Christopher Whalen

This week all eyes are on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. The FOMC must decide whether to stop monetizing the federal debt issued by the Treasury, which is what the U.S. central bank calls “quantitative easing.”

Americans continue to believe — and hope — that the Fed can save us from our collective idiocy when it comes to debt, both public and private. While there are growing signs that the Fed’s zero interest rate policy, or “ZIRP,” is greatly damaging individuals and financial institutions alike, we also need to question whether the Fed can let rates rise without provoking another financial assets collapse.

In effect, the Fed and other global central banks are all caught in a “Catch-22″ situation, to borrow the phrase from the 1961 novel by Joseph Heller. The Fed’s aggressive easing of interest rates and purchases of trillions of dollars in Treasury debt and other assets has stabilized and even raised the price of financial assets, but in other respects the Fed’s policy of reflation has failed — especially compared with past interest rate cycles.

In a comment published by IRA this week, Chief Monetary Economist of Cumberland Advisors Bob Eisenbeis notes:

“From the 50s through 70s, the main channel for monetary policy was through housing: when interest rates exceeded the Reg Q ceilings that banks and thrifts could pay for funds, the supply of funding to housing was cut off. Then construction declined and the effects rippled through the rest of the economy. Most of the economic models have that structure and international isolation embedded within them. Yet this is not the world that policy makers are now dealing with … “

In an earlier comment in one of my pieces on Reuters.com, I looked at the fact that “the Fed faces continued asset price deflation at home even as the impact of its accommodative policies are already boosting global inflation.” My friend and mentor Alan Boyce, who ran the risk book at Countrywide, has been trying to educate people in Washington about the lack of “trickle down” money in terms of the Fed reliquifying the housing sector.

While the Fed’s QE and ZIRP have been a boon to the largest banks and investors on Wall Street, Main Street has been left in the cold. The continued decline in home prices in February as reported by Case-Shiller — now down eight months in a row — has been ignored to a great peril by the Obama administration. As I’ve noted previously in this blog, how does President Obama expect to win reelection if the U.S. housing sector and the banks that hold these assets are melting down come election day 2012?

Last summer, my firm earned condemnation from Wall Street for suggesting that U.S. banks were not out of the woods and that net interest margins were starting to fall. Dawn Kopecki at Bloomberg reports: “At JPMorgan, almost half of the New York-based bank’s earnings came from the release of reserves previously set aside to cover bad loans. Net revenue at the second-largest U.S. bank dropped 8.9 percent to $25.2 billion.”

The reason that revenue at many banks is falling is largely due to the Fed’s policy stance, but also reflects the still dismal economic situation on Main Street. Most banks are seeing the revenue from interest earnings fall as older assets run off and new assets with far lower yields are put in their place. But the lack of demand for credit from consumers and business is also a big factor behind the sharp drop in bank assets.

The chart below is of the gross loan yield for Bank of America vs. its large bank peers. It is taken from the IRA Bank Monitor using data from the FDIC and shows the gross yield on the loan book for Bank of America Corp’s subsidiary banks going back a decade. Notice that in the 2000 timeframe, just before Chairman Bernanke joined the Fed and his predecessor Alan Greenspan stepped on the monetary gas pedal, bank’s were earning yields on loans almost two times today’s levels. Notice, too, how competition in the 2005-2007 period drove bank loan yields down, but from 2007 the Fed’s QE and ZIRP temporarily boosted lending spreads.

Now, however, the benefits of Fed easing and FDIC debt guarantees are fading. Bank loan yields are starting to fall as lenders compete ever more aggressively for the few borrowers in the market who want credit and can actually qualify for a loan. The shrinking pool of earning assets and the lack of yield on these assets is perhaps the greatest danger to the banking system — and makes it next to impossible for Chairman Bernanke to put off raising interest rates much longer.

As we told clients of The IRA Advisory Service last week during the Q1 2011 earnings reports from the banks:

Our predominant impression from top universal banks is slack revenue to date and weak demand, and thus doubtful backlog going forward. In Q1 2011 US banks are reflecting the true situation facing their customers in the US economy. We were struck this past week by the fact that several bank executives basically said during calls and Q&A that the Fed needs to allow rates to rise so as to counter the effects of the accelerating run-off of earning assets and subsidized funding such as FDIC TLGP. Perhaps the appropriate policy formulation for the Fed is to force the cost of funds up while continuing to support overall volume of market liquidity via QE, reductions in bank reserves. End of QE without liquidity support is a very dangerous path for this fragile market in our view.

