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Article Artículo

Lesson for Robert Samuelson on the Financial Crisis: Just Because You're Stupid Doesn't Mean You Didn't Commit Fraud

There have been considerable efforts made over the last five years to convince us that the bankers at the center of the financial crisis were victims just like the rest of us. Robert Samuelson does his part in a column today.

The main line in his argument are a couple of studies showing that most of the top execs at the banks at the center of the crisis were themselves heavily invested in real estate. This means that they also bought into the housing bubble. Therefore there was no fraud, just bad business judgment. That doesn't follow.

Let's look to Enron, a case where everyone agrees there was fraud. Did Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling and the other top execs believe that Enron had a viable business model? I never met any of these folks, but my guess is that they probably did believe in the company and certainly their stockholding pattern was not consistent with people who knew they had a Ponzi scheme on their hands. It is entirely plausible that at one level they both believed they had a really clever business model and that they also committed fraud to advance this model.

If we look to the Countrywides and Citigroups it is entirely plausible that their top honchos really thought that the housing market was just going to keep rising forever. It is also entirely plausible that they issued and securitized millions of fraudulent mortgages to maximize their profit from this rising market. Being stupid about the housing market does not in any way prove that they did not commit fraud, just as the Enron boys would not be somehow exonerated if they really believed in the company's business model.

There are two other points worth noting in Samuelson's story. He is quick to dismiss the idea that the problems of the financial crisis were a deeply corrupt financial sector. He tells readers:

"We were victims of success. The crisis originated from 25 years of prosperity, from roughly the end of 1982 to the end of 2007. This conditioned people — bankers, regulators, economists, almost everyone — to take stable growth for granted. The longer the prosperity continued, the more it inspired the risky behaviors that ultimately wrecked the economy."

The piece tells us how great things were over the quarter century from 1982 to 2007. The big problem with Samuelson's story is that by almost every measure things were better over the prior quarter century and certainly over the first quarter century after World War II. If prosperity created the conditions that led to the crisis, why didn't the much great prosperity over the period from 1947-1972 lead to any comparable crisis?

The answer is that the problem was not prosperity, the problem was that it was prosperity that was being driven by asset bubbles. And, as we should all know, asset bubbles burst. If they are the basis of prosperity, then it is destined to end badly.

This brings up the second point and another serious Robert Samuelson confusion. He tells readers:

Dean Baker / September 16, 2013

Article Artículo

Honduras

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Blaming the Victims: U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Doubles Down Regarding Ahuas Shootings

Earlier this week, U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Lisa Kubiske gave a talk at the Institute of the Americas in San Diego. During the Q and A, audience member Aaron Montenegro asked her about the May 11, 2012 DEA-related shooting incident in Ahuas, in Honduras’ Mosquitia region in which four local, unarmed villagers were killed and several others wounded. (As Americas Blog readers know, CEPR has co-authored two in-depth reports on the incident with Rights Action, based on evidence and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and various U.S. and Honduran officials; and on a review of official investigations.  And we have blogged about ongoing developments regarding the case as well.)

A recording of the revealing exchange is posted here, and a full transcript follows:

Question:  I'd like to mention something that you didn't talk about, and that's the Ahuas case in Mosquitia and the lack of cooperation coming from the U.S. Embassy.  For those of you who don't know, in indigenous territory, the Mosquitia, there was a massacre that took place in the name of fighting narcotráfico, and this was taking place with U.S. State Department helicopters, with DEA agents and subcontracted Guatemalan pilots. And there has been a refusal to participate within this investigation as far as the ballistic tests are concerned.  So I would just like for you to maybe address that and why there hasn't been so much forward participation with that if you are talking about impunity. And then, another question I would like to 

Moderator: Wait a minute, let’s do that one...

Question: OK.

CEPR / September 13, 2013

Article Artículo

Why the Wall Street Perps Walked

Neil Irwin had a discussion of the failure to prosecute any of the Wall Street honchos for the conduct that led up to the financial crisis. He concludes that:

"America doesn’t criminalize bad business decisions, even when they lead to business failure."

That is obviously true, but this is not the issue. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) found:

"Lenders made loans that they knew borrowers could not afford and that could cause massive losses to investors in mortgage securities. As early as September 2004, Countrywide executives recognized that many of the loans they were originating could result in “catastrophic consequences.” Less than a year later, they noted that certain high-risk loans they were making could result not only in foreclosures but also in “financial and reputational catastrophe” for the firm. But they did not stop.

"And the report documents that major financial institutions ineffectively sampled loans they were purchasing to package and sell to investors. They knew a significant percentage of the sampled loans did not meet their own underwriting standards or those of the originators. Nonetheless, they sold those securities to investors. The Commission’s review of many prospectuses provided to investors found that this critical information was not disclosed."

