Easy Answers to the Cry of the Bankstas' Regrets

Have you heard the bankstas register their regrets about the national (or international) mayhem their wild playdays caused previously?

Me neither (not real regrets anyway). And as the game is gearing up again for the next stick-it-to-us bubble, do you think there should be any changes (at a minimum) to the financial derivatives regulations, or do you agree with JPMorgan (and Government Sex) that they are really, really going to play fair this time?

Robert Reich asks "Where are the antitrusters when we need them? Alternatively, why isn't the government charging Goldman and JPMorgan a large insurance fee for classifying both firms as "too big to fail" and therefore automatically bailed out if the risks they take turn sour? Instead, we've ended up with two giants that now have most of the casino to themselves, are playing with poker chips backed by taxpayers, and have a big say in what the rules of the game are to be." (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

Besides Goldman Sachs, the Street's other surviving behemoth is JPMorgan.

Today it posted second-quarter earnings up a stunning 36 percent from the first quarter, to $2.7 billion.

The resurgence of JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs gives both banks more financial clout than any other players on the Street - allowing both firms to lure talent from everywhere else on the Street with multi-million pay packages, giving both firms enough economic power to charge clients whopping fees, and bestowing on both firms even more political heft in Washington.

. . . When JP Morgan repaid its federal bailout of $25 billion last month it was, like Goldman, freed from stricter government oversight. The freedom has also allowed JP, like Goldman, to take tougher and more vocal stands in Washington against proposed financial regulations they dislike.

JP is mounting a furious lobbying campaign against regulations that would funnel derivatives trading through exchanges where regulators can monitor them, and thereby crimp JP's profits. Now the Street's biggest derivatives player, JP has generated billions helping clients navigate these contracts and assuming counter-party risk in such transactions. Its derivatives contracts were valued at roughly $81 trillion at the end of the first quarter, representing 40 percent of the derivatives held by all banks, according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. JP has played down its potential risk exposure from these derivatives contracts, of course, but anyone who's been paying attention over the last ten months knows that unregulated derivatives have been at the center of the storm.

The tumult on the Street has also given both firms extraordinary market power. That's where much of the current profits are coming from.

JP used the crisis to snap up Bear Stearns in March and Washington Mutual last fall, with the amiable assistance of the Treasury. The deals have boosted JP's dominance in retail banking and prime brokerage, enabling it to charge its corporate clients heftier fees for lending and other financial services, and to corner more of the market in fixed-income and equities. JP also bolstered its earnings by helping other financial companies raise capital following the stress test results in May.

Antitrust law was designed to prevent just this sort of market power and political heft. The Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission should investigate the new-found dominance of Goldman and JP - and, if warranted, break them up.

Alternatively, Congress should impose a surtax on the newly-exclusive group of Wall Street firms, most notably Goldman and JPMorgan, which are now backed by implicit government bailout insurance guaranteeing that, should they get into trouble, taxpayers will keep them afloat. The surtax would approximate the economic benefit to these firms of such government largesse, which I'd estimate to be at least 50 percent of their profits from here on.

But they've already moved the mechanism that determines the profits to countries without taxes, right, Bob?

Our man in Havana (just kidding!), Paul Krugman, details, for your growing displeasure, The Joy of Sachs.

The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us?

First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away.

Third, it shows that by rescuing the financial system without reforming it, Washington has done nothing to protect us from a new crisis, and, in fact, has made another crisis more likely.

Let’s start by talking about how Goldman makes money.

Over the past generation — ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan years — the U.S. economy has been “financialized.” The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared in importance compared with the actual production of useful stuff. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007.

Such growth would be fine if financialization really delivered on its promises — if financial firms made money by directing capital to its most productive uses, by developing innovative ways to spread and reduce risk. But can anyone, at this point, make those claims with a straight face? Financial firms, we now know, directed vast quantities of capital into the construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls. They increased risk rather than reducing it, and concentrated risk rather than spreading it. In effect, the industry was selling dangerous patent medicine to gullible consumers.

