What to Know About the History of the Debt Ceiling

Published in TIME:

But Alex Pollock, a former Treasury Department official, argued in a 2021 op-ed in The Hill that there are four precedents for U.S. defaults: 1) During the Civil War in 1862, when the U.S. printed paper money after the Union’s reserves of gold and silver coin were depleted; 2) during the Great Depression in 1933, when the government refused to repay bondholders with gold, as agreed to when the securities were sold; 3) in 1968, when the U.S. did not honor silver certificates with an exchange of silver dollars; and 4) in 1971, when the government abandoned the Bretton Woods Agreement, which included a commitment to redeem dollars held by foreign governments for gold.

Joe Biden Could Use Gold to Solve the Debt Ceiling Crisis

Published in Newsweek:

Economists Paul H. Kupiec and Alex J. Pollock recently published an article advocating for Congress to "simply direct the U.S. Treasury to value its gold holdings, which are real, at real market prices."

…

"If Congress were to make a simple, financially sound amendment to the Gold Reserve Act, it would free up nearly $480 billion in new Treasury cash without raising the debt limit," wrote Kupiec and Pollock in their piece.

"These funds would allow the Treasury to pay all its bills past the end of fiscal 2023, thereby giving Congress an entire session to debate, negotiate budgets, reduce deficits, and set the debt ceiling accordingly, all in bills passed under regular order—something that has not happened in years."

For this to work, write Kupiec and Pollock, Congress would need to change just five words of the Gold Reserve Act.

…

For Pollock, 50 years is too long for the statutory price of gold and the Gold Reserve Act to have remained unchanged.

"The government can fund itself past the end of the fiscal year if Congress merely recognizes that the Treasury's gold is a real massively undervalued monetary asset," Kupiec and Pollock wrote.

"Unlike the phony idea of the Treasury issuing a trillion-dollar platinum coin [a solution that was first floated in 2011], the Treasury already has the legal authority to monetize its gold holdings without creating new government debt. It is only because Congress has failed to amend a woefully outdated law that the Treasury values its gold at an absurdly low price."

They add: "To monetize the market value of the Treasury's gold holding, the Congress need only replace five words in the Gold Reserve Act. Replacing '42 and two-ninths dollars' with 'the current market value (as determined by the Secretary at the time of issuance),' would allow the Treasury to use nearly $480 billion in spendable dollars without raising the current debt limit."

How Would Amending It Help Solve The Debt Ceiling Crisis?

"It's already been done in history, it was done under President Eisenhower in the 1950s," Pollock told Newsweek. "It can be done. It does take an act of Congress to do it," he added.

Neither Kupiec nor Pollock see amending the Gold Reserve Act as a definite solution to the debt ceiling crisis—but as an available alternative.

…

"Of course, that's not a permanent solution," said Pollock. "It's a way for them to create space, to have a serious negotiation of expenses and deficits without raising the debt limit. That's what's so intriguing about it, since there's no debt involved in this transaction. You don't have to raise the debt limit."

…

While the solution suggested by Kupiec and Pollock is legal and could technically work, others are skeptical that it would actually help the current situation.

JPMorgan Chase, FDIC put an end to First Republic's slow bleed

Published in the American Banker:

"There's a lesson in that for all finance that what seems like a darling and a wonderful winner at one moment seems like the opposite only a little while later," said Alex Pollock, a former Treasury Department official.

…

"Obviously there's a very generalized problem of people making the most classic financial mistake, which is investing in long-term fixed-rate assets and funding them with floating-rate money," Pollock said. "They were lulled into it by the actions of the central banks — by keeping interest rates both long and short-term very low for very long periods of time, and convincing people that it was going to continue."

Yes, taxpayers fund the Fed's losses

Published in the Washington Examiner.

Let us start with why the Fed is losing money. Paul H. Kupiec and Alex J. Pollock over at the Wall Street Journal explain in detail, but in short, the Fed purchased Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities — trillions of dollars' worth, in fact — back when they inexplicably held interest rates near zero, despite persistent economic growth. The purchase of these bonds put more money into the economy. They now pay the Fed a low interest rate, meaning they are comparatively worth less than new Treasurys that pay higher rates.

