Ivory tower vs. real world part deux

The curse of politics

Financial crises can drag on because efficient remedies are politically unpalatable

AS THEIR banking crisis approaches Japanese proportions, Americans can take comfort from the fact that their political culture is more capable of finding a solution. Or can they? Today’s anti-banker backlash bears a striking resemblance to the voter outrage that stymied efforts to fix Japan’s banking system in the 1990s. Indeed, an enduring lesson of financial crises is how political constraints interfere with economically efficient solutions.

For example, America’s Treasury and the Federal Reserve began examining options to use public money to buy up illiquid mortgage assets and to inject capital into financial institutions shortly after rescuing Bear Stearns, a failing investment bank, in March 2008. But it was another six months before they acted on those plans. “There was no way we could go to Congress without the American people understanding we faced a crisis,” says Henry Paulson, the treasury secretary at the time.

Sure enough, not until the failure of Lehman Brothers sparked a global panic in September did Mr Paulson and Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, ask Congress to authorise an outlay of $700 billion to support the system. Some say Mr Paulson should have tried harder to acquire the funds before the Lehman crisis. Perhaps, but it is doubtful he would have succeeded. “Even at the height of the crisis, [that] proved almost too hard to do,” he notes.

Phillip Swagel, an economist who will join Georgetown University this autumn, writes in a review* of his experience as an aide to Mr Paulson from December 2006 to January 2009 that market participants and academic economists often proposed solutions that glossed over real-world political and legal obstacles. Some academics argued bank creditors should be forced to swap their debt for equity, for example. But Mr Swagel notes that is not legally possible without a change in the bankruptcy code, a tortuous political process. Similarly, to reduce housing foreclosures the Treasury and Congress focused on reducing interest rates for struggling homeowners, even though this would be less effective than subsidising write-downs of mortgage principal. But politicians and voters would have seen that as an unacceptable bail-out of some undeserving homeowners.

Economists have long studied how institutional constraints interfere with efficient economic choices, such as when special interests erect barriers to entry in product markets. Such constraints have received relatively little attention in the burgeoning literature on financial crises. Yet a closer examination shows that many of the same political obstacles crop up from one crisis to the next. Japan’s Ministry of Finance first sought private-sector solutions to its banking crisis so as not to arouse voter anger by using taxpayers’ money. When those solutions failed, the government proposed in 1995 spending a mere ¥685 billion ($7 billion) to take over the problem loans of seven jusen, or mortgage-finance companies. The backlash was intense. Opposition parties called for the finance minister’s resignation and staged a sit-in at parliament. In one poll, 87% of voters disapproved. The measure eventually passed, but the experience was so searing that it discouraged the government from tackling the banks’ much bigger bad loans until 1997.

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