got now is very troublesome.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Dr. Elmendorf
Dr. Elmendorf. I would just add two quick points.
I am also intrigued by the idea. I think one thing is we would
need to be sure if that happens that people who take these ratings
seriously understand that then they are dealing with a much larger
set of raters with very different capacities perhaps. It is very important that they realize that that then puts them back on their

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own judgment. It doesnt just proliferate the number of institutions
getting a gold star that should be taken for granted.
Chairman Schumer. Thats happening anyway.
Dr. Elmendorf. I think that is happening.
Chairman Schumer. They relied on these agencies to their detriment, and I am sure they are not going to rely as much now as
they did a year ago.
Dr. Elmendorf. I think thats right.
I think the second thing is just to echo the importance of deciding how we are going to measure risk and control risk in these institutions, and what we do in the absence of the ratings.
Chairman Schumer. You didnt, Mr. Pollock, talk about the
Super Fed idea, but you heard my interchange with Paul Volcker.
Do you want to just comment on that? I mean, again I think havingPaul brings up two very good points. Too much power. And
independence.
Both are importantwell, why dont you comment. But on the
other hand he agrees we have to do some degree of consolidation
here.
Mr. Pollock. I did touch on what people are calling, and I called,
the Super Fed in my written testimony
Chairman Schumer. Yes, you did.
Mr. Pollock [continuing]. And that is the one thing in the Treasury Plan, Secretary Paulsons plan, that I think is likely to happen,
as well being as a good idea.
Making bureaucratic agencies go out of existence, as we all know,
is not easy. But I think if you look at the idea of an overall financial market risk overseer, thats actually pretty sensible. As I say
in my written testimony, in my view it is consistent with the original idea of the Fed in 1913.
We didnt have Glass-Steagall in 1913, not for 20 more years.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Mr. Pollock. And we dont have Glass-Steagall now. So the debates, which in my mind reflect the 19331999 period, which is
over, really miss the point.
Then the next question becomes though, about oversight. Well
then, how much information do you have to have? How much authority do you have to have? And you clearly have to have some.
On the other hand, I must say I am not at all drawn to the other
part of the consolidated regulator idea. With consolidated regulators you have missed the checks and balances that Chairman
Volcker talked about. Also, as weve seen with the rating agencies,
you might get some things right, but you might get some things
enormously wrong with a single point of view, and in general, I am
a fan of checks and balances in every area of Government.
Chairman Schumer. Although a lot of the times now we dont
have checks and balances, we just have sort of little islands each
unto themselves, each issuing regulations. Theyre not checking one
another.
First, they miss large chunks altogether. And then sometimes
they send out conflicting and not necessarily one checking the other
kind of thing. It is sort of a mismatch right now.

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Mr. Pollock. Its a problem, but in my view, whatever we may
design we would have a good Madisonian focus on ensuring checks
and balances.
Chairman Schumer. Well, the American Enterprise Institute
would very much like your reference to Madison. Any Hamiltonians
here? Dr. Elmendorf?
[Laughter.]
Dr. Elmendorf. I am a Hamiltonian. I guess I would
Chairman Schumer. From New York.
Dr. Elmendorf. Yes.
Mr. Pollock. Thats what I was going to say.
[Laughter.]
Dr. Elmendorf. I think I would not put too much emphasis in
thinking about regulatory reform on who is doing it. I think the
higher priority is to focus on what the regulation is doing.
Chairman Schumer. Exactly, yes.
Dr. Elmendorf. So I think for example that the Treasury blueprint has a lot of interesting ideas, and I commend them for putting it out, but it focuses mostly on the boxes on the organization
chart, which I think is a legacy of starting the study at a time
when the biggest concern was competitiveness and consistency and
not so much how to deal with the excessive leverage that weve
seen.
I think it is better to focus on how we are regulating people. And
many of the specific changes that all of us have talked about would
be enhanced by some coordination across the regulatory agencies as
exists.
Its not that I am an enthusiast for the current hodgepodge, but
I think given the complexity of the issues, it is important to
prioritize and tackle the issues that are highest priority first.
Chairman Schumer. Take my example of Bear Stearns, which
I mentioned early on. That wasnt a question of having better regulation; it was a question of which box governed which. And you had
the wrong box governing the wrong place. So that wasnt a question
of coming up with a new way of regulating, or a new model.
My guess isI dont know, but had the Fed had jurisdiction over
Bear Stearns on safety and soundness issues, theres a real chance
they would have forced them to do the things that the SEC was
unable to, and certainly it wasnt even in their sphere of thinking.
Dr. Elmendorf. I think thats exactly right. The investment
banks are a particular example where there is no box that is responsible for the aspects of their behavior that have turned out to
be very important. And in that case, I do supportand we talk in
our paper about giving more authority to the Federal Reserve.
If they are going to be lending to these institutions as the lender
of last resort, they should be regulating and supervising them as
well.
Chairman Schumer. Ms. Seidman.
Ms. Seidman. I basically agree with what Doug has said, but let
me point out a couple of things that I think are important.
When we talk about the current crisis and the current market
crisis, and focus in on Bear Stearns, I think we, very correctly, are
thinkng about the top tier of institutions.

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And yet when we say consolidated regulator, all of a sudden
were bringing into play insurance companies, community banks,
pay-day lenders.
I totally agree with Doug, that figuring out what were doing is
more important than figuring out the boxes.
Chairman Schumer. And youd be sort of for functional regulation? Youd change the boxes to more conformI mean, pay-day
lender and somebody whos looking at a hedge fund
Ms. Seidman. Are very different.
Chairman Schumer [continuing]. For systemic risk
Ms. Seidman. Are totally different.
Chairman Schumer. Are totally different and probably should
be in the same agency.
Ms. Seidman. Thats my basic point; that I think that
functionality at the level of institutions that can in fact create systemic problems, may not be the best way to organize.
It may be that with systemic-risk entities you organize across
functions. Maybe this is where the Fed really should have its focus.
But that requires us to change our language.
Chairman Schumer. Yes.
Ms. Seidman. And to make sure that we dont sweep all these
other institutions that really still need to be considered under that.
One other thing Id like to say about the British situation is I can
remember visiting the FSA, while I was at OTS, and talking to
them about how they were setting up. It was right after they started what they were doing.
And Id say that there were two things that we need to be cognizant about with the British system: One, they rely very, very,
very heavily on CPAs and the public accountng system in a way
that is much greater than we do in terms of examination. They
have a much smaller exmaination corps.
The second thing is that in England, name and shame still
counts for something, and Im not sure it does in the United States.
Chairman Schumer. So you might disagree with Volckers
analysis that Northern Rock was a failure of the FSA and is much
more awell, go ahead. Do you?
Ms. Seidman. I mean, I dont know what Northern Rock was
primarily a failure of. I think that certainly, the issue of swooping
in and announcing that youre going to back up all the creditors is
a troublesome way to run a system.
Chairman Schumer. That wasnt the FSA.
Ms. Seidman. The FSA should have figured out that there was
a problem earlier.
Chairman Schumer. Got it. Do you both agree?
Dr. Elmendorf. Yes.
Mr. Pollock. I think the problem, as I understand italthough
Im not a close student of itin dealing with Black Rock
Chairman Schumer. Im sorry. I dont want to create any problems.
Mr. Pollock [continuing]. With the Northern Rock
[Laughter.]
Mr. Pollock [continuing]. Was the dependence on short-term
market funding, funding longer-term assets. At least some people
say the longer-term assets were of good quality. I dont know.

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There is a general characteristic of all financial bubbles, as the
confidence builds. Here, I will cite a different authority, Hyman P.
Minsky, an old friend of mine who wrote with great insight, I
think, into the makings of financial busts which he called financial
fragility. As the confidence builds, it becomes viewed subjectively
as normal and proper to engage in greater and greater degrees of
short-term financing.
Chairman Schumer. Right. So that leads to something that I
think has been touched on here, but I havent heard much discussion of on this side of the table, which is your suggestion, Mr. Pollock, which I think either Dr. Elmendorf or Ms. Seidman talks
about, which is encouraging risk retention by the mortgage originators.
It sounds great, but how the heck do you do it?
Ms. Seidman. Oh, I mean, we used to do it.
Chairman Schumer. OK, tell me.
Ms. Seidman. Even after securitization really got going, it was
very traditional for the securitizer, the originating bank, to hold a
significant piece of the bond.
Chairman Schumer. They were required to.
Ms. Seidman. Well, no one would take it from them is really
what was going on, and the rating agencies requiredit was a
combination of no one would buy it from them and the rating agencies saying youve got to hold it in order to be able to get the kind
of rating you want.
Chairman Schumer. And no one would buy it from them because, if they werent holding a piecegot it. It wasnt that sophisticated where they were chopping up different types of pieces with
different amounts of risk.
Ms. Seidman. This one is not as hard as people have a tendency
to make it.
Mr. Pollock. Mr. Chairman, this one, financially speaking, is
really easy. The problems are regulatory capital and accounting
problems.
Chairman Schumer. I mean, yes, and what if you either required, or probably more likely, required different retention of capital by how much you retained. You know, different
Ms. Seidman. Well, thats one of the big issues, because the
question becomes, OK, so Ive retained 5 percent of this pool. Have
I therefore
Chairman Schumer. Just 1 second. These days, the pool isnt
uniform the way it used to be. Its chopped up in different pieces
with different levels of risk.
Ms. Seidman. Right, but lets start with the simple one.
Chairman Schumer. OK.
Ms. Seidman. And even in the old days, the pools were always,
for example, geographically diversified, except when they were
CRA pools. They were geographicaly diversified because there was
the benefit of geographical diversification, particularly in real estate.
So, if Im holding onto 5 percent of the pool, the question is have
I nevertheless held onto a 100 percent of the risk.
Chairman Schumer. Right.

