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Eric Falkenstein discusses the ideas of Gary Gorton:This financial crisis has had two legs: the initial boom and bust in housing prices, primarily in the USA, and the accelerator mechanism that then turned this crisis into a panic, affecting financial institutions almost indiscriminately, and countries furthest away from the USA were among the worst performers.There is much more there or excerpts of his paper linked to herein:All bond prices plummeted (spreads rose) during the financial crisis, not just the prices of subprime‐related bonds. These price declines were due to a banking panic in which institutional investors and firms refused to renew sale and repurchase agreements (repo) – short‐term, collateralized, agreementsthat the Fed rightly used to count as money. Collateral for repo was, to a large extent, securitized bonds. Firms were forced to sell assets as a result of the banking panic, reducing bond prices and creating losses. There is nothing mysterious or irrational about the panic. There were genuine fears about the locations of subprime risk concentrations among counterparties. This banking system (the “shadow” or “parallel” banking system) ‐‐ repo based on securitization ‐‐ is a genuine banking system, as large as the traditional, regulated and banking system. It is of critical importance to the economy because it is the funding basis for the traditional banking system. Without it, traditional banks will not lend and credit, which is essential for job creation, will not be created.U.S. financial history is replete with banking crises and the predictable political responses. Most people are unaware of this history, which we are repeating. A basic point of this note is that there is a fundamental, structural, feature of banking, which if not guarded against leads to such crises. Banks create money, which allows the holder to withdraw cash on demand. The problem is not that we have banking; we need banks and banking. And we need this type of bank product. But, as the world grows and changes, this money feature of banking reappears in different forms. The current crisis, far from being unique, is another manifestation of this problem. The problem then is structural.There was a banking panic, starting August 9, 2007.The fundamental business of banking creates a vulnerability to panic because the banks’ trading securities are short term and need not be renewed; depositors can withdraw their money. But, panic can be prevented with intelligent policies. What happened in August 2007 involved a different form of bank liability, one unfamiliar to regulators. Regulators and academics were not aware of the size or vulnerability of the new bank liabilities.In fact, the bank liabilities that we will focus on are actually very old, but have not been quantitatively important historically. The liabilities of interest are sale and repurchase agreements, called the “repo” market. Before the crisis trillions of dollars were traded in the repo market. The market was a very liquid market like another very liquid market, the one where goods are exchanged for checks (demand deposits). Repo and checks are both forms of money. (This is not a controversial statement.) There have always been difficulties creating private money (like demand deposits) and this time around was no different.The panic in 2007 was not observed by anyone other than those trading or otherwise involved in the capital markets because the repo market does not involve regular people, but firms and institutional investors. So, the panic in 2007 was not like the previous panics in American history (like the Panic of 1907, shown below, or that of 1837, 1857, 1873 and so on) in that it was not a mass run on banks by individual depositors, but instead was a run by firms and institutional investors on financial firms. The fact that the run was not observed by regulators, politicians, the media, or ordinary Americans has made the events particularly hard to understand. It has opened the door to spurious, superficial, and politically expedient “explanations” and demagoguery.As explained, the Panic of 2007 was not centered on demand deposits, but on the repo market which is not insured. As the economy transforms with growth, banking also changes. But, at a deep level the basic form of the bank liability has the same structure, whether it is private bank notes (issued before the Civil War), demand deposits, or sale and repurchase agreements. Bank liabilities are designed to be safe; they are short term, redeemable, and backed by collateral. But, they have always been vulnerable to mass withdrawals, a panic. This time the panic was in the sale and repurchase market (“repo market”)....banking panics continued. They continued because demand deposits were vulnerable to panics. Economists and regulators did not figure this out for decades. In fact, when panics due to demand deposits were ended it was not due to the insight of economists, politicians, or regulators. Deposit insurance was not proposed by President Roosevelt; in fact, he opposed it. Bankers opposed it. Economists decried the “moral hazards” that would result from such a policy. Deposit insurance was a populist demand. People wanted the dominant medium of exchange protected. It is not an exaggeration to say that the quiet period in banking from 1934 to 2007, due to deposit insurance, was basically an accident of history.The fragility of our unit banks prior to deposit insurance made an interesting contrast to the system of Canadian branch banks which were more stable due to greater diversification and generally more restrained lending practices.The outstanding amount of subprime bonds was not large enough to cause a systemic financial crisis by itself. ... The issue is why all bond prices plummeted. What caused that? ... Outstanding subprime securitization was not large enough by itself to have caused the losses that were experienced. Further, the timing is wrong. Subprime mortgages started to deteriorate in January 2007, eight months before the panic in August.He is talking here about the early stages of panic before it became full blown in the Fall of 2008.... Subprime started significantly deteriorating well before the panic... Subprime will play an important role in the story later. But by itself it does not explain the crisis.Holding loans on the balance sheets of banks is not profitable. This is a fundamental point. This is why the parallel or shadow banking system developed. If an industry is not profitable, the owners exit the industry by not investing; they invest elsewhere. Regulators can make banks do things, like hold more capital, but they cannot prevent exit if banking is not profitable. “Exit” means that the regulated banking sector shrinks, as bank equity holders refuse to invest more equity. Bank regulation determines the size of the regulated banking sector, and that is all. One form of exit is for banks to not hold loans but to sell the loans; securitization is the selling of portfolios of loans. Selling loans – while news to some people—has been going on now for about 30 years without problems.... No one has produced evidence of any problems with securitization generally; though there are have been many such assertions. The motivation for banks to sell loans is profitability.The parallel or shadow banking system is essentially how the traditional, regulated, banking system is funded. The two banking systems are intimately connected. This is very important to recognize. It means that without the securitization markets the traditional banking system is not goingto function.Institutional investors and nonfinancial firms have demands for checking accounts just like you and I do. But, for them there is no safe banking account because deposit insurance is limited. So, where does an institutional investor go to deposit money? ... The answer is that the institutional investor goes to the repo market.A problem with the new banking system is that it depends on collateral to guarantee the safety of the deposits. But, there are many demands for such collateral. ... The demand for collateral has been largely met by securitization, a 30‐year old innovation that allows for efficient financing of loans. Repo is to a significant degree based on securitized bonds as collateral, a combination called “securitized banking.” The shortage of collateral for repo, derivatives, and clearing/settlement is reminiscent of the shortages of money in early America, which is what led to demand deposit banking....There’s another aspect to repo that is important: haircuts. ... Prior to the panic, haircuts on all assets were zero! For now, keep in mind that an increase in the haircuts is a withdrawal from the bank. Massive withdrawals are a banking panic. That’s what happened. Like during the pre‐Federal Reserve panics, there was a shock that by itself was not large, house prices fell. But, the distribution of the risks (where the subprime bonds were, in which firms, and how much) was not known. Here is where subprime plays its role. Elsewhere, I have likened subprime to e‐coli (see Gorton (2009a, 2010)). Millions of pounds of beef might be recalled because the location of a small amount of e‐coli is not known for sure. If the government did not know which ground beef possibly contained the e‐coli, there would be a panic: people would stop eating ground beef. If we all stop eating hamburgers for a month, or a year, it would be a big problem for McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and so on. They would go bankrupt. That’s what happened.Faced with the task of raising money to meet the withdrawals, firms had to sell assets.The development of the parallel banking system did not happen overnight. It has been developing for three decades, and especially grew in the 1990s. But bank regulators and academics were not aware of these developments. Regulators did not measure or understand this development. As we have seen, the government does not measure the relevant markets. Academics were not aware of these markets; they did not study these markets. The incentives of regulators and academics did not lead them to look hard and ask questions.There are some interesting summary points there in conclusion. Also a book based upon the authors earlier papers is mentioned here.Eric Falkenstein offers a comparison: Gorton vs LewisHis main evidence that this was a system-wide crisis was that securities backed by autos, credit cards, student loans, and financial companies of varied focus all declined, even though default rates in these other classes were not changing much. A financial crisis is when all finance becomes suspect, created a self-fulling prophesy because the system is always insolvent if there is no confidence in the system.It's very interesting to think of financial crises, and recessions they cause, this way, as overreactions caused by people not being able to suss out the essence of a crisis in real time. Gorton notes crises occurred regularly in the US (1819, 1837, 1860, 73, 84, 90, 93, 1907, 1914, 1931-33), and every time, people are befuddled. When a a drastic change