Can we regulate our way towards financial stability?

Published in the Institute of Economic Affairs:

Here a new book by Alex Pollock and Howard Adler gives the answer. The book is called Surprised Again, and for good reason. Central bankers frequently tell us that they have fixed the problems of stability this time, and then, often quite soon afterwards, they are surprised and another shock comes. 

Why is this? However clever they are, the world fools them, and always will. The explanation turns on the difference between risk and uncertainty. Risk is when we know the range of possible outcomes, and the chance of each. There are many such situations about. But there is also uncertainty – when we may not even know the full range of possible outcomes, and we certainly cannot know how likely each is. This important distinction was the subject of a book by Frank Knight in 1921, and was emphasised recently by John Kay and Mervyn King in their Radical Uncertainty. 

The distinction is at the heart of another new book by Jon Danielsson, who shows that to stabilise finance we need to think about the system as a whole. In The Illusion of Control he writes that 

“The more different the financial institutions that make up the system are and the more the authorities embrace that diversity the more stable the system becomes and the better it performs” (p. 9).  

This is an important part of the explanation for the stability of the British banking system in the nineteenth and a good part of the twentieth centuries. The names of banks – Midland Bank, Bank of Scotland, British Linen Bank for example –make one aspect of this diversity clear. 

Mises Institute's Alex Pollock discusses the The Silicon Valley Bailout

First aired on Chicago’s Morning Answer:

The ‘Insolvency’ of the Fed

Published in the New York Sun:

“A bad balance sheet killed Silicon Valley Bank,” Mr. Coy writes. “You know what other bank has a similar balance sheet?” he asks. “The Federal Reserve,” is the reply. An ex-Treasury official, Alex Pollock, goes further, telling us the Fed’s balance sheet “looks just like a Savings & Loan in 1980.” It echoes the worst banking crisis since the Depression. It’s a reminder that while we may be in a banking crisis, the real emergency is fiat money.

It was abandoning the gold standard, after all, that allowed central banks like the Fed to veer into monetary experiments like its Quantitative Easing, buying up trillions in assets while keeping interest rates artificially low. Now that rates are rising, a reckoning is at hand. The Fed’s QE assets “yield 2 percent or 3 percent, but the cost of funding them is now over 4 ½ percent,” Mr. Pollock notes — “a guaranteed way to lose money.” 

…

Mr. Pollock, who directed financial research at Treasury, sums up the Fed’s view as “It doesn’t matter and no one cares.” There may be some truth to this, given the deference the press shows the Fed and the Fed’s own obfuscation of its work via the PhD-inflected language known as FedSpeak. Yet the bank runs could raise scrutiny on the Fed. Asked how Silicon Valley Bank’s balance sheet compares to the Fed’s, Mr. Pollock says “it’s worse.” 

How Should We Regulate Crypto?

Published by David G.W. Birch:

Meanwhile, Howard Adler, a former deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury for the Financial Stability Oversight Council, and Alex Pollock, a former Principal Deputy Director of the Treasury’s Office of Financial Research, advocate a more laissez-faire approach: Why regulate crypto at all?Their view is that we should allow investors to proceed at their own risk under the protections of general commercial law and existing anti-fraud and criminal laws. As they point out, since cryptocurrency originated as a libertarian revolt against the government monopoly on money, this approach is consistent with its founding ideas.

WRAL: Fact check: Has the U.S. ever defaulted on its debt?