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Ms. Seidman. And if Ive held onto a 100 percent of the risk,
then proper capitalization should require me to capitalize it as if
Id held onto the whole pool.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Ms. Seidman. And that obviously obviates the benefits of
securitization.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Ms. Seidman. Thats why, as Alex points out, its easy to figure
out the finance; its hard to figure out the capital and accounting.
Chairman Schumer. What do you think?
Dr. Elmendorf. I think this is a case where a private response
can be very helpful. As Ellen says, people couldnt sell those before
because the other side of the transaction wouldnt buy.
Chairman Schumer. Wouldnt buy.
Dr. Elmendorf. And I was on a panel recently with a former
president of an important bank, and the president said that he
thought the real problem was that people let Countrywide, which
was the example, issue a bunch of mortgages they shouldnt have
been allowed to issue. So Im inclined to think that there should
have been restrictions, mostly to protect the mortgage borrowers.
But the fair question I put to him was also, but you shouldnt
have bought these mortgages from Countrywide. And if his bank
had not been putting up the money, then Countrywide would not
have been making loans of that sort, because they would not have
been able to get the funding for them.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Dr. Elmendorf. So, a lot of it comes back to these institutions,
and this was a heavily regulated and supervised bank, but I think
they need to take this lesson to heart. I think some of them have
learned.
Also, I think the supervisors need to learn that if some bank is
buying a lot of mortgages and they know nothing about the origination of those mortgages, or the underwriting standards that were
applied, then they need to know doing this is very, very risky.
Chairman Schumer. We dont just have two levels here. It
could be four or five levels, and that bank that bought them would
probably, just like Coutrywide, have no intention of keeping any of
it even, right?
Dr. Elmendorf. Thats right. I think some more
Chairman Schumer. That doesnt
Dr. Elmendorf. [continuing]. More askance the internal risk
manangement systems and the more askance the supervisors need
to look at it.
Chairman Schumer. Somehow, it seems to me, theres got to be
a way to give both more information and more responsibility to the
ultimate investor, as opposed to looking at it, as you go through the
plan, I mean, which is sort of the opposite, in a certain sense, of
what people are saying, although it relates to credit rating agencies, it relates to
I mean, I guess you have two models here. Theyre not necessarily conflicting, but having the risk, having the ultimate investor have greater knowledge and ability to assess the riskand
maybe thats just a market forceor having the originator have
some of the risk, based on, you know, based on credit.

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Mr. Pollock. Mr. Chairman, could I add something?
Chairman Schumer. Yes.
Mr. Pollock. One of the key things in this idea of retention of
credit risk by the originator is to distinguish between kinds of
risks.
Chairman Schumer. Yes.
Mr. Pollock. You might
Chairman Schumer. As opposed toyeah.
Mr. Pollock. That is to say, you could be retaining credit risk,
but fully, or at least very largely, divesting yourself of the interest
rate risk and the liquidity risk, and thats where I think, Ellen, the
rules have to adjust themselves.
For prime mortgages, most of the risk is interest rate risk.
Chairman Schumer. Yes.
Mr. Pollock. And thats where I think we could really do some
fruitful work on distinguishing the types of risk and allowing this
structure to emerge.
And also, as you say, Mr. Chairman, we dont want the buyers
to be able to go to their trustees and say, nothing to worry about,
Ive got a Government-approved triple-A. You want them to say,
wait a mimute, what is this?
Ms. Seidman. This is another place whereand Alex mentioned
it a little bit in his testimonywhere I think we have to be careful
about our language because thinking that the ultimate investor,
me buying a share in a mutual fund, wouldnt be able to have any
idea of risk, isI mean, wed be fooling ourselves. Thats why we
have deposit insurance.
Chairman Schumer. Well, in these instruments, you didnt
have
Ms. Seidman. I understand.
Chairman Schumer. The answer there would be thats why we
have credit rating agencies.
Ms. Seidman. No, I understand, Alexs point was that theres
nothing as opaque as a bank.
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Ms. Seidman. But we have deposit insurance, so we can put a
deposit in. I do think that it is with the large intermediaries that
eventually enable the little guys to buy, where we have to put this
responsibility for knowing what youre buying and not buying it, if
its risky, and having your regulator tell you not to buy it, or that
you have to capitalize heavily against it, if you have.
I think you just have to get the level right.
Chairman Schumer. A lot of peopleand tell me if Im wrong
herea lot of the people who ultimately bought this, were not little
guys. They were very big guys.
Ms. Seidman. A lot of people were very big guys, but you know,
theres the apocryphal
Chairman Schumer. Ill bet the vast bulk of all of these
chopped up pieces ended up not inI mean, the only way theyd
end up in the little guys pockets was through pension funds and
whatever else.
Ms. Seidman. Thats exactly my point, right.
Chairman Schumer. But notthe actual purchaser who ultimately parked the stuff, was not a little guy.

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Ms. Seidman. Right. There are pieces of information that simply
werent there. So, for example, on the first round of a securitization
of mortgages, if you are a Lou Ranieri, you can get the information
and run it through your computers.
Even Lou Ranieri could not do that through their CDOs because
the information was not available.
Chairman Schumer. Right. But he, Lou Ranieri, fact in point,
was a friend of mine, and he was warning about this stuff long before anybody else.
Ms. Seidman. He absolutely was. If people had paid attention
to what Lou was saying in early 2006, we might be in a different
place.
Chairman Schumer. Right. Dr. Elmendorf, you get the last
word here on all this.
Dr. Elmendorf. Thats a lot. I would just make a small point,
which is that I think the extent to which these risky assets found
their way back onto the balance sheets, or right next to the balance
sheets of the large institutions, was one of the very surprising features for many people.
The idea had been that the risk was going to be disseminated,
and certainly some was sent around the world. Thats why UBS
was in trouble and other foreign institutions.
But the fact that such a large share ended up right back on the
balance sheets or in the structured investment vehicles that we
pretended werent on the balance sheets of these large financial institutions was shocking, and thats really
Chairman Schumer. And they relied on the credit rating. I
mean, I guess they ultimatelythese very sophisticated institutionsI was not there. I dont do this for a living, but Im sure
somebody said, well, its triple-A.
Dr. Elmendorf. Yes.
Chairman Schumer. And we can leverage it, and we can make
a lot of money on a triple-A investment.
Dr. Elmendorf. I think that the extent to which the risk was
correlated across the underlying mortgages was not recognized.
There was a sense that you have a pool of a hundred thousand
mortgages, then you can guess pretty well what share of the people
will lose their jobs or get sick
Chairman Schumer. Right.
Dr. Elmendorf. [continuing]. Or have other reasons for not paying. The extent to which the whole pool and all of the mortgages
were only good if house prices continued to go up and didnt go
downwhich was a very highly correlated risk across themwas
not understood, and its hard to see, in retrospect, how that could
have been missed, but it does seem to have been missed.
Chairman Schumer. Im still totally befuddled by the fact that
all these sophisticated people from the creditwould buy no-doc
loans, and its only no-doc loansno-doc loans. And a lot of these
and its only related to the, I guess, idea that everything will always go up and all you have to do, Mr. Pollock, is study financial
history. Everything doesnt always go up, but thats what they were
doing.
Dr. Elmendorf. Yes.

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Chairman Schumer. Hey, this was great. Thank you all very
much for your concern and erudition. The hearing is finished.
[Whereupon, at 12:04 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.]

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Submissions for the Record

(51)

