Fifty Herbert Hoovers

By PAUL KRUGMAN

New York Times: December 28, 2008

No modern American president would repeat the fiscal mistake of 1932, in which the federal government tried to balance its budget in the face of a severe recession. The Obama administration will put deficit concerns on hold while it fights the economic crisis.

But even as Washington tries to rescue the economy, the nation will be reeling from the actions of 50 Herbert Hoovers — state governors who are slashing spending in a time of recession, often at the expense both of their most vulnerable constituents and of the nation’s economic future.

These state-level cutbacks range from small acts of cruelty to giant acts of panic — from cuts in South Carolina’s juvenile justice program, which will force young offenders out of group homes and into prison, to the decision by a committee that manages California state spending to halt all construction outlays for six months.

Now, state governors aren’t stupid (not all of them, anyway). They’re cutting back because they have to — because they’re caught in a fiscal trap. But let’s step back for a moment and contemplate just how crazy it is, from a national point of view, to be cutting public services and public investment right now.

Think about it: is America — not state governments, but the nation as a whole — less able to afford help to troubled teens, medical care for families, or repairs to decaying roads and bridges than it was one or two years ago? Of course not. Our capacity hasn’t been diminished; our workers haven’t lost their skills; our technological know-how is intact. Why can’t we keep doing good things?

It’s true that the economy is currently shrinking. But that’s the result of a slump in private spending. It makes no sense to add to the problem by cutting public spending, too.

In fact, the true cost of government programs, especially public investment, is much lower now than in more prosperous times. When the economy is booming, public investment competes with the private sector for scarce resources — for skilled construction workers, for capital. But right now many of the workers employed on infrastructure projects would otherwise be unemployed, and the money borrowed to pay for these projects would otherwise sit idle.

And shredding the social safety net at a moment when many more Americans need help isn’t just cruel. It adds to the sense of insecurity that is one important factor driving the economy down.

So why are we doing this to ourselves?

The answer, of course, is that state and local government revenues are plunging along with the economy — and unlike the federal government, lower-level governments can’t borrow their way through the crisis. Partly that’s because these governments, unlike the feds, are subject to balanced-budget rules. But even if they weren’t, running temporary deficits would be difficult. Investors, driven by fear, are refusing to buy anything except federal debt, and those states that can borrow at all are being forced to pay punitive interest rates.

Are governors responsible for their own predicament? To some extent. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in particular, deserves some jeers. He became governor in the first place because voters were outraged over his predecessor’s budget problems, but he did nothing to secure the state’s fiscal future — and he now faces a projected budget deficit bigger than the one that did in Gray Davis.

But even the best-run states are in deep trouble. Anyway, we shouldn’t punish our fellow citizens and our economy to spite a few local politicians.

What can be done? Ted Strickland, the governor of Ohio, is pushing for federal aid to the states on three fronts: help for the neediest, in the form of funding for food stamps and Medicaid; federal funding of state- and local-level infrastructure projects; and federal aid to education. That sounds right — and if the numbers Mr. Strickland proposes are huge, so is the crisis.

And once the crisis is behind us, we should rethink the way we pay for key public services.

As a nation, we don’t believe that our fellow citizens should go without essential health care. Why, then, does a large share of funding for Medicaid come from state governments, which are forced to cut the program precisely when it’s needed most?

An educated population is a national resource. Why, then, is basic education mainly paid for by local governments, which are forced to neglect the next generation every time the economy hitsa rough patch?

And why should investments in infrastructure, which will serve the nation for decades, be at the mercy of short-run fluctuations in local budgets?

That’s for later. The priority right now is to fight off the attack of the 50 Herbert Hoovers, and make sure that the fiscal problems of the states don’t make the economic crisis even worse.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 29, 2008, on page A25 of the New York edition.

Dollar Shift: Chinese Pockets Filled as Americans’ Emptied

By MARK LANDLER

NYTimes: December 25, 2008

WASHINGTON — In March 2005, a low-key Princeton economist who had become a Federal Reserve governor coined a novel theory to explain the growing tendency of Americans to borrow from foreigners, particularly the Chinese, to finance their heavy spending.

The problem, he said, was not that Americans spend too much, but that foreigners save too much. The Chinese have piled up so much excess savings that they lend money to the United States at low rates, underwriting American consumption.

This colossal credit cycle could not last forever, he said. But in a global economy, the transfer of Chinese money to America was a market phenomenon that would take years, even a decade, to work itself out. For now, he said, “we probably have little choice except to be patient.”

Today, the dependence of the United States on Chinese money looks less benign. And the economist who proposed the theory, Ben S. Bernanke, is dealing with the consequences, having been promoted to chairman of the Fed in 2006, as these cross-border money flows were reaching stratospheric levels.

In the past decade, China has invested upward of $1 trillion, mostly earnings from manufacturing exports, into American government bonds and government-backed mortgage debt. That has lowered interest rates and helped fuel a historic consumption binge and housing bubble in the United States.

China, some economists say, lulled American consumers, and their leaders, into complacency about their spendthrift ways.

“This was a blinking red light,” said Kenneth S. Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. “We should have reacted to it.”

In hindsight, many economists say, the United States should have recognized that borrowing from abroad for consumption and deficit spending at home was not a formula for economic success. Even as that weakness is becoming more widely recognized, however, the United States is likely to be more addicted than ever to foreign creditors to finance record government spending to revive the broken economy.

To be sure, there were few ready remedies. Some critics argue that the United States could have pushed Beijing harder to abandon its policy of keeping the value of its currency weak — a policy that made its exports less expensive and helped turn it into the world’s leading manufacturing power. If China had allowed its currency to float according to market demand in the past decade, its export growth probably would have moderated. And it would not have acquired the same vast hoard of dollars to invest abroad.

Others say the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department should have seen the Chinese lending for what it was: a giant stimulus to the American economy, not unlike interest rate cuts by the Fed. These critics say the Fed under Alan Greenspan contributed to the creation of the housing bubble by leaving interest rates too low for too long, even as Chinese investment further stoked an easy-money economy. The Fed should have cut interest rates less in the middle of this decade, they say, and started raising them sooner, to help reduce speculation in real estate.

Today, with the wreckage around him, Mr. Bernanke said he regretted that more was not done to regulate financial institutions and mortgage providers, which might have prevented the flood of investment, including that from China, from being so badly used. But the Fed’s role in regulation is limited to banks. And stricter regulation by itself would not have been enough, he insisted.

“Achieving a better balance of international capital flows early on could have significantly reduced the risks to the financial system,” Mr. Bernanke said in an interview in his office overlooking the Washington Mall.

“However,” he continued, “this could only have been done through international cooperation, not by the United States alone. The problem was recognized, but sufficient international cooperation was not forthcoming.”

The inaction was because of a range of factors, political and economic. By the yardsticks that appeared to matter most — prosperity and growth — the relationship between China and the United States also seemed to be paying off for both countries. Neither had a strong incentive to break an addiction: China to strong export growth and financial stability; the United States to cheap imports and low-cost foreign loans.

In Washington, China was treated as a threat by some people, but mostly because it lured away manufacturing jobs. Others argued that China’s heavy lending to this country was risky because Chinese leaders could decide to withdraw money at a moment’s notice, creating a panicky run on the dollar.

Mr. Bernanke viewed such international investment flows through a different lens. He argued that Chinese invested savings abroad because consumers in China did not have enough confidence to spend. Changing that situation would take years, and did not amount to a pressing problem for the Americans.

“The global savings glut story did us a collective disservice,” said Edwin M. Truman, a former Fed and Treasury official. “It created the idea that the world was doing it to us and we couldn’t do anything about it.”

But Mr. Bernanke’s theory fit the prevailing hands-off, pro-market ideology of recent years. Mr. Greenspan and the Bush administration treated the record American trade deficit and heavy foreign borrowing as an abstract threat, not an urgent problem.

Mr. Bernanke, after he took charge of the Fed, warned that the imbalances between the countries were growing more serious. By then, however, it was too late to do much about them. And the White House still regarded imbalances as an arcane subject best left to economists.

By itself, money from China is not a bad thing. As American officials like to note, it speaks to the attractiveness of the United States as a destination for foreign investment. In the 19th century, the United States built its railroads with capital borrowed from the British.

In the past decade, China arguably enabled an American boom. Low-cost Chinese goods helped keep a lid on inflation, while the flood of Chinese investment helped the government finance mortgages and a public debt of close to $11 trillion.

