The Fed bailed out Bear Stearns without authorization from Congress

Robert Reich
The Fed has finally came clean. It now admits it bailed out Bear Stearns – taking on tens of billions of dollars of the bank’s bad loans – in order to smooth Bear Stearns’ takeover by JPMorgan Chase. The secret Fed bailout came months before Congress authorized the government to spend up to $700 billion of taxpayer dollars bailing out the banks, even months before Lehman Brothers collapsed. The Fed also took on billions of dollars worth of AIG securities, also before the official government-sanctioned bailout.

The losses from those deals still total tens of billions, and taxpayers are ultimately on the hook. But the public never knew. There was no congressional oversight. It was all done behind closed doors. And the New York Fed – then run by Tim Geithner – was very much in the center of the action.

This raises three issues.

First, only Congress is supposed to risk taxpayer dollars. The Fed is not part of the legislative branch. Its secret deals, announced almost two years after they were done, violate the democratic process, if not the Constitution itself. Thomas Jefferson put a stop to Alexander Hamilton’s idea of a powerful central bank out of fear it would be unaccountable to the public. The Fed has just proven Jefferson’s point.

Second, if the Fed can secretly bail out big banks, the problem of “moral hazard” – bankers taking irresponsible risks because they know they’ll be rescued – is far greater than anyone assumed after Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations bailed out the banks. Big banks will always be too big to fail because they know the Fed will secretly back them up if they get into trouble, even if Congress won’t do it openly.

Third, the announcement throws a monkey wrench into the financial reform bill now on Capitol Hill, which gives the Fed additional authority by, for example, creating a consumer protection bureau inside it. Only yesterday, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) blasted the Dodd bill for expanding the Fed’s authority “even as it remains shrouded in secrecy.”

The Fed has a big problem. It acts in secret. That makes it an odd duck in a democracy. As long as it’s merely setting interest rates, its secrecy and political independence can be justified. But once it departs from that role and begins putting billions of dollars of taxpayer money at risk — choosing winners and losers in the capitalist system — its legitimacy is questionable.

That it chose to reveal the truth about its activities during a week when Congress is out of town, when much of official Washington and the Washington media have gone on vacation, and only after several federal courts have held that the Fed must release documents related to its bailout of Bear Stearns, suggests it would rather remain secret than become transparent.

Much of what Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner did (when Geithner was at the New York Fed) in 2008 was presumably necessary. But the public has no way of knowing. The public doesn’t even know who else the Fed has bailed out, or what entities it will bail out in the future. All we know is the Fed secretly bailed out Bear Stearns and AIG and thereby subjected taxpayers to risks that remain even today, without informing the public. That’s not a record on which to build public trust.

AIG’s mysterious Schedule A finally revealed

reuters.com
The heavily-redacted regulatory filing that spells out the details of the New York Federal Reserve’s controversial bailout of American International Group is a secret no more.

Reuters has obtained a copy of the five-page document the giant insurer and the New York Fed had asked the Securities and Exchange Commission to keep confidential. The effort by the New York Fed to keep the document under wraps has sparked a furor on Capitol Hill and was the subject of a hearing on Wednesday by House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The unredacted version of the “Schedule A – List of Derivative Transactions” fills out some of the missing pieces in the AIG bailout, in which an entity set-up by the New York Fed effectively funneled tens of millions of dollars to 16 big U.S. and Europeans banks that had bought credit default swaps from the insurer.

The unredacted version of the Schedule A enables some to identify all of the 178 mortgage-related securities, or collateralized debt obligations, that AIG wrote insurance-like protection on.

It’s been known for months that Goldman Sachs and Societe Generale were the two banks who recieved the most money in the dea because they had insured the most CDOs with AIG. But the new information enables traders, investors and the general public to see just which deals the banks had purchased insurance on.

The new information also reveals that of the 178 tranches of CDOs that AIG insured, some 14% were on deals issued after 2005. That’s critical because in December 2007, former AIG Financial Products head Joseph Cassano had said AIG largely got out of the CDS business by the end of 2005.

The newly disclosed information also reveals that Goldman not only bought a lot of CDS from AIG to protect itself; the Wall Street firm also originated a good number of the CDOs that were in SocGen’s portfolio. Some of the Goldman deals in SocGen’s portfolio that AIG had insured includes CDOs with names like Adirondack 2005, Putnam Structured Product CDO 2002 and Davis Square Funding IV.