occurs, such as the change from Free Banking era (1837-62) to the National Banking era, or the creation of the Federal Reserve, after about 10 years they think they have eliminated business cycles. They put in new institutions, but because they don't fully understand the old institution, they fail in totally unappreciated new ways.Gorton notes that fixes are perhaps futile. Indeed, he has some recommendations, one that the government insure 'approved AAA' paper, to help reduce the risk of a panic, but given their role in the reduction of credit underwriting standards (documented on page 66), it is then likely they would have made the essential mistake worse, because one thing government does not do well is admit mistakes, because they don't have to (unfortunately, no government agency has gone bankrupt).I would suggest that the US financial system was also insolvent in 1975,1981,1990, and that if you had to mark their books to market, (indeed we had new accounting, FAS 157 that tried to apply market prices to accounting during the crisis), this would basically cause massive dislocations. Why not increase bank capital rates from 4-8%, to 20+%? I don't see a consistent risk premium in financial markets, so the cost is rather low. That is, the market does not require a 6% return premium to bank equity, so one does not need that kind of leveraged return.Alas, most people will find Gorton a bit too dry, too many references, too much math (there are a handful of algebraic equations). Michael Lewis, in contrast, takes the Gladwellian approach to big problems, which is always well received. Indeed, I have seen him an on TV with several different interviewers discussing his latest book, The Big Short [I expect Russ Roberts at econtalk to interview him and totally agree, notwithstanding the 5 other authors with orthogonal diagnoses he also totally agreed with]. Lewis is considered an expert because he worked on Wall street for 2 years and wrote Liar's Poker, an insider's view of the bluster of rich young men. As anyone who has worked in an industry for a couple decades knows, after only 2 years in the business, the impressions of a kid right out of college, no matter how smart and eloquent the sojourner, are invariably quite naive. ... Ultimately Lewis blames everyone, but especially greedy bankers, and so in a banal sense he is correct.But Lewis will most assuredly sell more books than Gorton, part of the reason these crises are endogenous. Stephen Spruiell & Kevin Williamson offer some ideas on shadow banking reform:The really offensive thing about the bailouts was the prevailing sense of adhocracy — that Congress and the White House and the Treasury and the Fed were more or less making things up as they went along. This bank got rescued, that one didn’t. This firm got a bailout on generous terms, that one got the pillory.Before we can get our economy fully un-TARPed, un-Fannied, and un-Freddied, we need an FDIC-style resolution authority that can do for the shadow banking system what the FDIC does for banks: police safety and soundness and, when necessary, take troubled institutions into custody and disassemble them in an orderly manner.The institutions that make up the shadow banking system are a diverse and complicated lot: If traditional banking is a game of checkers, this is 3-D chess on dozens of boards at the same time. It is therefore likely that the regulators will lack the expertise to establish appropriate, timely resolution programs for the complex institutions they are expected to govern. The solution to that problem is found in Columbia finance professor Charles Calomiris’s proposal that every TBTFI — Too Big to Fail Institution — coming under the new agency’s jurisdiction be required to establish and maintain, in advance, its own resolution plan, which would be subject to regulatory approval.Such a plan — basically, a pre-packaged bankruptcy — would make public detailed information about the distribution of losses in the event of an institutional failure — in other words, who would take how much of a haircut if the bank or fund were to find itself in dire straits. This would be a substantial improvement on the political favor-jockeying that marked the government’s intervention in General Motors, for instance, or the political limbo that saw Lehman doing nothing to save itself while waiting to be rescued by a Washington bailout that never came. The authority’s main job would be to keep up with the resolution plans and, when necessary, to execute them.Taking a fresh regulatory approach would give us the opportunity to enact some useful reforms at the same time. At present, capital requirements — the amount of equity and other assets financial firms are required to hold in proportion to their lending — are static: X cents in capital for every $1 in, for example, regular mortgage loans. This makes them “pro-cyclical,” meaning that, during booms, banks suddenly find themselves awash in capital as their share prices and the value of their assets climb, with the effect that they can secure a lot more loans with the assets they already have on the books. But the requirements are pro-cyclical on the downside, too: During recessions, declining share and asset prices erode banks’ capital base, hamstringing their operations and making financial contractions even worse. Instead, we should use counter-cyclical capital requirements: During booms, the amount of capital required to back each dollar in lending should increase on a pre-defined schedule, helping to put the brake on financial bubbles and to tamp down irrational exuberance. During downturns, capital requirements should be loosened on a pre-defined schedule, to facilitate lending and to keep banks from going into capital crises for mere accounting reasons. But these counter-cyclical capital requirements should begin from a higher baseline: The shadow banking system exists, in no small part, to skirt traditional capital requirements, and its scanty capital cushions helped make the recent crisis much worse than it had to be.As always, the devil is in the details. Furthermore, the prepackaged bankruptcy features must be credible. Any framework that might work will require considerable thought and deliberation.As with some of the matters highlighted in earlier posts in this series, this is getting very little emphasis in the public arena.Returning to the contributing factors and events relevant to the panic, Reuven Brenner offers:Confusing the responsibilities of the private markets and the government leads to misguided policies. Some analysts draw the dangerously wrong conclusion that the crisis of 2008 simply was a failure of capitalism. Judge Richard Posner, for example, recently argued that “the key to understanding is that a capitalist economy, while immensely dynamic and productive, is not inherently stable.” Whether a capitalist economy is stable or not might be a worthwhile topic for abstract speculation. But the events of 2008 shed no light on it, since what they actually tell is the story of what happens when governments neglect their responsibilities.In a well-functioning market, the chances of all the players making the same mistake in the same direction is negligible. But systemic errors—errors in which a plurality of the players all err in the same direction—can and do occur when governments forget what makes a commercial society tick. This can occur suddenly, as in a communist revolution. Or it can occur imperceptibly over years, as during the past decade in the United States. Such governmental neglect of responsibilities prepared the ground for the present day, the worst American financial crisis since the Great Depression.The financial technology of the past decade created trillions of dollars’ worth of structured bonds—in effect, attempting to do a magic trick by turning the inherently uncertain cash flows of junk bonds into the predictable cash flows of high-grade debt. Subprime mortgages, for example, are a kind of junk bond. Households with insufficient incomes, and often without prospects of securing good ones in the future, were not just granted entry into the market but were also helped (actively, though indirectly, by the mortgage agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) to speculate in housing on an unprecedented scale.Home-mortgage debt relative to disposable personal income stood stable around 80 percent between 1957 and 2000 but jumped to 140 percent by 2007. The availability of adjustable-rate mortgages at very low interest rates prevailing in the early part of the decade allowed households to carry these much higher debt levels for a while. However, once the Federal Reserve raised the federal-funds rate from 0.5 percent in 2002 to 5.25 percent in 2007, households no longer could pay the higher debt burden. Meanwhile, financial institutions resold about 65 percent of the face value of the mortgages in the form of AAA-rated securities. This means that they sold the other 35 percent to investors who would absorb losses before any losses accrued to the AAA-rated securities.Individuals and firms thought money-market funds to be reliable substitutes for bank deposits: always available and invested heavily in structured securities as well as corporate commercial paper. Once it became clear that supposedly AAA-rated securities were in fact prone to default, money-market funds faced a run by fearful depositors, and the market for corporate commercial paper crashed as well.The collapse of the structured securities market in July 2007 led to the collapse of Bear Stearns in March 2008, the failure of the government-sponsored mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and eventually the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in September 2008, followed by the bailout of the nation’s largest commercial banks and the reincarnation of the remaining investment banks and of GMAC as bank-like institutions, with access to funds from the Federal Reserve. Capital markets, as we knew them, shut down. And asset prices predictably then crashed. Too many mistakes, too much mispriced debt.When this happened, there was no alternative but for the government and the Federal Reserve to step in and become a financial intermediary. The intervention was needed because the mistakes suddenly exposed the fragility of the financial institutions’ funding mechanism. To restore it, the government had to insure the counterparty risks.Whatever the reasons, at first the government did not, and it allowed Lehman Brothers to fail. Then the government suddenly did: Correcting this blunder of letting the edifice of counterparty claims collapse led then to the dramatic expansion of the Federal Reserve balance sheet and the Treasury’s bailing out the banks.In truth, the government had no choice: Depositors had to be convinced that they were secure. Otherwise, the government would have failed in its responsibility of providing the default-free assets that are the foundation of commercial banking. We would have had a massive run on the system, and the vanishing liquidity would have been much worse than what we experienced. By guaranteeing bank deposits as well as a