Goldman’s role in the financialization of America was similar to that of other players, except for one thing: Goldman didn’t believe its own hype. Other banks invested heavily in the same toxic waste they were selling to the public at large. Goldman, famously, made a lot of money selling securities backed by subprime mortgages — then made a lot more money by selling mortgage-backed securities short, just before their value crashed. All of this was perfectly legal, but the net effect was that Goldman made profits by playing the rest of us for suckers.

And Wall Streeters have every incentive to keep playing that kind of game.

The huge bonuses Goldman will soon hand out show that financial-industry highfliers are still operating under a system of heads they win, tails other people lose. If you’re a banker, and you generate big short-term profits, you get lavishly rewarded — and you don’t have to give the money back if and when those profits turn out to have been a mirage. You have every reason, then, to steer investors into taking risks they don’t understand.

And the events of the past year have skewed those incentives even more, by putting taxpayers as well as investors on the hook if things go wrong.

I won’t try to parse the competing claims about how much direct benefit Goldman received from recent financial bailouts, especially the government’s assumption of A.I.G.’s liabilities. What’s clear is that Wall Street in general, Goldman very much included, benefited hugely from the government’s provision of a financial backstop — an assurance that it will rescue major financial players whenever things go wrong.

You can argue that such rescues are necessary if we’re to avoid a replay of the Great Depression. In fact, I agree. But the result is that the financial system’s liabilities are now backed by an implicit government guarantee.

Now the last time there was a comparable expansion of the financial safety net, the creation of federal deposit insurance in the 1930s, it was accompanied by much tighter regulation, to ensure that banks didn’t abuse their privileges. This time, new regulations are still in the drawing-board stage — and the finance lobby is already fighting against even the most basic protections for consumers.

If these lobbying efforts succeed, we’ll have set the stage for an even bigger financial disaster a few years down the road. The next crisis could look something like the savings-and-loan mess of the 1980s, in which deregulated banks gambled with, or in some cases stole, taxpayers’ money — except that it would involve the financial industry as a whole.

The bottom line is that Goldman’s blowout quarter is good news for Goldman and the people who work there. It’s good news for financial superstars in general, whose paychecks are rapidly climbing back to precrisis levels. But it’s bad news for almost everyone else.

And we know what that means now. I just wonder if we'll have pulled out of this deep d/recession before the next one hits.

Thanks, Obama!

Suzan
________________

Banksta Gangstas ("Scum!") Succeed Where Deregulation Led

Glenn Greenwald has done a masterful job of raking Chuck Todd NBC News political director (insider apologist) over the coals here. I just adore these true patriots!

As a regular reader of Wired Magazine, I still have to give a decidedly big tip of my sunbonnet to Urantian Sojourn's sharp-eyed reporters for the article exposing one of the forces behind the banksta gangsta's (Goldman (Government) Sachs). (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

. . . as dazed bankers, politicians, regulators, and investors survey the wreckage of the biggest financial meltdown since the Great Depression, Li is probably thankful he still has a job in finance at all. Not that his achievement should be dismissed. He took a notoriously tough nut—determining correlation, or how seemingly disparate events are related—and cracked it wide open with a simple and elegant mathematical formula, one that would become ubiquitous in finance worldwide.

For five years, Li's formula, known as a Gaussian copula function, looked like an unambiguously positive breakthrough, a piece of financial technology that allowed hugely complex risks to be modeled with more ease and accuracy than ever before. With his brilliant spark of mathematical legerdemain, Li made it possible for traders to sell vast quantities of new securities, expanding financial markets to unimaginable levels.

His method was adopted by everybody from bond investors and Wall Street banks to ratings agencies and regulators. And it became so deeply entrenched—and was making people so much money—that warnings about its limitations were largely ignored.

Then the model fell apart. Cracks started appearing early on, when financial markets began behaving in ways that users of Li's formula hadn't expected. The cracks became full-fledged canyons in 2008—when ruptures in the financial system's foundation swallowed up trillions of dollars and put the survival of the global banking system in serious peril.

How could one formula pack such a devastating punch? The answer lies in the bond market, the multitrillion-dollar system that allows pension funds, insurance companies, and hedge funds to lend trillions of dollars to companies, countries, and home buyers.

