I have heard many times in my life some people telling me that the only way to advance and prosper is leaving behind our past and forgetting our errors. I have never believed in this, as the only way of improving and performing at a higher level on your next try is by analysing and eliminating past errors. It has been 10 years since the global financial crises; which has now fortunately got to an end, started. I was still a young kid to perceive anything of the situation, as at my young age of 6 years I wasn’t even capable of understanding what finance was about. But there is one that hasn’t been blamed at all, that has been unjustifiably sanctified and has come across as our “saviour” while having caused the most harsh and unbearable crisis in history, of course, this was the government. Because deregulation was and has been always a myth, and overregulation always a problem.
Let’s start talking about the FED. IN the year 2006, Bernanke astonishingly inverted the Treasury yield curve, where the FED continuously maintains low term interest rates higher than short term rates, generating an excess of demand for bonds in the short term and debt in the long run. He of course knew that this would cause a recession and a credit financial crisis, but he decided allowing the snowball to get bigger before announcing its existence. Without necessity and in the middle of a real estate market boom, he decided also to impose a 1.7 trillion-dollar quantitative easing (QE) policy, where the FED promised to purchase a determined number of corporate and sovereign debt bonds each month.
Other of the greatest problems of the recession was caused by one of the greatest government corporations, concretely, the FEDERAL DEPOSIT INSURANCE CORPORATION, or as it is widely known, the FDIC, which was created in 1934 after the Great Depression of 1930. Its main role was to protect small depositors in commercial banks, even though in the last years previous to the crisis it also placed a premium on “unsound banking” and how not, involved the government in the loss. Over the years, the amount covered by the FDIC to every American citizen with deposits in the US has been in the rise. At first it was of 100,000 dollars, while a family of four people could easily benefit from it and have more than 500,000 dollars insured in just one deposit. The latter Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) increased the coverage up to 250,000 dollars and financial pools up to 1,000,000 dollars, providing unlimited coverage for certain deposits of a fraction of society.
The FDIC insurance sound pretty and a matter for partying all night long, but that’s not reality, as important problems were caused by this mechanism. First of all, the FDIC insurance destroyed market discipline and the free fluctuation of market forces, causing depositors to don’t worry about the safety, quality or soundness of their banks; as the State would be there to rescue them.
It all started back in the 1930s with the New Deal, as since then a wide variety of government policies had artificially reduced house prices, encouraging people to buy properties over their possibilities, creating a credit bubble that someday had to explode altogether with loose monetary policies. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1979 were practically designed to prevent racial discrimination in terms of loans, mortgages and credit given by banks. The definite policy was the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which was thought to encourage banks to invest locally and reduce Euromarkets influence on mortgages. The new law also pretended to facilitate credit for small businesses. The final and real effect was that banks were forced to make loans to low-income borrowers and many African Americans which didn’t comply with the established credit requirements. This oversupply of mortgages and loans caused that almost 70% of the total loans given under conditions of the Community Reinvestment Act became “Non-Performing Loans” (NPL), which supposed astonishingly high bad debts for financial corporations and banks.
To sum up, the financial recession of this last 10 years should serve to show us how the government underperforms when it exceeds its role. Financial risks were taken through various investment and innovative financial vehicles, and mainly incentivised by the FDIOC deposits’ insurance and the artificially low prices houses had due to government housing policy. Obviously, the FED took the biggest part into the problem to make it even worse by generating greater levels of debt and devaluation through their supposedly inflationary policies of QE and near zero interest rates. The government should always be restricted and limited, because if the beast is given power, the economy will tremble, and we will have to tell the chronicle of another global recession.
Estudiante de economía internacional. Defensor del libre mercado desde que tengo uso de razón. Una sola frase para cambiar el mundo: «Laissez faire». Autor de «IN DEFENSE OF FREEDOM», prologado por Daniel Lacalle.
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