• Immediately establish a single, Euro area-wide bank deposit guarantee scheme.  A single currency must absolutely ensure that a Euro held as money in Greece be the same as a Euro held as money in Germany.  That means that retail and commercial deposits in each should be backed by the same guarantee.  I have no firm opinion on how it should be funded.  The classic manner is through a fee on banks proportional to their deposits, but if Euro area countries ultimately prefer to use a Tobin-style tax on transactions, that’s up to them.  Just get the thing up and running.  Of course, a unified deposit guarantee also requires a unified resolution authority in the event of an insolvent bank collapsing.  There are many and varied forms that fiscal union can take; this is the most urgent of them all.  I am shocked that this does not already exist.

• The ECB should switch from targetting current inflation to expected future inflation.  The Bank of England already does this.  Accepting that any effect of monetary policy on inflation will come through with a lag (or at least acknowledging that current inflation is backward looking), they “look through” current inflation to what they expect it to be over the coming few years.  This is important.  Current inflation in the Euro area — i.e. the rate of change over the last 12 months — is at 3%.  On the face of it, that might make an ECB policymaker nervous, but looking ahead, market forecasts for average inflation over the coming five years are as low as 0.85% per year in Germany.  They will be much lower for the rest of the Euro area.  Monetary policy in the Euro area is much, much too tight at the moment.  At the very least, (a) interest rates should be lowered; and (b) the ECB should announce their shift in focus toward forward inflation.

• The ECB should start to speak more, publicly, about forms of current inflation that most affect future inflation.  This follows on from my previous point, but is still logically distinct.  The Fed likes to focus on “core” inflation, stripped of items with particularly volatile price movements.  I don’t much care whether it is non-volatile prices or nominal wages, or even nominal GDP.  I just want the ECB to be speaking more about something other than headline CPI, because it is those other things that feed into future headlines.

• The ECB’s provision of liquidity to the banking system, while currently large, is not nearly large enough.  The fact that “German Bunds trade below the deposit facility rate at the ECB and well below the Overnight Rate” is clear evidence of this.  I currently have no opinion on whether this ought to be in the form of increasing the duration of loans to Euro area banks, relaxing the collateral requirements for loans or working with member countries’ treasuries to increase the provision of collateral.  I certainly believe (see my second point above) that interest rates should be lowered.  The point, as far as is possible, is to make replacing lost market funding with ECB funding more attractive to banks than deleveraging.

• A great deal of Euro area sovereign debt is unsustainable; hair-cuts are inevitable and they should be imposed as soon as possible (but, really, this requires that a unified bank resolution authority be established first).  The argument for delaying relies on banks’ ability to first build up a cushion of capital through ongoing profitability.  When banks are instead deleveraging, the problem is made worse by waiting.

• Credit Default Swaps must be permitted to trigger.  The crisis may have its origins in the the profligacy of wayward sovereigns (frankly, I think the origins lie in the Euro framers not appreciating the power of incentives), but the fundamental aspect of the crisis itself is that various financial assets, previously regarded as safe, are coming to be thought of as risky.  By denying market participants the opportunity to obtain insurance, Euro area policymakers are making the problem worse, not better.  Market willingness to lend to Greece in 2025 will in no way depend on how we label the decisions made in 2011 and 2012.

• Every member of the Euro periphery should be in an IMF programme.  Yes, I’m looking at you, Italy.  If the IMF does not have sufficient funds to work with, the ECB should lend to it.  All politicians in Euro periphery countries should be speaking to their electorates about multi-decade efforts to improve productivity.  These things cannot be fixed in two or three years.  They can, at best, be put on the right path.

• For every country in an IMF programme, all sovereign debt held by the ECB should be written down to the price at which they purchase it.   If the ECB buys a Greek government bond at, say, a 20% discount to face value, then that bond should be written down by 20%.  The ECB should not be in a position to make a profit from their trading if Europe finds its way through the overall crisis.  Similarly, the ECB should not be in a position to take a loss, either — they should not be required to take a hair-cut below the price they pay for Euro area sovereign debt.

Note that I have not yet used the phrase “Euro bond” anywhere.  Note, too, that a central bank is only meant to be a lender of last resort to banks.  The lender of last resort to governments is the IMF.