But Americans did not use the lower-cost money afforded by Chinese investment to build a 21st-century equivalent of the railroads. Instead, the government engaged in a costly war in Iraq, and consumers used loose credit to buy sport utility vehicles and larger homes. Banks and investors, eagerly seeking higher interest rates in this easy-money environment, created risky new securities like collateralized debt obligations.

“Nobody wanted to get off this drug,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who pushed legislation to punish China by imposing stiff tariffs. “Their drug was an endless line of customers for made-in-China products. Our drug was the Chinese products and cash.”

Mr. Graham said he understood the addiction: he was speaking by phone from a Wal-Mart store in Anderson, S.C., where he was Christmas shopping in aisles lined with items from China.

A New Economic Dance

The United States has been here before. In the 1980s, it ran heavy trade deficits with Japan, which recycled some of its trading profits into American government bonds.

At that time, the deficits were viewed as a grave threat to America’s economic might. Action took the form of a 1985 agreement known as the Plaza Accord. The world’s major economies intervened in currency markets to drive down the value of the dollar and drive up the Japanese yen.

The arrangement did slow the growth of the trade deficit for a time. But economists blamed the sharp revaluation of the Japanese yen for halting Japan’s rapid growth. The lesson of the Plaza Accord was not lost on China, which at that time was just emerging as an export power.

China tied itself even more tightly to the United States than did Japan. In 1995, it devalued its currency and set a firm exchange rate of roughly 8.3 to the dollar, a level that remained fixed for a decade.

During the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, China clung firmly to its currency policy, earning praise from the Clinton administration for helping check the spiral of devaluation sweeping Asia. Its low wages attracted hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign investment.

By the early part of this decade, the United States was importing huge amounts of Chinese-made goods — toys, shoes, flat-screen televisions and auto parts — while selling much less to China in return.

“For consumers, this was a net benefit because of the availability of cheaper goods,” said Laurence H. Meyer, a former Fed governor. “There’s no question that China put downward pressure on inflation rates.”

But in classical economics, that trade gap could not have persisted for long without bankrupting the American economy. Except that China recycled its trade profits right back into the United States.

It did so to protect its own interests. China kept its banks under tight state control and its currency on a short leash to ensure financial stability. It required companies and individuals to save in the state-run banking system most foreign currency — primarily dollars — that they earned from foreign trade and investment.

As foreign trade surged, this hoard of dollars became enormous. In 2000, the reserves were less than $200 billion; today they are about $2 trillion.

Chinese leaders chose to park the bulk of that in safe securities backed by the American government, including Treasury bonds and the debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which had implicit government backing.

This not only allowed the United States to continue to finance its trade deficit, but, by creating greater demand for United States securities, it also helped push interest rates below where they would otherwise have been. For years, China’s government was eager to buy American debt at yields many in the private sector felt were too low.

This financial and trade embrace between the United States and China grew so tight that Niall Ferguson, a financial historian, has dubbed the two countries Chimerica.

‘Tiptoeing’ Around a Partner

Being attached at the hip was not entirely comfortable for either side, though for widely differing reasons.

In the United States, more people worried about cheap Chinese goods than cheap Chinese loans. By 2003, China’s trade surplus with the United States was ballooning, and lawmakers in Congress were restive. Senator Graham and Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, introduced a bill threatening to impose a 27 percent duty on Chinese goods.

“We had a moment where we caught everyone’s attention: the White House and China,” Mr. Graham recalled.

At the People’s Bank of China, the central bank, a consensus was also emerging in late 2004: China should break its tight link to the dollar, which would make its exports more expensive. Yu Yongding, a leading economic adviser, pressed the case. The American trade and budget deficits were not sustainable, he warned. China was wrong to keep its currency artificially depressed and depend too much on selling cheap goods.

Proponents of revaluation in China argued that the country’s currency policies denied the fruits of prosperity to Chinese consumers. Beijing was investing their savings in low-yielding American government securities. And with a weak currency, they said, Chinese could not afford many imported goods.

The central bank’s English-speaking governor, Zhou Xiaochuan, was among those who favored a sizable revaluation.

But when Beijing acted to amend its currency policy in 2005, under heavy pressure from Congress and the White House, it moved cautiously. The renminbi was allowed to climb only 2 percent. The Communist Party opted for only incremental adjustments to its economic model after a decade of fast growth. Little changed: China’s exports kept soaring and investment poured into steel mills and garment factories.

But American officials eased the pressure. They decided to put more emphasis on urging Chinese consumers to spend more of their savings, which they hoped would eventually bring the two economies into better balance. On a tour of China, John W. Snow, the Treasury secretary at the time, even urged the Chinese to start using credit cards.

China kicked off its own campaign to encourage domestic consumption, which it hoped would provide a new source. But Chinese save with the same zeal that, until recently, Americans spent. Shorn of the social safety net of the old Communist state, they squirrel away money to pay for hospital visits, housing or retirement. This accounts for the savings glut identified by Mr. Bernanke.

Privately, Chinese officials confided to visiting Americans that the effort was not achieving much.

“It is sometimes hard to change successful models,” said Robert B. Zoellick, who negotiated with the Chinese as a deputy secretary of state. “It is prototypically American to say, ‘This worked well, but now you’ve got to change it.’ ”

In Washington, some critics say too little was done. A former Treasury official, Timothy D. Adams, tried to get the I.M.F. to act as a watchdog for currency manipulation by China, which would have subjected Beijing to more global pressure.

Yet when Mr. Snow was succeeded as Treasury secretary by Henry M. Paulson Jr. in 2006, the I.M.F. was sidelined, according to several officials, and Mr. Paulson took command of China policy.

He was not shy about his credentials. As an investment banker with Goldman Sachs, Mr. Paulson made 70 trips to China. In his office hangs a watercolor depicting the hometown of Zhu Rongji, a forceful former prime minister.

“I pushed very hard on currency because I believed it was important for China to get to a market-determined currency,” Mr. Paulson said in an interview. But he conceded he did not get what he wanted.

In late 2006, Mr. Paulson invited Mr. Bernanke to accompany him to Beijing. Mr. Bernanke used the occasion to deliver a blunt speech to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in which he advised the Chinese to reorient their economy and revalue their currency.

At the last minute, however, Mr. Bernanke deleted a reference to the exchange rate being an “effective subsidy” for Chinese exports, out of fear that it could be used as a pretext for a trade lawsuit against China.

Critics detected a pattern. They noted that in its twice-yearly reports to Congress about trading partners, the Treasury Department had never branded China a currency manipulator.

“We’re tiptoeing around, desperately trying not to irritate or offend the Chinese,” said Thea M. Lee, public policy director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. “But to get concrete results, you have to be confrontational.”

An Embrace That Won’t Let Go

For China, too, this crisis has been a time of reckoning. Americans are buying fewer Chinese DVD players and microwave ovens. Trade is collapsing, and thousands of workers are losing their jobs. Chinese leaders are terrified of social unrest.

Having allowed the renminbi to rise a little after 2005, the Chinese government is now under intense pressure domestically to reverse course and depreciate it. China’s fortunes remain tethered to those of the United States. And the reverse is equally true.

In a glassed-in room in a nondescript office building in Washington, the Treasury conducts nearly daily auctions of billions of dollars’ worth of government bonds. An old Army helmet sits on a shelf: as a lark, Treasury officials have been known to strap it on while they monitor incoming bids.

For the past five years, China has been one of the most prolific bidders. It holds $652 billion in Treasury debt, up from $459 billion a year ago. Add in its Fannie Mae bonds and other holdings, and analysts figure China owns $1 of every $10 of America’s public debt.

The Treasury is conducting more auctions than ever to finance its $700 billion bailout of the banks. Still more will be needed to pay for the incoming Obama administration’s stimulus package. The United States, economists say, will depend on the Chinese to keep buying that debt, perpetuating the American habit.

Even so, Mr. Paulson said he viewed the debate over global imbalances as hopelessly academic. He expressed doubt that Mr. Bernanke or anyone else could have solved the problem as it was germinating.

“One lesson that I have clearly learned,” said Mr. Paulson, sitting beneath his Chinese watercolor. “You don’t get dramatic change, or reform, or action unless there is a crisis.”

David Barboza contributed reporting from Shanghai, and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong.