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PREPARED STATEMENT

OF

SENATOR CHARLES E. SCHUMER, CHAIRMAN

I want to thank you, Chairman Volcker, as well the other witnesses who will join
us on the second panel, for coming to this hearing today about the financial system,
and the steps we need to take to reform our regulatory structures.
Im worried that, because things do not seem as bad as they were a month or so
ago, were already starting to become complacent about the critical need to address
the regulatory and market failures that have had much to do with the troubling economic situation we find ourselves in.
The past year has been a stark reminder of the direct link between Wall Street
and Main Street, between the health of the financial markets and the economic
well-being of all Americans.
A year ago, most of us had never heard of CDOs and CMGs and SIVs, of option
ARMs and credit default swaps and auction rate securities. Now, we know that
those who knew about these complex financial instruments clearly didnt know
enough to protect consumers, investors, and our economy from them. And weve
learned too much about the central role these financial tools have played in the
worst housing crisis since the Great Depression, the freezing of credit markets
worldwide, and the onset of our current recession.
Financial innovation is vital, both for the health of our financial system and our
economy, but it is just as vital that financial regulation keep up with innovation.
It has not.
In my view, this credit crisis is as much a failure of regulation as it is a failure
of the marketplace. The goal of regulation should always be to encourage entrepreneurial vigor while ensuring the health of the financial system. We found that balance in the past, but it seems to have been lost. We have a 21st century global financial system, but a 20th century national set of financial regulations. That needs
to change soon.
To begin, we need to acknowledge that consolidation has transformed the financial industry. We no longer have the clear distinctions between commercial banks,
investment banks, broker-dealers and insurers that we did sixty years ago, or even
twenty years ago. Instead, there are a large number of financial institutions surrounded by many smaller institutionssuch as hedge funds and private equity
fundswith their own specialties. Its as though we have a handful of large financial Jupiters that are becoming more and more similar encircled by numerous small
asteroids. Our regulatory structure has to recognize that change. As large investment banks have come to act more and more like commercial banksespecially now
that they can borrow from the Feds discount windowthen they need to be supervised more strictly.
We need to think very seriously about moving toward more unified regulation, if
not a single regulator. We have too many regulators, each watching a different part
of the financial system, while no one keeps an eye on the greater threats of systemic
risk. In the U.K., they have a single, strong regulator who has responsibility for the
entire system and the authority to act when necessary. Maybe a regulator with that
authority could have prevented a debacle like the collapse of Bear Stearns by acting
quickly and forcefully before things began to unravel.
We must figure out how to regulate the currently unregulated parts of financial
markets. For example, credit default swaps are a multi-trillion dollar industry almost completely outside the purview of regulators. Recently, theres has been talk
about creating a clearinghouse for credit default swaps. I think this an excellent
idea, and the sort of innovation we should be thinking about more broadly. I also
believe we need to think about whether a unique exchange for these swaps might
be an even more effective way to bring about greater transparency and limit systemic risk.
We must have greater transparency in the financial system. The credit crunch has
been as much a crisis of confidence as it has been a real economic crisis. Financial
markets operate on trust, on the belief participants have that they can rely on the
people they are entering into contracts with. As long as so many black holes remain
in the financial system, it will be hard for that trust to be restored.

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We must involve our international partners. National regulations can only achieve
so much in a global financial market. It does us no good to enact new rules if other
countries remain lax in their regulations or their enforcement. The global financial
regulatory system should not be the arithmetical equivalent of the lowest common denominator. This crisis and the complexity of our system requires much more.
And finally, we must put aside the laissez-faire, no Government is good government, mantra that we hear from this administration and the other side of the aisle.
The market does not solve all problems by itself and neither does the Government.
Thats why we need firm, forward looking regulation, to prevent the sort of crises
were facing now from recurring in the future.
I share with Treasury Secretary Paulson and Chairman Bernanke the hope that
the worst of the credit crisis is behind us. But I am not convinced that it is over.
Whatever calm has been brought to financial markets today has been the result largely of extraordinary actions taken by the Federal Reserve. Chairman Bernanke deserves credit, but the actions he has had to take are sign of just how unprecedented,
and how troubling, this credit crisis has been.
We cannot sit back, relax and hope for the best. The American people, our economy
and the global financial system cannot afford it.

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PREPARED STATEMENT

OF

REPRESENTATIVE CAROLYN B. MALONEY, VICE CHAIR

Good morning. I would like to thank Chairman Schumer for holding this hearing
to examine the risks in the U.S. financial system and potential solutions. I want
to welcome former Chairman Volcker and our other witnesses and thank you all for
your testimony today.
At the core of the ongoing liquidity crisis is the decline in home prices, which is
causing banks to readjust their balance sheets and to buildup capital. Congress is
currently focusing its attention on keeping families in their homes and stemming
the deepening decline in home prices.
The crisis in the housing market has brought to light the inability of our most
sophisticated and respected institutions to measure their exposure to opaque assets
and manage the risks associated with them. Detangling the DNA of assets has become increasingly difficult for investors. We clearly need greater transparency for
complex investment products to assure smoothly functioning markets.
Our entire regulatory system is also in serious need of renovation because financial innovation has surpassed our ability to protect consumers and hold institutions
accountable. In our rather fragmented system, financial regulators do not have authority to broadly address systemic risk.
The Financial Services Committee will soon turn its attention to rethinking financial services regulation. Meanwhile, the Treasury Secretary has a sweeping proposal
for revising the Federal regulation of all financial institutions. That plan would
grant the Federal Reserve power to serve as an overarching market stability regulator, with the ability to collect information and require corrective action across the
broad spectrum of financial services.
Our current system of multiple regulators leaves big holes that a super regulator could plug. For example, the unwillingness up to this point of the Federal Reserve and the S.E.C. to require working capital limits has been criticized as exacerbating risk-taking. Only now has the S.E.C. joined other Federal regulators in working with the Basel Committee to extend the capital adequacy standards to deal explicitly with liquidity risk.
The Bear Stearns rescue also exposed the lack of Federal regulatory authority to
supervise investment bank holding companies with bank affiliates, as the Fed supervises commercial bank holding companies. Thus, investment bank holding companies dont have to maintain liquidity on a consolidated basis.
In the wake of the Bear Stearns debacle, S.E.C. Chairman Cox has said that investment banks can no longer operate outside on a statutory consolidated supervision regime. Giving investment banks access to the Feds discount window, which
was created for depository institutions, creates problems since they are not regulated like depository institutions. In particular, they have no restrictions on how
highly leveraged they can be.
We need reform, but the Treasury plan is so sweeping that it risks being disruptive while we are working hard to stabilize our economy. Moreover, it risks eliminating regulatory voices that should be heard. The American system of Government
relies on checks and balances, and we can all think of instances when the lone voice
of the multiple Federal regulators has pushed the group to an action that was unpopular but proved to be right.
We should focus first on targeted reforms with maximum effect. Improving the
transparency and accountability of trading in credit default swaps and derivatives
is an example. A key factor that apparently pushed the Fed to rescue Bear Stearns
was concerns about a domino effect from the interlocking relationships between
thousands of investors and banks over credit default swaps, which are presently
traded by investment banks off any exchange and without any transparency. Requiring the use of exchanges and clearing houses for credit default swaps and derivatives is worth exploring.
Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing and I look forward to our witnesses views on correcting the imbalances in our financial markets.

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PREPARED STATEMENT

OF

SENATOR SAM BROWNBACK

Thank you Mr. Chairman. I appreciate you scheduling todays hearing. Our topic
is quite broad, Mr. Chairman. Is the Credit Crisis Over and What Can the Federal
Government Do to Prevent Unnecessary Systemic Risk in the Future? sounds suitable for a series of well-planned and broad-based hearings. I certainly hope that we
will take the time as a committee to examine this subject in much more detail.
Obviously, much of the current economic slowdown can be attributed to dysfunctional financial markets over the past year caused by turmoil in markets for assetbacked debt securities and obligations. We have witnessed the collapse of a major
investment banking firmor near collapse, but for the unprecedented action of the
Federal Reserve Board. While there has been general praise for the actions of the
Federal Reserve, questions have been raised about how close to or how far outside
the boundaries of its authority the Federal Reserve actions were.
Mr. Chairman, I must say that one aspect of our hearing title causes me some
concernprevent unnecessary systemic risk. I think we need to determine what
level of systemic risk is acceptable before we can even venture into a discussion of
whether its necessary or not. I also believe that a related issue to define and sort
out is the definition of the lender of last resort function of the Federal Reserve
and what that actually means the Fed can and cannot do in pursuing that function.
I would like to note that the Fed took onto its balance sheet, and therefore the
taxpayers balance sheet, risky private-sector assets, inherited from an investment
bank over which the Fed did not have direct regulatory oversight, in its part of the
takeover of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan Chase. While the Fed has the power to do
so, under a 1932 provision of the Federal Reserve Act allowing the Fed to lend to
non-banks under unusual and exigent circumstances, it isnt entirely clear what
constitutes such circumstances. The Feds recent actions introduce serious issues of
moral hazard by signaling to risk-takers in financial markets that if the dice do not
turn up favorable, the Fed and, hence, taxpayers will provide a backstop.
The Federal Reserve has also created new ways of lending to depository institutions and to investment banks by setting up a new Term Auction Facility and Term
Securities Lending Facility. The latter allows primary dealers to exchange less-liquid securities at an auction-determined fee for some of the Feds Treasury securities.
Recently, the Fed has allowed private-sector asset-backed securities as securities eligible for such transactions. So, the Fed has basically been conducting some of its
monetary policy by rearranging its, and therefore the taxpayers, balance sheet
trading Treasury securities for securities that include risky asset-backed private securities.
While I believe that the Feds recent activities have been creative and may have
helped reduce tensions in domestic and global credit markets, I also take seriously
the responsibility that Congress has in its oversight role regarding the Fed. I think
that we need to know more than we currently do about recent actions. For example,
to my knowledge, we dont have a clear accounting of the assets or that the Fed
took onto its balance sheet in the Bear Stearns-JPMorgan Chase deal or an accounting of the value of those assets. Given the Feds recent emphasis on transparency,
it would be useful to know, but interesting that we dont.
One of our witnesses today, former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul
Volcker, is eminently qualified to offer perspectives not only on the broad topic of
avoiding systemic risk, but on the more narrow question of whether or not the Federal Reserve acted appropriately.
Chairman Volcker served our nation at another time of crisis when the Federal
Reserves dual mandate was severely strained. Inflation raged in double digits and
the unemployment rate was a full percent higher than it is today. Through Chairman Volckers leadership, inflation was brought under control. That did not come
without a steep price in terms of a recession that saw the unemployment rate rise
to 10.8 percent.
It was also during his tenure that the Federal Reserve, over Chairman Volckers
objection, used it regulatory powers to grant banks expanded powers in the investment banking arena despite the provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act. It may be a
useful time to revisit that decision and debate whether we need a clearer, Glass-

