Economic Crisis – Page 7 – artdiamondblog.com

Goldman I.P.O. Led to Pressure to Grow

Source of book image: http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-ZF094_bkrvgo_GV_20131008133334.jpg

(p. B8) Steven G. Mandis, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Columbia University, takes a measured, academic approach to the question in a new book, “What Happened to Goldman Sachs,” an examination of the bank’s evolution from an elite private partnership to a vast public corporation — and the effects of that transformation on its culture.

. . .

Mr. Mandis said that the two popular explanations for what might have caused a shift in Goldman’s culture — its 1999 initial public offering and subsequent focus on proprietary trading — were only part of the explanation. Instead, Mr. Mandis deploys a sociological theory called “organizational drift” to explain the company’s evolution.
The essence of his argument is that Goldman came under a variety of pressures that resulted in slow, incremental changes to the firm’s culture and business practices, resulting in the place being much different from what it was in 1979, when the bank’s former co-head, John Whitehead, wrote its much-vaunted business principles.
These changes included the shift to a public company structure, a move that limited Goldman executives’ personal exposure to risk and shifted it to shareholders. The I.P.O. also put pressure on the bank to grow, causing trading to become a more dominant focus. And Goldman’s rapid growth led to more potential for conflicts of interest and not putting clients’ interests first, Mr. Mandis says.

For the full review, see:
PETER LATTMAN. “An Ex-Trader, Now a Sociologist, Looks at the Changes in Goldman.” The New York Times (Tues., October 1, 2013): B8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date SEPTEMBER 30, 2013.)

The book under review is:
Mandis, Steven G. What Happened to Goldman Sachs: An Insider’s Story of Organizational Drift and Its Unintended Consequences. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2013.

“Steven G. Mandis is the author of “What Happened to Goldman Sachs.”” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Samuelson Disputed Nephew Summers’ Praise for Milton Friedman

(p. A4) [Uncle Paul Samuelson and nephew Larry Summers] clashed over the fate of struggling mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were bolstered by a government backstop in July 2008 and later taken over completely by the U.S. Treasury.
Mr. Samuelson found “strange and harmful” his nephew’s skepticism about the government backstop for the firms. Mr. Summers, a longtime critic of the two firms, wrote back that shareholders and management of Fannie and Freddie didn’t deserve taxpayer support.
Friction had emerged earlier in 2006, when Mr. Summers praised the late Mr. Friedman in a New York Times column. Friedman was “the most influential economist” of the second half of the 20th century, Mr. Summers said.
“For your eyes only,” Mr. Samuelson wrote to his nephew of Mr. Friedman, “I had to grade him low as a macro economist” and “stubbornly old fashioned.”

For the full story, see:
JON HILSENRATH. “A Close Bond and a Shared Love for ‘Dismal Science’; Correspondence Between Famously Brash Summers and His Uncle, a Nobel Economist, Reveals Flashes of Humility and Tenderness.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., September 14, 2013): A4.
(Note: bracketed words added.)
(Note: the online version of the story was updated on September 15, 2013 and has the title “Letters Show Little-Known Side of Summers; Correspondence With Uncle, a Nobel Economist, Reveals Flashes of Humility and Tenderness.”)

Taxpayers Work, Save and Invest More When Taxes Are Low

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. 15) The 1980s boom was launched on the simple insight that, by lowering tax rates and regulatory hurdles and juicing the incentives to produce, innovate and take risks, the animal spirits of the American free-enterprise system would revive. Two seminal books hatched the supply-side revolution. The first was Jude Wanniski’s “The Way the World Works” (1978); the second, George Gilder’s “Wealth and Poverty” (1981).