Peru Advances With Bond Sale to Show ‘Strength’ (Update2)

By Drew Benson

Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) — Peru is advancing with plans to sell its first foreign bonds in almost two years to “demonstrate the economy’s strength” after receiving investment-grade ratings, said Betty Sotelo, the Economy Ministry’s debt director.

The Andean country, the world’s largest silver miner and third-biggest copper producer, would follow Mexico, which yesterday became the first developing nation to tap international debt markets since the global credit crisis deepened in September with the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Peru is also seeking to establish benchmark bond yields that will help companies sell debt abroad, Sotelo said in an interview in her office in Lima late yesterday. The government has no pressing need for the cash and doesn’t need the funds to help finance a $3 billion economic stimulus plan that President Alan Garcia announced last week, she said.

“We’re not desperate; we don’t have to place debt to meet financing needs,” Sotelo said. “The government’s goal is to demonstrate the economy’s strength.”

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are advising Peru on the bond sale, she said. The government will wait until at least January to carry out the sale, she said.

Economy Minister Luis Valdivieso, who returned last night from a weeklong trip to meet with investors in New York, Boston, London and Madrid, said in October that the government planned to sell as much as $600 million of 30-year bonds.

‘Excessive’

Sotelo said the sale could be bigger because emerging-market borrowing costs have fallen since Valdivieso spoke. Last week, the government authorized a dollar-denominated bond sale of up to $1.35 billion next year.

The yield on Peru’s 6.55 percent bonds due in 2037 has sunk 4.3 percentage points from an Oct. 23 high to 7.54 percent, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. That yield remains 67 basis points, or 0.67 percentage point, above the 6.87 percent yield on Sept. 15, the day Lehman collapsed.

Pablo Secada, who resigned as public credit director under Sotelo last month, questioned the decision to tap markets soon.

“Paying high prices when you don’t need funds is not necessarily a sign of strength, it’s excessive,” said Secada, who’s now chief economist at Lima-based Peruvian Institute of Economics. “I’m not so convinced by the argument that being able to sell bonds during a crisis distinguishes you from other emerging market countries.”

Mexico’s Sale

Mexico sold $2 billion of 10-year bonds yesterday to yield 5.98 percent, or 3.9 percentage points above Treasuries. Other countries will follow Mexico “as early as early next week or in January,” said Elizabeth Dennis, head of the Latin America debt syndicate desk at Morgan Stanley in New York. Morgan Stanley managed Mexico’s sale with Goldman.

“If borrowers were skeptical about the demand that they might receive, Mexico has certainly paved the way for them,” Dennis said in an interview.

Sotelo declined to provide more details on Peru’s sale plans. The sale would be the country’s first in international markets since it issued $1.2 billion of the 6.55 percent bonds in March 2007.

Peru won an investment-grade rating of BBB- from Fitch Ratings in April and Standard & Poor’s in July as surging commodity exports fueled growth and helped the country pay down foreign debt. Moody’s Investors Service rates the debt Ba1, one level below investment grade.

While growth is poised to slow as the global slump drives down commodities from their July record high, Peru will remain one of the world’s fastest growing economies, the International Monetary Fund said last week.

The IMF predicts Peru’s economy will expand 6 percent next year, matching forecasts by Citigroup Inc. and the Peruvian government. Citigroup said this week that it expects Peru’s economy outperform all major economies in Latin America. Peru’s $109 billion economy has grown more than 9 percent for four straight quarters.

To contact the reporter on this story: Drew Benson in Lima at Abenson9@bloomberg.net

A glimmer of light: Fed policy is working

News N Economics, 19 de diciembre del 2008

There is a slew of bad economic news out there, but finally a glimmer of light emerges. The light is dull – a 40-watt rather than 200-watt light bulb- but is nevertheless there: Fed policy is working.

What is Fed policy? Fed policy is massive:

• Adding $1.4 trillion in liquidity to the domestic and global banking systems via loanable funds and currency swaps
• Making unprecedented loans to the private sector, American International Group and Bear Stearns
• Buying agency bonds directly
• Creating demand in the commercial paper market with $315 billion net transactions
• Using the Treasury to sterilize inflows
• On the horizon: buying U.S. Treasuries directly, mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and perhaps other instruments not yet mentioned (CDS, corporate debt, etc.)

Some signs that Fed policy is working:

Corporate spreads are stabilizing if not falling

The chart illustrates corporate bond indices for investment grade and high yield corporate bonds since the beginning of the year. A sign of relief is emerging as corporate bonds spreads – borrowing costs for investment grade and high yield companies – stabilize, even fall.

Corporate bond rates are important – the higher are the costs to borrow, the lower will the borrowing be for new capital investment. See this post to for corporate bond spread indices (against Treasuries) on a longer horizon.

The money supply – all measures of – is growing faster on a weekly basis

And surging on an annual basis

The chart illustrates various measures of the U.S. money supply (the data and definitions are listed here). The growth rate of non-M1 components of M2 (Table 4) started to fall slightly at the end of October, but has since then picked up speed. The 4-week average M2 – a better look at the trend – is growing at a record 8%. Finally, M3 (at least most of M3) is slowing on an annual, but it is reverting back to its longer-term trend rather than falling off a cliff. The Fed is keeping the money supply afloat; this will offset some of the negative price pressures going forward.

Mortgage rates are falling

Who said that traditional monetary policy – cutting the target federal funds rate – was dead, because clearly it is not. In the wake of the Fed’s December 16th announcement, mortgage rates fell with force to 5.27% (as of 7am on December 19th from Bankrate.com). And with the Fed gearing up for its $500 billion MBS program, I expect that mortgage rates will fall further, potentially driving up buyer demand in the housing market.

It looks like the U.S. economy is just skirting a financial meltdown. Phew, now we have a recession to contend with.

Out of the Spotlight, an Industry Copes With Crisis

By JOE NOCERA

New  York Times: November 28, 2008

When you live and work in New York, it is easy to succumb to the fallacy that the financial crisis is all about us. It’s about giant, New York-based institutions failing or coming close to failing. It’s about high-stakes weekends in the offices of the New York Federal Reserve. It’s about credit-default swaps and mortgage-backed securities and the wild swings of the New York stock exchange. It’s about Jamie Dimon and Richard Fuld.

But of course it’s not just about us. It is not even primarily about Washington, where so much of the response to the crisis —$700 billion bailouts! Front-page Congressional hearings! Economic summit meetings! — has taken place.

No, it is about everybody, in every part of the country: neighborhoods awash in foreclosures and For Sale signs. Layoffs at the worst possible time. Small companies struggling to stay alive. Credit card companies raising rates unconscionably. People with perfectly fine credit scores finding it all but impossible to get loans.

The credit crisis is rippling up and down the economy in ways that may not create obvious headlines but that affect the way people do their business and live their lives. People, for instance, who sell and drive trucks.

•

“Even in good times, the trucking community works on razor-thin, single-digit margins,” said G. David Gerrard, who runs a Chicago-area business that is the largest truck dealership in the United States. “If somebody bumps your lending costs by three basis points” — that is three hundredths of a percent — “it is a big deal. There is no price elasticity.”

He continued: “We have a customer here in Chicago, a 50-year-old company, that just shut down. It had all of its eggs in one basket — 80 percent of its revenues came from an auto parts company that just liquidated. I have another customer with 280 to 290 drivers that had its first layoffs in 40 years. They laid off 20 drivers. One truck deal blew up when we discovered the guy was four months late on his mortgage payments. I have guys who buy 25 trucks a year from us who aren’t buying anything this year. We sold 38 percent fewer units in 2008 than we did in 2007.”

I had gone to Chicago to learn about the effects of the credit crisis on a large, industrial, somewhat under-the-radar company called Navistar, one of two independent manufacturers of trucks and buses in the United States. Founded at the turn of the last century as a maker of agricultural equipment, it was known as International Harvester until the mid-1980s (truckers still call it “International”). The company has survived two World Wars, the Great Depression, a near-death experience in the early 1990s, and, most recently, an accounting problem severe enough to cause it to be delisted for almost a year and a half from the New York Stock Exchange.

Because it is conservatively managed — no fancy financial engineering, no excessive debt, no risky loans to customers — Navistar is going to survive this crisis as well. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t feeling any pain, or that it doesn’t see the effects of the crisis all around it. On the contrary, companies like Navistar see the effects of the financial crisis far more clearly than most policy makers do. Because trucks haul 70 to 80 percent of everything we buy, truck drivers and trucking companies feel even the slightest economic downturn. They’re on the front lines of the crisis.