Back in October, after the meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Associated Press reported that “The Federal Reserve is likely to take additional action to rejuvenate the economy and lower unemployment, an influential member of the central bank’s policymaking group said.”

Of course the Fed neither rejuvenates economies nor creates jobs.  For some reason members of the media attribute magical powers to the US central bank and its employees.

Part of the reason for this divine veneration is that there is little in the way of ideas or resources elsewhere in the federal government, thus the holy printing press is now well and truly the only game in town.

Since October the Fed has purchased hundreds of billions of dollars in US Treasury debt in an effort to force liquidity into private assets.  But while the U.S. central bank is able to float the Treasury’s red ink on a sea of new fiat paper dollars, overseas the great deflation has left global central banks largely emasculated.  Unable to create their own money with the ease of the Fed, even the largest central banks in Europe have gone begging for alms in the form of dollar swap lines from Chairman Bernanke.

Other global central banks are chronically short dollars and the Fed is the proverbial tail wagging the global doggie.  Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner brags about collecting hundreds of billions in nominal greenbacks recovered from the TARP, Ally Financial and AIG bailouts, among others, but it is Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and his colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee who are playing the big game with trillions of new fiat paper dollars.

The Daily Bail asks: “Will Bernanke Scoop Up $50 Billion Of Ireland’s Toxic Assets? Fine Gael Seeks MASSIVE Loan From U.S. Fed” This is a very good question since the Irish government likely to be elected in a week or so is going to face an assortment of very unpleasant choices.  If Ireland’s new political coalition goes hat in hand to the American central bank, the new regime is not likely to last very long, especially with the IRA now talking of great conspiracies among private business.

Neither are Chairman Bernanke and the Fed likely to endure if they continue to play the role of de facto global central planning agency without explicit legal authority from Congress.  The trouble here is both one of legal authority and the deleterious effects of current Fed policies.  The more the Fed tries to help the domestic economy with low rates and explicit bailouts, the worse our collective predicament.  Recall the advice of Martin Mayer, who always taught that the Fed (and government generally) should emulate the physician and “first do no harm.”

The Fed keeps interest rates artificially low to “help” the current situation, but in doing so only stokes inflation and bubbles in sectors such as food, energy and strategic commodities — and also market sectors such as equities.  In the past, the central bank has attempted to fine tune the national economy, most recently in the period a decade ago when then-Chairman Alan Greenspan stepped on the monetary gas.  Not only did the resulting surge in cheap credit stoke a domestic housing boom in the US, but it created booms in global financial assets and also internationally traded goods that impacted investment and asset allocation decisions around the world.

With the 30-plus percentage decline in US housing prices so far and another 10-20% in prospect this year and in 2012 before we hit the bottom, the Fed faces continued asset price deflation at home even as the impact of its accommodative policies are already boosting global inflation.  The combination of volatile weather and poor logistical planning in terms of stockpiles could make the global food supply situation acute in 2011-2012.  The Fed, not hedge funds, is making the situation worse in markets for energy, commodities and food.

The Fed’s extreme monetary policies used to bail out the largest banks are creating bubbles with cheap credit.  Look at the bull market in commercial real estate assets, for example, an entirely speculative financial phenomenon.   Prices for well-located assets are driven up by speculative interest among investors who prefer CRE risk to zero yields on Treasury paper.  But is there sufficient cash flow under these assets to support these valuations?

With yields on longer maturities climbing, it seems that the greatest risk facing the Fed is the transition from life support to something that resembles a sustainable run rate.  Trouble is, Bernanke and a majority on the FOMC still seem to be making policy decisions based upon domestic criteria, this even as the extreme easy money policies of the Greenspan/Bernanke era have already achieved the implicit policy goal of asset price reflation.  It’s all relative, you understand.  When an election-focused White House calls for economic recovery, Bernanke, like Greenspan before him, dutifully steps on the gas, seemingly heedless of the risks.

Of course, classical reflationists argue that the Fed is doing precisely the right thing by using low interest rates to force liquidity into private assets.  One reader of my work rebukes those who argue for monetary restraint and invokes Irving Fisher in his famous 1931 “Econometrica” article.  By lowering rates on Treasury bonds below where they might otherwise be, he argues, Bernanke “is likely to push investors into corporate bonds and lower spreads–which, in the end, are the ONLY real engines of growth in the financial markets.”

The trouble with this argument, like the neo-Keynesian corollary about the use of debt to fund fiscal stimulus, is that expedients such as low interest rates and deficit spending are meant to stimulate economic growth on the margins, not to replace private sector demand and economic activity that does not exist.  Bernanke and his fellow travelers on the FOMC, it seems, have entirely embraced the world view of Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, and echoed among the inflationati in the EU led by Martin Wolf, that new monetary emissions are an apt replacement for fiscal spending.