great deal of bank debt, and by purchasing more than a trillion dollars’ worth of securities, the government prevented a collapse of the financial system. That was not a matter of ideology or politics but of necessity.The spending and managing powers of the government have limits. If the government abuses its financial power to buy political support and does not restore the eroded responsibilities, it will eventually fail in its function of providing default-free assets. Without such assets, a commercial society cannot exist, no matter what the constitution of the country says. The words would lose their meaning, and the traditional institutions would be much weakened, becoming a mere façade.Anyone longing for days gone by in the world of banking should be aware:Consider the savings-and-loan (S&L) debacle of the 1980’s. The crisis, which erupted only two decades ago but seems all but forgotten, was almost entirely the result of a failure of government to regulate effectively. And that was by design. Members of Congress put the protection of their political friends ahead of the interests of the financial system as a whole. After the disaster of the Great Depression, three types of banks still survived—artifacts of the Democratic party’s Jacksonian antipathy to powerful banks. Commercial banks offered depositors both checking and savings accounts, and made mostly commercial loans. Savings banks offered only savings accounts and specialized in commercial real-estate loans. Savings-and-loan associations (“thrifts”) also offered only savings accounts; their loan portfolios were almost entirely in mortgages for single-family homes. All this amounted, in effect, to a federally mandated cartel, coddling those already in the banking business and allowing very few new entrants. Between 1945 and 1965, the number of S&L’s remained nearly constant at about 8,000, even as their assets grew more than tenfold from almost $9 billion to over $110 billion. This had something to do with the fact that the rate of interest paid on savings accounts was set by federal law at .25 percent higher than that paid by commercial banks, in order to compensate for the inability of savings banks and S&L’s to offer checking accounts. Savings banks and S&L’s were often called “3-6-3” institutions because they paid 3 percent on deposits, charged 6 percent on loans, and management hit the golf course at 3:00 p.m. on the dot. These small banks were very well connected. As Democratic Senator David Pryor of Arkansas once explained: You got to remember that each community has a savings-and-loan; some have two; some have four, and each of them has seven or eight board members. They own the Chevy dealership and the shoe store. And when we saw these people, we said, gosh, these are the people who are building the homes for people, these are the people who represent a dream that has worked in this country. They were also, of course, the sorts of people whose support politicians most wanted to have—people who donated campaign money and had significant political influence in their localities. The banking situation remained stable in the two decades after World War II as the Federal Reserve was able to keep interest rates steady and inflation low. But when Lyndon Johnson tried to fund both guns (the Vietnam war) and butter (the Great Society), the cartel began to break down. If the government’s first priority had been the integrity of the banking system and the safety of deposits, the weakest banks would have been forced to merge with larger, sounder institutions. Most solvent savings banks and S&L’s would then have been transmuted into commercial banks, which were required to have larger amounts of capital and reserves. And some did transmute themselves on their own. But by 1980 there were still well over 4,500 S&L’s in operation, relics of an earlier time.Why was the integrity of the banking system not the first priority? Part of the reason lay in the highly fragmented nature of the federal regulatory bureaucracy. A host of agencies—including the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC and the FSLIC, state banking authorities, and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB)—oversaw the various forms of banks. Each of these agencies was more dedicated to protecting its own turf than to protecting the banking system as a whole. Adding to the turmoil was the inflation that took off in the late 1960’s. When the low interest rates that banks were permitted to pay failed to keep pace with inflation, depositors started to look elsewhere for a higher return. Many turned to money-market funds, which were regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission rather than by the various banking authorities and were not restricted in the rate of interest they could pay. Money began to flow out of savings accounts and into these new funds, in a process known to banking specialists by the sonorous term “disintermediation.”There is much more banking and financial history in that article. The key point is that prior financial arrangements were abandoned not for ideological reasons but because they were no longer tenable.Just to reiterate the point:There is a widespread but erroneous belief that the financial crisis has its origins in deregulation dating all the way back to the late 1970s. Therefore any steps to restore the pre-Reagan regulatory system are to be welcomed. This is really bad financial history. ... in the more controlled capital markets of the 1970s, borrowers generally paid more for their loans because there was less competition. Lousy managements were protected from corporate raiders. Savers earned negative real interest rates because of high inflation. Deregulation—such as lifting restrictions on the interest rates banks could pay and charge—and financial innovation delivered real benefits for the U.S. economy in the 1980s and '90s. One last point. Once asset markets like this experience a pricing blackout, conventional attempts to help the economy with any kind of fiscal stimulus are worthless. Visibility, transparency and activity must be restored to those asset markets for the economy to recover. Asset markets are an order of magnitude greater in value compared to annual economic output. So far corporate bond market issuance has recovered nicely. Other areas have shown partial recovery and some very little even with help from available Fed lending facilities. Things are getting better, but there is a long way to go. Of course a war on wealth creation won't help.
You've probably heard about the role of the credit rating agencies in the GR, in an interview with Steve Horwitz:FMM: Returning to “The Great Recession,” it is interesting that you, essentially, charge the SEC with creating adverse information problems in securities markets. “In the late 1960s, after some investment scandals, the SEC created a cartel by authorizing only a limited number of these agencies to be officially-designated raters. With that government-created cartel in place, the agencies slowly shifted from serving investors to serving the issuers of bonds.”Can you elaborate on the nature of the SEC-created cartel and in what ways it is serving the issuers of bonds rather than the investors? SH: The SEC authorized those agencies to have privileged status in the wake of some financial problems in the late 60s and early 70s. The thinking, I guess, was to more closely oversee the officially approved firms. The SEC then said that banks could only hold fancy securities rated by one of these three agencies. Once that happened, the big shift occurs. Before that, the agencies served the buyers by, like Consumer Reports, giving them information and ratings about the instruments. But once their approval was needed in order for the securities to be marketed, the sellers started going to them to get the ratings they wanted. The raters then had an incentive to provide good ratings so as to not lose the business to their other two co-cartelists. They also then had reason to eliminate the costs of inter-firm competition by coming to more agreement on how to do things. The results, as you can see, were not pretty.In the absence of free entry into this market, there was no way to correct the mistakes of the cartelists. There was no Hayekian learning process in place.We read in The Sellout:At the same time, government-anointed credit raters were assigning triple-A ratings to mortgage-backed securities that in no way deserved them. The Federal Reserve's so-called Basel capital standards gave banks more credit for owning mortgage-backed securities than many other assets, and in 2004 the SEC applied those standards to investment banks, with dramatic results. In 2003, Lehman Brothers held roughly equal amounts of U.S. Treasury bonds and mortgage- and other asset-backed securities. By 2006 the firm's Treasury holdings had barely budged while its mortgage- and asset-backed holdings had almost tripled. Meanwhile, the Fed's easy money policies of the early 2000s subsidized credit and sent the banks looking for higher yields. Mortgage bonds offered high returns and the "safety" of AAA ratings.As credit spreads began to widen in 2007 and then continued to widen in 2008 it was clear that distress was increasing in the financial system. It wasn't that difficult to understand how investment banks heavily involved in mortgage backed securities were having problems. What didn't make sense was the level of distress I was hearing about at many regular commercial banks. The role of the little known but rather significant recourse rule is explained at some length here: (and in a more limited version here)There is little evidence that deregulation or banks' compensation practices caused the financial crisis. What did seem to cause it were capital regulations imposed on banks across the world. These regulations explain why bankers who are commonly seen as having recklessly bought risky mortgage-backed bonds in order to boost earnings--and bonuses--actually bought the least-risky, least-lucrative bonds available: those that were guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac or were rated AAA. These securities were decisively favored by capital regulations, raising the question of whether regulation actually increases systemic risk. By definition, regulations aim to homogenize the otherwise heterogeneous behavior of competing enterprises. Since one set of regulations has the force of law, it homogenizes the entire economy in that jurisdiction. But regulators are fallible, and if their ideas turn out to be wrong--as they appear to have been in the case of capital regulations--the entire system is put at risk....why did the bursting of the housing bubble cause a financial crisis, that is, a banking crisis?This might not seem so puzzling at first: commercial banks made many of the mortgage loans that were financed by the Federal Reserve's low interest rates. But the financial crisis was not caused by mortgage defaults directly: it was caused by a sharp drop, in September 2008, in the market price of mortgage-backed bonds, in anticipation of their declining value as the bubble deflated. The first victims of the falling price of mortgage-backed bonds were Fannie and Freddie; in quick succession came the investment bank Lehman Brothers; and finally came the commercial banks--because they held so many mortgage-backed bonds, not mortgages. The question, then, is why the commercial banks held so many mortgage-backed bonds. If deregulation or the quest for high earnings, hence high compensation, did not cause the banks to buy these bonds, what did?To answer this question, we have to turn in a direction that has been overlooked by the conventional wisdom: an obscure regulation called the recourse rule. The recourse rule was enacted by the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision in 2001.[14] It was an amendment to the international Basel Accords governing banks' capital holdings, and all over the world, these regulations appear to have contributed significantly both to the housing boom and to the financial crisis.But under the recourse rule, "well-capitalized" American commercial banks were required to spend 80 percent more capital on commercial loans, 80 percent more capital on corporate bonds, and 60 percent more capital on individual mortgages than they had to spend on asset-backed securities, including mortgage-backed bonds, as long as these bonds were rated AA or AAA or were issued by a government-sponsored enterprise (GSE), such as Fannie or Freddie. Specifically, $2 in capital was required for every $100 in mortgage-backed bonds, compared to $5 for the same amount in mortgage loans and $10 for the same amount in commercial loans.One can readily see that the recourse rule was designed to steer banks' funds into "safe" assets, such as AAA mortgage-backed bonds. The fact that 93 percent of the banks' mortgage-backed securities were either AAA rated or were issued by a GSE shows that this is exactly what the rule accomplished.[16] Unfortunately, these bonds turned out not to be so safe. Without the recourse rule, however, there is no reason for portfolios of American banks to have been so heavily concentrated in mortgage-backed bonds.The recourse rule did not apply outside the United States, but the first set of Basel accords on bank capital, adopted in 1988,[19] included provisions for even more profitable forms of "capital arbitrage" through off-balance-sheet entities such as structured investment vehicles (SIVs), which were used extensively in Europe. Moreover, in 2006, a second set of bank-capital accords, "Basel II," began to be implemented outside the United States. Basel II took essentially the same approach as the recourse rule, encouraging foreign banks to acquire mortgage-backed securities, just as in the United States.[20] Here, then, we may have the genesis of the global financial crisis. If so, it turns out to have been caused by the very device--regulation--to which most people now, as they did throughout the twentieth century, look for the "reform" of capitalism. But is it really capitalism when it is so heavily regulated? In a complex world like ours, nobody really knows what will succeed until it is tried. Competition, which pits entrepreneurs' divergent ideas against each other, is the only way to test these ideas through anything but the highly unreliable process of verbal debate (in which the debaters' competing ideas cannot be simultaneously tested against each other in the real world, instead of in the imaginations of their audience).Capitalism will probably always be prone to asset bubbles and other manifestations of homogeneous behavior, but only because it is part of human nature for people to go along with the crowd. This is a risk that can be mitigated but not eliminated. But capitalism has a unique feature, competition, that does mitigate it by both encouraging and taking advantage of heterogeneous behavior, that is, innovation.Homogeneity, on the other hand, is the ineradicable curse of socialism, in which the community as a whole, through its elected (or self-appointed) representatives, decides on the allocation of resources. One plan is imposed on all, as thoroughly as if everyone spontaneously decided to join a herd.[22] And we maintain that homogeneity is also the problem with regulation. Regulations, by their very nature, align the behavior of those being regulated with the ideas of those doing the regulating. Regulations are like mandatory instructions for herd behavior, automatically increasing systemic risk. The recourse rule, Basel I, and Basel II loaded the dice in favor of the regulators' ideas about prudent banking. These regulations imposed a new profitability gradient over all bankers' risk/return calculations, conferring 80 percent capital relief on banks that bought GSE-issued or highly rated mortgage-backed bonds rather than commercial loans or corporate bonds, and 60 percent relief for banks that traded their individual mortgages for those "safe" mortgage-backed bonds. Only bankers with the most extreme perceptions of the downside, such as JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon, escaped unharmed.Bank-capital regulations inadvertently made the banking system more vulnerable to the regulators' errors. But this is what all regulations do. Whether by forbidding one activity or encouraging a different one, the whole point of regulation is, after all, to change the behavior of those being regulated. And the direction of change is, obviously, the one the regulators think is wise.The whole system crashed when the financial regulators' ideas about prudent banking backfired, but such failures are inevitable unless modern societies are so ¬simple that the solutions to social and economic problems will be self-evident to a generalist voter, or even a specialist regulator. That modern societies really are that simple is, in truth, the hidden assumption of modern politics. This is why political conflicts get so ugly: neither side can understand why their adversaries oppose what "self-evidently" should be done, so both sides ascribe evil motives to each other. But the financial crisis has exposed this simplistic view of the world for what it is. In the wake of the crisis, nobody can plausibly deny anymore that modern societies are bafflingly complex. The solutions to social and economic problems are thereby unlikely to be self-evident. The theories that seem so obviously true to voters or regulators may turn out to be disastrously false--unless regulators or citizens are infallible.That surely would be magical. But there is no more magic to politics than there is to markets. The question raised by the ongoing intellectual contest between socialism and capitalism, and the ongoing practical battle between regulation and competition, is how best to guard against human frailties: By putting all our eggs in one politically decided basket? Or by spreading our bets through the only practical means available: competition?The complicated interaction of all of the pieces of the puzzle are discussed further in a podcast with Charles Calomiris (notes available but no transcript). Jeffrey Friedman co-author of the article linked to above, offers a briefer version with some slightly different points in A Perfect Storm of Ignorance.Economist Brian Wesbury informs us of the significant problem of MTM here:In November 2007, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) reinstated mark-to-market accounting for the first time since 1938. This rule uses bids (exit prices) to value assets. So far, so good. However, in 2008, the market for asset-backed securities dried up. The prices of bonds that were still paying in full fell by 60 or 70 percent, and these losses often were driven through income statements. This wiped out regulatory capital, caused bankruptcies, and created a vicious downward spiral in the economy.In retrospect, it is clear that this accounting rule was a potent pro-cyclical force behind the 2008 panic.Finally, on April 2, 2009, the FASB allowed banks to use “cash flow” to value bonds when the markets are illiquid — the same sentiment that Bernanke expressed before Congress. This fixed the immediate problems in the system, and the economy and financial markets have been on the mend ever since. In fact, the stock market bottom of March 9, 2009, came on the very day news broke that Reps. Barney Frank and Paul Kanjorski would hold a hearing to force the FASB to change the misguided accounting policy.Mark-to-market accounting does not solve problems; it creates them by acting as a pro-cyclical force. Milton Friedman understood this, and he wrote about the devastating link between mark-to-market accounting and the Great Depression bank failures. Franklin Delano Roosevelt finally figured this out in 1938 — he suspended the rule and the Depression ended soon thereafter. Coincidence? We think not.But as long as bank regulators still impose mark-to-market-style rules — indeed, as long as such rules remain even a threat to the system — the system will not fully heal.More on the role of mark-to-market accounting in Bob McTeer's post here and Bill Isaac's testimony linked to within is worth a read:I use the term “mark to market accounting,” rather than “fair value accounting.” Everyone’s goal is a fair and descriptive accounting system. There is nothing “fair” about the misleading and destructive accounting regime promoted by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Accounting Standards Board under the rubric “fair value accounting.” MTM accounting has destroyed well over $500 billion of capital in our financialsystem. Because banks are able to lend up to ten times their capital, MTM accounting has also destroyed over $5 trillion of lending capacity, contributing significantly to a severe credit contraction and an economic downturn that has cost millions of jobs and wiped out vast amounts of retirement savings on which millions of people were counting. ...we believed that MTM accounting would make it very difficult for banks to perform their fundamental function in our economy, which is to convert relatively short-term money from depositors into longer-term loans for businesses and consumers. Banks necessarily have some mismatch in the maturities of their assets and liabilities – it is up to bank management, regulators, and investors to make sure the mismatch is not excessive. Accounting rules made to influence behavior are no substitute for good judgment and can interfere with appropriate business conduct. ...we felt that MTM accounting would be pro-cyclical (which is never a good thing in bank regulation) and would make it very difficult for regulators to manage future banking crises. The accounting profession, scarred by decades of costly litigation, keeps forcing banks to mark down the assets as fast and far as possible. This is contrary to everything we know about bank regulation. When there are temporary impairments of asset values due to economic and marketplace turmoil, regulators must give institutions an opportunity to survive the temporary impairment. Permanent impairments should be recognized, but assets should not be marked to unrealistic fire-sale prices. Regulators must evaluate the assets on the basis of their true economic value over a reasonable time horizon. The current world-wide crisis in the financial system demonstrates conclusively that major principles of accounting are much too important to be left solely to accountants. It is extremely important that bank regulation be counter-cyclical, not pro-cyclical. The time for banks to create reserves for losses is when the sun is shining, not in the middle of a hurricane.Having trading entities such as proprietary trading desks or hedge funds mark-to-market may be appropriate. Requiring lending institutions which hold assets with a longer term orientation to do so is simply asking for financial instability.Peter Wallison has some thoughts on deregulation here:There has been a great deal of deregulation in our economy over the last 30 years, but none of it has been in the financial sector or has had anything to do with the current crisis. Almost all financial legislation, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Improvement Act of 1991, adopted after the savings and loan collapse in the late 1980s, significantly tightened the regulation of banks.The repeal of portions of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999--often cited by people who know nothing about that law--has no relevance whatsoever to the financial crisis, with one major exception: it permitted banks to be affiliated with firms that underwrite securities, and thus allowed Bank of America Corp. to acquire Merrill Lynch & Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to buy Bear Stearns Cos. Both transactions saved the government the costs of a rescue and spared the market substantial additional turmoil.None of the investment banks that got into financial trouble, specifically Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., were affiliated with commercial banks, and none were affected in any way by the repeal of Glass-Steagall.In a more extensive article here he concludes:The causes of the financial crisis remain a mystery for many people, but certain causes can apparently be excluded. The repeal of Glass-Steagall by GLBA is certainly one of these, since Glass-Steagall, as applied to banks, remains fully in effect. In addition, the fact that a major CDS player like Lehman Brothers could fail without any serious disturbance of the CDS market, any serious losses to its counterparties, or any serious losses to those firms that had guaranteed Lehman's own obligations, suggests that CDS are far less dangerous to the financial system than they are made out to be. Finally, efforts to blame the huge number of subprime and Alt-A mortgages in our economy on unregulated mortgage brokers must fail when it becomes clear that the dominant role in creating the demand--and supplying the funds--for these deficient loans was the federal government.If you don't know about the recourse rule, the Basel Accords and mark-to-market accounting rules at a minimum, you can't begin to understand the regulatory failure which gave us the Great Recession.see also The Myth of Financial Deregulation Posted by
4/22/2010 01:34:00 PM
I was doing a quick scan of posts and news and saw some quoted material to which my reaction was, "What bunch of violent hooligans wrote that?" Here are some of the quotes:"Unfortunately, nothing will preserve [liberty] but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.”“Liberty must at all hazards be supported. We have a right to it, derived from our Maker. But if we had not, our fathers have earned and bought it for us, at the expense of their ease, their estates, their pleasure, and their blood.”"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."Force and Blood! Yeesh!Upon closer inspection, the quotes were from Patrick Henry, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson in an article by Bill Whittle.The founding fathers of the United States were brilliant and innovative, but they certainly didn't shy away from violence, did they?
Many factors contributed to the Great Recession: unchecked GSEs(Fannie and Freddie), monetary policy in a few ways, moral hazard in several ways on several levels, regulatory problems - not so much deregulation but poorly conceived changes and failure to deal with a changing financial environment and innovations as well as assorted lesser factors.The general key point is captured here:Our point isn't that bankers didn't make stupendous blunders. It is that the roots of the mania and panic are so much larger than any single financial security, compensation practice or regulation. And those roots are found as much in Washington as on Wall Street. Start with the Federal Reserve, which for years kept interest rates below the rate of inflation and thus created a global subsidy for credit. Bankers and investors had an incentive to sell and take on more debt. A Journal survey of economists this week found that a majority now think Fed policy was a major culprit. Providing a rare source of wisdom at yesterday's hearing was FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, who explained how the Fed's monetary policy helped inflate the housing bubble. If the commissioners are looking for historical guidance, they might consult the late Charles Kindleberger's classic, "Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises." On page 10 of the Fifth Edition paperback, the good professor declares that "The thesis of this book is that the cycle of manias and panics results from the pro-cyclical changes in the supply of credit." (Our emphasis.) An inquiry that ignores the sources of credit that fed the mania is like a history of the Civil War that ignores slavery. Also missing this week was anyone from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants that turbocharged the housing boom. With their implicit taxpayer backing, Fan and Fred held or guaranteed more subprime and Alt-A loans than anyone—much more than the combined holdings of the four bankers represented this week. So long as Fan and Fred kept increasing mortgages to low-income borrowers, the dynamic duo's political protectors kept fighting off efforts to cap the size of Fan and Fred's mortgage portfolios. The pair would ultimately hold or guarantee mortgages amounting to more than $5 trillion. That sum is greater than the annual GDP of Japan, the world's third largest economy, and yes, a whole lot bigger than the balance sheet of Goldman Sachs. A serious inquiry will examine the business practices of Fan and Fred, the long battle to rein them in, and the Members of Congress who blocked reform.There is more of an overview here and a rebutting of blame on EMH:But is the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) really responsible for the current crisis? The answer is no. The EMH, originally put forth by Eugene Fama of the University of Chicago in the 1960s, states that the prices of securities reflect all known information that impacts their value. The hypothesis does not claim that the market price is always right. On the contrary, it implies that the prices in the market are mostly wrong, but at any given moment it is not at all easy to say whether they are too high or too low. The fact that the best and brightest on Wall Street made so many mistakes shows how hard it is to beat the market.This does not mean the EMH can be used as an excuse by the CEOs of the failed financial firms or by the regulators who did not see the risks that subprime mortgage-backed securities posed to the financial stability of the economy. Regulators wrongly believed that financial firms were offsetting their credit risks, while the banks and credit rating agencies were fooled by faulty models that underestimated the risk in real estate.From 2000 through 2006, national home prices rose by 88.7%, far more than the 17.5% gain in the consumer price index or the paltry 1% rise in median household income. Never before have home prices jumped that far ahead of prices and incomes. This should have sent up red flags and cast doubts on using models that looked only at historical declines to judge future risk. But these flags were ignored as Wall Street was reaping large profits bundling and selling the securities while Congress was happy that more Americans could enjoy the "American Dream" of home ownership. Indeed, through government-sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Washington helped fuel the subprime boom.Our crisis wasn't due to blind faith in the Efficient Market Hypothesis. The fact that risk premiums were low does not mean they were nonexistent and that market prices were right. Despite the recent recession, the Great Moderation is real and our economy is inherently more stable. But this does not mean that risks have disappeared. To use an analogy, the fact that automobiles today are safer than they were years ago does not mean that you can drive at 120 mph. A small bump on the road, perhaps insignificant at lower speeds, will easily flip the best-engineered car. Our financial firms drove too fast, our central bank failed to stop them, and the housing deflation crashed the banks and the economy.Important lessons were ignored as relayed in a conversation with Vernon Smith:Money is a problem both in the world and in the asset trading markets in the laboratory.So the laboratory results make it very clear that it’s cash flopping around in the system that tends to give you these runaway asset market bubbles.I think of the housing bubble as the asset bubble that blindsided the economy. If you look at bubbles in stock markets they do not cause general problems in the economy. We had the dot com stock bubble that ran all through the nineties and peeked out in 2000 and crashed and you had about 10 trillion dollars loss in asset market value as a result of that stock market bubble and it had a minor affect, small affect on the banking system and the economy generally. On the other hand, if you look at 2007 when we lost about three trillion dollars in value in the housing market it devastated the banking system and the reason for this is really I think quite clear.And so what that means is that bubbles in the stock market if there is a problem the problem is borne by the investors in the market. On the other hand if you have people buying houses with very low or zero down payments and the prices of homes starts to decline right away those homes, those loans that the banks have made are underwater, the banks start then to get into trouble. They have a balance sheet problem and as soon as the banks are in trouble it puts all kinds of people into difficulty that may have had nothing to do or they may not have had anything to do with what was going on in the stock market. So if the banks are under pressure and not making loans all sorts of people may be hurt and they may not even be homeowners. They rent and they haven’t been contributing to the problems, but they nevertheless may suffer. So there is a big difference here between asset market bubbles where people are required to collateralize all of their borrowing and cases as in the housing market where they’re inadequately collateralized and so there is no cushion, no nothing to protect sort of the systemic risk in the banking system if those asset prices decline.I don’t think there is anything you can do to prevent bubbles. I think we’ve had frequent stock market bubbles that have self corrected and the burden of those bubbles and the pain is basically borne by the investors in those markets and you do not have collateral damage to the economy from bubbles in stock markets like you have in bubbles with housing and generally with consumer durables and I think the solution in the housing and the consumer durables markets is the same as the solution that we’ve worked out institutionally in stock markets and that is require these purchases to be reserved, collateralized.We learned all about amortizing loans. We learned about having 25 or 30% down payments for homes. We learned that in the 1920s and 1930s because if you go back to the 1920s there were lots of bank loans being made. The state banks were making loans on real estate that were interest only loans. They tended to be short term loans, three and four years. You paid only the interest and then when they came due you rolled them over and that turned out to be part of the difficulties, certainly not all of them. A lot of them the problems in the twenties were not only credit financing of home sales, but all sorts of consumer durables. You had for the first time in the twenties the development of buy now pay later for all sorts of durables like furniture and automobiles and that credit binge in the twenties was an important part of the collapse that took place in 1929 and 1930. And one of the things that you saw in the 1930s was the disappearance of the unamortized housing loan. If you compare for example 1928 and 1938 mortgage loans by banks. In 1938 they’re amortized and in 1928 many, half of them were not amortized, so there is an example where we had institutional learning, but somehow that memory faded. We forgot that lesson in the case of the housing markets and that’s what gave us a recurrence you see of a lot of the same conditions of the 1920s and ’30s. We’ve seen repeat of that from about 1997 to 2006 was the boom period in the housing market and then the collapse since then. And you know we have kind of a nice controlled experiment in one of the states. I don’t think it’s generally realized that Texas law (and this law dates back I think to about 2001 or 2) prohibits lending, making unamortized loans on a home. They prohibit balloon payments. There is a provision requiring that whatever the payment and loan stream conditions are the principle has to rise. That is as you pay of a loan you more and more of the money is going in to reduce the amount of the loan and what is interesting is that when if you look at the Case-Shiller Housing Index and how it blossomed up from 2000 to 2006. It was rising 75 or 80%. In Texas prices only rose 30 percent. And so it’s clear that this Texas law made a substantial difference there and it seems to me those are very reasonable kind of property type regulations in which you say that people don’t have a right to buy homes without putting up some, a reasonable cash down payment and that the loan be amortized. And so that’s not a heavy handed regulation. It’s a very reasonable benign type of regulation: give people rights to take action that are consistent with sustainability and stability. Well the evidence that the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Open Market Committee and Bernanke did not anticipate the kind of trouble we were in is indicated by looking at the difference between the press release they put out in August 7, 2007 and the one three days later on August 10th. On August 7th they were reiterating that they would hold the federal funds rates steady and I think at that time it was five and a quarter percent and that they still anticipated the possibility of inflation and then three days later the press release points out that a number of financial markets are likely to experience considerable stress. And well, tell me about it. The mortgage market had completely collapsed and it was the derivatives market that was the tipoff. And its collapse was the first indication that the whole mortgage market was in serious trouble and no one has I think better expert econometric and economic analysis than the Federal Reserve, but it doesn’t mean that they can predict was is not predictable and so it’s clear that the experts were surprised and blindsided by that development, but I think it’s to Bernanke’s credit that he moved in what seemed to be a pretty decisive way at that time to dramatically enhance the liquidity of the banking system.The problem is that what was happening I think in the mortgage market indicated that what the banks faced was a solvency problem, not just a liquidity problem. Now sometimes of course it’s hard to tell the difference. You have a solvency problem you see if the fundamental value of your assets are less than the value of your obligations that’s different from a liquidity problem in the sense that you just have a short term need for funds and of course you can have if you have a short term need for funds and a lack of liquidity that can cause distress sales and create a solvency problem, but and I think that’s the way that Bernanke saw the situation he was in, in August 2007 and it’s also I think pretty much how he saw the developments in the early thirties, in the early part of the Great Depression that the Federal Reserve System had simply not supplied sufficient liquidity to keep the system from creating an insolvency problem. I don’t really agree with this. I think in both cases that both in 1930 there is evidence that the banks had a solvency problem because of the loans that had been extended on residential and also commercial properties and those prices had started to, had come down and in fact that had been developing for already for three or four years in the late 1920s just as it had been developing, the defaults were starting to move up in our economy already by 2005, 6 and 7. It started to become then critical in 2007. A lot of the knowledge in the economy is this kind of can do practical knowledge learned by practice and the same thing is true at the level of experts and formulating central bank policy. It’s a matter of practice and you can have a good understanding of say the 1930s about what happened then, but it doesn’t mean that when you’re in the middle of a storm you will recognize that it’s happening around you because it’s just a different kind of understanding based upon practice and not necessarily the kind of academic analysis and knowledge that we get through econometric analysis and studies. And I think that’s basically a problem, and it means that you shouldn’t have too high expectations as to what the ability of our experts to deliver is. They’re going to be fallible and what we’ve seen I think and throughout this crisis is both in the Federal Reserve and also in the U.S. Treasury and other agencies of government you’ve had people learning as they go and a lot of the policies are being made up as they go. And that’s I think and inevitable consequence of the imperfection of our knowledge and the limits of our ability to practically manage complex systems like the U.S. economy.Various devices were used to encourage private lenders to more aggressively make loans on homes to be purchased by people of modest income and what we got from that was a particularly strong demand for homes at the low end of the pricing tier. If you look at the Case-Shiller Housing Index and if you divide that index into three tiers, the low price tier, the middle price tier and the high price tier from 2000 to 2006 the prices that went up the most were the low price tier. The low price tier of homes rose the most, the greatest percentage and fell by the greatest percentage after the collapse and so those policies didn’t actually help those people in the sense that it ended up in many ways we hurt the people we most had a most heartfelt desire to help and the middle price tier homes rose less rapidly than the low and the higher priced tiers rose the least. So the impact of the housing bubble was felt disproportionately in the lower income buyers of homes, so I think I would begin not with any notion that we need a radical reexamination of the regulatory framework, but just introduce some of the institutional learning that we’ve already achieved and let that institutional learning stand and not interfere with it.Compare the path of a US home price index with the path of a Canadian home price index see here . A less radical undermining of lending standards requiring meaningful down payments matters.
It's been fun!For those of us in San Diego, earthquakes are sort of like virtual reality motion simulator rides - except for the "virtual" and "simulator" parts. They're not strong enough to cause any damage or injury or even be particularly scary.The big fault line that runs through Los Angeles splits about 60 miles north of here and goes around San Diego, both to the East and West. The latest earthquakes were on the Eastern (and larger) fork of the fault, about 110 miles from San Diego, in a very sparsely populated area of the Mexican and California deserts.I'm on vacation for the next little bit, so blogging and commenting will be sporadic.


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Amazon.com: Help With Wrinkes
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Code Pink Journals CodePINK Journals: Oct 4, 2016
Kill kill kill – we are a country that LOVES killing.
Not only do we begin this country by just killing almost all the people who lived here and continue to kill any people - mostly Black and brown - whose lives, lands, resources we want, we also kill the animals, the birds, the fish, the wildlife, the insects.
And now we’re killing the air, the water, the soil – everything necessary to sustain all life on this planet.
We are a country that LOVES killing.

value: Blogger is an American online content management system (CMS) which enables multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. Pyra Labs developed it before being acquired by Google in 2003.


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Houston Daily Photo: July 2011
This is the recently opened Co-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart. The main stained glass window is a beacon to those that pass during weekend evenings. While spiritual in nature, it also reminds me I need to start working out again as it seems Christ is in very good shape.
One of five municipal golf courses, the Jim Mozola Memorial Disc Golf Course is located within Buffalo Bayou Park and offers great views of the Houston skyline.So it’s got that going for it…Which is nice.
...and boy do they mean it.This is the end of the Heights Bike Trail that ends near the County Jail at McKee St.
It’s Always Time to Play
…or so says this P.O.D.A. Project.The Portable On Demand Art Project is a temporary public art exhibit featuring several local artists transforming a PODS® container into a piece of public art.This one is located on the grounds of the Baker-Ripley Campus of Neighborhood Centers Inc
From the fingers of babes... comes this wonderful piece.Abstract? Expressionism? You tell me.
Van Vranken’s “Flame” was commissioned in 1991 to honor the patients and employees of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and commerate the center’s Golden Jubilee, offering a symbol of knowledge, achievement and hope for the future.
Red means stop!These traffic lights along Main Street have the extra red trim, perhaps making sure no one ventures onto the tracks of our light rail system.
I fell for itThis is a lost purse, but rather a sculpture by Dixie Friend Gay titled "Treasures from Grandma's Purse" located at the Waterway Fountains in the Woodlands.Very clever.
It's One O'Clock Somewhere...
Well... at least according to the sundial in front of the Museum of Natural Science it is.Well... actually it was two o'clock, but someone forgot to inform the sun about Daylight Savings Time.
The Alley Theater houses one of the four performance venues in the Downtown Theater District and has been the home to the Alley theater company since it opened in 1968. Within the walls of this Brutalist styled building are two stages that provide an intimate setting to enjoy various theatrical productions.While some view its fortress-like appearance as unphotogenic, I quite like the different angles and shapes… but that’s just me.
The sound of flowing water makes things seem less stressful, which, I suppose, was the idea of the designers that added this water treatment between the buildings of Allen Center downtown.
Playfully referred to as the “Love Boat”, the George R Brown Convention Center does strike a very unique public profile. Opened in 1987 its 1.8 MILLION square feet of multi-use floor space ranks it as one of the ten largest convention centers in the country.
Seems to be if you believe this quick snap of some street art along the Washington corridor.
Would You Please Pick Me Up Some...
This isn't your average grocery list, but rather a monument to the goods that arrived at the original Port of Houston. Captured on the banks of Buffalo Bayou in the park that honors Allen's Landing.
This seemingly ambiguous building is probably the most secure structure in Houston, the Federal Reserve Bank. Posted by
All that remains of the Bethel Baptist Church, originally built in 1923, is a hollowed out shell, the victim of a fire in January of 2005. Purchased by the city in 2009, the plans are to eventually preserve the façade and turn the city block into an enclosed green space for public use while keeping the church’s historic presence.
This large oak is actually screening the view of the Menil Collection building behind it.As the temperatures soar... shade becomes more my friend.Except for air conditioning.
The Gus Wortham Memorial Fountain, obviously often referred to as “the dandelion fountain”, is a visual mainstay as one drives along Allen Parkway near Waugh Drive. Completed in 1978 it is located near a popular jogging/bike trail and the wind blown mist is a welcome relief to those that happen by.Not to mention the occasional rainbow.
Several “statement” pieces have popped up throughout the First Ward waxing philosophic of the slow gentrification of the area. Neighborhoods change, sometimes for the better, sometimes not so much.This work is from the Mission Year Arts Team, a group of people who have moved into this urban district from other parts of the country with the hopes of bettering the area. The group DOES make a difference, but somehow this seems out of character from their mission statement.If it were me? I might have gone with a “Remember Goliad” theme… but maybe that’s a Texas thing.
With some of the historic buildings of downtown as its backdrop, the recently refurbished Market Square now offers an excellent respite to enjoy being outdoors in the downtown area.It it weren't so darn HOT.
This somewhat colorful, although eerie, wall is located in the back courtyard of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in the city’s Sixth Ward. It was a project of MECA, a community based organization that develops underserved youths and adults through the arts giving them an outlet to express themselves creatively through artistic inclinations.
The Houston Armillary Sphere was donated to the City of Houston by Elizabeth Bracewell and sits in Sam Houston Park.
The Fred Hartman Bridge spans the Houston Ship Channel just east of town. The longest cable-stayed bridge in Texas at 2.6 miles, it replaced the Baytown Tunnel when the ship channel was dredged to allow for bigger ships in 1995.
This is how the work day leaves me.A clever use of small mirrored pieces and a bit of wheatpaste.
This car dealership shows its patriotism throughout the year, not just on today’s national holiday celebrated our country’s independence.Happy Fourth of July everyone.
Another visit to Texas Art Asylum, a cool little shop that collects hundreds of seemingly forgotten items to be used by crafty people for creative uses. I really dig this place.I just wish I was crafty.
The Astros were in the World Series and at the top of the baseball world.Today? Not so much, as they are officially the worst team in Major League Baseball, but they are still the team I follow. Maybe one day... they'll be back at the top of the standings.
This house is located near the intersection of Tuscon and Linder Streets in the city’s Fifth Ward, and obviously is a true testament of the owner’s beliefs. You really have to admire their dedication. Posted by


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Niall Deacon and Joshua E. Schlieder, "1 Trillion Kilometres Apart: a Lonely Planet and its Distant Star" (January 26, 2016)
ras.org.uk/news-and-press/news-archive/264-news-2016/2770-1-trillion-kilometres-apart-a-lonely-planet-and-its-distant-star
The planet 2MASS J2126 is in an extremely wide orbit around brown dwarf star TYC 9486-927-1, based on their shared:
(A) rotation rates.
(D) brightnesses and colors.
(E) pulsation periods.
Ann Jenkins, Ray Villard, and Andrew Fox
, "Hubble Sees Monstrous Cloud Boomerang Back to our Galaxy" (January 28, 2016)
nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/hubble-sees-monstrous-cloud-boomerang-back-to-our-galaxy
The Smith Cloud originated from the outer parts of the Milky Way disk, based on measurements of its:
(B) Doppler redshifts.
(D) star formation rate.
(E) chemical composition.
News release
, "Stellar Parenting: Making New Stars By 'Adopting' Stray Cosmic Gases" (January 27, 2016)
northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2016/01/globular-clusters.html
Several old globular clusters contain younger stars, as determined by observations of the __________ of these stars.
(A) pulsation periods.
(B) brightnesses and colors.
(D) chemical composition.
(E) distances and motions.
An example of this is the diffraction of light through the circular aperture of a telescope with a diameter a (although the more correct equation in this case would be Wsinθ = (1.22)(1)λ). This is the Whirlpool Galaxy M51 as seen by the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency Herschel Space Telescope, as observed with the same infrared wavelength λ. As the Spitzer Space Telescope has a much smaller mirror diameter, light from each part of the galaxy will diffract more and spread out more, resulting in a much less resolved image than from the Herschel Space Telescope, with a much larger mirror diameter, such that light from each part of the galaxy will diffract less and spread out less, resulting in a much better resolved image with finer details left intact.
Posted by Patrick M. Len at 9:29 AM 0 comments
In the previous presentation we discussed the conditions for constructive or destructive interference for waves (of the same wavelength) due to phase and/or path differences. In this presentation we discuss the very specific case of waves (again, of the same wavelength) from two side-by-side in-phase sources, which we will see has been classically called "double-slit" interference.
First, path-length differences.
You will demonstrate this for yourselves in recreating a classic experiment in laboratory. Using laser light (of a given wavelength λ) that illuminates two very closely spaced together slits (two in-phase sources spaced a distance d apart), there will appear bright (maxima, or constructive interference) regions and dark (minima, or destructive interference) regions on a screen (the detector) at certain θ angles, as predicted by the double-slit interference maxima/minima equations.
Labels: constructive, destructive, double slit, electromagnetic radiation, interference, light, maxima, minima, presentation, wavelength
Posted by Patrick M. Len at 6:16 PM 0 comments
Elizabeth Landau
, "Most Luminous Galaxy Is Ripping Itself Apart" (January 15, 2016)
jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4820
W2246-0526, the most luminous galaxy known, is being torn apart by energy emitted as its central supermassive black hole:
(A) steadily implodes.
(B) disrupts gravity waves.
(D) pulls gas in around itself.
(E) flattens out.
Gianrico Filacchione, Fabrizio Capaccioni, Matt Taylor, and Markus Bauer
, "Exposed Ice on Rosetta's Comet Confirmed as Water" (January 31, 2016)
blogs.esa.int/rosetta/2016/01/13/exposed-ice-on-rosettas-comet-confirmed-as-water/
Data from the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft reveals that comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko has traces of __________ mixed in its topmost layers.
(A) fluorescent compounds.
(B) radioactive isotopes.
(C) water ice.
(D) nanoparticles.
(E) volcanic lava.
Kimm Fesenmaier, "Caltech Researchers Find Evidence of a Real Ninth Planet" (January 20, 2016)
caltech.edu/news/caltech-researchers-find-evidence-real-ninth-planet-49523
Evidence that the outer solar system may have a previously undiscovered giant planet in an elongated orbit is based on:
(A) mathematical models.
(B) rogue asteroid compositions.