Mr. Gerrard, a garrulous, animated, 50-year-old executive who looks like a retired middle linebacker, runs a huge Navistar dealership that generates around $200 million in annual sales. Outside, in the company’s lot, stood rows of trucks of all sorts, from basic city delivery trucks to spacious truck cabs priced at more than $100,000. Mr. Gerrard took over the dealership several years ago, when Navistar concluded it needed to bring in new management, and he’s been whipping the place into shape ever since. He employs 400 people in and around the Chicago area.

Thanks to cost controls and other measures Mr. Gerrard put in place, the dealership still expects to make a profit this year, despite the drastic drop in sales and revenue. He is managing his receivables very tightly, he told me — even going to the homes of customers who are in arrears on their payments. Since the financial crisis began, he hasn’t had to lay anyone off. But he is consolidating two shifts into one, and getting rid of a lot of overtime pay. His employees aren’t complaining, though, not in this environment. They still have jobs.

Like most companies in America right now, a crucial issue for Mr. Gerrard is credit — in his case, credit for his customers. Navistar has a captive finance company, Navistar Financial, which is the trucking equivalent of GMAC. But its cost of capital has risen sharply, thanks to the crisis. That means Mr. Gerrard’s costs have risen as well, since Navistar Financial supplies much of his financing needs.

Perhaps more important, it means that it costs his customers more when they need loans to buy a truck. What’s more, other lenders, like GE Capital, have ceased making truck loans in the Chicago area. When I suggested to Mr. Gerrard that this must be good for Navistar’s business, he shook his head vigorously. It is impossible for Navistar Financial to make 100 percent of the truck loans, so the withdrawal of other lenders means that trucking companies will not be able to get loans to buy vehicles.

“We have situations where customers need or want trucks but they can’t get financing,” he said. “They are really, really struggling.”

•

The next morning I drove out to Warrenville, in the Chicago suburbs, to visit Navistar’s headquarters. The company’s chief executive, Dan C. Ustian, had just returned from Washington, where he had attended a big executive conference held by The Wall Street Journal. He had originally been put on a panel to tackle energy and environment — a natural spot for a truck executive — but he had asked to be moved to the finance panel instead.

As I quickly discovered, the state of lending in the financial crisis is his most pressing concern, far more than, say, the new emissions requirements on diesel engines that are mandated for 2010. No sooner had he shaken my hand than he launched into a passionate speech about the failure of the banking industry to do what it was supposed to be doing to help get us out of this crisis.

“It appears that money is being loaned by the government to the banks at a very attractive rate, and that money is not getting down to consumers or businesses,” he said. “We have had 2,500 bankruptcies in our industry in a nine-month period. You can’t believe how many of those trucking companies have been in business a long time, and they’re profitable, but they can’t get working capital. And when they can get it, they have to pay an arm and a leg. Some of the midsized customers we do business with are paying 14 and 15 percent for money, with a lot of onerous covenants. So that is what is happening to our customers.”

Like Mr. Gerrard at the dealership, Mr. Ustian was fairly sanguine about Navistar’s own prospects. The company, he explained, had happily negotiated a five-year financing in January 2007, at very favorable rates, which was helping keep its own capital costs low even as everyone else’s were soaring. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t going to be pain. When I asked him about layoffs, he sighed. “Yeah, for sure, they’re coming,” he said. He also explained that in a normal economy, this should be a time when truck sales increase. The truck business is highly cyclical, and the industry was just coming out of a low point in the cycle. What’s more, there is usually a big uptick in sales in the year before new emissions standards take effect, because the new engines required to meet the standards push up the cost of a truck by thousands of dollars.

But that wasn’t happening this time. “We were gaining in market share and overall sales” earlier in the year, Mr. Ustian said. But then came the traumatic events of September — Fannie and Freddie, Lehman Brothers, American International Group, the bailout bill and all the rest of it — and “it just stalled,” he said. “You could see it starting to get better, and then it just collapsed.”

Something else happened to Navistar in September. Its stock price went into free fall. After working through its accounting issues, the company was relisted on the New York Stock Exchange in July, with its stock in the 60s. (It had traded over the counter during the delisting.) But in a two-month span between mid-September and mid-November, it dropped from $62 a share to $15.

Mr. Ustian found this bewildering — and more than a little frustrating. On the one hand, other trucking companies were suffering similar declines, and truck sales were certainly down. On the other hand, his company’s fundamentals hadn’t really changed all that much between September and November.

So what was going on? When Navistar was delisted in February 2007, large institutional investors like pension funds had to get rid of the stock. The shares were picked up by hedge funds, which at the peak owned well over half of Navistar’s stock.

Though no one at Navistar can prove it, they strongly suspect that the stock has been hammered because hedge funds, badly hurt during this phase of the financial crisis, have been forced to sell some of their more liquid positions to return money to exiting shareholders. I suspect this theory is correct, and it would be yet another way that fallout from the financial crisis has spread from New York to the rest of the country.

“My opinion is that it is going to get worse before it gets better,” Mr. Ustian said, as I prepared to leave. He wasn’t talking about Navistar anymore, but about the American economy. “Unemployment is going to get worse. We have to free up money so that people have confidence again to spend. It’s psychological. We have to get some confidence back.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 2, 2008
The Talking Business column on Saturday, about the effect of the credit crisis on truck manufacturers and dealers, misstated the singularity of Navistar, a Chicago-based maker of trucks and buses. It is one of two independent American truck makers, not the only one. The other is Paccar, which makes the Kenworth and Peterbilt brands and is based in Bellevue, Wash.

How India Avoided a Crisis

New York Times, 19 de diciembre del 2008

Por: Joe Nocera

“What has taken a number of us by surprise is the lack of adequate supervision and regulation,” Rana Kapoor was saying the other day. “This was despite the fact that Enron had happened and you passed Sarbanes-Oxley. We don’t understand it. Maybe it’s because we sit in a more controlled economy but ….” He smiled sweetly as his voice trailed off, as if to take the sting off his comments. But they stung nonetheless.

Mr. Kapoor is an Indian banker, a former longtime Bank of America executive with a Rutgers M.B.A. who, along with his business partner and brother-in-law, Ashok Kapur, was granted government permission four years ago to start a private bank, which they called Yes Bank. In the United States, Yes Bank is the kind of name a go-go banker might give to, say, a high-flying mortgage lender in the middle of a bubble. (You can even imagine the slogan: “Yes is part of our name!”) But Yes Bank is not exactly the Washington Mutual of India. One news release it hands out to reporters who come calling is an excerpt from a 2007 survey by The Financial Express: “#1 on Credit Quality amongst 56 Banks in India,” reads the headline.

I arrived in Mumbai three weeks after the terrorist attacks that killed 200 people — including, tragically, Yes Bank’s co-founder Mr. Kapur, who had served as the company’s nonexecutive chairman and was gunned down while having dinner at the Oberoi Hotel. (His wife and two dinner companions miraculously escaped.)

My hope in traveling to Mumbai was to learn about the current state of Indian business in the wake of both the credit crisis and the attacks. But in my first few days in this grand, sprawling, chaotic city, what I mainly heard, especially talking to bankers, was about America, not India. How could we have brought so much trouble on ourselves, and the rest of the world, by acting in such an obviously foolhardy manner? Didn’t we understand that you can’t lend money to people who lack the means to pay it back? The questions were asked with a sense of bewilderment — and an occasional hint of scorn. Like most Americans, I didn’t have any good answers. It was a bubble, I would respond with a sheepish shrug, as if that were an adequate explanation. It isn’t, of course.

“In India, we never had anything close to the subprime loan,” said Chandra Kochhar, the chief financial officer of India’s largest private bank, Icici. (A few days after I spoke to her, Ms. Kochhar was named the bank’s new chief executive, in a move that had long been anticipated.) “All lending to individuals is based on their income. That is a big difference between your banking system and ours.” She continued: “Indian banks are not levered like American banks. Capital ratios are 12 and 13 percent, instead of 7 or 8 percent. All those exotic structures like C.D.O. and securitizations are a very tiny part of our banking system. So a lot of the temptations didn’t exist.”

And when I went to see Deepak Parekh, the chief executive of HDFC, which was founded in 1977 as the country’s first specialized mortgage bank, practically the first words out of his mouth were these: “We don’t do interest-only or subprime loans. When the bubble was going on, we did not change any of our policies. We did not change any of our systems. We did not change our thought process. We never gave more money to a borrower because the value of the house had gone up. Citibank has a few home equity loans, but most banks in India don’t make those kinds of loans. Our nonperforming loans are less than 1 percent.”