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Steagall-like delineation between where investors have a safety net under them,
subject to certain restrictions, and where investors should not expect any Government backing of their private risk taking.
It may be that part of our recent problem stems from an absence of such a clear
delineation, because if you are a big enough private financial risk taker, and are
intertwined enough with a large number of counterparties in important markets,
then you evidently have access to the Feds discount window and a taxpayer-funded
safety net. Taxpayers are being exposed to risks without, perhaps, the benefit of
adequate oversight regarding institutions that are being backed by the Fed. I am
concerned that recent actions by the Fed could introduce too much moral hazard
and signals that have been sent by recent Federal Reserve actions.
Before closing, I would like to take exception to the portrayal by many on the
other side of the aisle of a recent financial crisis somehow caused by an Administration that is somehow antagonistic toward financial regulation and an Administration that shuns regulation of financial activity. I would ask: What actions identify
such an attitude by the Administration? We clearly have now, and have had for
some time, regulations against much of the freewheeling mortgage activities that led
us to a lot of our recent problems. And a lot of those regulations are housed at the
Federal Reserve, under the Home Ownership Equity Protection Act of 1994 for example. The current Administration did nothing to prevent the Fed from using its
supervision and regulation staff to take action regarding what was clear to anyone
with a pulse was risky mortgage lending in recent years. Nor did the Administration encourage any regulatory agency to act loosely in enforcing existing regulations.
To paint the recent strains in mortgage and financial markets as somehow being
caused by the Administration is plain and simply an exercise in groundless political
positioning.
I am interested to hear Chairman Volckers views and those of our other witnesses, on our present situation, changes to our regulatory system, and what other
actions we should take to avoid another crisis within the next decade.
PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. PAUL A. VOLCKER, FORMER CHAIRMAN
FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD OF GOVERNORS, WASHINGTON, DC

OF THE

I appreciate the opportunity to discuss informally some implications of the systemic risks in the financial system as revealed in the current crisis. This statement
will simply point out some of the more important and unresolved issues as I see
them. The complications are evident. There are no quick and facile answers. Your
deliberations can, however, help lay the groundwork for legislation that will, I believe, be necessary, if not now in the midst of crisis and an election campaign, then
in 2009.
The background for the crisis and for any official and legislative response is the
rather profound change in the locus and nature of financial intermediation over the
past couple of decades. We have moved from a heavily regulated and protected commercial bank dominated world to a more open market system, with individual credits packaged and repackaged and traded in impersonal markets. Large commercial
banks have themselves taken on important characteristics of investment banks, but
the investment banks and hedge funds that have come to dominate the trading, if
regulated at all, have not been closely supervised with respect to their safety and
soundness.
The new system has, indeed, been heavily engineered, with highly talented,
well paid, and mathematically sophisticated individuals dissecting and combining
credits in a manner designed to diffuse risk and to encourage an allocation of those
risks to those most able to handle them.
The result in practice has been enormous complexity, and with the complexity has
come an opaqueness. In the process, close examination of particular credits with respect to risk has too often been lost; the sub-prime mortgage is only the leading case
at point.
The complexity has also made it more difficult to assess risk for the managers
of particular large institutions, for supervisors and for credit rating agencies alike.
The new system seemed to work effectively in fair financial weather, with great confidence in its efficiency and presumed benefits. However, I believe there is no escape
from the conclusion that, faced with the kind of recurrent strains and pressures typical of free financial markets, the new system has failed the test of maintaining reasonable stability and fluidity.
One broad lesson, it seems to me, is the limitations of financial engineering, involving presumably sophisticated modeling of past market behavior and probabilities of default. Its not simply a matter of inexperience or technical failures in

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data selection or the choice of relevant time periods for analysis. The underlying
problem, I believe, is that mathematic modeling, imbued with the concept of normal
frequency distributions found in physical phenomena, cannot easily take account of
the human element of marketsthe episodes of contagious irrational exuberance
or conversely unreasoned despair that characterize extreme financial disturbance.
It is recognition of those extreme and unsettling market disturbances that conceptually has justified official intervention in free markets. That intervention has taken
the form of regulation and supervision and of providing an official safety net for
systemically important institutions, in the past almost entirely limited to commercial banks and traditional thrift institutions.
Faced with the evident threat of a potential cascading breakdown of an already
heavily strained financial institution, the Federal Reserve, drawing upon long dormant emergency powers, recently felt it necessary to extend that safety net, first
by providing direct support for one important investment bank experiencing a devastating run, and then potentially extending such support to other investment
banks that appeared vulnerable speculative attack.
Whatever claims might be made about the uniqueness of current circumstances,
it seems inevitable that the nature of the Feds response will be taken into account
and be anticipated, by officials and market participants alike, in similar future circumstances. Hence, the natural corollary is that systemically important investment
banking institutions should be regulated and supervised along at least the basic
lines appropriate for commercial banks that they closely resemble in key respects.
Several issues now need to be resolved by legislation or otherwise.
Just how far should the logic of regulation and supervision be extended? To all
investment banks and what is an accepted definition of an investment bank? What
about to hedge funds of which I am told there are some fifty thousand around the
world? Presumably very few of them could reasonably meet the test of systemic importance. However, a few years ago, a single large, widely admired, heavily engineered hedge fund suddenly came under market pressure and was judged to require assistance by the Federal Reserve in the form, not of overt official financial
assistance, but of moral suasion among its creditors.
Recent events raise another significant question for central banking. Given the
strong pressures and the immobility of the mortgage marketspressures spreading
well beyond the sub-prime sectorcentral banks in the United States and elsewhere
have directly or indirectly intervened in a large scale in those markets. That approach departs from time-honored central bank practices of limiting lending or direct purchases of securities to Government obligations or to strong highly rated commercial loans. Apart from any consequent risk of loss, intervention in a broad range
of credit market instruments may imply official support for a particular sector of
the market or of the economy. Questions of appropriate public policy may in turn
be raised, going beyond the usual remit of central banks, which are typically provided a high degree of insulation from political pressures.
That independence is integral to the central responsibility of the Federal Reserve
(and other central banks) for the conduct of monetary policy.
The Federal Reserve also has in practice, and enshrined in is founding mandate,
certain responsibilities for commercial banking supervision. In practice, it has in my
mind been properly considered as primus inter pares among the various financial
regulators.
In my view, a continuing strong role in banking regulation and supervision by the
Fed has been important for at least three reasons. First, as the lender of last resort and the ultimate provider of financial liquidity, if should be intimately aware
of conditions in the banking system generally and of particular institutions within
it, a precondition for decisions with respect to financial or other assistance.
Second, the widely understood and accepted independence of the central bank provides strong protection from the narrow political pressures that may be brought to
bear in the exercise of regulatory responsibilities.
Third, the broad responsibilities of the Federal Reserve to encourage orderly
growth seem to me to encourage an even-handedness over time in its approach toward regulation.
I have long thought the Federal Reserve lead role in banking (and financial) supervision should be recognized more clearly than in present law. Experience over
time, reinforced by recent events, also strongly suggests that if that Federal Reserve
role is to be maintained and strengthened, important changes will be necessary in
its internal organization. Specifically, direct and clear administrative responsibility
should lie with a senior official, designated by law. Stronger staff resources, adequately compensated, will be necessary.
I recognize that, if supervisory and regulatory responsibilities are to extend well
beyond the world of commercial banking and its holding companies, then a more

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fundamental question will need to be faced. Should such a large responsibility be
vested in a single organization, and should that organization reasonably be in the
Federal Reserve without risking dilution of its independence and central bank monetary responsibilities?
Clearly, other large questions are exposed by the present financial crisis. The role
and organization of credit rating agencies, the use and mis-use of mark-tomarket
and fair value accounting, the oversight of hedge funds, and somewhat removed
but nonetheless important, the growing role of sovereign wealth funds, all need consideration.
More generally, I must emphasize that little of the needed changes and reforms
can proceed independently, without consideration of, and a high degree of cooperation with, other leading financial powers, especially the European Union and Japan.
In a world of globalized finance, recent experience demonstrates we are all in this
together. Idiosyncratic national approaches simply cannot be fully effective, and can
easily be counter-productive of needed discipline.
Recent years have brought encouraging progress in a number of important areas:
bank capital requirements, common accounting standards, growing consistency in
auditing and settlement procedures and elsewhere. It is those areas of intergovernmental, private, and publicprivate initiative upon which we need to build. The
critical pressures on our financial markets are not unique; nor can an approach to
dealing with those pressures be successful in isolation. We have a lot upon which
to build, and we should not miss the opportunity to extend the areas of cooperation.
PREPARED STATEMENT OF DR. DOUGLAS W. ELMENDORF, SENIOR FELLOW,
BROOKINGS INSTITUTION, WASHINGTON, DC
Chairman Schumer, Ranking Member Saxton, and Members of the Committee, I
appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today.
The current financial crisis in the United States poses two separate challenges for
economic policy: one, to resolve the immediate problems; the other, to reduce the
likelihood that these problems recur. My testimony will focus on the second of these
challenges. The diagnosis and prescriptions I will offer are based on a report I am
writing with my Brookings Institution colleagues Martin Baily and Bob Litan, of
which a preliminary draft will be released this Friday. However, I alone am responsible for any errors or inadequacies in my comments.
The U.S. financial system remains in a perilous state. I share the view of some
other observers that the worst of the credit crisis is probably behind us. But that
is by no means certain, and, even if it turns out to be right, the return to normal
financial conditions will be a slow and uneven process.
Indeed, we have already seen two false dawns during this crisis. Last October and
again this January, financial conditions appeared to be stabilizingonly to be followed by renewed widening of risk spreads, further declines in asset values, and
struggles for survival by some financial intermediaries. The Federal Reserve has responded to this turmoil vigorously and, in my view, appropriately by reducing the
Federal funds rate 314 percentage points and by providing significant liquidity as
the so-called lender of last resort. Through these actions, the Fed has so far prevented what might have been a cascade of defaults and institutional failures. Hopefully, the relative calm since the sale of Bear Stearns in March is a precursor of
further stabilization.
Still, estimates suggest that billions of dollars of mortgage-related losses have yet
to be declared by U.S. financial institutions. Interbank loan rates remain elevated
as banks hoard liquidity and continue to be concerned about the creditworthiness
of other institutions. The slowing of the economy is depressing loan repayment
rates. Thus, the risk of a large institutional collapse has been reduced but not eliminated. More important, an absence of dramatic events going forward will not imply
that financial intermediation is back to normal. The weakened state of banks balance sheets will make them less willing to lend to households and businesses for
some time to come. For example, the Fed reported recently that a large fraction of
banks tightened lending standards and terms across a broad range of loan categories in the first quarter of the year. Many banks have raised additional capital
to bolster their balance sheets, but much more needs to be raised. If that does not
occur in a timely way, we could face a constriction of lending to households and
businesses analogous to the Japanese experience in the 1990s.
The turmoil in the financial system is important primarily because of its impact
on the overall economy. The latest data on spending, employment, and production
suggest that the economy is very likely in recession, and several forces are exerting
further downward pressure on economic activity:

