The Tax Song!

U.S. Government to Sue 17 Financial Firms Over Home Loans

"The top federal housing regulator filed lawsuits on Friday against 17 of the world's biggest financial institutions, saying they sold $196 billion of risky home loans over four years to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac without adequately disclosing the risks.

The suits, filed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, represent the most sweeping action to date from a federal regulator stemming from the mortgage meltdown, which brought the financial system to its knees in the fall of 2008 and helped push the economy into a deep recession." (1)

"Among those targeted by the lawsuits were Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., JP Morgan Chase & Co., and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Large European banks including The Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays Bank and Credit Suisse were also sued.

The lawsuits were filed by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. It oversees Fannie and Freddie, the two agencies that buy mortgages loans and mortgage securities issued by the lenders.

The total price tag for the mortgage-backed securities sold to Fannie and Freddie by the firms named in the lawsuits: $196 billion." (2)

Milton Friedman stated many times that legal recourse is one of those checks and balances within free enterprise/free markets to weed out the unscrupulous.

In this particular case exactly where is the root problem? Does legal action need taken to root out the source of the problem or the problem's results?

In John B. Taylor's book Getting Off Track he makes a very convincing argument that the government itself set the stage for financial shenanigans. (3) The community reinvestment act, the Clinton Administration's aim to raise the percentage of home ownership, the lowering of standards for a loan application approval (which was government directed), etc., along with the cheap money bubble created in 2003-2004 by the Fed [government] set the stage for the financial shenanigans that followed. Stated alternatively, no government intervention in the housing market and no government induced cheap money bubble then no stage is set for financial shenanigans. If one sets the stage for financial shenanigans then one should be surprised to find financial shenanigans?!?

Secondly, the residential housing sector is in a depression. Partly due to the above phenomena and also due to the government directing way too many resources into a single sector (residential housing) via the aid of the tax code. Hence suing lenders is going to help the housing market -or- is suing lenders merely blaming some entities for the housing market depression?

Most importantly, how does this action solve the current economic malaise?

Notes:

(1) U.S. Sues Big Banks Over Home Mortgages, Wall Street Journal, 09/02/2011
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903895904576546904174271250.html

(2) Feds sue big banks over sales of risky investments, Yahoo Finance, 09/02/2011
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Feds-sue-biggest-US-banks-apf-3066897747.html

(3) Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis. John B. Taylor, Hoover Institution Press, February, 2009.

Government Sponsored Structural Unemployment?

If one reads the Richmond Federal Reserve essay The Rise in Long-Term Unemployment, Potential Causes and Implications (see link below) and peruses Table 1: Demographic Differences in Unemployment, the following observations are apparent:

(a) educational attainment clearly yields different average unemployment rates. Higher education levels yield lower unemployment rates,

(b) the unemployment rate in the construction sector exceeds 10%. (1)

Unemployment by Industry

By industry, construction has the highest unemployment rate. The unemployment rate in construction is 10.3% and the share, of which, that is long term unemployment is 42.8%.

Educational Needs by Industry

The construction sector educational attainment/needs are exactly what dynamic? Could not find a U.S. breakdown however found this breakdown: Employment Snapshot - Construction, New Zealand Department of Labour. (2) One can see from the New Zealand report that educational attainment/needs in the construction industry is heavily weighted to unskilled labor.

Government Sponsored Structural Unemployment?

If you make the assumption that the construction sector requires many low skilled workers for much of its needs, and you factor in a government induced residential/commercial construction bubble, then was a group of workers [some subset] then induced to skip skill enhancements [vocational school, etc.] to enter a low skill occupation? That is, why absorb the cost of skill enhancement when a relatively high paying job awaits requiring low skills?

Government Failure

Considering the above proposition, and now that politicos point to structural unemployment and the need for government sponsored retraining, is the politico argument in essence a sub-government failure of the the original government failure: government sponsored cheap money bubble along with government induced social engineering schemes related to mortgage attainment leading to construction bubble resulting in structural unemployment? (3)

Stated alternatively, that a rise in structural unemployment, to some extent, is related to other politico failures through the mechanism of government. And, on queue, the fix to the politico failure is another politico program [government sponsored retraining].

Notes

(1) http://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/annual_report/2010/pdf/article.pdf

(2) http://www.dol.govt.nz/services/LMI/tools/skillsinsight/snapshots/construction/index.asp

(3) http://www.answers.com/topic/structural-unemployment

ObamaCare: governments fail too

Governments fail too

Many times you read articles or see news reports regarding "market failure". That some how the market has failed. What you intuitively know but is rairly reported is that "governments fail too". Both markets and governments fail basically because they are both made up of human beings that make errors. Some errors are unfortunately by design.