Yet two years ago, the Indian real estate market — commercial and residential alike — was every bit as frothy as the American market. High-rises were being slapped up on spec. Housing developments were sprouting up everywhere. And there was plenty of money flowing into India, mainly from private equity and hedge funds, to fuel the commercial real estate bubble in particular. Goldman Sachs, Carlyle, Blackstone, Citibank — they were all here, throwing money at developers. So why did the Indian banks stay on the sidelines and avoid most of the pain that has been suffered by the big American banks?

Part of the reason is cultural. Indians are simply not as comfortable with credit as Americans. “A lot of Indians, when you push them, will say that if you spend more than you earn you will get in trouble,” an Indian consultant told me. “Americans spent more than they earned.”

Mr. Parekh said, “Savings are important. Joint families exist. When one son moves out, the family helps them. So you don’t borrow so much from the bank.” Even mortgage loans tend to have down payments in India that are a third of the purchase price, a far cry from the United States, where 20 percent is the new norm. (Let’s not even think about what they used to be.)

But there was also another factor, perhaps the most important of all. India had a bank regulator who was the anti-Greenspan. His name was Dr. V. Y. Reddy, and he was the governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Seventy percent of the banking system in India is nationalized, so a strong regulator is critical, since any banking scandal amounts to a national political scandal as well. And in the irascible Mr. Reddy, who took office in 2003 and stepped down this past September, it had exactly the right man in the right job at the right time.

“He basically believed that if bankers were given the opportunity to sin, they would sin,” said one banker who asked not to be named because, well, there’s not much percentage in getting on the wrong side of the Reserve Bank of India. For all the bankers’ talk about their higher lending standards, the truth is that Mr. Reddy made them even more stringent during the bubble.

Unlike Alan Greenspan, who didn’t believe it was his job to even point out bubbles, much less try to deflate them, Mr. Reddy saw his job as making sure Indian banks did not get too caught up in the bubble mentality. About two years ago, he started sensing that real estate, in particular, had entered bubble territory. One of the first moves he made was to ban the use of bank loans for the purchase of raw land, which was skyrocketing. Only when the developer was about to commence building could the bank get involved — and then only to make construction loans. (Guess who wound up financing the land purchases? United States private equity and hedge funds, of course!)

Then, as securitizations and derivatives gained increasing prominence in the world’s financial system, the Reserve Bank of India sharply curtailed their use in the country. When Mr. Reddy saw American banks setting up off-balance-sheet vehicles to hide debt, he essentially banned them in India. As a result, banks in India wound up holding onto the loans they made to customers. On the one hand, this meant they made fewer loans than their American counterparts because they couldn’t sell off the loans to Wall Street in securitizations. On the other hand, it meant they still had the incentive — as American banks did not — to see those loans paid back.

Seeing inflation on the horizon, Mr. Reddy pushed interest rates up to more than 20 percent, which of course dampened the housing frenzy. He increased risk weightings on commercial buildings and shopping mall construction, doubling the amount of capital banks were required to hold in reserve in case things went awry. He made banks put aside extra capital for every loan they made. In effect, Mr. Reddy was creating liquidity even before there was a global liquidity crisis.

Did India’s bankers stand up to applaud Mr. Reddy as he was making these moves? Of course not. They were naturally furious, just as American bankers would have been if Mr. Greenspan had been more active. Their regulator was holding them back, constraining their growth! Mr. Parekh told me that while he had been saying for some time that Indian real estate was in bubble territory, he was still unhappy with the rules imposed by Mr. Reddy. “We were critical of the central bank,” he said. “We thought these were harsh measures.”

“For a while we were wondering if we were missing out on something,” said Ms. Kochhar of Icici. Banks in the United States seemed to have come up with some magical new formula for making money: make loans that required no down payment and little in the way of verification — and post instant, short-term, profits.

As Luis Miranda, who runs a private equity firm devoted to developing India’s infrastructure, put it: “We kept wondering if they had figured out something that we were too dense to figure out. It looked like they were smart and we were stupid.” Instead, India was the smart one, and we were the stupid ones.

Ms. Kochhar said that the underlying risks of having “a majority of loans not owned by the people who originated them” was not apparent during the bubble. Now that those risks have been made painfully clear, every banker in India realizes that Mr. Reddy did the right thing by limiting securitizations. “At times like this, you tend to appreciate what he did more than we did at the time,” said Mr. Kapoor. “He saved us,” added Mr. Parekh.

As the credit crisis has spread these past months, no Indian bank has come close to failing the way so many United States and European financial institutions have. None have required the kind of emergency injections of capital that Western banks have needed. None have had the huge write-downs that were par for the course in the West. As the bubble has burst, which lenders have taken the hit? Why, the private equity and hedge fund lenders who had been so eager to finance land development. Us, in others words, rather than them. Why is that not a surprise?

When I asked Mr. Kapoor for his take on what had happened in the United States, he replied: “We recognize it as a problem of plenty. It was perpetuated by greedy bankers, whether investment bankers or commercial bankers. The greed to make money is the impression it has made here. Anytime they wanted a loan, people just dipped into their home A.T.M. It was like money was on call.”

So it was. And our regulators, unlike theirs, just stood by and let it happen. The next time we’re moving into bubble territory, perhaps we can take a page from Mr. Reddy’s book — sometimes it’s better to apply the brakes too early than too late. Or, as was the case with Mr. Greenspan, not at all.

•

None of this is to say that the global credit crisis hasn’t affected India. It certainly has. I’ll be back after the holidays with more columns from India, including how Sept. 15 — the day Lehman Brothers defaulted — changed everything, even here, on the other side of the world.

China and India: Suddenly vulnerable

Asia’s two big beasts are shivering. India’s economy is weaker, but China’s leaders have more to fear

THE speed with which clouds of economic gloom and even despair have gathered over the global economy has been startling everywhere. But the change has been especially sudden in the world’s two most populous countries: China and India. Until quite recently, the world’s fastest-growing big economies both felt themselves largely immune from the contagion afflicting the rich world. Optimists even hoped that these huge emerging markets might provide the engines that could pull the world out of recession. Now some fear the reverse: that the global downturn is going to drag China and India down with it, bringing massive unemployment to two countries that are, for all their success, still poor—India is home to some two-fifths of the world’s malnourished children.

The pessimism may be overdone. These are still the most dynamic parts of the world economy. But both countries face daunting economic and political difficulties. In India’s case, its newly positive self-image has suffered a double blow: from the economic buffeting, and from the bullets of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai last month. As our special report makes clear, India’s recent self-confidence had two roots. One was a sustained spurt in economic growth to a five-year annual average of 8.8%. The other was the concomitant rise in India’s global stature and influence. No longer, its politicians gloated, was India “hyphenated” with Pakistan as one half of a potential nuclear maelstrom. Rather it had become part of “Chindia”—a fast-growing success story.

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The Mumbai attacks, blamed on terrorist groups based in Pakistan and bringing calls for punitive military action, have revived fears of regional conflict. A hyphen has reappeared over India’s western border, just as the scale of the economic setback hitting India is becoming apparent. Exports in October fell by 12% compared with the same month last year; hundreds of small textile firms have gone out of business; even some of the stars of Indian manufacturing of recent years, in the automotive industry, have suspended production. The central bank has revised its estimate of economic growth this year downwards, to 7.5-8%, which is still optimistic. Next year the rate may well fall to 5.5% or less, the lowest since 2002.

Still faster after all these years

If China’s growth rate were to fall to that level, it would be regarded as a disaster at home and abroad. The country is this month celebrating the 30th anniversary of the event seen as marking the launch of its policies of “reform and opening”, since when its economy has grown at an annual average of 9.8%. The event was a meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee at which Deng Xiaoping gained control. Tentatively at first but with greater radicalism in the 1990s, the party dismantled most of the monolithic Maoist edifice—parcelling out collective farmland, sucking in vast amounts of foreign investment and allowing private enterprise to thrive. The anniversary may be a bogus milestone, but it is easy to understand why the party should want to trumpet the achievements of the past 30 years (see article). They have witnessed the most astonishing economic transformation in human history. In a country that is home to one-fifth of humanity some 200m people have been lifted out of poverty.