Janet Tavakoli, a derivatives consultant who has called the AIG bailout a gift to the Wall Street banks, said the issue isn’t just what deals AIG insured, but the underlying assets in those deals. She noted that a goodly number of the CDOs held by the banks also held pieces of other CDOs.

Goldman Sachs, Societe Generale, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch and other banks sold their ailing collateralized debt obligations to the New York Fed-sponsored entity, Maiden Lane III. AIG then canceled out the CDS contracts it had sold as default insurance on those 178 CDOs.

“If all of this had come out in the public domain in late 2008, Goldman Sachs and Merrill would have been deeply embarassed and the Federal Reserve woudl have been questioned,” said Tavakoli.

In the process, the banks were made whole and AIG no longer had to pay out billions of dollars in cash collateral to the banks everytime the CDOs dropped in value.

BLS Non-Farm Payroll Survey: smoke, mirrors, bias and outright falsehoods

Ilargi at The Automatic Earth
Drowning by the numbers
No doubt there are people who see this week's BLS Non-Farm Payroll survey as "not good, but not all that bad either". They can point for instance to the fact that the 85,000 jobs lost according to the report is much better than the 800,000 jobs lost back in March 2009.

The Wall Street Journal puts it like this: ”Even though the payroll number was worse than expected, the data reflects an improvement in the jobs market.”.

But unfortunately, this is all smoke, mirrors, bias and outright falsehood. The Household part of the monthly BLS survey mentions 465,000 lost jobs. 647,000 full time jobs left the building. But that's not even remotely where the true problem lies.

The reason why unemployment, as per the Household survey, stayed at 10% and "only" 85,000 jobs are reported MIA in the Payroll survey can be found in the labor force numbers. From November to December 2009, the "persons not in the labor force" category went up by 843,000 (over 1 million when not seasonally adjusted), and now stands at 83,865,000. The vast majority of those singing off, i.e. not actively looking for work, are people who can't see any jobs anywhere in their environment. The worse the economy gets, the fewer people are counted as unemployed. It’s a lovely invention, but it's also am awfully perverted one.

That is also true for seasonal adjustments in other categories. It’s estimated that that actual initial claims numbers may be double what's reported, simply because the models used are too rigid to take into account present economic conditions. A similar idea is true for continuing claims. Michael Widner at Stifel, Nicolaus says:

”We could conceivably have nearly 11 million people collecting unemployment and see the data reported as a 3.something million figure."

U6 unemployment is up. Average and median unemployment duration is up on all counts. The amount of people without a job for more than half a year is soaring, and these people now form 40% (6.1 million) of the total unemployed. The employment to population ratio fell to 58.2%, the lowest in at least 27 years. The national payroll level went from 130.8 million in 2000 to 130.9 million today. 100,000 jobs added for the 13 million people who were added to the "available" labor pool. In other words, 13 million unemployed were added.

Extended benefits and Emergency Unemployment Compensation, the two programs set up for the long-time jobless, are bursting through their seams. A slight decrease in initial and continuing jobless claims may seem to indicate something positive, but the reality is that people don't leave these programs because they find jobs, but because they've exhausted their benefits and are forced into extended and emergency programs. There are strong suggestions that the latter grew by some 43% in just the past month.

And though we've seen no mention of it this week, we haven't forgotten that the BLS "owes" us the 824,000 jobs they "forgot" to count till March 2009.

No matter where you stand, no matter what you see the economy doing in 2010, it should be clear to everyone who can read by now that reporting on unemployment in the US is a god-forsaken mess, strongly biased towards what pleases Washington, i.e. numbers much lower than the real ones. That said, while many citizens may still be fooled by the official data, you can bet that Washington knows perfectly well what the real numbers are, and many hours of backroom meetings are dedicated to the topic. How much of that reflects genuine care for constituencies, and how much mere worry about election numbers, we’ll leave up to you to ponder.

The same mentality that leads to the severely distorted jobs numbers speaks loudly from the AIG files, that increasingly question Tim Geithner role in the $100+ billion handed to Goldman Sachs et al as 100% compensation for lost credit default swaps wagers. And that, predictably, leads to calls for the resignation of Geithner.

But we've seen similar calls for Ben Bernanke and Larry Summers to resign. And they're still there. Moreover, what difference would it make to remove one of them and leave the others be where they are? If you don't clean up for real, why bother? It becomes just another silly game that way, doesn't it?

Reminds me of a man named Travis Bickle, who said some 35 years ago:

"All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."

Peter Schiff on AIG and Bailouts