Vanity Fair has an excerpt from the new Michael Lewis book that chronicles Michael Burry, an independent fund manager who foresaw the collapse of subprime backed assets and made a fortune shorting them. Today, Burry has a piece in the Times taking Greenspan to task for failing to foresee it.
Back in 2005 and 2006, I argued as forcefully as I could, in letters to clients of my investment firm, Scion Capital, that the mortgage market would melt down in the second half of 2007, causing substantial damage to the economy. My prediction was based on my research into the residential mortgage market and mortgage-backed securities. After studying the regulatory filings related to those securities, I waited for the lenders to offer the most risky mortgages conceivable to the least qualified buyers. I knew that would mark the beginning of the end of the housing bubble; it would mean that prices had risen — with the expansion of easy mortgage lending — as high as they could go.
Atrios highlights a passage that I missed the first time:
Since then, I have often wondered why nobody in Washington showed any interest in hearing exactly how I arrived at my conclusions that the housing bubble would burst when it did and that it could cripple the big financial institutions. A week ago I learned the answer when Al Hunt of Bloomberg Television, who had read Michael Lewis’s book, “The Big Short,” which includes the story of my predictions, asked Mr. Greenspan directly. The former Fed chairman responded that my insights had been a “statistical illusion.” Perhaps, he suggested, I was just a supremely lucky flipper of coins.
(emphasis mine)
And everyone who opposed the Iraq war was just a supremely lucky pacifist hippie. And everyone who warned that George W. Bush was too lazy/incurious to be a successful president was just an unhinged partisan.
Derelict
We have, indeed, hit a very, very strange point in our society. Right now, being correct about something is a serious detriment to advancement, while being consistently wrong in the most spectacular fashion possible (preferably with the result of your error including lots of dead people and homelessness) is proff of how people need to take you seriously.
See also, Rubini, Nouriel
Mr Furious
Whereas, Greenspan was what? A supremely ignorant/arrogant man who thought he could will a coin showing heads to flip to tails by staring at it?
Undercover FBI Agent DougJ
See also, Rubini, Nouriel
Krugman and DeLong say that, in fairness, Rubini cried wolf too many times before.
Brent
It’s not being wrong that gets you tagged as a serious authority, it is sucking up to the current establishment agenda in the most servile manner, while denouncing anti-establishment critics in such a manner so as discourage it. The ol’ acceptable/fringe window. In other words, knob gobbling the naked emporer while hand jobbing other serious analysts waiting in line.
kansi
I can’t believe anyone seriously listens to these morans anymore. Wasn’t “The Maestro” forced to apologize for being so wrong in front of Waxman’s committee? And he is still considered an expert? Al Hunt should be the next to apologize.
Derelict
Rubini is just one of many who were right. Duncan Black called the crisis long before it hit. So did Billmon.
Hell, even I was discussing the coming implosion on DeLong’s blog back in 2006.
Greenspan is willfully ignorant, and does that to suit his own purposes. We note that during his time under Bush I, deficits did not matter at all. Until Clinton became president, when getting the deficit under control through spending cuts became the top priority (remember Greenspan fought hard against the Bush I/Clinton tax hike). Greenspan pushed hard for every more spending cuts (in everything except defense) from 1993 through 2000.
And then something magical happened: Bush II was installed in office. Suddenly, deficits not only didn’t matter, but paying down the debt became a bad thing. Greenspan actually came out and said exactly that to support the Bush tax cuts.
The housing bubble was Greenspan’ desperate attempt to shore up the economy in any way possible so that Bush would not be the first post-war president to leave office with the economy substantially smaller than it was when he took office.
eric
See Baker, Dean.
Also, the issue is not about just being right, it is about the perceived timing of being right. The fact that Baker had been talking about the real estate crash for years DISCREDITS him because, in their eyes, it is just like predicting a meteor will hit earth, but just not sayign when. But the difference is in the economy there are artificial things you can do that forestall the problem from materializing AND maximizing its impact when it happens. Ladies and gentleman, yooooouuuuuuuuuur financial markets.
jcricket
What #3 said – This guy does seem smart, and I’m supremely dismayed our current people “in charge” of reforming the financial system seem depressingly unaware of what caused the current mess or how to avoid it in the future. For me the list is fairly simple:
* Enforce existing regulations
* Bring back boring and simple regulations that worked for 50 years (Canada’s 4 major banks are all “too big to fail”, but b/c they’re just banks, a failure of exotic investment firms doesn’t hurt Canada as much)
* Lower leverage limits
* Make sure to regulate the entire banking “system”
* Increases taxes a lot on higher levels of earnings (add brackets at $500k and $1m) so at least we have revenue to fund unemployment and social services after the next crash
Back on point, there are a lot of doomsayers out there, and 99% of the time they’re wrong. Things are always supposed to crash, and sometimes they do, but usually not for specifically the reasons, or at specifically the time that the doomsayers predict. Moreover, once the crash does occur, the doomsayers usually move into “this is the big realignment” mode, where they predict massive shifts in the US economy, permanent decline for our standard of living, etc.