If Euro area policymakers really want to engage in a fiscal union (a.k.a. transfers) beyond the absolutely essential creation of a unified bank deposit guarantee scheme, it is perfectly possible to do so in a minimal fashion that does not lessen the sovereignty of any member nation:  Have a newly created European Fiscal Authority (with voluntary membership) provide the minimum universally agreed-on level of unemployment benefits across the entire area, funded with a flat VAT.  Any member country would retain the ability to provide benefits above and beyond the minimum.  This will have several benefits:

• Since its membership would be voluntary and it would provide only the minimum universally agreed level, it cannot, by definition, constitute a practical infraction on sovereignty;
• It will help provide pan-European automatic stabilisers in fiscal policy;
• It will provide crucial intra-European stabilisation;
• It will increase the supply of long-dated AAA-rated securities at a time when demand for them is incredibly high; and
• It will decrease the ability of Euro member countries to argue that they should be able to violate the terms of the Maastricht Treaty at times of economic hardship as at least some of the heavy lifting in counter-cyclical policy will be done for them.

———————-

Update 30 Nov 2011, 13:05 (25 minutes after first publishing the post):

It would appear that the world’s major central banks have announced a coordinated improvement in the provision of liquidity to banks.  This is a good thing. Press releases:

• Bank of England
• Bank of Canada
• ECB
• Bank of Japan
• Swiss National Bank
• Federal Reserve

New York – Citi today announced the sale of its entire ownership interest of three North American partner credit card portfolios representing approximately $1.3 billion in managed assets. The cards portfolios were part of Citi Holdings. Terms of the deals were not disclosed. Citi will continue to service the portfolios through the first half of 2010 at which time the acquirer will assume all customer servicing aspects of the portfolios.

The sale of these card portfolios is consistent with Citi’s strategy to optimize the assets and businesses within Citi Holdings while working to generate long-term profitability and growth from Citicorp, which comprises its core franchise. Citi continues to make progress on its strategy and will continue to pursue opportunities within Citi Holdings that create the most value for stakeholders.

The answer should be “not much, or perhaps a little negatively” because the press release contains close to no information at all.  Here is Floyd Norris:

A few unanswered questions:

1. Who is the buyer?
2. Which card portfolios are being sold?
3. What is the price?
4. Is there a profit or loss?

A check of Citi’s last set of disclosures shows that Citi Holdings had $67.6 billion in such credit card portfolios in the second quarter, so this is a small part of that. Still, I can’t remember a deal announcement when a company said it had sold undisclosed assets to an undisclosed buyer for an undisclosed price, resulting in an undisclosed profit or loss.

Chris Kaufman at Reuters noted the same.

Now, to be fair, there is some information in the release if you have some context.  In January 2009 Citigroup separated “into Citicorp, housing its key banking business, and Citi Holdings, which included its brokerage, consumer finance, and troubled assets.”  In other words, Citi Holdings is the bucket holding “assets that Citigroup is trying to sell or wind down.”  The press release is a signal to the market that Citi has been able to offload some of those assets – it’s an attempt to speak of improved market conditions.  But the refusal to release any details suggests that they sold the portfolios at a deep discount to face value, which implies either that Citi was desperate for the cash (a negative signal) or that they think the portfolios were worth even less than they got for them, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of their credit card holdings (also a negative signal).  It’s unsurprising, then, that Citi were down 4.1% in afternoon trading after the release.

Some more information did emerge later on.  American Banker, citing “industry members with knowledge of the transaction,” reported:

The buyer was U.S. Bancorp, according to industry members with knowledge of the transaction, who identified the assets as the card portfolios for KeyCorp and Associated Banc-Corp, which Citi issues as an agent bank, and the affinity card for the American Dental Association.

But a spokeswoman for Citi, which only identified the portfolios as “North American partner credit card portfolios” in a press release, would not comment, identify the buyer, or elaborate on the release. U.S. Bancorp, Associated Bank and the American Dental Association did not return calls by press time; a spokesman for KeyCorp would not discuss the matter.

It’s tremendously frustrating that even this titbit of information needed to be extracted via a leak.  Did Maria Aspan — the author of the piece at American Banker — take somebody out for a beer?  Did the information come from somebody at Citigroup, Bancorp or one of the law firms that represent them?