The question was not whether the top executives of mortgage issuers like Countrywide and investment banks like Goldman Sachs bought into the housing bubble, the question is whether they followed proper business practices in their lust to cash in. The assessment of the FCIC is that they did not. Issuing a mortgage that is known to be based on false information and then selling it in the secondary market is fraud and punishable by time in jail. Similarly, packaging loans into mortgage backed securities that an investment bank has good reason to believe are based on false information is also fraud and punishable by time in jail. (It's actually common for true believers in a bubble to also commit fraud. It is likely top executives at Enron believed that they were actually running a profitable company.)

The way prosecutors would construct a case to prosecute top executives would be by starting at the bottom. They would have gone to branch offices at major subprime issuers like Countrywide and Ameriquest and find out why mortgage agents were issuing so many mortgages with improper documentation. Since this was done by many agents, they presumably could have gotten one or more to report that this was a policy of the branch manager. Presumably branch managers told agents that they needed to issue certain numbers of mortgages and they did not care if the mortgages did not meet proper standards.

Dean Baker / September 13, 2013

Article Artículo

Haiti

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Haiti PM: UN Has “Moral Responsibility” to Address Cholera Epidemic

Haitian Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe, on a trip to Europe to ensure continued donor support, was asked by France 24’s Marc Perelman about the ongoing cholera epidemic and U.N. responsibility. Perelman notes that “all the scientific evidence up to date points to the U.N.” but questioned Lamothe as to why the Haitian government has “never pushed for a public apology.” Lamothe stressed that the government has tried to address the issue through “direct dialogue” with the U.N., but also noted that the U.N. has an obvious “moral responsibility” to address the epidemic.

The U.N., in addition to not issuing an apology, has never accepted responsibility for the deadly epidemic that has killed over 8,260 and sickened over 675,000 in the last three years. A U.N.-backed cholera elimination plan has been unable to raise the required funds to adequately address the issue, despite Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s assurance in late 2012 that he would “use every opportunity” to raise the necessary funds. A high-level donor meeting to raise funds for the plan, scheduled for early October in Washington, has now been postponed until 2014. It had been expected that Mr. Ban, as well as World Bank president Jim Yong Kim, would attend. The plan, which requires some $450 million over its first two years, remains less than half funded.

In the meantime, cholera continues to ravage the country as the response capabilities of national actors diminish. In a bulletin earlier this week, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) noted that “resources for cholera response, including funding and staff, have been in steady decline since 2012.” OCHA concludes by stating that “if this trend continues, it would be virtually impossible to effectively and efficiently respond to the epidemic in the event of sudden outbreaks.” The lack of adequate resources also means that detailed data on where cholera outbreaks are occurring and how many are dying is becoming harder and harder to come by. The actual toll of this imported disease could be much higher than the official numbers indicate.

In late August, members of the U.N. Security Council and countries contributing to MINUSTAH met to discuss the extension of the mission’s mandate. Not a single country (PDF) raised the issue of U.N. responsibility for cholera, though many praised the Secretary General’s efforts to eliminate it. MINUSTAH’s proposed budget for 2013/2014 is $576,619,000, more than enough to fully fund the cholera elimination plan over its first two years.

In light of continued U.N. denials of responsibility, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti and the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux continue to seek legal redress on behalf of over 6,000 cholera victims. An earlier claim brought to the U.N. was dismissed as “not receivable” in February. A recent Al Jazeera Fault Lines documentary by Sebastian Walker takes a detailed look at the evolution of the epidemic, its impact on rural communities and the responsibility of the U.N. In it, Walker interviews Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary General Eduardo Del Buey. After Del Buey reads, verbatim, the U.N. press release from February, Walker pressures him to explain the decision:

Jake Johnston / September 12, 2013

Article Artículo

Workers

The State of the Unions in Los Angeles, California, and the United States

UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) has published its latest annual report on union membership in the city of Los Angeles, the state of California, and the United States as a whole.  Some of their results, covering trends from 2005 through 2013, might surprise you.

As the economy continues to struggle, unionization rates have managed to hold their own or even improve somewhat relative to the situation before the recession.  In 2005 and again in 2013, 12.5 percent of US workers were union members.  Between the same two years, Los Angeles and California saw small increases in unionization rates; from 16.5 percent to 16.9 percent in California, and from 15.5 percent to 16.2 percent in Los Angeles. 

unions-ceprblog-2013-09-fig-1

Source: IRLE’s State of the Unions in 2013

CEPR and Teresa Kroeger / September 10, 2013