Yet in China, too, the present downturn is jangling nerves. The country is a statistical haze, but the trade figures for last month—with exports 2% lower than in November 2007 and imports 18% down—were shocking. Power generation, generally a reliable number, fell by 7%. Even though the World Bank and other forecasters still expect China’s GDP to grow by 7.5% in 2009, that is below the 8% level regarded, almost superstitiously, as essential if huge social dislocation is to be avoided. Just this month a senior party researcher gave warning of what he called, in party-speak, “a reactive situation of mass-scale social turmoil”. Indeed, demonstrations and protests, always common in China, are proliferating, as laid-off factory-workers join dispossessed farmers, environmental campaigners and victims of police harassment in taking to the streets.

The gap between mouth and trouser

One worry is that China’s rulers will try to push the yuan down to help exporters. That would be a terrible idea, not least because the government has the resources to ease the pain in less dangerous ways: it is running a budget surplus and has little debt. Last month it announced a huge 4 trillion yuan (nearly $600 billion) fiscal-stimulus package. Some who have crunched the numbers argue that this was all mouth and no trousers—much of it made up by old budget commitments, double-counting and empty promises. It was thus mainly propaganda, to convince China’s own people and the outside world that the government was serious about stimulating demand at home. That may yet prove to be unfair: what matters is when infrastructure money is spent, not when it is announced. Yet there is little sign that the regime is ready to take radical steps in the two areas that would do most to persuade the rural majority to spend its money rather than hoard it: giving farmers better rights over their land; and providing a decent social safety-net, especially in health care.

Still, China does at least have trousers, with deep pockets. India, in contrast, is not seen as a big potential part of the answer to the world’s economic problems. Not only is its economy far smaller; its government’s finances are also a mess. Its budget deficit—some 8% of GDP—inhibits it from offering a bigger stimulus that might mitigate the downturn (see article). This is alarming. If China reckons it needs 8% annual growth to provide jobs for the 7m or so new members of its workforce each year, how is India to cope? A younger country, its workforce is increasing by about 14m a year—ie, about one-quarter of the world’s new workers. And, perversely, its great successes of recent years have been in industries that rely not on vast supplies of cheap labour but on smaller numbers of highly educated engineers—such as its computer-services businesses and capital-intensive manufacturing.

In two respects, however, India has a big advantage over China in coping with an economic slowdown. It has all-too extensive experience in it; and it has a political system that can cope with disgruntlement without suffering existential doubts. India pays an economic price for its democracy. Decision-making is cumbersome. And as in China, unrest and even insurgency are widespread. But the political system has a resilience and flexibility that China’s own leaders, it seems, believe they lack. They are worrying about how to cope with protests. India’s have their eyes on a looming election.

It used to be a platitude of Western—and Marxist—analysis of China that wrenching economic change would demand political reform. Yet China’s economy boomed with little sign of any serious political liberalisation to match the economic free-for-all. The cliché fell into disuse. Indeed, many, even in democratic bastions such as India, began to fall for the Chinese Communist Party’s argument that dictatorship was good for growth, whereas Indian democracy was a luxury paid for by the poor, in the indefinite extension of their poverty.

But as China enters a trying year of anniversaries—the 50th of the suppression of an uprising in Tibet; the 20th of the quashing of the Tiananmen Square protests; the 60th of the founding of the People’s Republic itself—it may be worth remembering that the winter of 1978-79 saw not only a party Central Committee plenum but also the “Democracy Wall” movement in Beijing. It was a brief flowering of the freedom of expression, quite remarkable after the xenophobic isolation of the Cultural Revolution. Deng, like Mao Zedong before him, tolerated the dissident movement as long as it served his ends, and then stamped it out. In so doing he thwarted what Wei Jingsheng, the most famous of the wall-writers, had dubbed “the fifth modernisation”: democracy. China still needs it.

The 17th Floor, Where Wealth Went to Vanish

By DIANA B. HENRIQUES and ALEX BERENSON

Published: December 14, 2008

The epicenter of what may be the largest Ponzi scheme in history was the 17th floor of the Lipstick Building, an oval red-granite building rising 34 floors above Third Avenue in Midtown Manhattan.

Ruby Washington

Bernard L. Madoff is the only person so far to be arrested in the fraud case at his investment firm in Manhattan.

A busy stock-trading operation occupied the 19th floor, and the computers and paperwork of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities filled the 18th floor.

But the 17th floor was Bernie Madoff’s sanctum, occupied by fewer than two dozen staff members and rarely visited by other employees. It was called the “hedge fund” floor, but federal prosecutors now say the work Mr. Madoff did there was actually a fraud scheme whose losses Mr. Madoff himself estimates at $50 billion.

The tally of reported losses climbed through the weekend to nearly $20 billion, with a giant Spanish bank, Banco Santander, reporting on Sunday that clients of one of its Swiss subsidiaries have lost $3 billion. Some of the biggest losers were members of the Palm Beach Country Club, where many of Mr. Madoff’s wealthy clients were recruited.

The list of prominent fraud victims grew as well. According to a person familiar with the business of the real estate and publishing magnate Mort Zuckerman, he is also on a list of victims that already included the owners of the New York Mets, a former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles and the chairman of GMAC.

And the 17th floor is now an occupied zone, as investigators and forensic auditors try to piece together what Mr. Madoff did with the billions entrusted to him by individuals, banks and hedge funds around the world.

So far, only Mr. Madoff, the firm’s 70-year-old founder, has been arrested in the scandal. He is free on a $10 million bond and cannot travel far outside the New York area.

According to charges against Mr. Madoff, his firm paid off earlier investors with money from new investors, fitting the classic definition of a Ponzi scheme. It unraveled as markets declined and many investors who lost money elsewhere sought to withdraw money from their investments with Mr. Madoff.

But a question still dominates the investigation: how one person could have pulled off such a far-reaching, long-running fraud, carrying out all the simple practical chores the scheme required, like producing monthly statements, annual tax statements, trade confirmations and bank transfers.

Firms managing money on Mr. Madoff’s scale would typically have hundreds of people involved in these administrative tasks. Prosecutors say he claims to have acted entirely alone.

“Our task is to find the records and follow the money,” said Alexander Vasilescu, a lawyer in the New York office of the Securities and Exchange Commission. As of Sunday night, he said, investigators could not shed much light on the fraud or its scale. “We do not dispute his number — we just have not calculated how he made it,” he said.

Scrutiny is also falling on the many banks and money managers who helped steer clients to Mr. Madoff and now say they are among his victims.

Mr. Madoff was not running an actual hedge fund, but instead managing accounts for investors inside his own securities firm.

While many investors were friends or met Mr. Madoff at country clubs or on charitable boards, even more had entrusted their money to professional advisory firms that, in turn, handed it to Mr. Madoff — for a fee. Investors are now questioning whether these paid advisers were diligent enough in investigating Mr. Madoff to ensure that their money was safe. Where those advisers work for big institutions like Banco Santander, investors will most likely look to them, rather than to the remnants of Mr. Madoff’s firm, for restitution.

Santander may face $3.1 billion in losses through its Optimal Investment Services, a Geneva-based fund of hedge funds that is owned by the bank. At the end of 2007, Optimal had 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, under management, according to the bank’s annual report — which would mean that its Madoff investments were a substantial part of Optimal’s portfolio.

A spokesman for Santander declined to comment on the case.

Other Swiss institutions, including Banque Bénédict Hentsch and Neue Privat Bank, acknowledged being at risk, with Hentsch confirming about $48 million in exposure.

BNP Paribas said it had not invested directly in the Madoff funds but had 350 million euros, or about $500 million, at risk through trades and loans to hedge funds. And the private Swiss bank Reichmuth said it had 385 million Swiss francs, or $327 million, in potential losses. HSBC, one of the world’s largest banks, also said it had made loans to institutions that invested in Madoff but did not disclose the size of its potential losses.

Calls to Mr. Zuckerman and his representatives were not returned on Sunday night.

Losses of this scale simply do not seem to fit into the intimate business that Mr. Madoff operated in New York.By the elevated standards of Wall Street, the Madoff firm did not pay exceptionally well, but it was loyal to employees even in bad times. Mr. Madoff’s family filled the senior positions, but his was not the only family at the firm — generations of employees had worked for Madoff and invested their savings there.

Even before Madoff collapsed, some employees were mystified by the 17th floor. In recent regulatory filings, Mr. Madoff claimed to manage $17 billion for clients — a number that would normally occupy far more than the 20 or so people who worked on 17.