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Housing construction continues to fall sharply, and the large supply of unoccupied homes offers no comfort that construction will recover soon.
House-price futures and analysts estimates of sustainable house prices point
to further declines, and the resulting loss in household wealth will depress consumption to a growing extent over the next year.
The tightening in lending that I just mentioned will further restrain spending,
as will the weak level of consumer confidence and the rising trend of home foreclosures.
And this years further rise in oil prices amounts to a tax on households whose
full effect on spending has probably not been apparent yet.
I do not mean to suggest that all of the economic news is bad. Data for the first
quarter of the year were more favorable than many had feared, and the decline in
the value of the dollar is buoying net exports. Moreover, powerful economic stimulus
has been set in motion through the actions of the Federal Reserve and the tax-cut
legislation passed by Congress in February. Therefore, I share the consensus view
among forecasters that a mild recession is the most likely outcome. But I would caution that a more serious economic downturn is entirely possible.
The experience of the U.S. financial system and economy during the past year vividly demonstrate the need for reform of our financial regulation and supervision. Let
me offer four principles to guide reform and the specific recommendations that follow from them:
PRINCIPLE

#1:

FINANCIAL REGULATION SHOULD TRY TO KEEP PACE WITH FINANCIAL

INNOVATION

This principle may seem self-evident, but it is worth stating explicitly because it
is so important. Financial innovation has been a very positive force in our economy,
but it also creates problems. New products, new markets, and new institutions are
usually more complex and less transparent than their predecessors; they tend to
boost leverage and risk-taking; and they tend to skirt existing regulations and supervisory attention. In recent years, regulation and supervision of financial institutions did not fully recognize the problems that were building and did not adapt
enough to put effective limits on these problems. Going forward, we need to be sure
that regulation evolves along with the financial system so that we can reap the
greatest benefits of innovation.
Financial innovation has benefited our economy in at least three important ways:
Innovation in recent decades has extended good opportunities for borrowing
and saving to people further down the income scale. The late Ned Gramlich, a
former Governor of the Federal Reserve, emphasized last year that the needed reforms of subprime mortgage lending should preserve the good aspects of such lending. He explained that the subprime expansion had enabled many households with
low income and poor credit histories to move out of undesirable rental housing, so
that even with the current problems, many households will have benefited from this
home-owning opportunity. On balance, the democratization of our financial system
has been a good thing.
Innovation has improved the allocation of capital and the distribution of risk
in our economy, thereby spurring long-term growth and raising peoples well-being.
Economists who have systematically compared the experiences of different countries
have found that financial development has a significant positive effect on growth
rates.1 In our country, we know that improved access to credit for smaller and
riskier businessesfor example, through the expansion of venture capital and the
so-called junk bond markethas provided critical funds for new industries.
Innovation has probably helped to stabilize the economy. This statement may
be surprising as we stand on the brink of a recession that was caused, at least in
part, by innovation run amok. However, I wrote a paper several years ago with
Karen Dynan and Dan Sichel in which we tried to catalog the channels through
which financial innovation affects economic volatility. We identified myriad channels, with different aspects of innovation pushing volatility in different directions.
On balance, we concluded that innovation likely contributed to the mid1980s stabilization of the U.S. economy known as the Great Moderation.2
1 For example, see Aubhik Khan, The Finance and Growth Nexus, Federal Reserve Bank of
Philadelphia Business Review, January/February 2000, and Ross Levine, More on Finance and
Growth: More Finance, More Growth?, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, July/August
2003.
2 See Karen E. Dynan, Douglas W. Elmendorf, and Daniel E. Sichel, Can Financial Innovation Help to Explain the Reduced Volatility of Economic Activity?, Journal of Monetary EcoContinued

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Along with these benefits, however, financial innovation also creates problems:
One key problem with innovation in recent years is the high degree of complexity and low degree of transparency. Nontraditional mortgagesincluding interest-only mortgages, negative amortization mortgages, and mortgages with teaser
rateswere apparently not well understood by many who borrowed this way or lent
this way. Unconventional credit-market instrumentssuch as derivatives on assetbacked securitieswere intrinsically complicated and unfamiliar even to sophisticated investors, and they had a very short track record that was exclusively from
a period of rapidly rising house prices. Transparency was further reduced by arrangements that purported to insulate investors from risk, such as credit default
swaps, bond insurance, and shifting liabilities off balance sheets.
Another key problem is the increasing divergence of incentives between the ultimate investors and the people guiding financial decisions. These principal-agent
problems, as economists call them, are endemic in financial markets, but recent innovation has exacerbated them. One example is mortgage brokers who were compensated for the volume of transactions they initiated and had little incentive to
monitor the quality of loans they made. Another example is credit ratings agencies
that are paid by the sellers of securities rather than the buyers; as securities became more complicated, investors reliance on the agencies judgment increased.
These problems diluted the potential benefits of the innovation. Democratization
of credit is counterproductive if many people end up with loans that are inappropriate for them. Capital is not allocated to its highest-value uses if everyone thinks
that the risks of investment are borne by someone else. Lack of transparency and
divergent incentives caused a run-up in financial risk-taking, both in the assets purchased and the degree of leverage used to finance those assets. These forces helped
to fuel the housing bubble, and they greatly worsened the consequences when the
bubble deflated.
In sum, financial innovators and regulators are in a race, and the regulators will
always lose that race. But it matters how much they lose by. If regulators do not
try to keep up, or are completely outclassed in the race, then much of the benefit
of financial innovation will be offset by the cost.
PRINCIPLE #2: MORTGAGE ORIGINATION SHOULD HAVE SIMPLER DISCLOSURES FOR
EVERYONE AND LIMITS ON OFFERINGS TO SUBPRIME BORROWERS

Economists and others sometimes assume that having more choices improves peoples well-being. Clearly, that is true in many cases. However, it is not necessarily
true if people are choosing among complicated products without sufficient information or understanding.
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that people do not fully understand
their financial arrangements. For example, researchers have found that younger
adults and older adults tend to pay significantly higher interest rates than middleaged adults, even after controlling for various personal characteristics.3 This finding
suggests different degrees of sophistication across households of different ages. Researchers have also found that households with low income and little education are
less likely than other households to know their mortgage termsfor example, the
extent to which their interest rates can change.4
Financial innovation that gives people more choices can make these problems
worse. Newly designed mortgages are generally more complicated than older ones,
and people have little experience with new mortgagesin their own lives or the
lives of their friends and family membersto use in making decisions. More generally, the ability to borrow more is also the ability to borrow too much. Even in
2004, prior to the worst of the deterioration in lending standards, households with
the highest ratios of debt to assets were more likely to be insolvent than in previous
decades and more likely to face financial strain.5
Of course, protecting people from unwise choices is easier said than done. Financial arrangements that are unwise for some people in some circumstances are quite
nomics, January 2006, and Federal Reserve Board Working Paper, November 2005, http://
www.Federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2005/200554/200554abs.html.
3 See Sumit Agarwal, John C. Driscoll, Xavier Gabaix, and David Laibson, The Age of Reason: Financial Decisions Over the Lifecycle, Harvard University, March 2007.
4 See Brian Bucks and Karen Pence, Do Homeowners Know Their House Values and Mortgage Terms?, Federal Reserve Board Working Paper, January 2006, http://
www.Federalreserve.gov/PUBS/FEDS/2006/200603/index.html.
5 See Karen E. Dynan and Donald L. Kohn, The Rise in U.S. Household Indebtedness: Causes
and Consequences in The Structure and Resilience of the Financial System, Reserve Bank of
Australia, 2007, and Federal Reserve Board Working Paper, August 2007, http://
www.Federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2007/200737/200737abs.html.