In a recent Kudlow Report segment Don Luskin, chief investment officer of Trend Macro made this instant- classic statement: "Government is the only enterprise in the world that when it fails, it does the exact same thing over again except bigger". (1)

Luskin is not alone. Milton Friedman also observed: "The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem". (2)

Do we know of government failures?

We do in fact know governments fail. John and Jane Goodfellow have first hand experience from a simple trip to your local Department of Motor Vehicles that takes hours, to the out of body experience of trying to read and fill out you annual federal tax return. We also know government failure in a more complex proposition of unfunded future entitlements of Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security that are now in excess of 100 trillion dollars.


Why are market failures reported yet government failures are under reported?

It boils down to the "painting" of the subject matter. What exactly is the difference between politicos through the mechanism of government creating a cheap money bubble while simultaneously promoting purchases of single family housing units by low income marginal buyers and a financial advisor promoting a novice, part-time retail stock investor, with very modest means, into making risky trades using a margin account? (3)

The point being that both are highly risky practices especially for the type/kind of participants involved. One risky practice is promoted by the government while the other risky practice is promoted by the private sector.

If the outcome for both situations end in disaster, the government promoted activity is painted as merely public policy failure experiment albeit in-your-best-interest, helping the little guy, and social justice didn't work in this particular isolated incident. The other disastrous outcome from the private sector is painted in exact opposite terms where "greed", getting over on the little guy, and the-system-is-rigged are the overarching themes of the incident as well as the incident not being isolated but portrayed wide spread within the entire economic system.

In the larger picture, cases of government promoted failure and private sector promoted failure, yield only one report: "markets fail". The "governments fail too" proposition plays second fiddle and is only pointed out by a handful of people. Hence the public at large are feed the "markets fail" concept and the "governments fail too" proposition remains widely under reported.

ObamaCare and governments fail too

F.A. Hayek wrote extensively that centralized command and control programs only worked in the hunter/gatherer stage of economic evolution. When small groups of forty or so controlled a hunting/gathering region, centralized authority might have worked. Harold Demsetz has also written extensively regarding the subject. (4) (5)

However, both Hayek and Demsetz point out that when economies evolved into millions of people, the market became based on the individual, individuals in number that are far removed from the forty or so hunter/gather stage. That millions of unique individuals, through no master centralized plan, began to base information on "price" through no particular grand design. That an economy based on price, price being reflective of scarce resources with alternative uses, allowed the unique millions of individuals, within a vast economy, to communicate, economically speaking, in the universal language of "price".

Hayek went further and postulated that the summation of mundane knowledge of individuals was greater than the knowledge of any centralized authority. In effect, no centralized authority could mimic the knowledge of millions of unique individuals with specific mundane knowledge of their unique abilities, needs, wants, and desires. Thomas Sowell has also dispelled the myth that the knowledge of a centralized authority can supplant the billions of mundane knowledge decisions made everyday by individuals with specific mundane knowledge particular to each and every price decision. (6)

History repeats itself but market failure receives a front page headline

A quote by Ronald Reagan has been widely disseminated within the United States over the past half century: "....government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem". Actually Reagan went on in his statement to basically summarize Hayek's position of centralized authority being unable to organize an economy. You can hear those remarks in the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEuiI2PbSWQ


When ObamaCare, the first major entitlement introduced since LBJ'S Great Society programs, and with Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare all basically bankrupt, many, many individuals in US society immediately recalled Reagan's remarks. That yet another entitlement stacked atop a bundle of bankrupt entitlements smacked of "..government is the problem".

Upon review, ObamaCare is merely a centralized authority trying to mimic billions of mundane decisions by unique individuals. ObamaCare attempts to manipulate price which would simply cause individuals to receive the wrong price signals regarding the allocation of scarce resources with alternate uses. Moreover, ObamaCare is a price fixing scheme that ends, as do all price fixing schemes, with a qualitative and quantitative reduction in supply aka rationing. (7)

Oddly enough, "Governments fail too", regarding the introduction of yet another vast entitlement, was elevated, through the voices of millions, to the forefront. Millions upon millions of citizens want to investigate "government failure" before it becomes government failure. Upon further review and investigation, the failure of ObamaCare has become daily reports. That the plan is unravelling daily and possibly for the first time "governments fail" may be stopped before it happens.

Notes


(1) http://www.cnbc.com/id/15838446/

(2) http://thinkexist.com/quotes/milton_friedman/

(3) Getting Off Track, John B. Taylor

(4) Hayek: His Contributions to the Political and Economic Thought of out Time, Butler and Riggenbach

(5) From Economic Man to Economic System, Harold Demsetz

(6) Applied Economic, Thomas Sowell

(7) Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell