I have a Fidelity investment account from days yonder when I worked for a major corporation. I have no idea why I kept it because I yanked all my 401K funds out to try to pay off my house. That might look like a smart move given the current economic environment, but it was luck combined with my relatively newfound gag reflex regarding debt. I just got an email from Fidelity with the subject line: Insight into the Rescue Package.
You never really get any insight from these kinds of mails unless you read between the lines. So that’s what I did.
The mail starts off:
As part of Fidelity’s ongoing effort to keep you up to date on events affecting our economic situation, our Market Analysis Team has provided analysis on the Government Rescue Plan.
On October 3, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a rescue package for the U.S. financial system, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It includes measures added and approved by the U.S. Senate on October 1.
The main objectives of the Act are to:
Remove troubled assets from the financial system
Recapitalize the financial system by injecting a major infusion of capital
I guess the term “rescue package” or “Emergency Economic Stabilization” was more palatable than “government bailout” and that if felt better to say “troubled assets” than “bad debt” or “bad bets.” I have suspicions that they may need to work on their approach if they think that this kind of word smith’ing is going to help ease their clients’ fears.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I am no financial Merlin; certainly far from it. But indulge me for a moment because I think that my inexperience helps me in this case. As a result of my simple outlook, I have the luxury of being able to boil the overall financial maelstrom into a few rudimentary observations and gross oversimplifications. Here’s the insight I did get from the Fidelity form letter:
A market is like a game
The players want to play and the fans want the players to play - so that all can benefit from the game
A game works just fine as long as everyone plays by the established and agreed upon rules.
If you don’t have trust that everyone is playing fair you won’t have a game for very long
Fair play is the game and cheaters are to be penalized or punished depending on the seriousness of the indiscretion
A government is like a referee
Referees that operate with integrity are helpful to a game’s coherence
Referees that lack integrity are hurtful to a game’s coherence
If the Ref is susceptible to harming the nature of the game (either through lack of knowledge of the game or through a lack of integrity) your game will lose integrity and coherence.
If a game has no coherence, the players and fans suffer, and they’ll find another game elsewhere.
It seems to me that in our nation, we’ve voted in some bad ref’s and player cheating is out of control. We bear the responsibility and perhaps we’ll suffer the consequences.
There are some interesting highlights that have jumped out at me in my own research into the subject of what went down in this whole mess.
The short story seems to be the perennial tradition we humans share of succumbing to gold fever. That, coupled with a lack of transparency, kicked off a distant tsunami that still has a ways to go before its full effects are felt by those of us standing on the shore fishing.
I do want to expand the story a little bit, just to examine who poured the gas and where the spark came from.
After about 6 years of “growth,” we all remember the dot-com bubble imploding around 2001. To defend against a recession the Federal Reserve injected money into the financial system by printing more (of course we know they can just change some numbers in a computer and not have to get their fingers inky to inject money). The custodians of this new cash, and anyone who had large sums of it already, needed a new place to find for it to live - and they found one…the housing market.
The housing market was flying, in part, because of the growth in the tech industry. The government at the same time was doing everything it could to encourage families to get into homes. Lenders were looking the other way to get people who weren’t qualified into them.
Once the tech bubble deflated there was still plenty of momentum in the housing market the bubble helped create. I think it took a while for the housing boom to falter because we’re dealing with a real-life web of interdependent systems and materials and a slightly different psychological mindset. Where the tech boom was mostly just digital wealth, the real estate market had real and tangible assets. Everywhere everyone could see housing prices increasing. There were even countless TV shows based on it like Flip that House and Designed to Sell.
And, as we now know, it seems that these real assets were much more attractive as risk mitigator to the financial service industry. Assets are always better than the mere 1’s and 0’s in the dot com game. It seems it was thought that these assets “guaranteed” the capital investment – so it was “safe.” I guess it kind of makes sense…the housing prices just kept going up and up - and even if someone or many someones did default, on balance, it would be okay because you could probably sell the house for more.
When housing prices went kaput – the match was lit, and the rest you can get inundated with if you turn on the TV news.
This is a story - but not the whole story.
In publicly traded companies, other than trade secrets and personal employee records, I can’t really think of too many things that ought to be shielded from public view. Unfortunately, “shielding from public view” is exactly what the companies that are failing in the financial services industry asked for – and ultimately got, thanks in part to former Republican Texas Congressman/current McCain economic advisor Phil Gramm.
In 1999, with a final sweep, Gramm’s legislation (signed into law by Clinton) kicked the leg out from the Glass Steagall Act. The Glass Steagall Act, which regulated the financial services industry, was enacted in 1933 as the Great Depression was in full swing. One of its primary purposes was to, guess what…curb speculation and prevent bank holding companies from buying other financial institutions; basically to help prevent the situation we’re currently in now.
JP Morgan gets Bear Sterns and WaMu for a song, and institution after institution fails or gets absorbed. More and more control coalesces in fewer and fewer nodes.
I question Milton Friedman’s world view as it pertains to his influence on developing countries. He takes a one size fits all approach that I think does a great deal of harm. That said, he does have some interesting opinions as it relates to the United Stats. This video was made in the early 80’s but there might be something interesting to take away given the current climate:
I think the important thing to learn from this is that we’re not really good at learning - or at least we suffer from some form of selective collective memory loss. The thing is - grandma and grandpa knew all this stuff already - don’t trust banks and live within your means: save, save, save. The Chinese have a culture that adhere’s to this philosophy as well.
I have to admit that our economy has been able to withstand a herculean amount of punishment; far more than I thought it could. While that may mean things aren’t as bad as reported, I think it is more likely that we have been supported by a globalization suspension net. Unfortunately it sucks to stress test something while you’re dependent upon it - I wouldn’t do it while I was on a life support machine. I think our economy is definitely a reflection and consequence of our current cultural mindset. In the context of mythos, I am extremely curious about what cultural Karma might look like.
Mindsets can be hard to change. The good news is that they will if they have to. As the USA looks to find its role in a future where we may not be the world’s alpha protector dog, other countries will naturally assert their own strength. Loki, Kali, Nun and Naunet, and other chaos gods come to mind (side note: I find special interest that Nun and Naunet are the male and female Egyptian gods/aspects of chaos AND water). These mythic figures may be worth investigating to see how the human psyche orients towards their representation of change. For those who are not accustomed to reorienting their world view on a regular basis, the journey ahead may get a little rough; they in turn may make it rough on the rest of us. To me, education and awareness seem to be the best preparation in any case.
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