#equality – Federal Financial Analytics

19 08, 2024

Karen Petrou: What the Fed Must Do to Make Monetary Policy Work

Shane Smith2024-08-19T09:22:53-04:00August 19th, 2024|The Vault|

Later this week, monetary-policy disciples – at least those who agree with the Fed – will gather around the campfire atop Jackson Hole to ponder the question set before them: whether monetary-policy transmission has been effective and, since it’s awesomely obvious it hasn’t, what might be done about that. The plan is clearly to float trial balloons in the clear mountain air to see if the Fed’s thinking about the new plan slated for 2025 is any better than that which lay behind its disastrous 2019 monetary-policy rewrite. Those allowed into these August precincts will have much of value to say this time around much as they sought to do the last time the Fed asked for all their views. Odds are, though, that Jackson Hole will not consider three non-econometric phenomena that lie behind recent policy misfires: economic inequality, NBFI migration, and the strong counter-cyclical impact of Fed supervisory policy.

Why do these matter so much?

First to economic inequality. The last time the Fed rewrote its monetary-policy model, it deigned to consider economic inequality, but promptly dismissed any reasons to worry. There were, though, lots of them.

The 2019 inequality exercise suffered from the same problem as most Fed models: reliance on representative-agent, not heterogeneous data showing distributional disparities. This approach thus reaffirmed blithe convictions that anything that keeps employment high and inflation in check is good for lower-wealth and -income households because it’s good for everyone else. See my book for why that’s grievously wrong and recent …

13 11, 2023

Karen Petrou: How Inequitable Rules Stoke Financial Crises and What the Banking Agencies Should do to Cut This Link

Eliza Allen2023-11-13T15:41:25-05:00November 13th, 2023|The Vault|

Last week, OMB issued another edict redesigning the way most of the federal government writes rules, going beyond its earlier directive to consider competitive impact now also to demand detailed consideration of the broader public good, especially when it comes to economic equality. I focused on public-good regulation in last week’s memo because it is sadly alien to federal financial regulation even though, as OMB says, “the benefits and costs of a regulation are ultimately experienced by people.” I grant that economists are people, but some are also people who don’t like people, at least when qualitative assessment of what people need challenges the quantitative conclusions they cherish. Pending banking rules thus ignore the public good in favor of complex market constructs, rationalizing them on assertions that, whatever else befalls finance, crises are less likely. This is a methodology fraught with perverse consequences, the most important of which is that the agencies’ standards will hike the risk of financial crises precisely because they omit distributional analysis.

A demand for distributional consideration is not – repeat not – a plea for the banking agencies to go easy on banks. It’s a plea for them to be as sure as they can that none but banks that need to be reined in are throttled. As OMB now also says, “some alternatives may change distributional effects even without significantly changing stringency.” The extent to which this is the case with bank standards is unknown because not one regulator has ever asked a distributional …

8 11, 2023

FedFin on: Rebirth at 91

Arezou Rafikian2023-11-08T16:55:16-05:00November 8th, 2023|The Vault|

Although FHFA calls its FHLB report a centenary event ahead of the System’s 2032 birthday, the agency clearly plans structural substantive reform well before that milestone. Much of what’s planned will crimp FHLB profitability, increasing the importance of what would otherwise seem like tidying-up operational improvements to protect the viability of the System’s weaker Banks. With its eye on keeping the System in line, FHFA does not even suggest it should be allowed by law or regulatory sleight-of-hand to issue MBS or …

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23 10, 2023

Karen Petrou: Why the New CRA Rules Won’t Serve Communities Any Better Than the Old CRA Rules

Eliza Allen2023-10-23T12:03:22-04:00October 23rd, 2023|The Vault|

On Tuesday, the banking agencies will release the final version of their 679-page proposal to rewrite the Community Reinvestment Act. Regrettably, much of the proposal reflected the worst of false-science staff seeking complex new models defining subjective goals combined with certainty-loving compliance officers and lawyers who just want to be told the number they need to hit, not if the number makes any sense. Unsurprisingly, there were hundreds of comment letters in which banks generally said the agencies should ease up and community groups urged still more stringent standards. But the story doesn’t end with this unremarkable line-up– in just the last few months, two major bank trade associations and one often-virulently anti-bank advocacy group agreed on one crucial thing: anything close to what the agencies proposed won’t work.

There are of course sharp differences between what banks and public advocates want in a new CRA rule, but what unites them is the over-arching understanding that the new approach is a cumbersome exercise remote from the reality confronting both banks and borrowers in the least-served urban and rural communities. Banks complain – often with good reason as I showed in my book on economic inequality – that risk-based capital rules over-estimate the risk of lending to many community-focused borrowers. The new capital proposals would ameliorate some of this in their “enhanced” risk weightings, but these weightings actually don’t count for much of anything since the proposed “higher-of” standards applies current, higher weightings.

The agencies in fact acknowledge as much …

29 09, 2023

Karen Petrou: How a Shut-Down Stokes Systemic Risk

Eliza Allen2023-09-29T11:41:22-04:00September 29th, 2023|The Vault|

Although there’s been some talk of what a government shut-down does to the SEC, there’s lots, lots more to worry about. Risks are out there, risks that should be taken very, very seriously by the Members of Congress who seem to think that more chaos stokes their political fortunes. Perhaps it does, but it could well do a lot of damage to their finances, not to mention those of all the voters who might well bear a reasonable grudge.

Where’s the systemic scary place? Or, better said, places? Some are right in front of us; others lurk in the closet waiting to pounce.

What worries me the most in the immediate future is the ability of bad actors to exploit what could be lightly- or even unguarded portals into critical financial market infrastructure. There are of course many, many bad actors out there with the sophistication and/or state sponsorship quickly to test and then attack critical points in the payment, settlement, and clearing systems and/or the grids on which they rely.