One Madoff employee said he and other workers assumed that Mr. Madoff must have a separate office elsewhere to oversee his client accounts.

Nevertheless, Mr. Madoff attracted and held the trust of companies that prided themselves on their diligent investigation of investment managers.

One of them was Walter M. Noel Jr., who struck up a business relationship with Mr. Madoff 20 years ago that helped earn his investment firm, the Fairfield Greenwich Group, millions of dollars in fees. Indeed, over time, one of Fairfield’s strongest selling points for its largest fund was its access to Mr. Madoff.

But now, Mr. Noel and Fairfield are the biggest known losers in the scandal, facing potential losses of $7.5 billion, more than half the firm’s assets.

Jeffrey Tucker, a Fairfield co-founder and former federal regulator, said in a statement posted on the firm’s Web site: “We have worked with Madoff for nearly 20 years, investing alongside our clients. We had no indication that we and many other firms and private investors were the victims of such a highly sophisticated, massive fraudulent scheme.”

The huge loss comes at a time when the hedge fund industry has already been wounded by the volatile markets. Several weeks ago, Fairfield had halted investor redemptions at two of its other funds, citing the tough market conditions as dozens of hedge funds have done. The firm reported a drop of $2 billion in assets between September and November.

Fairfield was founded in 1983 by Mr. Noel, the former head of international private banking at Chemical Bank, and Mr. Tucker, a former Securities and Exchange Commission official. It grew sharply over the years, attracting investors in Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Mr. Noel first met Mr. Madoff in the 1980s, and Fairfield’s fortunes grew along with the returns Mr. Madoff reported. The two men were very different: Mr. Madoff hailed from eastern Queens and was tied closely to the Jewish community, while Mr. Noel, a native of Tennessee, moved in the Greenwich social scene with his wife, Monica.

“He was a person of superb ethics, and this has to cut him to the quick,” said George L. Ball, a former executive at E. F. Hutton and Prudential-Bache Securities who knows Mr. Noel.

Fairfield boasted about its investigative skills. On its Web site, the firm claimed to investigate hedge fund managers for 6 to 12 months before investing. As part of the process, a team of examiners conducted personal background checks, audited brokerage records and trading reports and interviewed hedge fund executives and compliance officials.

In 2001, Mr. Madoff called Fairfield and invited the firm to inspect his books after two news reports questioned the validity of his returns, according to a person close to Fairfield. Outside auditors hired to inspect Mr. Madoff’s operations concluded that “everything checked out,” this person said.

The Fairfield Greenwich Group “performed comprehensive and conscientious due diligence and risk monitoring,” Marc Kasowitz, a lawyer for Fairfield, said in a statement. “FGG, like so many other Madoff clients, was a victim of a highly sophisticated massive fraud that escaped the detection of top institutional and private investors, industry organizations, auditors, examiners and regulatory authorities.”

Now, Fairfield is seeking to recover what it can from Mr. Madoff.

“It is our intention to aggressively pursue the recovery of all assets related to Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities,” Mr. Tucker said in a statement. “We are also committed to the operation of our continuing funds. We hope to have a better idea of the entire situation as the facts develop.”

Working alongside the federal investigators on Madoff’s 17th floor, staff workers for Lee S. Richards 3d, the court-appointed receiver for the firm, are trying to determine what parts of the firm can keep operating to preserve assets for investors.

“We don’t have anything to report to investors at this time,” he said. “We are doing everything we can to protect the assets of the Madoff entities that are subject to the receivership, and to learn what we can about the operations of those entities.”

Eric Dash, Jennifer 8. Lee, Zachery Kouwe, Michael J. de la Merced and Nelson D. Schwartz contributed reporting.

El retorno triunfante de John Maynard Keynes

AHORA SOMOS TODOS KEYNESIANOS. Incluso la derecha se sumó con un entusiasmo desenfrenado y en una escala que, en otro momento, habría sido  inimaginable.

Para quienes nos adjudicábamos alguna conexión con la tradición keynesiana, éste es un momento de triunfo, después de que nos dejaran en el desierto, prácticamente ignorados, durante más de tres décadas. En un nivel, lo que está sucediendo ahora es un triunfo de la razón y la evidencia sobre la ideología y los intereses. La teoría económica se había dedicado a explicar durante mucho tiempo por qué los mercados sin obstáculos no se autocorregían, por qué se necesitaba regulación, por qué era importante el papel que jugaba el gobierno en la economía.

Pero muchos, especialmente la gente que trabaja en los mercados financieros, presionaban por una suerte de “fundamentalismo de mercado”. Las políticas erróneas resultantes —impulsadas, entre otros, por algunos miembros del equipo económico del presidente electo de Estados Unidos, Barack Obama— ya antes habían infligido enormes costos a los países en desarrollo. El momento de iluminismo se produjo recién cuando esas políticas empezaron a generar costos en Estados Unidos y otros países industriales avanzados.

Keynes sostenía no sólo que los mercados no se autocorregían, sino que, en una crisis pronunciada, la política monetaria probablemente resultaba ineficiente. Se necesitaba una política fiscal. Pero no todas las políticas fiscales son equivalentes. En Estados Unidos hoy, con una montaña de deuda inmobiliaria y un alto nivel de incertidumbre, los recortes impositivos probablemente resulten ineficientes (como lo fueron en Japón en los noventa). Gran parte, si no la mayor parte, del recorte tributario norteamericano del pasado mes de febrero fue destinado al ahorro.

Con la enorme deuda que deja atrás la administración Bush, Estados Unidos debería estar especialmente motivado para obtener el mayor estímulo posible de cada dólar invertido. El legado de subinversión en tecnología e infraestructura, especialmente del tipo verde, y la creciente brecha entre los ricos y los pobres, requieren una congruencia entre el gasto a corto plazo y una visión a largo plazo.

Eso exige la reestructuración de los programas tanto tributario como de gasto. Bajarles los impuestos a los pobres y aumentar los beneficios de desempleo al mismo tiempo que se aumentan los impuestos a los ricos puede estimular la economía, reducir el déficit y disminuir la desigualdad. Reducir el gasto en la guerra de Irak y aumentar el gasto en educación puede incrementar la producción en el corto y largo plazo y, al mismo tiempo, reducir el déficit.

A Keynes le preocupaba la trampa de la liquidez —la incapacidad de las autoridades monetarias para inducir un incremento en la oferta de crédito a fin de aumentar el nivel de actividad económica—. El presidente de la Reserva Federal de Estados Unidos, Ben Bernanke, hizo un esfuerzo por evitar que se culpara a la Fed de agravar esta crisis de la misma manera que se le responsabilizó por la Gran Depresión, asociada con una contracción de la oferta monetaria y el colapso de los bancos.

Y aún así deberíamos leer la historia y la teoría con cuidado: preservar las instituciones financieras no es un fin en sí mismo, sino un medio para alcanzar un fin. Lo importante es el flujo de crédito y la razón por la cual el fracaso de los bancos durante la Gran Depresión fue importante es porque participaban en la determinación de la capacidad crediticia; eran los depositarios de información necesaria para el mantenimiento del flujo de crédito.

Sin embargo, el sistema financiero de Estados Unidos cambió drásticamente desde los años 1930. Muchos de los grandes bancos de Estados Unidos salieron del negocio del “préstamo” y se metieron en el del “movimiento”. Se centraron en comprar activos, reempaquetarlos y venderlos, al mismo tiempo que marcaron un récord de incompetencia a la hora de evaluar el riesgo y analizar la capacidad crediticia. Se invirtieron cientos de miles de millones de dólares para preservar estas instituciones disfuncionales. Nada se hizo para reencauzar sus estructuras perversas de incentivos, que alentaban el comportamiento cortoplacista y la toma excesiva de riesgos. Con recompensas privadas tan marcadamente diferentes de los retornos sociales, no sorprende que la búsqueda del interés personal (codicia) condujera a consecuencias tan destructivas desde un punto de vista social. Ni siquiera velaron por los intereses de sus propios accionistas.

Mientras tanto, es muy poco lo que se está haciendo para ayudar a los bancos que efectivamente hacen lo que se supone que deben hacer los bancos: prestar dinero y evaluar la capacidad crediticia.

El gobierno federal asumió billones de dólares en pasivos y riesgos. Al rescatar al sistema financiero, tanto como en política fiscal, necesitamos preocuparnos por el “retorno de la inversión”. De lo contrario, el déficit —que se duplicó en ocho años— aumentará aún más.