In what seems perfectly designed to turn that furstration into anger, we then have other media outlets reporting this extra information unattributed.  Here‘s the Wall Street Journal:

Citigroup Inc. sold its interest in three North American credit-card portfolios to U.S. Bancorp of Minneapolis, continuing the New York bank’s effort to unload assets that aren’t considered to be a core part of its business, according to people familiar with the situation.

[...]

Citigroup announced the sale, but it didn’t identify the buyer or type of portfolio that was being sold. Representatives of U.S. Bancorp couldn’t be reached for comment.

That’s it.  There’s no mention of where they got Bancorp from at all.

It’s all whispers and rumours, friendships and acquaintences.  It’s no way for the market to get their information.

Here’s my it’ll-never-happen suggestion for improving banking regulation:

Any purchase or sale of assets representing more than 1% of a bank’s previous holdings in that asset class [in this case the sale represented 1.9% of Citi's credit card holdings] must be accompanied by the immediate public release of information uniquely identifing the assets bought or sold and the agreed terms of the deal, including the price.  Identities of all parties involved must be publicly disclosed within 6 months of the transaction.

I side with Bernanke because an economy can withstand only so much major bank insolvency at once. Lots of major banks were levered up 30-1 or so. Their assets fell in value more than a modest amount and then they were insolvent, sometimes grossly so. (A three percent decline in asset values already puts you into insolvency range.) If AIG had gone into bankruptcy court, some major banks would have been even more insolvent. Or if Frannie securities had been allowed to find their non-bailout values. My guess is that at least 15 out of the top 20 U.S. banks would have been flat-out insolvent if, starting at the time of Bear Stearns, all we had done was loose monetary policy and no other bailouts. Subsequent contagion effects, and the shut down of short-term repo markets, and a run on money market funds, would have made even more financial institutions insolvent. The world as we know it then becomes very dire, both for credit reasons and deflation reasons (yes you can print up currency to keep measured M up and running but the economy still collapses). So we needed not just emergency lending but also resource transfers to banks, basically to put them back into the range of possible solvency.

I really like to see Tyler’s evolving attitudes here.  It lets me know that mere grad students are allowed to not be sure of themselves.  In any event, let me present my latest thoughts on the bailouts:

Imagine being Bernanke/Paulson two days before Lehman Brothers went down:  you know they’re going to go down if you don’t bail them out and you know that to bail them out creates moral hazard problems (i.e. increases the likelihood of a repeat of the entire mess in another 10 years).  You don’t know how close to the edge everyone else is, nor how large an effect a Lehman collapse will have on everyone else in the short-run (thanks, in no small part, to the fact that all those derivatives were sold over-the-counter), but you’re nevertheless almost certain that Lehman Brothers are not important enough to take down the whole planet.

In that situation, I think of the decision to let Lehman Brothers go down as an experiment to allow estimation of the system’s interconnectedness.  Suppose you’ve got a structural model of the U.S. financial system as a whole, but no empirical basis for calibrating it.  Normally you might estimate the deep parameters from micro models, but when derivatives were exempted from regulation in the 2000 Commodities Futures Modernization Act, in addition to letting firms do what they wanted with derivatives you also gave up having information about what they were doing.  So instead, what you need is a macro shock that you can fully identify so that at least you can pull out the reduced-form parameters.  Letting Lehman go was the perfect opportunity for that shock.

I’m not saying that Bernanke had an actual model that he wanted to calibrate (although if he didn’t, I really hope he has one now), but he will certainly have had a mental model.  I don’t even mean to suggest that this was the reasoning behind letting Lehman go.  That would be one hell of a (semi) natural experiment and a pretty reckless way to gather the information.  Nevertheless, the information gained is tremendously valuable, both in itself and to society as a whole because it is now, at least in part, public information.

