I'm curious what history Jack Clark is referring to here.
If I think of the last thirty years of policy in most of Europe and the US I'm thinking of a strong trend of deregulation and giving more powers to markets, removing international trade barriers and so on.
That seems to be a dynamic opposite to the one the quoted article is suggesting.
> If I think of the last thirty years of policy in most of Europe and the US I'm thinking of a strong trend of deregulation and giving more powers to markets
That's been the PR spin, but it's not actually true. It's a smoke screen to help governments avoid actual accountability.
For example, the crash of 2008 was blamed on too much market and not enough regulation, but in fact it was the opposite: regulatory thumbs on the scale, for example the US government wanting to encourage home ownership and skewing the mortage market and the money supply and requiring lenders to accept more default risk, and governments implicitly giving a "too big to fail" guarantee to large financial institutions and then being extremely arbitrary in when that implicit guarantee was broken. A true free market would never have produced such a thing.
> removing international trade barriers and so on.
Globalization of trade has been going on for much longer than the last 30 years. If anything, the last 30 years have seen more of things like trade wars (for example between the US and China) and other disruptions to smooth international trade.
> for example the US government wanting to encourage home ownership and skewing the mortage [sic] market and the money supply and requiring lenders to accept more default risk
Are there economists who share your view on this? I don’t see how the issue of repackaging CDS and related products by a financial rating agency has anything to go with the government.
If you’re saying that the government forced buyers to abandon due diligence… I think we will have to disagree about the facts of the GFC
> I don’t see how the issue of repackaging CDS and related products by a financial rating agency has anything to go with the government.
The financial rating agencies are creatures of government regulation.
> If you’re saying that the government forced buyers to abandon due diligence
I said no such thing. I said that government regulations forced lenders to accept more default risk--meaning they were forced to lend to people they would not otherwise have lent to because the risk of default was too high. That's what "subprime mortgages" means, and those were a huge contributor to the crash.
> said that government regulations forced lenders to accept more default risk--meaning they were forced to lend to people they would not otherwise have lent to because the risk of default was too high. That's what "subprime mortgages" means, and those were a huge contributor to the crash.
The ratings agencies are free to rate things as they wish - unless maybe you’re saying there’s a government directive to misrate things?
Also, please clarify how the government is compelling lenders to make loans that don’t pass the lender’s underwriting criteria… this is news to me
It's a half truth; the truth is somewhere in the middle of this and another theory. I'm not an economist, but the start of my professional life was marred by the experience of 2008 so I spent a lot of my time reading about it.
In reality, there were a lot more sub-prime loans but only one of those lenders was actually expected to take on sub-prime loans. That's to say, taking on more sub-prime loans was a choice reflected in an ecosystem of incentives where profits were falling because a few lenders started a campaign to lower borrowing standards and the rest of the herd followed to stay afloat. What also happened was that lenders were essentially over weighting sub-prime loans into these packages and then using their relationships with the privately controlled ratings agencies to rate them the way that would be if they were filled with primes. If you read between the lines lenders found the solution to their profit problem and were trying to justify its stability post-hoc through package ratings. The reality is that sub-primes are highly profitable when they work out because they have high interest rates. When they don't they're not that expensive because generally the property is offloaded but this only works up to a magical threshold depending on a lot of risk variables. Once you go beyond that threshold and the dominos begin to fall, they all fall spectacularly. Risk traditionally should be leveled by packaging them with less risky loans.
> please clarify how the government is compelling lenders to make loans that don’t pass the lender’s underwriting criteria
It didn't. Instead it required the lenders, by law, to change their underwriting criteria so that loans which the lenders would previously have chosen not to make, because they were not within their underwriting criteria, were now within their underwriting criteria. It also passed laws forbidding lenders from refusing loans to people who met their underwriting criteria. This was all done on the theory that encouraging home ownership was a good thing and that lenders had been arbitrarily refusing loans to people and needed to be stopped from doing that.
The book Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy makes a claim to that effect, that US government created some unfortunate incentivizes towards risky credit. It was of course not the only problem that led to the 2008 GFC, but it certainly was a part. I recommend the book, it was detailed and has a global focus, as the author was the Chief Economist at the IMF for some years.
Right, and many of those deregulation moves turned out poorly in hindsight. Governments have ratcheted up control in some cases, but stating that it is a universal law is patently false, although it sounds good as a quip.
Regulations are kind of like security practices. When done well they are often taken for granted, but poor ones get a lot of negative attention. I'm glad that I don't have to wonder if the cereal I buy at a store is filled with rat poison. I'm fine if the government never relinquishes the power to oversee that.
Unfortunately the current leaders in the latest AI craze have not inspired much confidence that they will act responsibly in the future. Maybe if different people were running these companies it would make sense for the government to keep out of it, but in this world we're going to need some reasonable regulation.
Deregulation is not returning power to the people, it's bestowing carte blanche privatization of profits to corpos, in the wake of near complete regulatory capture, while they dump the negative externalities on the public.
At least for Europe this is wrong. I mean yes, there are new trade treaties but internally EU regulations and at least for Germany its regulations increase by the day. Just this year the personal tax declaration form got 10 or so additional pages. And the new supply chain law needs medium to large companies to prove that all their purchases are morally correct (sorry not sure how to phrase this properly). And I don't even follow new laws closely.
If I think of the last thirty years of policy in most of Europe and the US I'm thinking of a strong trend of deregulation and giving more powers to markets, removing international trade barriers and so on.
That seems to be a dynamic opposite to the one the quoted article is suggesting.