There have been twelve recessions since the Great Depression. During each of them the same rhetoric has been trotted out, and in each time, they’ve been wrong – the economy has recovered, and we’ve (at a macro level) moved on to better things. Maybe this time will be different, but I’m betting on eventual recovery.
Zifnab25
I don’t know about that. Mike Lewis appears to be doing fairly well. Aside from making a killing in the markets, he’s even got a sweet book deal.
Being correct is only a serious detriment when you pitch your ideas to the corporate media or the conservative lawmakers. It’s only a problem if you want to slot yourself into the status quo power structure. But, as an outsider, being correct seems to be a very effective method of earning some fame and a great deal of fortune.
The real problem in all this is that being right might turn a huge profit, financially, but being wrong doesn’t matter so long as you are TBTF. You can get praised for success, but you’ll never get derided for failure. The government will just float your billionare ass another pile of poker chips to keep gambling.
It’s the “You Can’t Lose” mentality that is making such a mess.
El Cid
People should read the accompanying NYT op-ed by 3 academics who tried to warn regulators that they were simply continuing the Enron game of taking advantage of both deregulatory environments and anti-regulatory regulators to keep fictitiously turning debt into corporate assets.
But no — Big Finance and the Phil Gramm generation of anti-regulatory thieving ideologues fantasies had won:
See? We need this ‘financial innovation’ turning shit into shinola, and any old school, Stone Age ‘big gubmit’ approach in which regulators aren’t full of shit and believe Randian shit about corporate hacks is clearly not letting our economy modernize.
This column may be one of the clearest, most timely discussions of the insane gambling portion of the recent Reaganite economic collapse I’ve seen.
fraught
Exactly. I remember it and because of Atrios I could see it all unfolding as if it were a chapter in a terrifying novel. Greenspan is as laughable as an economist as Ayn Rand is as a novelist.
fraught
as Ayn Rand is as a novelist
salacious crumb
Bill Clinton, everyone in the media, and most people with an Ivy League degree were all busy blowing Greenspan and admiring and complimenting everyone else who blew Greenspan.
Here is another thing that everyone misses: Even Greenspan supported the Iraq war. Ordinary Americans supported it. Fine. Im willing to give them the benefit of the doubt because the media trumped up the charges of WMD and most Americans wanna believe their President. its not something I agree with but ok, whatever. But Alan fucking Greenspan?! this is the guy who is supposed to have advanced critical and analytical thinking to the nth degree and even he wasnt able/willing to look at the rush to war activity and take a critical look at it.
At the end of the day he was just another partisan Republican hack too in thrall with the idea that people were in thrall and awe of him and he got his rocks off by being fellated by Summers, bankers and members of Congress and Bush.
El Cid
As a mere peasant, let me just say that at the time of the whole series of Enron-style collapses from ridiculous levels of state- and nation-supported fraud schemes in the name of bullshit fantasy deregulation and ‘innovation’, not all the business whining in the world about Sarbanes-Oxley and poor Arthur Anderson and shit made me think that anyone had taken anywhere near the steps needed to clean out the rot.
On the other hand, we have people telling us that our senses are wrong, that these market interactions are much, much more subtle than quantum physics (so are novels, big deal), and don’t pay any attention to that screaming feeling you get by watching the structures around you crack at the base.
Balconesfault
If the collapse had really been forseeable, then Greenspan would have forseen it, no?
That he didn’t meant that it’s simply luck if anyone else did.
mattH
Yet when they do, they are ignored, and if you get it wrong, in the face of evidence that someone else pegs to a T, the person who got it wrong is excused while the person who had it nailed is marginalized. The housing bubble was ephemeral, purely speculative in nature. The tech bubble of the 90s at least had some underlying factors that have had tangible, long term effects on productivity and created value. Show me where the underlying value is in the housing bubble that it was based on. I bet you can’t. And that short of major supports from government, housing values fall back to their pre-bubble value, adjusted for inflation from 2001, once all the gimmick mortgages and “financial innovations” have their run.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
That self-same Al Hunt, who I think is actually one of the less bad of his ilk, opined in 2009 that he had expected Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to be among the more thoughtful and insightful (I think those were the words he used) critics of the new Obama administration. This was after Susan Smith, the “sick” and “unpatriotic” memo from GOPAC, Max Cleland, Swift Boating, Valerie Plame on and on and literally ad nauseum.