To some extent, I feel like the ideal overall response to the crisis from the Fed and Treasury would have been to let everyone fail a little bit, but that isn’t possible — you can’t let an institution become a little bit bankrupt in the same way that you can’t be just a little bit pregnant.  To me, the best real-world alternative was to let one or two institutions die to put the frighteners on everyone and discover the degree of interconnectedness of the system and then save the rest, with the nature and scale of the subsequent bailouts being determined by the reaction to the first couple going down.  I would only really throw criticism at the manner of the saving of the rest (especially the secrecy) and even then I would be hesitant because:

(a) it was all terribly political and at that point the last thing Bernanke needed was a financially-illiterate representative pushing his or her reelection-centred agenda every step of the way (we don’t let people into a hospital emergency room when the doctor isn’t yet sure of what’s wrong with the patient);

(b) perhaps the calibration afforded by the collapse of Lehman Brothers convinced Bernanke-the-physician that short-term secrecy was necessay to “stop the bleeding” (although that doesn’t necessarily imply that long-term secrecy is warranted); and

(c) there was still inherent (i.e. Knightian) uncertainty in what was coming next on a day-to-day basis.

General pro-market or anti-government arguments don’t rule out the recent bailouts.  Let’s take the hardest, least Friedman-friendly case, the insolvent banks.  For insolvent banks (and for some of the illiquid banks, which might have failed without bailouts), the alternative to those bailouts is calling in deposit insurance and the bankruptcy courts, both of which are, for better or worse, forms of government intervention.  In particular today’s bankruptcy procedures are ill-suited for disposing of a large financial institution in a timely manner and this can be considered a form of gross government failure.

Note that even when the Fed “bails out” a large investment bank, or insurance company, they are checking a chain reaction which would likely spread to some commercial banks, thus bringing in deposit insurance as well, not to mention further bankruptcies.  And that’s not even considering that Congress probably would have stepped in, I’m just looking at laws already on the books.

So if you’re “opposed to financial bailouts,” as a libertarian, you’re not for the market.  You’re saying that one scheme for governmental disposition is better than another.  Of course you are entitled to that opinion but the sheer force of libertarian doctrine is not necessarily on your side.  The general pro-market and anti-government arguments are not necessarily on your side.  I think it is quite plausible for a libertarian to believe that the Fed is “less bad” than the bankruptcy courts and the FDIC.

Now, all things considered, I don’t see why this “libertarian two-step” move should be needed.  I think it’s enough to simply ask whether the bailouts were a good idea and proceed accordingly.  But if you’re concerned about compatibility with libertarian principle, this is one simple way of seeing why my view fits right in.  In fact I think it is the more libertarian of the views under consideration, as it keeps the very worst of the government interventions on the table at bay.

No doubt some libertarians will counter that the FDIC and bankruptcy courts ought not to exist either (I disagree with that – while neither is perfect, they’re both needed.  But then, I’m hardly a libertarian), but that misses the point of Tyler’s title for the post:  ”A second-best theory of libertarian bailouts”.  The world of second-best is the real world.  It accepts that things are currently as they are and asks what is best given the current state of the world, not in all possible worlds.

While Professor Krugman’s characterisations of recent recessions are broadly correct, I am still inclined to disagree with him in predicting what will occur in the current recovery.  This is despite Brad DeLong’s excellent advice:

1. Remember that Paul Krugman is right.
2. If your analysis leads you to conclude that Paul Krugman is wrong, refer to rule #1.

This will be quite a long post, so settle in.  It’s quite graph-heavy, though, so it shouldn’t be too hard to read.

Professor Krugman used his 24 August post on his blog to illustrate his point.  I’m going to quote most of it in full, if for no other reason than because his diagrams are awesome:

First, here’s the standard business cycle picture:

Real GDP wobbles up and down, but has an overall upward trend. “Potential output” is what the economy would produce at “full employment”, which is the maximum level consistent with stable inflation. Potential output trends steadily up. The “output gap” — the difference between actual GDP and potential — is what mainly determines the unemployment rate.

Basically, a recession is a period of falling GDP, an expansion a period of rising GDP (yes, there’s some flex in the rules, but that’s more or less what it amounts to.) But what does that say about jobs?

Traditionally, recessions were V-shaped, like this:

So the end of the recession was also the point at which the output gap started falling rapidly, and therefore the point at which the unemployment rate began declining. Here’s the 1981-2 recession and aftermath:

Since 1990, however, growth coming out of a slump has tended to be slow at first, insufficient to prevent a widening output gap and rising unemployment. Here’s a schematic picture:

And here’s the aftermath of the 2001 recession:

Notice that this is NOT just saying that unemployment is a lagging indicator. In 2001-2003 the job market continued to get worse for a year and a half after GDP turned up. The bad times could easily last longer this time.

