The present situation is portrayed overwhelmingly as an economic story when, in fact, it is primarily about regulation and public policy—the past 30 years of bipartisan, nearly universally-praised policy to be specific. And it is probably that universality of opinion that keeps misconstruing what is really happening.
The history of the FDIC illustrates what has transpired. Born out of Great Depression economic turmoil, the FDIC was created to ensure the safety and soundness of bank deposits, hence the deposit insurance bit. In the face of bank runs, the feds stepped in to say, “Not to fear, your money is not going anywhere. Uncle Sam has you covered.”
Yet that is not what the FDIC is now doing. Its mission has changed. As it tries to clean up California’s Indy Mac Bank, for example, its first order of business is avoiding foreclosure on bad loans the bank made to homeowners. An analyst with Barclays Capital called this approach “dangerous” because it gives investors in mortgage-backed securities a reason to run for the exits if the FDIC does not care about recovering their money. In effect, the policy shorthand has changed to read, “Not to fear, you are not going anywhere. Uncle Sam will pay your mortgage.” This is very different thing from its original mission, but perfectly consistent with the public policy trend which began in the 1970s and accelerated with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The goal was to make banks agents of social change.
The federal government, Democrat and Republican, wanted trillions of dollars of credit extended to private borrowers. This was primarily done via the active secondary mortgage market participation of government-backed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but also through leverage the CRA provided by requiring expanding banks to explicitly promise to lend money to higher risk borrowers. And incidentally, the overwhelming beneficiaries of that flow of credit was America’s supposedly beatdown middle class, which took the money and ran to buy not just homes, but cars, boats, college educations, diamonds, furs, boobs, computers, widescreens, flatscreens, and then second homes.
So then, the policy worked? Yep, private investors created ever more complex ways of leveraging capital into ever more lendable money. They took the federal directive to spread the wealth around (quite literally) to the point where risk was no longer a negative aspect of the credit calculus. In fact, by the dawn of the 21st century, risk was courted by banks because it was more profitable in the short-term. Federal regulators, who in decades before might have been aghast at such practices, applauded because the larger goal of extending credit to every corner of the American landscape was advanced.
But with risk out of the picture it was only a matter of time before the entire enterprise became over-extended.
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