I know Villagers mock us talking about, well, the Village, and cocktail weenies, but what other explanation there be? Villagers always choose to believe the person they meet socially over what their lying eyes tell them about that person’s public operations. “Oh, s/he’s not really like that, I know him/her, our kids play soccer together”
WereBear
I’ve been curled up reading Freedom From Fear on my iPod touch, thanks to a recc here this weekend.
It’s downright eerie, reading the same/old from a distance of eighty years ago. It’s one of the things which convinces me we dodged a big Depression bullet with the actions of the Obama administration.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
d’oh. I shouldn’t read on half a cup of coffee. I thought it was Hunt who called him a lucky coin flipper
Linda Featheringill
There is a myth that the Fat Cats are in control of capitalism. Some people find comfort in this while others mutter about cabals and conspiracies. The truth is that capitalism is inherently chaotic. Some folks might be able to discern where it is going next but they cannot really control it.
But nobody in the establishment – NOBODY – wants to admit that publicly. It may be true that these guys don’t want to admit it to themselves, either. Maybe they are not lying when they hand out assurances but instead are deep in denial.
QrazyQat
Greenspan (and so many others) have to believe these things for them to continue to believe they themselves are not, you know, kinda dumb.
jcricket
I will grant you this. It’s as infuriating as it is that those who were spectacularly wrong on Iraq getting off scott-free and still out there spewing their other fact free nonsense. Needs to be some “truth and reconciliation”, imho.
The problem is there are those that were truly right, and those that were more of a “stopped clock” kind of way. Distinguishing between those who perpetually change the supposed reason America is doomed – not just to crash, but also never to recover – and those that have a good argument that we’re “currently” wrong/unsustainable/headed for a cliff is important.
I guess what I’m saying is going from irrational exuberance to unwarranted, permanent, pessimism isn’t that smart.
El Cid
On this:
They may not know exactly what will happen, but they know damn well what kind of game they’re playing and what sorts of deadly activities they’re encouraging when they collaborate on a 30 year trend of removing all protections and supporting scurrilous gambling and juggling by our major financial institutions.
Mine regulators may not know what would happen where, but if you (and to a degree this actually happened) continually work against mine safety regulations and install regulators who think their job is to get out of the mine companies’ way, what do you think will happen? It’s not fundamentally different in finance from any other valuable yet potentially calamitous industry.
Reaganites knew exactly whom they were favoring when they went on the attack against food safety inspectors using every tool they had. They might not have known which deadly outbreak would occur where, but they knew whose interests they favored over those risks. Thank them in part for American chicken famous for vastly more salmonella contaminated poultry products than those of more sanely regulated nations.
They just don’t give anywhere near a shit about long term consequences for the citizenry and nation compared to the massive, massive enrichment of the top tiers of the nation’s super-rich.
That’s not cynical. It’s how power works unless there’s cause to work against those tendencies.
scav
Linda Featheringill: I’d mostly * agree, except that some people are more out of control than others. Funny how that sentence works either way you read it.
edit: * with qualifications, bien sur.
Punchy
And in twenty years, you watch. It’ll be Saint Greenspan to Republicans. There’ll be a line a score deep waiting to fellate his dead corpse. The dumb-fu is strong with the true believers.
Linda Featheringill
To El Cid:
Anything, but ANYTHING, for a bigger profit? And everything else be damned?
Well, that is difficult to argue with. So I won’t.
I still think that the economic system is more out of control than the Powers That Be want to admit, but you do have a point.
bemused
Greenspan & the others were willfully obtuse. It was all extremely good for them so they didn’t want to know or if they did know, give a rat’s ass about the consequences for the country or the rest of us. And so it will go on if they aren’t watched like hawks.
El Cid
Linda Feathergill:
I don’t disagree that it’s out of simple control, but you can either work to reinforce what helpful and safety-oriented controls you do have, or you can work at destroying and removing those, and declare yourself the victim of complexity should huge problems occur.
JohnMcF
“As a nation, we cannot afford to live with Mr. Greenspan’s way of thinking. The truth is, he should have seen what was coming and offered a sober, apolitical warning. Everyone would have listened; when he talked about the economy, the world hung on every single word.”