En septiembre se decía que el gobierno recuperaría su dinero, con intereses.  A medida que se incrementó el rescate, cada vez resulta más evidente que éste era simplemente un ejemplo más de una mala apreciación del riesgo por parte de los mercados financieros —como lo vienen haciendo consistentemente en los últimos años—. Los términos de los rescates de Bernanke y Paulson eran desventajosos para los contribuyentes y, aún así, a pesar de su volumen, hicieron poco para reactivar el préstamo.

La presión neoliberal para una desregulación también satisfacía algunos intereses. A los mercados financieros les fue bien a través de la liberalización del mercado de capitales. Permitirle a Estados Unidos vender sus productos financieros riesgosos y participar en una especulación en todo el mundo puede haber beneficiado a sus compañías, aunque esto les impusiera grandes costos a otros.

Hoy, el riesgo es que se utilice y se abuse de las nuevas doctrinas keynesianas para satisfacer algunos de estos mismos intereses. ¿Acaso quienes presionaron por la desregulación hace diez años aprendieron la lección? ¿O simplemente querrán imponer reformas cosméticas —el mínimo requerido para justificar los rescates de megabillones de dólares—? ¿Hubo un cambio de parecer o solamente un cambio de estrategia? Después de todo, en el contexto de hoy, perseguir políticas keynesianas parece incluso más rentable que ir detrás del fundamentalismo de mercado.

Hace diez años, en el momento de la crisis financiera asiática, se discutió mucho sobre la necesidad de reformar la arquitectura financiera global. Poco se hizo. Es imperativo que no sólo respondamos adecuadamente a la crisis actual, sino que emprendamos reformas a largo plazo que serán necesarias si queremos crear una economía global más estable, más próspera y equitativa.

El Tiempo| 13 Dic 2008

Por: Joseph E. Stiglitz

AHORA SOMOS TODOS KEYNESIANOS. Incluso la derecha se sumó con un entusiasmo desenfrenado y en una escala que, en otro momento, habría sido  inimaginable.

Para quienes nos adjudicábamos alguna conexión con la tradición keynesiana, éste es un momento de triunfo, después de que nos dejaran en el desierto, prácticamente ignorados, durante más de tres décadas. En un nivel, lo que está sucediendo ahora es un triunfo de la razón y la evidencia sobre la ideología y los intereses.La teoría económica se había dedicado a

explicar durante mucho tiempo por qué los mercados sin obstáculos no se autocorregían, por qué se necesitaba regulación, por qué era importante el papel que jugaba el gobierno en la economía. Pero muchos, especialmente la gente que trabaja en los mercados financieros, presionaban por una suerte de “fundamentalismo de mercado”. Las políticas erróneas resultantes —impulsadas, entre otros, por algunos miembros del equipo económico del presidente electo de Estados Unidos, Barack Obama— ya antes habían infligido enormes costos a los países en desarrollo. El momento de iluminismo se produjo recién cuando esas políticas empezaron a generar costos en Estados Unidos y otros países industriales avanzados.

Keynes sostenía no sólo que los mercados no se autocorregían, sino que, en una crisis pronunciada, la política monetaria probablemente resultaba ineficiente. Se necesitaba una política fiscal. Pero no todas las políticas fiscales son equivalentes. En Estados Unidos hoy, con una montaña de deuda inmobiliaria y un alto nivel de incertidumbre, los recortes impositivos probablemente resulten ineficientes (como lo fueron en Japón en los noventa). Gran parte, si no la mayor parte, del recorte tributario norteamericano del pasado mes de febrero fue destinado al ahorro.

Con la enorme deuda que deja atrás la administración Bush, Estados Unidos debería estar especialmente motivado para obtener el mayor estímulo posible de cada dólar invertido. El legado de subinversión en tecnología e infraestructura, especialmente del tipo verde, y la creciente brecha entre los ricos y los pobres, requieren una congruencia entre el gasto a corto plazo y una visión a largo plazo.
Eso exige la reestructuración de los programas tanto tributario como de gasto. Bajarles los impuestos a los pobres y aumentar los beneficios de desempleo al mismo tiempo que se aumentan los impuestos a los ricos puede estimular la economía, reducir el déficit y disminuir la desigualdad. Reducir el gasto en la guerra de Irak y aumentar el gasto en educación puede incrementar la producción en el corto y largo plazo y, al mismo tiempo, reducir el déficit.

A Keynes le preocupaba la trampa de la liquidez —la incapacidad de las autoridades monetarias para inducir un incremento en la oferta de crédito a fin de aumentar el nivel de actividad económica—. El presidente de la Reserva Federal de Estados Unidos, Ben Bernanke, hizo un esfuerzo por evitar que se culpara a la Fed de agravar esta crisis de la misma manera que se le responsabilizó por la Gran Depresión, asociada con una contracción de la oferta monetaria y el colapso de los bancos.
Y aún así deberíamos leer la historia y la teoría con cuidado: preservar las instituciones financieras no es un fin en sí mismo, sino un medio para alcanzar un fin. Lo importante es el flujo de crédito y la razón por la cual el fracaso de los bancos durante la Gran Depresión fue importante es porque participaban en la determinación de la capacidad crediticia; eran los depositarios de información necesaria para el mantenimiento del flujo de crédito.

Sin embargo, el sistema financiero de Estados Unidos cambió drásticamente desde los años 1930. Muchos de los grandes bancos de Estados Unidos salieron del negocio del “préstamo” y se metieron en el del “movimiento”. Se centraron en comprar activos, reempaquetarlos y venderlos, al mismo tiempo que marcaron un récord de incompetencia a la hora de evaluar el riesgo y analizar la capacidad crediticia. Se invirtieron cientos de miles de millones de dólares para preservar estas instituciones disfuncionales. Nada se hizo para reencauzar sus estructuras perversas de incentivos, que alentaban el comportamiento cortoplacista y la toma excesiva de riesgos. Con recompensas privadas tan marcadamente diferentes de los retornos sociales, no sorprende que la búsqueda del interés personal (codicia) condujera a consecuencias tan destructivas desde un punto de vista social. Ni siquiera velaron por los intereses de sus propios accionistas.

Mientras tanto, es muy poco lo que se está haciendo para ayudar a los bancos que efectivamente hacen lo que se supone que deben hacer los bancos: prestar dinero y evaluar la capacidad crediticia.

El gobierno federal asumió billones de dólares en pasivos y riesgos. Al rescatar al sistema financiero, tanto como en política fiscal, necesitamos preocuparnos por el “retorno de la inversión”. De lo contrario, el déficit —que se duplicó en ocho años— aumentará aún más.

En septiembre se decía que el gobierno recuperaría su dinero, con intereses. A medida que se incrementó el rescate, cada vez resulta más evidente que éste era simplemente un ejemplo más de una mala apreciación del riesgo por parte de los mercados financieros —como lo vienen haciendo consistentemente en los últimos años—. Los términos de los rescates de Bernanke y Paulson eran desventajosos para los contribuyentes y, aún así, a pesar de su volumen, hicieron poco para reactivar el préstamo.

La presión neoliberal para una desregulación también satisfacía algunos intereses. A los mercados financieros les fue bien a través de la liberalización del mercado de capitales. Permitirle a Estados Unidos vender sus productos financieros riesgosos y participar en una especulación en todo el mundo puede haber beneficiado a sus compañías, aunque esto les impusiera grandes costos a otros.

Hoy, el riesgo es que se utilice y se abuse de las nuevas doctrinas keynesianas para satisfacer algunos de estos mismos intereses. ¿Acaso quienes presionaron por la desregulación hace diez años aprendieron la lección? ¿O simplemente querrán imponer reformas cosméticas —el mínimo requerido para justificar los rescates de megabillones de dólares—? ¿Hubo un cambio de parecer o solamente un cambio de estrategia? Después de todo, en el contexto de hoy, perseguir políticas keynesianas parece incluso más rentable que ir detrás del fundamentalismo de mercado.
Hace diez años, en el momento de la crisis financiera asiática, se discutió mucho sobre la necesidad de reformar la arquitectura financiera global. Poco se hizo. Es imperativo que no sólo respondamos adecuadamente a la crisis actual, sino que emprendamos reformas a largo plazo que serán necesarias si queremos crear una economía global más estable, más próspera y equitativa.

* Premio Nobel de Economía en 2001.
© Project Syndicate 1995–2008