Before I begin, I have a minor quibble about Prof. Krugman’s definition of “potential output.”  I think of potential output as what would occur with full employment and no structural frictions, while I would call full employment with structural frictions the “natural level of output.”  To me, potential output is a theoretical concept that will never be realised while natural output is the central bank’s target for actual GDP.  See this excellent post by Menzie Chinn.  This doesn’t really matter for my purposes, though.

In everything that follows, I use total hours worked per capita as my variable since that most closely represents the employment situation witnessed by the average household.  I only have data for the last seven US recessions (going back to 1964).  You can get the spreadsheet with all of my data here: US_Employment [Excel].  For all images below, you can click on them to get a bigger version.

The first real point I want to make is that it is entirely normal for employment to start falling before the official start and to continue falling after the official end of recessions.  Although Prof. Krugman is correct to point out that it continued for longer following the 1990/91 and 2001 recessions, in five of the last six recessions (not counting the current one) employment continued to fall after the NBER-determined trough.  As you can see in the following, it is also the case that six times out of seven, employment started falling before the NBER-determined peak, too.

Prof. Krugman is also correct to point out that the recovery in employment following the 1990/91 and 2001 recessions was quite slow, but it is important to appreciate that this followed a remarkably slow decline during the downturn.  The following graph centres each recession around it’s actual trough in hours worked per capita and shows changes relative to those troughs:

The recoveries following the 1990/91 and 2001 recessions were indeed the slowest of the last six, but they were also the slowest coming down in the first place.  Notice that in comparison, the current downturn has been particularly rapid.

We can go further:  the speed with which hours per capita fell during the downturn is an excellent predictor of how rapidly they rise during the recovery.  Here is a scatter plot that takes points in time chosen symmetrically about each trough (e.g. 3 months before and 3 months after) to compare how far hours per capita fell over that time coming down and how far it had climbed on the way back up:

Notice that for five of the last six recoveries, there is quite a tight line describing the speed of recovery as a direct linear function of the speed of the initial decline.  The recovery following the 1981/82 recession was unusually rapid relative to the speed of it’s initial decline.  Remember (go back up and look) that Prof. Krugman used the 1981/82 recession and subsequent recovery to illustrate the classic “V-shaped” recession.  It turns out to have been an unfortunate choice since that recovery was abnormally rapid even for pre-1990 downturns.

Excluding the 1981/82 recession on the basis that it’s recovery seems to have been driven by a separate process, we get quite a good fit for a simple linear regression:

Now, I’m the first to admit that this is a very rough-and-ready analysis.  In particular, I’ve not allowed for any autoregressive component to employment growth during the recovery.  Nevertheless, it is quite strongly suggestive.

Given the speed of the decline that we have seen in the current recession, this points us towards quite a rapid recovery in hours worked per capita (although note that the above suggests that all recoveries are slower than the preceding declines – if they were equal, the fitted line would be at 45% (the coefficient would be one)).

Within a few years, western governments will have to sharply raise taxes, inflate, partially default, or some combination of all three.

Reading this sentence frustrated me, because the “will have to” implies that these are the only choices when they are not.  Cutting government spending is the obvious option that Professor Rogoff left off the list, but perhaps the best option, implicitly rejected by the use of the word “sharply“, is that governments stabilise their annual deficits in nominal terms and then let the real growth of the economy reduce the relative size of the total debt over time.  Finally, there is an implied opposition to any inflation, when a small and stable rate of price inflation is entirely desirable even when a country has no debt at all.

Heck, we can even have annual deficits increase every year, so long as the nominal rate of growth plus the accrual of interest due is less than the nominal growth rate (real + inflation) of the economy as a whole and you’ll still see the debt-to-GDP ratio falling over time.