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sensible for other people in different circumstances. Thus, public policy should improve financial literacy and provide information needed for making informed financial choices. However, these steps are not enough in my view, and some limitations
on mortgage offerings are also appropriate. Moreover, protecting people also reduces
risks for the financial system as a whole, because people who understand their
mortgages are more likely to be able to repay them.
Specifically, Martin Baily and Bob Litan and I recommend:
Simpler mortgage disclosures, pre-mortgage counseling for subprime borrowers, and perhaps a default mortgage contract from which people could opt out.
Further restrictions on the design of mortgage contracts under the HOEPA
rules and a broadening of HOEPA coverage, both along the lines proposed by the
Federal Reserve.
Federal oversight of state regulation for all mortgage originators.
PRINCIPLE

#3:

FINANCIAL INSTRUMENTS AND INSTITUTIONS SHOULD BE MORE

TRANSPARENT

As we know from many examples, self-interest is a powerful economic force. Good

regulation harnesses that force. I have already explained that one important problem with the new financial products and markets of recent years is their very low
degree of transparency. By increasing transparency, we can give investors better
tools to monitor financial risk-taking themselves.
The private sector is already moving in this direction. Many financial intermediaries recognize that they need to be more diligent in learning about assets before buying them instead of placing blind confidence in other peoples evaluations.
Going forward, investors will put less weight on the judgment of the credit ratings
agencies. They will be more skeptical of assertions that certain complicated financial
strategies have no risk. They will be more concerned about the underwriting standards that had been applied to loans underlying asset-backed securities. And they
will be less likely to buy derivatives whose payoff structure they do not fully grasp.
Warren Buffett has been quoted as saying that he only buys things he understands,
and more investors will adopt that mantra.
Appropriate changes in regulation can aid investors in this process. Specifically,
Martin Baily and Bob Litan and I recommend:
Increased transparency in the mortgage origination process, as I have already
described.
For asset-backed securities, public reporting on characteristics of the underlying assets.
For credit ratings agencies, greater clarity in presenting ratings across asset
classes, reporting of the ratings agencies track records, and disclosure of the limitations of ratings for newer instruments.
For commercial banks, clearer accounting of off-balance-sheet activities.
For derivatives, a shift toward trading on exchanges, which will encourage
standardization of instruments.
PRINCIPLE

#4.

KEY FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS SHOULD BE LESS LEVERAGED AND MORE

LIQUID

Even if private investors had perfect information, they would tend to take greater
financial risks than are optimal from societys perspective. The reason is that taking
risks in a financial transaction can have negative consequences for people not directly involved in that transaction. These spillover effects arise in part because of
the risk of contagion in the financial system, and they arise in part because of the
Government safety net including bank deposit insurance and the role of the Federal
Reserve as lender of last resort. The parties to a transaction have no reason to take
account of these externalities, as economists label them, and this provides the traditional rationale for Government financial regulation and supervision.
To be sure, the financial system is already moving to reduce leverage and increase
liquidity. Those institutions with larger capital cushions are weathering this crisis
far better than their less-conservative competitors, and they now find themselves in
a position to purchase assets at favorable prices. Those institutions with greater
amounts of liquid assets have been less subject to runs in which their investors
scramble to get their money out first. These examples provide strong lessons for future institutional strategies. To highlight one example, the future will see less borrowing on a short-term basis to finance long-term commitments. That approach
ended up hurting families who could not afford their adjustable-rate mortgage payments after the rates reset; it hurt so-called structured investment vehicles (SIVs)
that were not viable when short-term funding costs increased; it hurt municipalities
that borrowed in the auction-rate market and were suddenly unable to roll over

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their debts at previous rates; and it hurt investment banks that financed themselves
heavily through overnight repurchase agreements. In the future, more borrowers
will pay higher rates to lock in longer-term financing.
Still, these private responses should be accompanied by changes in regulation and
supervision.6 Specifically, Martin Baily and Bob Litan and I recommend:
For commercial banks, capital requirements for off-balance-sheet liabilities, required issuance of uninsured subordinated debt, and closer public supervision of
risk-management practices.
For investment banks, regulation and supervision of capital, liquidity, and risk
management.
For bond insurers, higher capital requirements and closer supervision of underwriting standards for new products.
CONCLUSION

Let me conclude with three final observations.

First, my comments have focused on what should be regulated rather than who
should do the regulating. That is not because I am enthusiastic about the existing
hodgepodge of regulation. Rather, I think that regulatory reform needs to set priorities, and the highest priority in my view is not to change boxes on the organization
chart but to change what happens inside each box. Insisting on a grand redesign
of financial regulation may simply bog down the legislative process and ultimately
accomplish very little. To be sure, the seriousness of the current situation and the
impact on the housing and mortgage markets that directly affect so many people
should provide political support for change. However, regulation of the financial system is substantively complex and will still feel remote to many citizens, and I expect
that reform will be difficult to achieve.7
Second, the private and regulatory changes that I have discussed will raise the
price of risk and therefore the cost of borrowing by risky borrowers. They will also
reduce the demand for complex financial transactions, which in turn will diminish
the rewards for undertaking this sort of financial engineering. These outcomes are
appropriate in my view. During the past fifty years, the value added by the finance
and insurance industry has surged from about 3 percent of GDP to about 8 percent.
Much of that increase, and the financial innovation it reflects, were beneficial for
the reasons I described earlier. But the events of the past year have shown that
the latest steps in financial complexity and risk-taking, without appropriate advances in regulation, had smaller benefits and larger costs than many people initially understood. Some step-back in the upward trend of financial engineering
should be sought and not feared.
Lastly, financial markets will always experience swings between confidence and
fear, and between optimism and pessimism. However, effective regulation and supervision can reduce the frequency, the magnitude, and the broader consequences
of these swings.
Thank you very much.
6 Some analysts have argued that excessive leverage should also be thwarted by restrictive
monetary policy. In the words of the IMFs recent World Economic Outlook, there may be benefits to be derived from leaning against the wind, that is increasing interest rates to stem the
growth of house price bubbles and help restrain the buildup of financial imbalances. I disagree
with this view, principally because monetary policy is a very blunt tool for preventing increases
in leverage. More restrictive policy earlier this decade might have diminished the housing and
financial bubbles, but only at the cost of significantly higher unemployment and lower inflation
at a time when resource utilization was already depressed and inflation was falling toward the
bottom of the Federal Reserves comfort zone. See Douglas W. Elmendorf, Financial Innovation
and Housing: Implications for Monetary Policy, Brookings Institution, April 2008, http://
www.brookings.edu/papers/2008/0421lmonetarylpolicylelmendorf.aspx.
7 On a related note, I think that regulatory reform should focus on key financial institutions.
Economists generally advocate a level playing field in which Government rules are neutral
across economically identical activities and thus do not distort private behavior. Yet, creating
a completely level field for risk-taking and leverage is both impractical and unnecessary. It is
impractical because individuals will always find ways to make risky investments and some will
undoubtedly lose their wealth doing so. It is unnecessary because these phenomena create larger
problems in some circumstances than others. Although mortgage-backed securities and their derivatives spread risks around the global financial system to some extent, significant exposures
remained on the balance sheets of key U.S. institutions. It is their losses that have done the
most damage to the functioning of the system and created the greatest concerns about future
credit supply. Moreover, the Federal Reserves recent actions show a clear benefit of doing business with key institutions. Tighter regulation can balance the effect of providing that safety net.

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PREPARED STATEMENT OF ELLEN SEIDMAN, DIRECTOR, FINANCIAL SERVICES
EDUCATION PROJECT, NEW AMERICA FOUNDATION, WASHINGTON, DC

