FedUpUSA

Archive for July 16th, 2010

Side Note: Interesting that the two morons that caused the Fannie and Freddie Mortgage Crash are the two that authored this bill….

Without spending a single dime, the Obama administration did more yesterday to create jobs for the U.S. economy than it has throughout its entire existence. With the single stroke of a pen, President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill that set in motion 243 new formal rule-makings by 11 different federal agencies. Each of the 243 rule-makings will employ hundreds of banking lobbyists as they try to shape what the final actual laws will look like. And when the rules are finally written, thousands of lawyers will bill millions of hours as the richest incumbent financial firms that caused the last crisis figure out how to game the new system. Yesterday, the Washington law firm Jones Day snapped up the Securities and Exchange Commission head enforcement division lawyer, and J.P. Morgan Chase, one of the biggest U.S. banks by assets, assigned more than 100 teams to examine the legislation. University of Massachusetts political science professor Thomas Ferguson tells The Christian Science Monitor:

By delegating so much to the regulators, Congress is inviting everyone interested in the outcome to make more campaign contributions, as they intervene in the regulatory process to influence the regulators. Nothing is settled. It’s a gold mine for members of Congress.

So if the richest big banks, lawyers, lobbyists and Congress were the big winners yesterday, who are the losers? Small banks, entrepreneurs and you.

Smaller community banks do not have the same resources that the Goldman Sachs of the world do to hire armies of lawyers and lobbyists to shape and comply with new regulations. The cost of compliance will eat up a much larger share of small bank revenue. Jim MacPhee, CEO of Kalamazoo County State Bank in Michigan and chairman of the Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA), told USA Today: “We weren’t part of the subprime (mortgage) meltdown. Why throw more regulations at us?”

Entrepreneurs take a double hit in the Dodd-Frank bill. First, by forcing banks to raise more capital it will now be more difficult for them to make new loans for small businesses. But more important is the regulatory threat for new products. Across the world mobile device and telecommunications firms are beginning to compete against credit card companies and banks to reshape how consumers buy products and manage their finances. Will the Dodd-Frank Consumer Financial Protection Bureau even allow these services to come to market? Will cell phone firms have to be regulated exactly like financial firms? Nobody knows the answer to these questions. Here is what we do know: it will be the banks and telco firms with the best lawyers and lobbyists – not the best entrepreneurs – that come out on top in this battle.

Then there is what the Dodd-Frank does not do: it does nothing to stop future government bailouts. Instead, it makes the TARP bailout system permanent. The bill’s “orderly liquidation” process empowers regulators to seize any firm they deem a threat to our financial system and liquidate them. These powers are subject to insufficient judicial review and do nothing to ensure that the firms’ creditors won’t receive 100% of their irresponsibly lent money back in future taxpayer funded bailouts. And speaking of taxpayer-funded bailouts, the bill does nothing to address Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose activities were instrumental to the financial crisis.

Back in 1994, Jonathan Rauch wrote in his book Government’s End: “Economic thinkers have recognized for generations that every person has two ways to become wealthier. One is to produce more, the other is to capture more of what others produce. … Washington looks increasingly like a public-works jobs program for lawyers and lobbyists, a profit center for professionals who are in business for themselves.” The Dodd-Frank bill is the perfect extension of Washington as “a public-works jobs program for lawyers and lobbyists.” Instead of encouraging the U.S. economy to invest in engineers, technology and new products, it requires firms to invest in lawyers and lobbyists just to stay alive. It will do nothing to help create new wealth or new net jobs in the economy, but will transfer more wealth to lobbying and law firms in Washington, D.C.

The Heritage Blog

During the past week there has been a flurry of Federal Reserve reports and commentary concerning the levels of credit in the current economy. The two most notable were:

On July 8th they reported that the level of seasonally adjusted outstanding U.S. Consumer Credit (their G.19 report) decreased during May by $9.1 billion, representing an annualized rate of credit contraction of 4.5%. Although even this change is above the average for the preceding twelve months, it is much smaller than a quiet revision to the previously published April U.S. Consumer Credit figure — which is now reported to have decreased by $14.9 billion (a 7.3% annualized contraction rate).

To put these numbers in perspective, consumer credit has contracted during 15 of the past 16 reported months, and is down a record total $148 billion over that time span. The $14.9 billion in credit ‘lost’ during just April is the second highest monthly amount in history, second only to the $23.4 billion ‘lost’ during November, 2009. And the nearly 6% cumulative reduction in consumer credit over the past 16 months is the largest (on a percentage basis) for any 16 month span since September 1944 — when FDR was still in the White House and people were buying War Bonds instead of tightly rationed consumer goods.

On July 12th Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke noted that small businesses were not getting the loans that they need to create new jobs. The Federal Reserve’s own data reports that lending to small businesses dropped to below $670 billion in Q1 2010, down about $40 billion from two years prior.

The New York Times reported Mr. Bernanke wondered: ‘How much of this reduction has been driven by weaker demand for loans from small businesses, how much by a deterioration in the financial condition of small businesses during the economic downturn, and how much by restricted credit availability? No doubt all three factors have played a role.’

What does this mean?

The reported credit contraction is real, at historic levels and on-going. Although the Federal Reserve does not yet know whether the most recent consumer credit contraction is the result of consumer pay-downs or credit company write-offs, the fact remains that consumer spending and the money supply are both being impacted negatively as consumers (one way or another) clean up their personal balance sheets.

Small businesses, which account for over 60% of gross job creation, are not – for whatever reason – tapping into the credit necessary to create those jobs.

On July 6th we reported that the nearly relentless decline in our ‘Daily Growth Index’ had leveled off, but cautioned that the index should be viewed from a longer perspective. Since then the decline has resumed:

(Click on chart for fuller resolution)

When the most recent period of contraction in our ‘Daily Growth Index’ (January 15, 2010 to date) is charted along with the similar ‘Daily Growth Index’ contraction events from 2006 and 2008 (with the first day of each contraction aligned on the left-hand axis) the relative severity of each contraction can be visualized.

(Click on chart for fuller resolution)

One measure of the true severity of an economic slowdown is the ‘area under the curve’ (or ‘above’ the curve in this case) swept out by the ‘Daily Growth Index’ over time. This area is just the average magnitude of the decline times the duration of the contraction event. During the 2006 slowdown this area was about 136 percentage-days of contraction, while the 2008 event was much more severe at 793 percentage-days. The 2010 event has now reached 288 percentage-days, over twice the severity of 2006 and well over a third of 2008 ‘Great Recession’ — and it is still growing.

The key point to notice in the above chart is that if the current 2010 curve continues its current course, in about 20 days the 2010 slowdown will be more severe on a day-to-day basis than the 2008 ‘Great Recession’ was at the same point in its respective evolution. Unless the economy begins to pick up quickly, a double dip is likely — with the second round milder but lingering longer than the first.

Note: A more complete list of historical Commentary can be found on our History Page

Consumer Metrics Institute