Via Minzie Chinn [U. of Wisconsin], I see that the IMF has a new paper looking at the growth rates of potential output, and the likely path of government debt in the aftermath of the credit crisis.  Using the the historical correlation between the primary surplus, debt, and output gap, they ran some stochastic simulations of how the debt-to-GDP ratio for America is likely to develop over the next 10 years.  Here’s the upshot (from page 37 of the paper):

Here is their text:

Combining the estimated historical primary surplus reaction function with stochastic forecasts of real GDP growth and real interest rates—and allowing for empirically realistic shocks to the primary surplus—imply a much more favorable median projection but slightly larger risks around the baseline. If the federal government on average adjusts the primary surplus as it has done in the past—implying a stronger improvement in the primary balance than under the baseline projections—the probability that debt would exceed 67 percent of GDP by year 2019 would be around 40 percent (Figure 4). Notably, with 80 percent probability, debt would be lower than the level it would reach under staff’s baseline by 2019. [Emphasis added]

So I am not really worried about debt levels for America.  To be frank, neither is the the market, either, despite what you might have heard.  How do I know this?  Because the market, while clearly not perfectly rational, is rational enough to be forward-looking and if they thought that US government debt was a serious problem, they wouldn’t really want to buy any more of that debt today.  But the US has been selling a lot of new bonds (i.e. borrowing a lot of money) lately and the prices of government bonds haven’t really fallen, so the interest rates on them haven’t really gone up.  Here is Brad DeLong [Berkeley]:

[A] sharp increase in Treasury borrowings is supposed to carry a sharp increase in interest rates along with it to crowd out other forms of interest sensitive spending, [but it] hasn’t happened. Hasn’t happened at all:

It is astonishing. Between last summer and the end of this year the U.S. Treasury will expand its marketable debt liabilities by $2.5 trillion–an amount equal to more than 20% of all equities in America, an amount equal to 8% of all traded dollar-denominated securities. And yet the market has swallowed it all without a burp…

I don’t want to bag on Professor Rogoff. The majority of his piece is great: it’s a discussion of fundamental imbalances that need to be dealt with. You should read it. It’s just that I’m a bit more sanguine about US government debt than he appears to be.

A credit default swap is a contract that pays out if a specified event occurs on the underlying security. Normally, and in this case, the security is some debt and the event is a default on that debt.

There was a pile of $29 million in debt. Specifically, they were (based on) subprime loans in California and a bunch of them were already delinquent.

A brokerage firm from Texas started offering (i.e. selling) credit default swaps on the $29 million. Since so many of the underlying loans were delinquent, it seemed a sure thing that a default would occur and the big boys in New York were happy to buy the CDS contracts.  In fact, they were so sure that the debt would default that they were willing to pay up to 80 or 90 cents for a $1 payout in the event of a default.

Two important things then played a role:  First, credit default swaps are traded “over the counter”, so if you buy one from me you don’t know how many other people have also bought from me or how many they each bought.  Second, there are (currently) no regulations on credit default swaps and in particular, there is no limit to the scale of the CDS market against a particular asset.

In this case, the big banks paid about $100 million for CDS contracts that would pay out $130 million if the debt defaulted.

The brokerage firm took the $100 million, paid off the debt entirely (so it didn’t default) and walked away with $70 million.

Nevertheless, people do seem to be wondering about China as an engine of global growth in demand.  The reason is simple:  Despite a near catastrophic collapse in world trade, China’s economy is still growing while those of  other export-oriented countries like Japan or Germany are falling precipitously.

Clearly part of the reason for the continued Chinese growth, like in Australia, is the successful use of a fiscal stimulus to boost local demand (the Australian rebound was also helped by the fact that, by not manufacturing much, their decline in investment was offset by a fall in imports and (price) changes in natural resource exports occur with a significant lag).

Brad Setser has explored the Chinese stimulus a little.  He writes:

I initially underestimated the magnitude of China’s stimulus by focusing on the (fairly modest) change in the government’s fiscal balance. It is now clear that the majority of China’s stimulus has been off-budget: the huge increase in lending by state owned banks mattered far more than the change in the budget of the central government. The expected loss on these loans can be considered a form of fiscal stimulus.

Which is a fascinating way to conduct government business.

I thought it might be worthwhile to look at this idea further.  Here is the equivalent graph where movements in hours worked per capita are made relative to their actual troughs rather than their actual peaks:

At a first glance, recoveries do appear to be somewhat symmetric to their corresponding contractions, although they do also appear to be a bit slower coming back up to falling down in the first place.

