Colleges are acting like subprime loan brokers

Published in the Financial Times.

Rana Foroohar, in “Dangers of the college debt bubble,” points out a lot of problems with the U.S. student loan program, but misses the main point: the corruption of colleges by the flow of government money.

For a great many students, colleges play a role similar to that of a subprime mortgage broker: promoting risky loans with a high propensity to default. The college takes all the cash up front and spends it (perhaps, indeed, on “hiring more administrators” and “building expensive facilities”) and just like the subprime broker, it passes all the credit risk on to some sucker — in this case, the taxpayer.

An essential step to address this government-designed bubble is to make all colleges responsible for a significant part of the risk they promote and create. This is the lesson we thought we learnt from the housing bubble: give the pushers of credit some skin in the game. This might logically be done by making the colleges pay the first 20 percent of the loan losses of each student cohort.

I have come across one private college that has credit-enhanced the loans to its students under a fully private program for years, with excellent experience in terms of incentive alignment and financial results.

Do most colleges want to be responsible for their own risk-creating actions? Of course not. Should they be? Of course.

Barron’s LTE (Copy)

Published in Barron’s.

In asking “Is the Federal Reserve Using Overheated Data?” (Up & Down Wall Street, March 11), Randall W. Forsyth did the math: “If the Fed fulfills its own expectations of three [interest rate] hikes this year, it would put its target at 1.25 percent to 1.5 percent.” Let’s call it 1.5 percent at the end of this year. That is still a very low and substantially negative real interest rate. Against the Fed’s own goal of perpetual inflation at 2 percent a year, it is a real rate of negative 0.5 percent. Against the 2.5 percent increase in the consumer price index year over year through January 2017, it is a negative 1 percent real rate.

Although negative real interest rates during a crisis are usual, continuing them for nine years after the crisis ended, as it will be a year from now, serves powerfully to distort asset prices and rob savers.

Borrowers and speculators benefit at savers’ expense

Published in the Financial Times.

As your report “Fed balance sheet moves up agenda” makes clear (Jan. 19), the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing experiment is still buying bonds and mortgage securities eight years after the crisis ended and five years after U.S. house prices bottomed. Why? What hath the Fed wrought?

It has helped out the government by seriously reducing the cost of financing federal deficits; it has allocated huge resources to its favoured uses of government spending and rapid inflation of house prices; and it has expropriated the wealth of savers by running years of negative real interest rates. Far from it being the case that “all boats were lifted,” I calculate, using long-run average real interest rates, that since 2008, the Fed has purloined about $2 trillion from conservative savers and given it to borrowers and leveraged speculators. The biggest borrower of all, and thus the biggest beneficiary, is of course the government itself, of which the Fed is such a useful part.

The Fed should be accountable for its results

Published in The Wall Street Journal.

“Vote Brings Uncertainty for Fed” (U.S. News, Nov. 10) says that President-elect Donald Trump might work with Congress to rewrite the laws governing the Fed’s structure. Good idea. It is of course decried by the Federal Reserve as a threat to its independence.

We should hope that the new president does proceed with this project. The Fed needs to be made accountable, as every part of the government should be. The notion that any part of the government, especially one as powerful and dangerous as the Fed, should be granted independence of checks and balances is misguided. Naturally, all bureaucrats resent being subject to the elected representatives of the people, but this doesn’t exempt them from their democratic accountability to the legislature that created them and may uncreate them.

The Fed is still carrying out emergency monetary experimentation seven years after the end of the crisis. It is busy robbing savers to benefit borrowers and leveraged speculators—a political act. It is imperative to figure out how best to make the Fed accountable to the Congress and to correct the evolved imbalance between its power and its accountability.

Chapter 11 for Social Security?

Published in Barron’s.

In their Other Voices essay, Dudley Kimball and Robert Morgan said that Social Security will be insolvent in 2034.

In the sense of having liabilities vastly greater than assets, it is deeply insolvent today. Social Security really needs the equivalent of a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization.

Life expectancy for 20-year-old white men in the 1930s was 66—meaning that, on average, he’d get one year of Social Security. Today, a 20-year-old man has a life expectancy of 82.

Social Security has become a complex mix of financial functions. It is partly a welfare program; Kimball and Morgan would make it more so. It is partly a forced savings program with a very low average rate of return. It is partly insurance against outliving your savings. And it is entirely broke in present-value terms, reflecting cash already paid to those who took out much more than they put in.

It is time to draw a line and have a reorganization. Those people who can easily afford it could take substantial haircuts on their future benefits, receiving say 60 cents to 70 cents on the dollar, in exchange for voluntarily opting out of the program. This would make Social Security much less insolvent.

For the other creditors, Congress should step up, write off the Treasury’s loss, put in whatever it takes to pay off the accrued benefits at par, and put Social Security into runoff. To this extent, the government would then have honest, as opposed to dishonest, books. A program designed for the now-irrelevant demographics of the 1930s would slowly liquidate.

Then a sound retirement finance program could be put in place to go forward, based on 21st century demographics. Doubtless, the politics would be interesting. But perhaps starting over offers a better chance than trying to remake the 1930s DC-3 of Social Security into a jumbo jet while it’s flying.

Fed’s mandate is to ensure stable prices

Published in the Financial Times.

Sir, Michael Brownrigg (Letters, Oct. 4) makes a common, but fundamental, mistake in claiming that the Federal Reserve’s mandate includes “low inflation”. To the contrary, in the governing statute, Congress instructs the Fed to pursue “stable prices” not low inflation. Public confusion is understandable, since the Fed endlessly recites the oxymoron that “stable prices” means perpetual inflation (at the rate of 2 percent).

Mr Brownrigg is correct that there is no statutory instruction to the Fed to treat everybody equally. This does not change the egregious fact that the Fed has engineered a massive wealth transfer from savers to borrowers and leveraged speculators. To take a lot of money from some people and give it to others is a quintessentially political act. To whom is the Fed accountable for it?

Iron Chancellor was a good actuary too

Published in the Financial Times.

Sir, “Retirement age for young Germans will have to rise to 69, central bank warns” (Aug. 16). That is a quite reasonable, even generous, retirement age if you are going to live to 85 or 90 or more.

Moreover, it would not be the highest retirement age Germany has had. When Otto von Bismarck introduced the first state pension scheme in the German Empire of 1889, the retirement age was set at 70! Needless to say, on average you were going to live many fewer years after 70 then than now. The Iron Chancellor knew what he was doing, actuarially speaking

Mismatch has led us into trouble many times before

Published in the Financial Times.

Financial events cycle and financial ideas cycle. Here the United Kingdom is again, with real estate generating financial stress. As Patrick Jenkins rightly points out (“Open-ended property funds are accidents waiting to happen,” July 6), this vividly displays “the fundamental mismatch between a highly illiquid asset class and a promise of instant access to your money.”

This same mismatch has led us into trouble many times before. It is why the original U.S. National Banking Act of 1864 prohibited the national banks, as issuers of deposits and currency payable on demand, from making any real estate loans at all. “The property market is already too volatile,” says Mr. Jenkins. Yes, and it always has been.