From WRAL:

Possible precedents for defaults

In a 2021 op-ed in The Hill, a political news outlet, Alex J. Pollock, a former Treasury Department official, argued that there are four precedents for U.S. defaults. Pollock cited cases of the U.S. Treasury: Resorting to paper money largely not supported by gold during the Civil War in 1862; Redeeming gold bonds with paper money rather than gold coins during the Great Depression in 1933; Not honoring silver certificates with an exchange of silver dollars in 1968; and Abandoning the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1971, which included a commitment to redeem dollars held by foreign governments for gold. Also, a 2016 analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service noted that in 1979, the Treasury failed to make on-time payments to some small investors because of technical glitches. Most were paid within days or a week. The research service concluded that although the temporary payment delays "inconvenienced many investors, the stability of the wider market in Treasury securities was never at risk." But multiple economic specialists agree that although these were notable episodes, they do not mirror the type of default to which Jeffries was referring.

Mises Institute's Alex Pollock explains how to pay all of Treasury’s bills easily

From Chicago’s Morning Answer:

A “default on our debt” would be unprecedented in American history?

Published in Politifact:

Possible precedents for defaults

In a 2021 op-ed in The Hill, a political news outlet, Alex J. Pollock, a former Treasury Department official, argued that there are four precedents for U.S. defaults.

Pollock cited cases of the U.S. Treasury:

• Resorting to paper money largely not supported by gold during the Civil War in 1862;

• Redeeming gold bonds with paper money rather than gold coins during the Great Depression in 1933; 

• Not honoring silver certificates with an exchange of silver dollars in 1968; and

• Abandoning the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1971, which included a commitment to redeem dollars held by foreign governments for gold. 

…

Our Sources

Hakeem Jeffries, interview with NBC’s "Meet the Press," Jan. 8, 2023

Congressional Research Service, "Has the U.S. Government Ever ‘Defaulted’?" Dec. 8, 2016

Alex J. Pollock, "The US has never defaulted on its debt — except the four times it did," Oct. 7, 2021

Will The FTX Crash Kill Crypto?

Cited in Forbes:

That includes digital currencies. This the irony which Mises Institute scholar Alex Pollock points out in his new book, Surprised Again!, coauthored with Howard Adler: that crypto’s problems may well speed the digitization of national currencies and increase the power and influence of central banks—the crypto enthusiast’s No. 1 nemesis.

Surprised Again! The COVID Crisis and the New Market Bubble

Published in Library Journal:

by Alex J. Pollock & Howard B. Adler

Paul Dry. Nov. 2022. 222p. ISBN 9781589881655. pap. $21.95. ECONOMICS

COPY ISBN

As former senior officials of the U.S. Department of Treasury under the Trump administration, Pollock (Finance and Philosophy: Why We’re Always Surprised) and Adler are qualified to synthesize complex financial behaviors into digestible chapters; the graphs they include are excellent. This book analyzes prime money market funds, cryptocurrencies, mortgages, municipal debt, pension debt, and student loans, in regard to their pre and current pandemic behavior. Each chapter serves as a primer and an update of each category. The authors argue that all finance is political finance, and they believe that predicting financial market behavior is ineffective, since many times those forecasts are wrong or surprising. Salient points are emphasized with a “Dear Reader” salutation that is both annoying and effective, as the examples in those paragraphs are essential for understanding. The chapters on prime market funds and cryptocurrencies are especially enlightening due to their exploration of regulations, both real and theoretical, that influence their behavior. Although the book is designed to be read in sequence, readers looking to delve into these topics beyond daily media coverage will be able to start at the chapter they’re most interested in.

VERDICT A helpful and insightful analysis of current economics.

Reviewed by Tina Panik , Nov 01, 2022

William Isaac Announcements: October 28, 2022

October 28, 2022

My good friend, Alex Pollock and his colleague, Paul Kupiec, co-authored an article on the Federal Reserve, which was just published by The Hill. The legislation creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau required the CFPB to be headed by a single individual instead of a bipartisan board governing most independent agencies such as the FDIC, the SEC, the FTC. Moreover, the CFPB receives its funding from the Federal Reserve Board instead of being funded by Congress. A Federal Court recently ruled – I believe correctly – that these governance arrangements are unconstitutional. Alex and Paul address these issues and go on to note that the Federal Reserve is hardly in position to fund the CFPB. I highly recommend this article to you.