Is that really true, would “everyone” have listened?
It’s always been very hard to get people to listen to something they don’t want to hear.
And is there such a thing as an, “apolitical warning,” these days?
Linda Featheringill
You can probably control how much protection you have against the system going haywire.
For example, if you can only purchase a little bit on margin, you are more likely to land on your feet if the market falls suddenly.
A lot of “controls” work on this principle. But that does not mean they are controlling the market.
[BTW – we are getting a bit theoretical here, aren’t we? How stimulating!]
scav
Yea for theoretical! Another thing that always irks me is when economic laws are supposed to work like laws of gravity. Practically, it’s a socio-cultural system. If geography worked like economics, we’d be bull-dozing and tefloning the entire planet so that the real world better matched our expectations based on modelling of the Isotropic Plane.
OK, The Deification and Reification of Simplifying Assumptions rant for 2010, check.
Linda Featheringill
Scav:
Ditto.
Citizen_X
Amen to that. Economics–especially the Randian/Chicago school–is treated in our politics like it’s the hardest of the hard sciences. In reality, it is the softest of the soft sciences, as it is the most dependent upon social constructs and assumptions.
KRK
Thanks for the earworm, Doug. Excellent choice.
Svensker
Heck, my husband and I — both ordinary schlubs the two of us, with no financial expertise — foresaw it back in the early 2000s. We were looking around at crappy little houses selling for $500,000 that only a few years before had been selling for $150,000 and we knew there was a bubble. And we knew that Wall Street was operating as though the bubble weren’t a bubble (a broker friend told us that with the internet, bubbles couldn’t really do damage anymore and that stuff could only go up from now on. Seriously.) And we knew things would be bad when the bubble popped. It was frigging obvious.
Let those who have eyes to see and ears to hear…
PanAmerican
J Michael Neal’s post at Yglesias on the real estate bubble is interesting.
Shorter billmon: “The whole damn system is out of order! We’re gonna stick it to the man….man….just as soon as we turn in our expense reports from Davos.”
morzer
What troubles me in all of this is that we seem faced with two unpalatable and unsustainable choices:
1) Either we commit to a series of expensive and increasing unaffordable bailouts, which will ultimately be impossible to sustain, both financially and politically
or
2) A truly epic crash is going to happen, once a bailout if refused/impossible to afford, which, with the longterm level of unemployment already unacceptably high, is going to produce a Depression of truly astounding proportions. Just what that might do to the US and the global economy is almost unthinkable.
Unfortunately, the logical progression of 1) leads ineluctably to 2).
PhoenixRising
I think the Kick the Can plan is working well, don’t you? Now those of us who DID foresee this crisis and therefore are net taxpayers in the current economy are going to subsidize banks writing down the LTV balances they ought to have looked at in 2005-06. This will enlongate the crash and perhaps even lead to a bounce.
My wife and I walked out of the closing on our re-fi in April 2006 just stunned by the complete lack of controls in the system. We could have tapped out our equity and bought some very nice toys with the change, but we were unwilling to take those kinds of chances on our home’s ‘value’.
We drove straight home and sold all our investments in financial stocks. Put that money in CDs, which earn about 2%, which beats -40% by a lot. As a result, we have interest income which we pay taxes on…to subsidize Wells Fargo.
Derelict
Some of us remember reading the Irvine Housing Blog long ago and noting that the incentives for local bankers had completely reversed: It was now against their own interests to actually vet load applicants, since doing so might disqualify and applicant and thus cut into their fees. On the other hand, approving even the worst applicant allowed them to book their fee–and they had no downside whatever if the load went bad instantly.
mai naem
I am waiting for some of the bigwigs at the banks to do a perp walk. Ofcourse, it isn’t going to happen. Some poor black guy with an arrest warrant for an unpaid traffic ticket will be doing the perp walk but never a rich Wall Street banker.
mattH
@jcricket
Permanent skepticism, not pessimism is imo the answer.
As for evaluating who’s a stopped clock vs right on the facts, I think it’s simple, if not easy. The “stopped clocks” tend to be obstreperous to the point of hysteria, even to things other than what they may have been right on; a tendency to uncritically accept facts that support their positions and reject those that don’t; they tend to proclaim authoritatively about things they have no expertise in.
Those who are consistently right, besides that fact, also tend to be the opposite; measured responses, critical of facts, speaking with confidence only about those things they have expertise in. I’m sure I could come up with more, but those are generally enough to make a reasonably quick evaluation of who’s right and who’s lucky. The ability to admit mistakes maybe a great signifier.
Dong Heinlein
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