(D) analyzing old photos.
(E) Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Posted by Patrick M. Len at 5:27 PM 0 comments


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Solar PV News Blog : Scientists Build the First All-Carbon Solar Cell
article published in www.sciencedaily.com, October 31st 2012
Stanford University scientists have built the first solar cell made entirely of carbon, a promising alternative to the expensive materials used in photovoltaic devices today.The results are published in the Oct. 31 online edition of the journal ACS Nano.


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Bar L'Ancora Gelateria, Santa Maria di Castellabate - Restaurant Reviews, Phone Number & Photos - TripAdvisor
Bar L'Ancora Gelateria, Santa Maria di Castellabate
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Italian Restaurants with Outdoor Seating in Santa Maria di Castellabate
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Search Europe›Italy›Campania›Province of Salerno›Castellabate›Santa Maria di Castellabate›Santa Maria di Castellabate Restaurants›Bar L'Ancora Gelateria
163 Reviews #3 of 4 Dessert in Santa Maria di Castellabate #17 of 57 Places to Eat in Santa Maria di Castellabate Certificate of Excellence $$ - $$$
Also show MapSatellite Map updates are paused. Zoom in to see updated info. Reset zoom Updating Map... Return to Map Get directions Piazza Luigi Guercio Monsignor 5, 84048 Santa Maria di Castellabate, Castellabate, Italy +39 338 946 6061
Santa Maria di Castellabate, Castellabate More B&B Aurora
reviews Clear all Start your review of Bar L'Ancora Gelateria Click to rate
4 helpful votes “Charming place to relax with a coctail and watch the sea”
Had some great nights in this fantastic bar. Cocktails to die for - my wife highly recommends 'The Hugo'. If you hit a busy night or get a few friends together, this place is quirky and has get atmosphere. It sits directly opposite the beach, so day or night, the view is great.
Thank Danny G Report Graham E
12 helpful votes “Best ice cream”
Simply the best ice cream. Dozens of flavours, rich and creamy. Views over the beach.
Good service from very pleasant female staff.
Thank Graham E Report JoeDBerlin
8 helpful votes “Good gelato, poor service”
Get it to go! The server did not explain that we would get three scoops for two flavors. So we ended up with an odd order. They also asked us to move seats as the sofa we were on "was new"?! Odd. Gelato was better than average.
Helpful? Thank JoeDBerlin Report CiaraandGerard
2 reviews 2 helpful votes “The best cocktails & icecream in Italy!!”
We have been coming to Santa Maria for the past two years and we absolutely love this place! Only place we go to when we're there! This is certainly the best cocktail and ice cream place to go to! Their strawberry dacuquiri and mojito's are amazing! They have lots of flavours of ice cream and sorbet which is the best...
Thank CiaraandGerard Report Sandra M
6 helpful votes “The best ice cream in Italy! ”
We absolutely love the ice cream here and have been coming to St Maria for the last 10 years. This is certainly the best ice cream! Lots of flavours of ice cream and sorbet. The staff are great too.
I love the nocciotella its amazing! A great after dinner treat!
Helpful? Thank Sandra M Report Trevor K
24 helpful votes “Brilliant bar with outstandingly friendly staff ”
Excellent service and drinks - fine panini and deserts. Would strongly recommend this beach cafe fir its position - wonderful views ftom terrace. You must visit - thanks to Ivana
Helpful? Thank Trevor K Report julsteve0121
5 helpful votes “tantilising mix of superb icecream and drinks to keep you chilled”
this bar was located at the back of the beach area on the road, offering some scrumptious ice cream...and casta di labatta did prove to host the best ice creams i have ever tasted, and this bar provided the heady mix of that plus cold beers and cocktails...what more can a holiday maker ask for. The staff were fantasic, they...
Thank julsteve0121 Report Michelle D
6 helpful votes “Well worth a few visits”
Great location, lovely coffee, generous snacks with evening drinks and very hospitable and charming staff. Have visited every day so far of our wonderful holiday in Santa Maria. Highly recommended.
Helpful? Thank Michelle D Report JohnEire
15 helpful votes “Beautiful fun var”
Great bar in the most picturesque location in centre of santa maria. Beautiful and top class cocktails and service. The owner dominico is so down to earth and welcoming. Looking forward to our return visit in September already.
Helpful? Thank JohnEire Report Gerry D
2 reviews 3 helpful votes “Great place to gather and eat”
Nothing too much trouble for the staff. We were noisy, they were on it.
The most accommodating place in town! Good food, great gelati, nice people.
Helpful? Thank Gerry D Report Previous
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Been to Bar L'Ancora Gelateria? Share your experiences! Write a Review
Piazza Luigi Guercio Monsignor 5, 84048 Santa Maria di Castellabate, Castellabate, Italy Location:
+39 338 946 6061
Questions? Get answers from Bar L'Ancora Gelateria staff and past visitors.
Posting guidelines Get notified about new answers to your questions. Ask Typical questions asked: Do you have gluten-free options? Is there a dress code? Do you allow dogs on the outdoor patio? Near Bar L'Ancora Gelateria Top-rated Attractions Nearby 55 Reviews Santuario Santa Maria a Mare
10 Reviews Tours & Transfers
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Browse all attractions Top-rated Restaurants Nearby 671 Reviews Pasta e Pizze da Nello
132 Reviews Osteria 1861
321 Reviews Perbacco

value: Tripadvisor, Inc. is an American online travel company that operates a website and mobile app with user-generated content and a comparison shopping website.


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Twin Cities Transit: Camera Takes a Dump
Twin Cities Transit
Camera Takes a Dump
I went to the revealing of the new Siemens S70 at Target Field. I was ready to take videos and pictures when my camera did not work :(
So I went to the revealing watching other people taking pictures and I only had my cheap cell phone.It maybe a while before I get a new one. If anyone can suggest a camera for about $200 I would love to hear your suggestions
Posted by LRV Op Dude at 7:43 PM
J M said...
Sorry to hear about that.
I've had good luck with my Canon ELPH 300 HS so far. The only downside to it is the position of the microphones on top means it picks up wind noise very easily. Still Canon might be a good brand to look at.
November 24, 2012 at 12:25 AM
Hello everyone and welcome to my Transit Blog. I have been a bus driver since 2000. I worked for Waukesha Metro Transit in Waukesha, Wisconsin from 2000 to 2008. I moved to the Twin Cities with my family in March of 2008. I now work for Metro Transit in Twin Cities. I first started taking pictures and video in the fall of 2007.
I will post my transit related photos and video here. I will also post transit related news. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think.
BlueXpress Bus Service
Central Corridor Light Rail Transit
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Minnesota Valley Transit Authority
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Transit Websites & Blogs
MAX FAQs Portland Light Rail
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Man Speaks Out Claims to be Abused
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Baby Born on SEPTA Train
Work on the Blue Line
LRV 202
Testing of the New LRV
Siemens S70 LRV #201
Shake, Rattle and Rolling
Siemens S70 LRV Revealed


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Microsoft surface pro 4 News - Latest microsoft surface pro 4 News, Information & Updates - Telecom News -ET Telecom
26m	Huawei, ZTE should not be allowed to participate in 5G rollout in India: CAIT
31m	Vietnam's Vingroup says produces first 5G smartphones under Vsmart brand
33m	Home-grown mobile apps crop up to replace banned Chinese creations
36m	Samsung's second-quarter chip sales unlikely made up for smartphone weakness
37m	Overweight on Reliance Industries, target price Rs 1,801: Morgan Stanley
39m	France won't ban Huawei, but encouraging 5G telcos to avoid it: Report

value: Times Internet is an Indian internet technology company, based in Gurgaon, which owns, operates and invests in various internet-led products, services and technology. It is the digital arm of the Times Group, the largest media conglomerate in India.


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Social Media Sales Converter | Marketing sur Facebook | Marketing sur les médias sociaux | Google Plus | Sales Promotion | Freelancer
Compétences : Marketing sur Facebook, Marketing sur les médias sociaux , Google Plus, Sales Promotion
Nº du projet : #20890842
24 freelance font une offre moyenne de $13664 pour ce travail
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value: Freelance (sometimes spelled free-lance or free lance), freelancer, or freelance worker, are terms commonly used for a person who is self-employed and not necessarily committed to a particular employer long-term. Freelance workers are sometimes represented by a company or a temporary agency that resells freelance labor to clients; others work independently or use professional associations or websites to get work.