Almost as influential, coming a few years later, was Lawrence Lindsey’s “The Growth Experiment” (1990). Slightly academic in nature, it was the first book to quantify the economic and revenue windfall of the 1981 Reagan across-the-board tax cuts. Mr. Lindsey’s conclusion was that Reagan’s 1981 tax act quickened the pace of production, which reduced the predicted revenue loss. His research found that although the Reagan tax cuts didn’t “pay for themselves,” the ones at the highest end of the income spectrum “did produce a revenue gain” because of “changes in taxpayer behavior.” He concluded that “the core supply-side tenet–that tax rates powerfully affect the willingness of taxpayers to work, save and invest, and thereby also affect the health of the economy–won as stunning a vindication as has been seen in at least a half-century of economics.”
He has now updated his book, taking us through the booms and busts of the past 20 years. It is a valuable project in part because Mr. Lindsey was a front-seat economic adviser to George W. Bush, serving as director of the National Economic Council and as one of the architects of the often-maligned 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts.
Mr. Lindsey’s central claim is that those tax changes saved the economy from the undertow of the financial meltdown at the end of the Clinton presidency.

For the full review, see:
Stephen Moore. “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘The Growth Experiment Revisited’ by Lawrence Lindsey; The 25 years after Reagan’s tax cuts saw unprecedented wealth creation and progress. America’s net worth exploded by $40 trillion.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., September 10, 2013): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 9, 2013, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; Book Review: ‘The Growth Experiment Revisited’ by Lawrence Lindsey; The 25 years after Reagan’s tax cuts saw unprecedented wealth creation and progress. America’s net worth exploded by $40 trillion.”)

The book under review is:
Lindsey, Lawrence B. The Growth Experiment Revisited: Why Lower, Simpler Taxes Really Are America’s Best Hope for Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 2013.

Growth of Labor Safety Net Made Great Recession Deeper and Longer

Source of book image: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-VE881_bkrvre_GV_20121101145828.jpg

(p. 309) [Mulligan’s empirical results suggest] that employment was dropping not only because of declining demand for the employees’ products, but also because employers were substituting capital and other factors for labor. This surprising finding suggests that although a decline in aggregate demand for goods and services was one of the reasons for the decline in labor, other causes were also at play in most sectors of the economy. This fact is consistent with an inward shift in the supply of labor to the marketplace during this period.

In chapter 3, Mulligan introduces the main culprit responsible for this supplycurve shift–the unintended consequences of increases in the social safety net that substantially increased the marginal tax rate on work. In his model, Mulligan operationalizes this force into changes in the replacement rate (the fraction of productivity that the average nonemployed person receives in the form of means-tested benefits) and the self-reliance rate (1 minus the replacement rate), which is the fraction of lost productivity not replaced by means-tested benefits.
His conjecture is that, in a reverse of government policies in the 1990s that made work pay for single mothers by transforming welfare as we knew it into a program that nudged single mothers off the Aid to Families with Dependent Children rolls and into the workforce, “temporary” government program expansions to mitigate the (p. 310) short-run consequences of unemployment and the bursting of the housing bubble made a prolonged paid period of nonwork an offer that many Americans found too tempting to refuse.
Mulligan identifies and incorporates the major expansions in eligibility and benefit amounts for Unemployment Insurance and food stamps into an eligibility index that shows that most of the 199 percent growth in these programs between 2007 and 2009 was due to these changes. He uses this growth rate in a weighted index of overall statutory safety-net generosity to determine the degree to which it has influenced overall employment. He does a similar analysis of the means-tested Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), which facilitated substantial lender-provided discounts on home mortgage expenses for unemployment insurance-eligible workers. He finds that these market distortions that increased the marginal tax on work grew substantially in 2008, peaked in 2009–at almost triple their 2007 level–and then modestly fell in 2010 to a level appreciably above the 2007 level.
. . .
But his empirical evidence shows that the implementation of these “recession cures” was primarily responsible for the Great Recession’s depth and duration.

For the full review, see:
Burkhauser, Richard V. “Review of: “The Redistributive Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy” by Casey B. Mulligan.” The Independent Review 18, no. 2 (Fall 2013): 308-11.
(Note: ellipsis, and words in brackets, added.)

Book that is under review:
Mulligan, Casey B. The Redistribution Recession: How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2012.