As I discussed on Tuesday, not all providers of critical financial market infrastructure are under the hopefully-eagle eyes of the federal banking agencies which, funded outside federal appropriations, will remain open. Some fall under the SEC or CFTC, agencies that will be hobbled, and some critical providers are wholly outside the regulatory perimeter. Even if their nodes of market access seem small, disruption has a bad habit of migrating at lightning speed. Even if power outages are …

20 06, 2023

Karen Petrou: Our Baffled, Befuddled Central Bank

Eliza Allen2023-06-20T14:47:39-04:00June 20th, 2023|The Vault|

After SVB failed, Jay Powell told his monthly press conference that he found this “baffling” even though the Fed was the lead bank supervisor and the only one charged with its BHC’s oversight. At Wednesday’s presser, Mr. Powell took a different, but still-indefensible tack avoiding responsibility for a looming threat by stoutly denying his ability to do anything about nonbank financial-stability risk. However, the Board has an express mandate under the Dodd-Frank Act to address it. To be sure, the Fed does not have direct regulatory authority over nonbanks as it now remembers it did over SVB. But to say that the Fed’s only power is over banks as he Wednesday did is at best befuddled. A baffled, befuddled central bank is a national – indeed global – hazard.

Of course, perhaps Mr. Powell isn’t befuddled and instead wants to ensure that a crisis he claims the Fed can’t avert isn’t one that damages its already-scant credibility. This wouldn’t be the first time the Fed defended itself at the expense of sound policy, but that makes it no less inexcusable. I’ll have more to say about this in a talk on the 28^th, but last week’s memo looks at just one threat to financial stability and what the Fed could readily do to combat it.

The threat comes from the $1.4 trillion private-credit market’s ambition to use its regulatory-arbitrage advantage to morph into a $40 trillion fixed-income sector. Mr. Powell says all he can do …

30 01, 2023

Karen Petrou: M&Ms, McHenry, and the Making of Financial Policy

Arezou Rafikian2023-01-30T11:28:41-05:00January 30th, 2023|The Vault|

It’s a sad commentary on American politics to observe, as I feel we must, that the experienced chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Patrick McHenry, has followed M&M’s “spokescandies” as a target of Tucker Carlson’s bilious, yet widely-watched, wrath. The fundamental frivolity of this contrast is self-evident, but that has yet to dampen the credibility of this combustible commentator with his super conservative acolytes. That Mr. Carlson matters so much to public discourse is deeply distressing given some of his other targets – Nancy Pelosi’s husband after a brutal attack is only one that comes immediately to mind. Unlike him and many other Carlson targets, Mr. McHenry can more than take care of himself. Still, going after him means super-conservatives will blast any Member or measure that falls short of purity on their rightward-loaded scale. Since nothing these folks like can be enacted into law, all this does is reduce the hopeful odds we cast earlier this year for constructive financial-policy legislation. Too bad – the nation could use some.

The nub of the accusation lies in his chairman’s decision to leave the word “inclusive” in the name of one of his panel’s revamped subcommittees. Clearly, the concept of inclusion has become accursed because Democrats often used it in concert with what might seem an equally innocuous word: diversity. Democrats did use diversity and inclusion demands to press for racial, gender, and sexual-orientation equity in ways that rubbed many republicans raw, but the idea of inclusion is fundamental to …

19 09, 2022

Karen Petrou: An Easy Way to Turn Home Loan Banks into Equality Banks

Arezou Rafikian2022-10-13T10:02:13-04:00September 19th, 2022|The Vault|

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29 08, 2022

Karen Petrou: Why Failing to Focus on Economic Equality Flummoxes Fed Policy

Arezou Rafikian2023-01-04T10:22:48-05:00August 29th, 2022|The Vault|

August doldrums always seem to power up spirals of will-he or won’t-he speculation about the Fed’s Jackson Hole meeting because there usually isn’t all that much else to talk about economically-speaking. This year is different because this year has revealed the Fed as a central bank without a compass at a time of extraordinarily strong winds towards the rocks. Still, in all the punditry over whether the Fed can somehow maneuver to Jay Powell’s “softish landing,” there’s one missing, critical factor: inequality and what the Fed must do about it or, if it won’t, what we must do about the Fed.

The Fed is fond of blaming fiscal policy for economic inequality, but U.S. fiscal policy has been awesomely stimulative since the pandemic struck and the U.S. has still grown ever more unequal in terms of both income and wealth. This is because ultra-accommodative monetary policy stokes inequality and, at the scale practiced by the Federal Reserve, towers over even trillions of fiscal stimulus. As a result, the U.S. didn’t get the Fed’s promise of “robust growth” accompanied by only a bit of “transitory” inflation. Of course, we instead got a crushing combination of high-flying inflation that will leave long-lasting scars on vulnerable households even if it meaningfully abates as some now hope.

The Fed thinks itself aloof from any inequality accountability because it cloaks itself in the mantle of “maximum employment” as armor against any inequality-effect assertions. It was in fact this focus solely on employment …

19 08, 2022

FedFin: The Social-Impact Say-So

Arezou Rafikian2023-01-04T11:19:39-05:00August 19th, 2022|The Vault|

We look here at an interesting idea from three senior Fannie Mae officials: an index to measure a Single-Family MBS’s social impact. The proposal seeks to enable socially conscious investors to support affordable housing for underserved communities while balancing the needs of mortgage borrowers, investors, and market function. It also reflects the objectives laid out in Fannie Mae’s Equitable Housing Finance Plan such as providing social impact data and boosting low-income and minority homeownership. …

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