AND

Senator Schumer, Representative Maloney and members of the Committee, thank

you very much for this opportunity to testify before you concerning the regulatory
implications of and guidance we can take from the current market failures. My
name is Ellen Seidman, and I am the Director of the Financial Services and Education Project in the Assets and Ownership Program at the New America Foundation. Our project is focused on the development and implementation of policies that
will encourage responsible consumer financial services, enabling consumers to use
our powerful financial system to build, rather than destroy, their assets.
I also continue to serve as Executive Vice President, National Program and Partnership Development, at ShoreBank Corporation, the Chicago-based bank that is
the nations first and largest community development bank holding company and its
largest community development financial institution. I also serve on the Boards of
two other large and well respected community development financial institutions,
the Low Income Investment Fund and Coastal Enterprises, Inc. Each of these companies is both devoted to and in fact provides responsible financial services for lower
income communities, businesses and individuals in the parts of the country they
serve.
From 1997 through most of 2001, I was the Director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Federal agency that regulates the savings and loan industry. I draw on
all these experiences for many of the points and recommendations I make today.
Before I get to recommendations, let me step back a moment and consider how
we got here. I think there are three root causes: the unsustainable buildup of systemic risk; an antiquated, uneven and frequently ineffective regulatory system; and
a loss of alignment between serving customers well and standard business practices.
First, we have allowed systemic risk to buildup to what has obviously become an
intolerable level. The risks include those that were known but hiddenfrom consumers, from investors, from participants in the system, from regulators; risks that
were unknown, often because firms had created such a degree of complexity that
even the best efforts at ferreting out risk would have failed; and risks that were
unknowablethe model failures that Chairman Volcker talked about in his Economic Club of New York speech. Excessive leverage and reliance on short-term
funding to support long-term assets exacerbated the impact of these risks.
Second, we have both tolerated and allowed to grow a regulatory structure that
has two major failures. First, entities performing the same kinds of functions are
regulated very differently, with the general effect that business practice flowed
downhill to the practices of the least regulated. But second, we have not focused our
regulatory attention tightly enough on what really matters. Is finding every last
SAR violation really more important than making sure that the recourse on SIVs
is adequately capitalized? Or that borrowers have an ability to repay? Our regulatory system has become simultaneously unduly complex, ineffective where it
counts, and excessively burdensome on some of the least risky and most consumerfriendly elements of the system.
Getting this balance right is hard. In my tenure at OTS, I know we sometimes
got it right, as when we stepped in early to keep thrifts from engaging in payday
lending. Sometimes we got it wrong, most spectacularly in the Superior Bank failure. And sometimes we did things that seemed right at the time but had, in retrospect, some negative unintended consequences. An example of this is the sub-prime
guidance all the regulators issued in 2001 that to my mind was in part responsible
for pushing sub-prime lending out of banks and into less regulated affiliates. But
the fact that its hard means that well sometimes get it wrong, not that we are excused from trying.
Third, we have lost incentives for financial institutions to provide high quality,
consumer friendly products that provide long-term value. This is a result with many
causes: the originate-and-sell business model that, especially when tied to brokering
at the front and CDOs on the back, has separated the interests of borrower and
lender and of principal and agent; not extending the affirmative service mandate of
CRA beyond banks and thrifts; the manner in which CRA and other consumer protections wereor werentenforced; failure of financial literacy to keep up with a
fast-changing financial world; and not focusing our imagination and creativity on
ways to help consumers gravitate to products and services that are beneficial to
them while also profitable to providers.
This is not just being nice to consumers. As should be obvious from the mess were
in now, the financial viability of institutions is inextricably linked to that of their
customersincluding consumers. To give just one example, with the advent of the
secondary market, the long-term fixed-rate fully amortizing mortgage should have

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been a dynamite product: lenders get to charge for long-term use of money that is
likely to be used for a much shorter period and borrowers get a steady, predictable
payment schedule that builds equity. Somehow thats not what happened.
So what do we need to do? In the face of the mess families, communities, companies and markets now confront, I believe the critical question is how can we reestablish in our financial markets and companies a long-term, quality-oriented culture
that incents all parties to focus their attention on:
products and services that benefit both lender and borrower;
complete, accurate and transparent risk assessment and management; and
profitability and growth that is sustainable over the long term?
Obviously this is not a job solely for a regulatory system, and it is just as obviously not easy. But I think if we set this as a goal, we will have a standard to measure our thoughts and proposals against.
I suggest six critical strategies:
First, Effective Enforcement: the will and financial wherewithal to enforce the
laws and regulations we establish. Without this, we are not only allowing bad things
to continue to grow, we are fooling ourselves into believing weve resolved problems.
And this is not only an issue at the Federal level, but also at the state level, where
regulatory agencies are frequently starved for resources.
Second, Risk Assessment, namely concentration on enhanced risk knowledge
and transparency: within organizations, among organizations, for the public, and to
and among regulators, both domestically and internationally. We can no longer afford to have institutions that do not know their own level of risk and that of their
counterpartiesand regulators who are also in the dark. As noted, this will not be
perfect; there will always be unknown and unknowable risks, but lets at least get
rid of the hiding.
Third, Capital Adequacy, with increased capital all around. This has three critical effects. First, capital serves as the penultimate guard against institutional collapse. Second, because capital is at risk, it serves to mitigate against excessive and
foolish risk-taking, of the heads I win, tails you lose variety. Third, if all entities
in the system are required to hold a greater amount of capital, demand for returns
based on financial leverage should diminish. And by the way, its time to recognize
that in an uncertain world, loss reserves are in practice part of the capital structure
and to allow them to serve a counter-cyclical function by building up during good
times so they can be drawn down during the bad that will inevitably follow.
Fourth, Enhanced Responsibility, a system where all players have skin in the
game, realigning the interests of borrowers, lenders and all those in the chain between money provided and money used. For institutions, its capital in part, but an
explicit continuing residual interest in sold assets whose value depends on future
performance should also be considered. And certainly we need to do something
about compensation systemsboth individual and institutionalthat do not recognize back-end risk. What if deferred compensation for executive officers were required to be haircut if the bank received a CAMELS rating of 3 or lower within the
following 2 yearswith equivalent sanctions for non-banks? And certainly the days
of paying mortgage brokers up-front fees with no hold-back for performance should
be over. In this connection, I urge Congress to move ahead with consideration of the
two sets of bills related to the mortgage crisis that are pending: those dealing with
regulation of the market and those responding to the crisis for homeowners, communities and the markets.
Fifth, Regulatory Consistency across entities that are performing the same
tasks, such as providing consumer credit or brokering significant financial services
for consumers, and/or have access to the same kinds of benefits, such as the discount window. At the same time, we need to be cognizant of actual risk and relate
it to actual burden. Regulation is a fixed and a hidden cost, and smaller institutions
both have fewer options for dealing effectively with regulators and smaller budgets
within which to absorb the costs. Again, this is tough, but in enhancing regulation,
as I believe we need to do, especially with respect to risk management and consumer protection, its essential that we not destroy the financial viability of the
smaller institutions closest to the people, including community development financial institutions, credit unions and community banks and thrifts.
Finally, Aligning Incentives with Practices that treat customers fairly and equitably, before, during and after their purchase of financial services. There are many
ways to do this, including not only consumer protection legislation and regulation
and let me voice my support here for the regulators to stay strong as they move
toward final rules under HOEPA, TILA and the Federal Trade Commission Act and
for Congress to move forward on pending legislationbut also establishment of a
suitability standard for those selling or brokering significant consumer credit products; an enhanced and more broadly applicable Community Reinvestment Act; pub-

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lic information systems that extend beyond the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act to
enable the public and the media to see whos being served, whos doing it well and
whos doing it badly; improving financial literacy; and barrier removal and incentives to help consumers do the right things, such as the pension opt-out provisions
that were incorporated into the Pension Protection Act of 2006.
As markets begin to stabilize or we reach what I suspect will be temporary lulls
in foreclosures or house price declines, it will be easy to fall back into believing that
the status quo is acceptable, that changing it is too hard, or that enhanced regulation of consumer products will hurt consumers by limiting choice. Such a result
would be not only dangerous and a mistake, but also a waste of the trauma and
turmoil weve been through. Lets instead use this experience to learn, think creatively, and act.
PREPARED STATEMENT OF ALEX J. POLLOCK, RESIDENT FELLOW, AMERICAN
ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE, WASHINGTON, DC
REGULATORY IMPLICATIONS OF THE HOUSING AND MORTGAGE BUBBLE AND BUST

Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Saxton, Vice Chair Maloney and members of the
Committee, thank you for the opportunity to be here today. I am Alex Pollock, a
Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and these are my personal
views. Before joining AEI in 2004, I spent 35 years in banking, including 12 years
as President and CEO of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago. I am a director
of three financial services companies and a Past President of the International
Union for Housing Finance. I have both experienced and studied many credit cycles,
of which our 21st century housing and mortgage cycle is the latest example.
The Human Foundations of Financial Risk
The severe housing and mortgage bust we are experiencing can best be understood as the inevitable deflation of a classic asset bubble. Historically speaking, why
do we keep having these financial adventures, no matter what our technological and
theoretical progress or regulatory reorganizations? Why is a prudent banker one
who goes broke when everybody else goes broke? This witty line of Keynes points
us to the eternal human elements behind the credit overexpansion that our sophisticated, globalized, computerized, and leveraged markets produced between 2003 and
2006, the subsequent debt panics of 2007 and 2008, and the continuing bust.
The losses of the bust are now being recognized in the general, Main Street
banking system. Note in this context that 48 percent of the total loans of insured
depositories are based on real estate. For the vast majority of banks, those with
total assets of less than $1 billion, this number is 67 percent.
The human nature behind the bubbles and busts does not change, whether the
calculations of boundless future profit from increased leverage are made with quill
pens or advanced computers. Credit overexpansions are always based on a belief
the first optimistic, and then euphoric, belief in the rising price of some asset class.
The belief in the ever-rising price of the favored asset seems to be confirmed on
all sides as the bubble expands. As long as the underlying price, of houses in our
current case, keeps rising, everybody winsborrowers and lenders, brokers and investors, speculators and flippers, home builders and home buyers, rating agencies
and bond salesmen, realtors and municipalities, and many others. Bubbles are notoriously hard to control because so many people are making money from them while
they last.
Political actions also play a role. In the housing bubble, politicians of both parties
also thought they were winning as all sides cheered increasing home ownership ratios and expanding access to mortgage credit with lower credit quality loans. The
government has been an effective promoter of higher loan to value lending and
smaller down paymentssuch as recent proposals to move the FHA to 100 percent
LTV loansriskier lending, and the use of government guarantees. A 1994 National Homeownership Strategy, for example, advocated financing strategies,
fueled by creativity for those to become home buyers who lack the cash or income
to buy a home. A good deal of creativity was indeed subsequently applied.
Of course, bubbles always come to a sad end. Retreating eastward after the collapse of the bubble in Kansas land prices in the 1880s, defaulted farm mortgage borrowers put on their wagons: In God we trusted, in Kansas we busted.
This time expectations of house price increases entered the models analyzing
subprime mortgage pools as HPA, or house price appreciation. What ultimately
emerged was naturally HPD: house price depreciation. So we can update the Kansas
motto of 120 years ago to: In HPA we trusted, with HPD we busted.
Can regulation avoid these cycles?