For Hubbard and Kane “Institutions Explain Innovation”

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A11) Messrs. Hubbard and Kane argue, as do others, that certain policies and core principles are the key: property rights, flexible work rules, open markets. For the authors, such matters explain economic growth entirely.

To those who would cite the primacy of technological breakthroughs, Messrs. Hubbard and Kane assert that inventions only spark growth if there are systems in place (such as intellectual-property rights) that enable inventions to flourish and their value to spread. “The wheel and the windmill were invented many times,” they write, “then forgotten, until finally one society had the institutional framework to implement them widely and pass them on permanently.” In short, “institutions explain innovation.”

For the full review, see:
Matthew Rees. “BOOKSHELF; How the Mighty Fall; The Roman empire eventually lost its economic vitality thanks to price controls, heavy taxes and state-sponsored debt relief..” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., June 21, 2013): A11.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 20, 2013.)

The book under review is:
Hubbard, Glenn, and Tim Kane. Balance: The Economics of Great Powers from Ancient Rome to Modern America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

Less Credentialed Hazlitt Got More Right than Keynes and White

Source of book image:
http://s.s-bol.com/imgbase0/imagebase/large/FC/7/0/6/9/9200000009899607.jpg

(p. C5) One of the many merits of “The Battle of Bretton Woods,” a superb history of mid-20th-century monetary affairs, is the timing of its publication. Today, as never before, central banks are printing money, suppressing interest rates and manipulating markets. You wonder where it will all end.
. . .
(p. C6) According to Mr. Steil, the recondite Bretton Woods debates failed to engage the American public as a political issue. If so, it was no fault of Henry Hazlitt’s. An editorial writer for the New York Times, Hazlitt directed persistent, withering fire against White’s and Keynes’s brainchild. (His collected editorials, titled “From Bretton Woods to World Inflation,” were published in 1984.) The conference had it all wrong, Hazlitt thundered in the Times. The IMF would subsidize unsound policies. What was wanted were sound ones.
“The broad principles should not be difficult to formulate,” the readers of the Times were reminded on the eve of the gathering in New Hampshire. Governments should balance their budgets, forswear 1930s-style impediments to free trade (quotas, exchange restrictions) and refrain from “currency and credit inflation.” And the currency itself? It should be “redeemable in something that is itself fixed and definite: for all practical purposes this means a return to the historic gold standard.”
. . .
White was a Harvard Ph.D. Keynes was, at least according to Mr. Steil, “the most innovative and iconoclastic economist of his age, if not of all time.” Hazlitt was no trained economist at all. But it was he, not the two acclaimed experts, who turned out to be right.

For the full review, see:
James Grant. “A Fateful Meeting That Shaped the World.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 16, 2013): C5-C6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 15, 2013.)

The book under review is:
Steil, Benn. The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.

Children of Chinese Entrepreneurs Want to Work for Government

“Engineering student Xie Chaobo has yet to land a job.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) BEIJING–Xie Chaobo figures he has the credentials to land a job at one of China’s big state-owned firms. He is a graduate student at Tsinghua University, one of China’s best. His field of study is environmental engineering, one of China’s priorities. And he is experimenting with new techniques for identifying water pollutants, which should make him a valuable catch.
But he has applied to 30 companies so far and scored just four interviews, none of which has led to a job.
Although Mr. Xie’s parents are entrepreneurs who have built companies that make glasses, shoes and now water pumps, he has no interest in working at a private startup. Chinese students “have been told since we were children to focus on stability instead of risk,” the 24-year-old engineering student says.
Over the past decade, the number of new graduates from Chinese universities has increased sixfold to more than six million a year, creating an epic glut that is depressing wages, (p. A10) leaving many recent college graduates without jobs and making students fearful about their future. Two-thirds of Chinese graduates say they want to work either in the government or big state-owned firms, which are seen as recession-proof, rather than at the private companies that have powered China’s remarkable economic climb, surveys indicate. Few college students today, according to the surveys, are ready to leave the safe shores of government work and “jump into the sea,” as the Chinese expression goes, to join startups or go into business for themselves, although many of their parents did just that in the 1990s.