• The Fed is in the red: Should it still pay CFPB’s bills? By Alex J. Pollock and Paul Kupiec published by The Hill on October 26, 2022

The article can be found at williamisaac.com. Be safe and be well.

Economic Truths, Perennially Forgotten

A review of Surprised Again! The Covid Crisis and the New Market Bubble, written by William M. Briggs and published in Law & Liberty.

In 2021, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen assured Americans that recent inflation was “transitory.” Back in 2017, Yellen, then Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, hinted there would not be another financial crisis “in our lifetimes.”

Maybe she got that idea from Morgan Stanley boss James Gorman, who in 2013 put the chance of a crisis “in our lifetime” as “close to zero” as he could imagine. Well, imagination, as the song says, is crazy. “Your whole perspective gets hazy.”

These two experts, as Alex J. Pollock and Howard B. Adler tell us in Surprised Again! The Covid Crisis and the New Market Bubble, are far from alone. Economic experts, they confirm, have a collective accuracy that would embarrass a busload of blind golfers. Not one expert, they remind us, saw the Great Depression coming. And none foresaw the Calamitous Coronadoom Panic of 2020. Which lasted until now.

What is fascinating is that being wrong in no way dents the awesome armor of assurance donned by our experts. Whatever they do when given power, they do it boldly and without doubt. Whether this lack of humility is caused by amnesia or hubris can be debated. But no one can doubt  the astonishing effects of the economic “solutions” foisted upon us by a string of experts during the panic, each trying to correct the ill effects of the other “solutions.”

Read the rest here.

Mises Institute's Alex Pollock: The Fed’s Tough Year

From Chicago’s Morning Answer. Click here to listen.

Restoring The Fed's Credibility?

Published in Law & Liberty by Andrew Stuttaford.

If any central banker, both literally and figuratively, bestrode, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “the…world like a colossus,” it was the 6-foot-7 Paul Volcker.  But, perversely, the giant shadow he cast helps explain our not-so-transitory inflationary mess.

Alex Pollock offers a brisk, deft analysis of Volcker’s battle against inflation. He sets the stage with a 1979 speech by Arthur Burns, Volcker’s not quite immediate predecessor as Fed Chairman. In what Pollock describes as an “agonizing reappraisal,” Burns conceded (he could hardly do otherwise) that central banks had failed to rein in inflation. Running through his lament was an acknowledgment that the Fed had gone along with “the philosophic and political currents that were transforming American life and culture,” currents that had also swept away traditional notions of fiscal and monetary discipline.

Read the rest here.

SHEFFIELD: Democrats And The Fed — A Tale Of Two Realities

Published in the Daily Caller:

“We estimate that at the end of May, the Federal Reserve had an unrecognized mark-to-market loss of about $540 billion on its $8.8 trillion portfolio of Treasury bonds and mortgage securities,” American Enterprise Institute scholars Paul H. Kupiec and Alex J. Pollock wrote in late June. “This loss, which will only get larger as interest rates increase, is more than 13 times the Federal Reserve System’s consolidated capital of $41 billion … according to the Federal Reserve Act, Fed losses should impact its shareholders, who are the commercial bank members of the 12 district Federal Reserve banks.”

SHEFFIELD: Democrats’ Rosy Economic Picture Has Become A Nightmare As Recession Finally Hits

Published in the Daily Caller.

Under Powell’s watch, banks will win and everyday people lose, as AEI economists Paul H. Kupiec and Alex J. Pollock report: “For the first time in its 108-year history, the Federal Reserve System faces massive and growing mark-to-market losses and is projected to post large operating losses in the near future … Because they are now paid interest on their reserve balances and receive guaranteed dividends on their Federal Reserve stock, member banks will monetarily benefit from the Fed’s policy to fight inflation while the public bears Federal Reserve system losses. Meanwhile, the public at large will also face the costs of higher interest rates, reduced growth and employment and losses in their investment and retirement account balances.”

Mises Institute's Alex Pollock explains why economics is not a science

On Chicago’s Morning Answer radio. Listen here.