The problem with living in a world where relativity is the operative standard is that there is no truth in an objective sense.  Political survival, not civil society, is the first priority, so members of the FOMC will say and do anything to get through the day, no matter how internally inconsistent or reckless.  Until Bernanke and the FOMC start to recognize that their well-intentioned efforts to help the domestic US economy are creating the precursor for future global economic collapse, we cannot truly bring the Fed under effective public control and begin the process of national restructuring in America.

Our colleagues in the media have been diligently pouring over the latest disclosure by the Federal Reserve on rescue loans made to banks and corporations around the world in the hope of uncovering a pearl. For one thing, the details of the extensive rescue operation by the Fed following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 confirms the role of the U.S. central bank as the global lender of last resort, a job description as yet unauthorized by Congress. But there are some rather subtle revelations which do deserve investigation.

A number of writers have noticed that the fact that the Fed did not reveal these operations until now doubtless effected how the Congress finally legislated in the case of the Dodd-Frank law. “The Fed’s current set of powers and the shape of the Dodd-Frank bill over all might have looked quite different if this information had been made public during the debate on the bill,” American Institute for Economic Research fellow Walker Todd told Gretchen Morgenson in the Sunday New York Times. “Had these tables been out there, I think Congress would have either said no to emergency lending authority or if you get it, it’s going to be a much lower number — half a trillion dollars in the aggregate.”

Perhaps more important is the fact that there is now confirmation that the Fed took in equities as collateral during the market liquidity operations in 2008 and 2009. As one of our favorite equity market observers wrote last week, the fact of the Fed financing equity positions was known in September of 2008, but as my colleague noted at the time, “you had to read between the lines.”

As it turns out, the Fed’s primary dealer credit facility or “PDCF” was essentially able to take any paper, debt or equity, proving once and for all that the Fed had abandoned any pretense at market discipline. For 25 pips over Fed funds, you could finance any equity security: “Eligible collateral will include all collateral eligible in tri-party repurchase arrangements with the major clearing banks as of September12, 2008,” said the Fed in a press release.

Previously I had heard from a number of large bulge bracket firms that there was no problem financing anything with the Fed during the crisis: office furniture, equities, whatever. So now this latest data dump from Chairman Bernanke seems to confirm that eye-opening fact and more, namely that during the crisis dealers were using the Fed to finance equity positions as well as Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

Thus the question becomes: Will the U.S. central bank continue to backstop equities when (not if) falling economic growth, rising employment and rising interest rates push equity valuations lower? There are a number of reasons to be concerned that a sustained increase in interest rates will not only make bonds and other interest rate instruments more competitive with stocks, but that an overly optimistic consensus behind the prospects for growth is about to be brought down to earth.

For one thing, the Fed’s zero interest rate policy has made the equity markets seem relatively attractive. Putting cash into blue-chip equities makes more sense, at least for some investors, than buying bonds at what may be the lowest yields that will be seen for a generation. Given the Fed’s purchases of Treasury debt via QE II, volatility is understated and thus the duration risk on bonds is likewise being understated in the markets. As one trader asked me recently: “Is Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke steering the QE II or the Titanic?”

The other issue that has made equities relatively attractive is liquidity. When investors are buying large-cap stocks, even financial names such as Citigroup, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo, they are buying size, not quality. Whereas most of the largest US banks have single digit or event negative risk-adjusted returns, smaller regional exemplars such as Cullen Frost, BB&T or US Bancorp have consistently out-performed the larger players when it comes to growing fundamental value at reasonable levels of risk.

When the Fed uses QEII to subsidize the largest players on Wall Street, it is disadvantaging the smaller, better run banks, and it is also playing with politics. Priyank Gandhi and Hanno Lustig, in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper issued in November (No. 16553), suggest that the implicit collective guarantee extended to large U.S. financial institutions reflects an annual subsidy to the largest commercial banks of $4.71 billion per bank, measured in 2005 dollars. But, even more important, the paper notes that subsidies for the “too big to fail” banks shows the Fed’s willingness to support the equity markets, an extraordinary and ultimately political act that requires further hearings by the Congress.

Like it or not, indices such as the dollar, the Dow Jones Industrials and S&P 500 are a litmus test not only for the markets, but for the credibility of American political leaders. When the Fed deliberately bails out some banks but not others, and also relieves Congress and the White House from doing their collective jobs in terms of fiscal policy, Chairman Bernanke provides short-run stability via endless liquidity, but ultimately hurts the American people by short circuiting the political process.