For the full story, see:
MIKE RAMSEY and VALERIE BAUERLEIN. “Tesla Clashes With Car Dealers; Electric-Vehicle Maker Wants to Sell Directly to Consumers; Critics Say Plan Violates Franchise Laws.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., June 18, 2013): B1-B2.

Source of table: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

“The Million-Dollar Question” for “Our Long Economic Slump”: Why “the Severe Downturn in Jobs”?

(p. 5) [There are] . . . two underappreciated aspects of our long economic slump. First, it has exacted the harshest toll on the young — even harsher than on people in their 50s and 60s, who have also suffered. And while the American economy has come back more robustly than some of its global rivals in terms of overall production, the recovery has been strangely light on new jobs, even after Friday’s better-than-expected unemployment report. American companies are doing more with less.
“This still is a very big puzzle,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard professor who was chief economist at the Labor Department during the Clinton administration. He called the severe downturn in jobs “the million-dollar question” for the economy.

For the full commentary, see:
DAVID LEONHARDT. “CAPITAL IDEAS; The Idled Young Americans.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., May 5, 2013): 5.
(Note: ellipsis, and words in brackets, added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 3, 2013.)

$30 Million First National Bank Regulatory Costs Due to Dodd-Frank Replacing Clear Rules with Regulator “Wild Card” Leeway

(p. 1D) The president of First National of Nebraska, the nation’s largest privately held banking firm, said new federal regulatory and compliance efforts stand to cost the company as much as $30 million this year.
“It is a big uncertainty in the banking world,” said Dan O’Neill, speaking Wednesday at the company’s annual meeting in Omaha. “They are not operating off of concrete rules. A lot of it is their interpretation.”
The federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was formed as a result of the federal Dodd-Frank laws passed in 2010 after widespread bank failures and bailouts using taxpayer money. . . .
. . .
The bureau, he said, worries banks because there is not a “clear body of rules” from which the regulator is operating in evaluating the fairness of a bank’s business practices. He said the agency’s regulators have a lot of leeway in deciding what to do af-(p. 2D)ter examining a bank; penalties for running afoul include fines.
“So it is a bit of a wild card,” he said.

For the full story, see:
Russell Hubbard. “First National Chief Says Regulatory Costs Mounting.” Omaha World-Herald (THURSDAY, JUNE 20, 2013): 1D-2D.
(Note: ellipses added.)

In Latvia Deep Budget Cuts Lead to High Economic Growth

“A worker cleaned equipment at a new dairy factory outside Riga. The I.M.F. has hailed Latvia for its deep budget cuts.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

It is interesting that the New York Times photographer (see above) chose to display the Latvian economic success story in bleak shades of grey and darkness.

(p. A1) RIGA, Latvia — When a credit-fueled economic boom turned to bust in this tiny Baltic nation in 2008, Didzis Krumins, who ran a small architectural company, fired his staff one by one and then shut down the business. He watched in dismay as Latvia’s misery deepened under a harsh austerity drive that scythed wages, jobs and state financing for schools and hospitals.

But instead of taking to the streets to protest the cuts, Mr. Krumins, whose newborn child, in the meantime, needed major surgery, bought a tractor and began hauling wood to heating plants that needed fuel. Then, as Latvia’s economy began to pull out of its nose-dive, he returned to architecture and today employs 15 people — five more than he had before. “We have a different mentality here,” he said.
. . .
Hardship has long been common here — and still is. But in just four years, the country has gone from the European Union’s worst economic disaster zone to a model of what the International Monetary Fund hails as the healing properties of deep budget cuts. Latvia’s economy, after shriveling by more than 20 percent from its peak, grew by about 5 percent last year, making it the best performer in the 27-nation European Union. Its budget deficit is down sharply and exports are soaring.

For the full story, see:
ANDREW HIGGINS. “Used to Hardship, Latvia Accepts Austerity, and Its Pain Eases.” The New York Times (Weds., January 2, 2013): A1 & A6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date January 1, 2013.)