I then identified data pairs that are symmetric in time around each trough (e.g. 3 months before and after the trough) and put them in a scatter-plot:

Points along the 45-degree line here would represent recoveries that were perfectly symmetric with their preceding contraction.  Notice that for five of the six recessions shown, recoveries are in a fairly tight line below the 45-degree line.  By comparison, the recovery following the ’81-’82 recession was especially rapid – it came back up faster than it fell down.

Excluding the ’81-’82 recession on the basis that it’s recovery seems to have been driven by a separate process, a simple linear regression gives a remarkably good fit:

This is a very rough-and-ready analysis.  In particular, I’ve not allowed for any autoregressive component to employment growth during the recovery.  Nevertheless, it is suggestive.

There are more serious efforts in looking at this for the economy as a whole (rather than just hours worked).  James Hamilton is not convinced that it will occur this time.  The oddly rapid recovery in hours worked per capita following the ’81-’82 recession should give us reason to agree with Professor Hamilton, not disagree: it shows that the typical recovery is not guaranteed.  Look back at the scatter-plot of all the recessions.  Notice that the recovery following the ’69-’70 recession was actually quite slow.  It’s fitted line is y = 0.252 x.

For me, the big thing that makes me lean towards Professor Hamilton’s fears of a slower-than-typical recovery is the possibility of zombie banks, or as John Hempton argues, zombie borrowers.  Zombie borrowers should worry us because, if they exist, they are keeping hold of the capital that could (and should) be better placed elsewhere in the economy, which means that those more deserving would-be borrowers are not able to expand and employ more people.

As Hempton argues in the second of his posts, on this basis it is a Good Thing ™ that two of the three US car manufacturers have been forced into a bankruptcy-induced contraction.  Note that Ford only really managed to avoid the same fate by borrowing a huge amount just before the credit markets froze.  It probably needs (from the point of view of the economy as a whole) to follow the same process, whether inside or outside the courts.

But the car manufacturers are by no means the only candidates for the “zombie borrower” epithet.  The really big borrower behind all of the mess in the financial sector is the one at the bottom of all the “toxic” CDOs:  the underwater American households.

More than one smart analyst thinks that the yearly bonus regime encouraged both traders and their managers to take excess risk. I’m not sure, as an empircal matter, that I buy this argument. Most of those bankers who were allegedly gambling for free with (implicit) taxpayer money in fact lost half or more of their own fortunes in the ensuing crash. From this I infer that they did not, in fact, realize that they were gambling.

I still think that some regulation on bonuses is warranted. Indeed, I think it warranted precisely because the bankers didn’t fully appreciate the risks they were taking. By holding bonuses in escrow for, say, five years, we serve to increase the risk aversion of those bankers.  Megan implies partial agreement with the conclusion, if not the logic, a little later on:

But enforcing, say, a multi-year bonus scheme wouldn’t be terribly destructive, and it might help.

Continuing immediately on, she writes:

On the other hand, if the government starts meddling with the level of compensation, this will be disturbing both because it will not do good things for the American financial services industry, and because, well, who the hell is the government to start telling private firms that are not receiving any taxpayer money how much to pay their employees?

In general I’d agree, but we should also consider the recent work by Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef suggesting that remuneration in the finance sector relative to the rest of the economy for a given level of education has been especially high lately.  Here is an ungated version of their paper.  Here is the abstract:

We use detailed information about wages, education and occupations to shed light on the evolution of the U.S. financial sector over the past century. We uncover a set of new, interrelated stylized facts: financial jobs were relatively skill intensive, complex, and highly paid until the 1930s and after the 1980s, but not in the interim period. We investigate the determinants of this evolution and find that financial deregulation and corporate activities linked to IPOs and credit risk increase the demand for skills in financial jobs. Computers and information technology play a more limited role. Our analysis also shows that wages in finance were excessively high around 1930 and from the mid 1990s until 2006. For the recent period we estimate that rents accounted for 30% to 50% of the wage differential between the financial sector and the rest of the private sector. [emphasis added]

… which is prima facie evidence in support of some sort of regulation on remuneration in the finance sector.