It is time for Fed Chairman Bernanke and the other members of the FOMC to step back from crisis mode and demand that Congress and President Obama pick up the ball. Specifically, Washington needs to take an example from our friends in the United Kingdom and begin the process of economic and fiscal restructuring now, before the next phase of the economic crisis crests next year. That may require letting equity markets sag when the full truth of the remaining economic adjustment is accepted by the public.

As I wrote in Zero Hedge last week, “Loss Given Default: From Madrid to Los Angeles Foreclosures Set to Crest in 2011-2012”), next year, IMHO, we are going to see a further sharp decline in residential home prices as the tide of foreclosures begun in the past year starts to clear the courts and move to market via involuntary sales. The same thing is happening in Spain, by coincidence, “Foreclosed Homes May Flood Spanish Market as Banks Offload Unwanted Assets”. When this next deflationary leg in the “revenue side” of the economic equation ripples through the economy, both restructuring and aggressive action by the Fed to provide liquidity will be required.

The page proofs of my upcoming book, “Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream,” just went back to the editors. One of the benefits of writing a book about U.S. financial history is that it forces you to take a long view of both economics and the political narrative used to describe it. It is the issue of language and labels, in my view, that is making it so difficult for Americans to understand the current state of the economy.

The National Bureau of Economic Research just declared that the “recession” that began in 2007 ended in the middle of 2009, making it the longest downturn since WWII. The only problem is that none of the people who work at NBER today, which is one of my favorite research organizations, are old enough to remember what the U.S. economy was like before WWII; before the age of Keynesian socialism and the use of debt to stimulate growth and employment became standard policy in Washington.

Let’s start with the term “recession,” which itself reflects the assumption that economic growth is always positive and the trend line is always upward sloping. While many economists in the U.S. remain convinced that this is an accurate descriptor, what Americans and many other people of the world need to consider is whether the assumption that the economy will grow endlessly is reasonable.

In the period following the Crisis of 1907 and before the start of WWI, Americans faced a grim economic outlook. Jobs were scarce, product and commodity prices were flat, and the value of farm products and land had been falling for years. The American economy was entirely dependent upon Europe for financing and to buy U.S. products, mostly agricultural and other commodities. The dismal economic scene fed the rise of the Progressive movement in U.S. politics.

WWI provided a sharp relief from this picture of economic stagnation. Employment rebounded, American agricultural prices soared and the value of real estate around the U.S. also rose sharply. With renewed growth came inflation, however, so that by the time that WWI ended, prices for many consumer staples had doubled, but wages did not keep pace. Economic activity gradually slowed as the U.S. made its way through the Roaring Twenties, but many Americans never saw any benefit from this period of speculation and financial excess.

Following the Crash of 1929, the pretense observed by both political parties that all was well in the U.S. economy evaporated into almost twenty years of economic stagnation. While the massive mobilization  for WWII provided the appearance of a recovery, and the period of the Cold War extended this mirage on a sea of public debt and paper dollars, the basic issue of overcapacity remained.

From the 1970s, when the U.S. shifted from defense to housing as the chief driver of American economic growth, the illusion became ever more attractive and, seemingly at least, permanent. But the sad fact is that much of what Americans think was real growth supported by real income and real work was, in fact, the result of deficit spending and reckless monetary expansion by the Fed, first under Alan Greenspan and now Ben Bernake.

In an interview for my book former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker noted:

We live in an amazing world. Everybody has big budget deficits and big easy money, but somehow the world as a whole cannot fully employ itself. It is a serious question. We are no longer just talking about a single country having a big depression but the entire world. If the world as a whole cannot employ everyone who is ready and able to work, it raises some big questions.

Earlier this week in a research note for the IRA Advisory Service, we reported that some of the leading experts in the housing sector believe that the U.S. is less than 25% through the restructuring of defaulted loans on commercial and residential real estate, and that the backlog is growing.  Last week at the AmeriCatalyst conference held in Austin, TX, Laurie Goodman from Amherst Securities predicted that one in five U.S. households remains at risk of foreclosure. If this prediction turns out to be correct, the optimistic view of the U.S. economy and banking sector must be radically revised — and soon.

Just as the housing sector and the related debt was the driver of the U.S. economy over the past several decades, I believe that the deflation of the housing market could spell an equally drastic period of shrinkage in economic activity in the U.S. and around the world.  In order to meet this challenge, both the political and economic communities need to put aside preconceived notions of how the economy should look and begin to develop new language to describe what is really happening to consumers and businesses. Only then can we truly begin the process of working through what is the most serious economic contraction in the U.S. since WWI.