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Was There a Regulatory Golden Age?
Some current discussions give the impression that there used to be a time when
highly regulated banks dominated the credit system, so regulators prevented problems. Was there such a golden age of regulation? No, there wasnt.
In the 1960s, Federal regulation of deposit interest rates (the infamous Regulation Q), which can be viewed as having created a Government-sponsored deposit
cartel, caused two severe credit crunchesthose of 1966 and 1969, in which mortgage credit would get rationed out.
Consider the mid-1970s, when commercial bank lending created a bubble and
massive bust in loans to real estate investment trusts (REITs). The Senate Banking Committee held hearings wondering whether the entire commercial banking system was insolvent on a mark-to-market basis. (Needless to say, the banks did not
mark their assets to market.)
Savings and loans were then the most intensely regulated of financial institutions.
The result? By 1979, by following their fixed rate lending regulatory instructions,
in the aggregate they were insolvent on a mark-to-market basis. The insolvency of
the savings and loans laid the foundation for the move to mortgage securitization.
How about the 1980s? Well, more than a thousand commercial banks failed in
this decade. There were massive credit busts in loans to developing counties
(LDCs in the jargon of the time), in energy finance, and again in commercial real
estate loans. In all cases, we are speaking of loans on the balance sheets of the
banks. The insolvency of the saving and loans grew much greater, causing the insolvency of their Federal deposit insurer, FSLIC, and of course ending in collapse and
bailout in 1989, along with regulatory reforms and restructuring.
In 1993, in the wake of these reforms, the financial historian Bernard Shull
insightfully wrote:
Comprehensive banking reform, traditionally including augmented and improved supervision, has typically evoked a transcendent, and in retrospect, unwarranted optimism. The Comptroller of the Currency announced in 1914 that,
with the new Federal Reserve Act, financial and commercial crises or panics. . . seem to be mathematically impossible. Seventy-five years later, confronting the S&L disaster with yet another comprehensive reform. . . The Secretary of the Treasury proclaimed two watchwords guided us as we undertook
to solve this problem: Never Again.
Yet here we are again. In the meantime Congress also imposed the expensive Sarbanes-Oxley Act to manage corporate risk. It was so successful that we have nearly
had a global financial collapse.
The British formed a consolidated financial regulator, the FSA, and separated
its role from the Bank of England. But when the Northern Rock funding panic and
crisis hit, this structure did not work well. No matter how you organize any government activity (or company or anything), as time goes by, you will have to reorganize
it. The perfect answer does not exist. However you try to engineer a regulated market or industry, the reactions and adaptations to the regulatory engineering require
another reform, and another, and so on ad infinitum.
My point is not that no action should ever be taken, but that we have to be realistic about the adaptations to and unforeseeable effects of all interventions. I am
against utopian hopes for what financial regulation can achieve, but I am for sensible improvements.
Here are a number suggestions for such improvements:
Simple and straightforward disclosure in one page
Remove government support for rating agencies
Encourage credit risk retention by mortgage originators
Countercyclical management of LTV ratios
The Super Fed
Increased GSE responsibility for refinancing the bust
Controlling fair value accounting
The study of financial history
I will discuss each briefly.
Simple and Straightforward Disclosure in One Page
I have previously testified to this Committee that we should require a clear,
straightforward, one-page disclosure to borrowers of the essential information about
prospective mortgage loans. The information, in regular-sized type, should focus on
what commitments the borrowers are making and how much of their household income these will require, so they can underwrite themselves for the credit. This
would be a major improvement in the American mortgage finance system.

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Mr. Chairman, thank you for introducing S. 2296, which would implement this
idea, which everybody should be able to agree on. I hope it will be included in any
final mortgage legislation.
And thank you, Vice Chair Maloney, for your interest in the possibility of using
the one-page approach in another area, overdraft disclosures.
Remove Government Support for Rating Agencies
The credit rating agencies say that they are in the business of publishing opinions
about the future. In this I believe they are right, and I have a good deal of sympathy with the thought that in the course of financial events, some such opinions
will prove to have been mistaken, even disastrously mistaken. So when it comes to
opinions about the future, more opinions and competition is likely to uncover new
insights into credit risks and new methods of analysis.
A particularly desirable form of increased competition would be from ratings agencies paid solely by investors, as opposed to those paid for by the issuers of securities,
as many commentators have suggested.
But here is a larger question: Since all opinions are liable to error, and opinions
based on models are liable to systemic error of vast proportionsas the subprime
bust makes apparentwhy should the U.S. Government want to enshrine certain
opinions as having preferred, preferential, indeed mandatory, status? It shouldnt.
I suggest that all regulatory requirements to use the ratings of certain preferred
rating agencies be eliminated. Banks and other regulated investors should instead
be responsible for developing their own prudent standards, which would probably
entail the use of credit ratings as part of a credit management systembut without
government sponsorship of the dominant firms.
Encourage Credit Risk Retention by Mortgage Originators
One of the lessons of the savings and loan collapse was that for depository institutions to keep long-term fixed rate mortgages on their own balance sheet, while funding them with short-term deposits, was extremely dangerous in terms of interest
rate risk, although it was no problem in terms of credit risk. The answer was to
sell the loans to bond investors through securitization and divest the interest rate
risk to those better able to bear it. As a side effect, the credit risk was also divested.
In the wake of the mortgage bubble and bust, we now realize that divesting the
credit risk created big problems on its own, breaking the alignment of incentives
between the lender making the credit decision and the ultimate investor actually
bearing the credit risk. Some commentators have referred to the good old days when
the savings and loans kept the loans themselveshow short the memories are of
the disaster that caused.
The right synthesis of the historical lessons is for securitization to continue to address interest rate risk, while encouraging the retention of significant credit risk by
the original mortgage lender. There are numerous regulatory and accounting obstacles to this approach, but its obvious superiority makes it worth while to try to overcome them. This is an assignment which should be given to an appropriate group
of financial regulators.
Countercyclical Management of LTV Ratios
As asset prices rise in a bubble, more debt and leverage always seems better. The
credit experience of loans financing the inflating asset will be good, with delinquencies, defaults, and losses all low. Thus, the risk of the loans seems to be decreasing, even while the risk is in fact increasing.
The low delinquencies and defaults seem to confirm the success of the credit expansion and the accuracy of the lending models. Loan-to-value (LTV) ratios rise,
even while they should be being reduced. Innovative no-down-payment mortgages
are promoted. This inflates the price and credit bubble further, and insures that the
ensuing bust will be worse.
A rational, countercyclical management of LTV behavior would reduce LTV ratios
as the price of the asset inflates beyond its trendthis is the opposite of what in
fact occurs. How one might make this happen should be the subject of another
study.
The Super Fed
I believe the Super Fed idea contained in the Treasury Departments restructuring proposal is consistent with the original situation in 1913, the year of the Federal Reserve Act, as well as the current financial world. This idea would have the
Fed serve as stability, systemic risk overseer and lender of last resort to the financial markets in general.
Much has been made of the Feds extending discount window lending to investment banks, rather than only to commercial banks. But separation of banking into

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these two parts did not occur until the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. In 1913, for example, J.P. Morgan and Co. was still both an investment bank and a commercial
bank; it did not divide into Morgan the commercial bank and Morgan Stanley the
investment bank until forced to in 1935.
Today Morgan is again both a commercial bank and an investment bank, after
the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, and will be even more so with its pending acquisition of Bear Stearns, as arranged by the Fed. The Super Fed proposals seems
sensibly to deal with the financial structures of the present and the future, as opposed to those of 19331999.
Increased GSE Responsibility for Refinancing the Bust
As I have previously testified to this Committee, it seems to me that in exchange
for the manifold advantages Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac receive from the government, they should be assigned a larger role in refinancing the troubled loans of the
mortgage bust.
Controlling Fair Value Accounting
I know Congress does not like to get involved in the theoreticalone could say
the metaphysicaldisputes of accounting. Still, the current accounting fashion of
fair value accounting has played an important role in the financial problems of
the last 10 months. There is no doubt in my mind that fair value accounting is
pro-cyclical, that it accentuates reported losses in times of financial panic and helps
encourage the boom in times of optimism. Is there some way to control its perverse
effects?
Among the key questions which must be addressed are:
What does a market price mean when there is no market?
Should panicked levels of fear and uncertainty determine accounting results?
Should accounting be about the recording of cash-flows over time or the theoretical buying and selling of assets and liabilities?
I dont suggest that it is easy to answer such questions, only that they are in fact
legitimate policy issues.
The Study of Financial History
The mistakes of a sanguine manager are far more to be dreaded than the theft
of a dishonest manager, wrote Walter Bagehot. The best protection against excessively sanguine beliefs is the study of financial history, with its many examples of
how easy it is to be plausible, but wrong, both as financial actors and as policymakers. Perhaps we need a required course in the recurring bubbles, busts, foibles
and disasters of financial history for anyone to qualify as a government financial
official. I have the same recommendation for management development in every financial firm.
Thank you again for the opportunity to share these ideas.

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