A pretty story perhaps, but . . . if you think that the Rubins and Greenspans of Wall Street didn't see this coming (even at its advent), you are a sure candidate for several more bridges in Brooklyn - cheap!

Skippy has the final word on Government Sachs ("scum") at his site here.

"Goldman Sachs is literally stealing $100 million a day!"

Back to reporting on my favorite gangstas (those fine, upstanding citizens running Goldman Sachs and the country (presently)), Robert Scheer reports to our incredulity (NOT!) (emphasis marks added - Ed.):

Connect the dots: Goldman Sachs made $3.44 billion in profit this past quarter, while the U.S deficit topped $1 trillion for the first time in the nation’s history and appeared to be headed toward doubling that figure before the budget year is out. Since most of the increase in the federal deficit is due to bailing out the banks and salvaging the greater economy they helped destroy, why is the top investment bank doing so well?

Well, because that was the plan, as devised by Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Remember that Lehman Brothers, Goldman’s competitor, was allowed to go bankrupt. The Paulson crowd wouldn’t let Lehman change its status to that of a bank holding company and thus qualify for federal funds; soon afterward, Goldman was granted just such a deal, worth a quick $10 billion. Much is now made of Goldman paying back part of its bailout money, but forgotten is the $12.9 billion that Goldman got as its cut of the $180 billion AIG payoff. That is money that will not be paid back.

Goldman is considered a very smart bank because it was early in reducing its exposure to the mortgage derivatives that in large part caused the meltdown. However, it had done much to expand the market and continued to sell suspect derivatives to unwary buyers as sound investments, even as Goldman divested. The firm still holds $1.85 billion in real estate and lost $499 million in the previous quarter on bad loans, but made up for it by playing the vulture role and issuing high-interest debt to governments and companies made desperate by the recession that the financial gimmicks of the banks brought on in the first place.

And Goldman was not just another bank. Before Paulson ran the Treasury Department, another former Goldman head, Robert Rubin, pushed through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall controls on banking activity. While some now play down the significance of this radical deregulation, not so Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein — at least not back in June 2007, when the markets were still doing well.

“If you take an historical perspective,” Blankfein told The New York Times by way of explaining his company’s spectacular success at the time, “we’ve come full circle, because that is exactly what the Rothschilds or J.P. Morgan the banker were doing in their heyday. What caused an aberration was the Glass-Steagall Act.”

That 1933 Act was repealed in a law signed by President Bill Clinton at Rubin’s urging, and in the following eight years Goldman Sachs recorded a 265 percent growth in its balance sheet. “Back then,” The Wall Street Journal reports, “Goldman was churning out profits by trading credit derivatives, speculating on currencies and oil and placing big bets [on] the roaring stock market.”

Big bets made in a casino designed by Goldman, which now makes money off loans to the victims. High on the list of victims are state governments that have to turn to Goldman for money because the federal government that saved the banks won’t do the same for the states, which have watched their tax bases shrink because of the banking meltdown. As the WSJ noted, “issuing debt to ailing governments” is now a growth industry for Goldman.

Why didn’t the federal government just lend the money to the states? Why was all the money thrown at Wall Street instead of needy homeowners or struggling school systems? Because the federal government works for Goldman and not for us. Indeed, when it comes to the banking bailout, Goldman Sachs is the government.

So much so that last fall The New York Times ran a story, headlined “The Guys From `Government Sachs,’ ” that stated: “Goldman’s presence in the Treasury] department and around the federal response to the financial bailout is so ubiquitous that other bankers and competitors have given the star-studded firm a new nickname: Government Sachs.”

One of those stars was Stephen Friedman, another former head of Goldman. Friedman was both a director of the company and chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank when he helped work out the details of the Wall Street bailout. The president of the N.Y. Fed at the time, Timothy Geithner, now secretary of the treasury, requested a conflict-of-interest waiver that allowed Friedman to buy more Goldman Sachs stock, and Friedman ended up with 98,600 shares. At market close on Tuesday that was worth $14,756,476. That’s nothing – three years ago, the 50 top Goldman execs made $20 million each, and this year could be better.

They’re not hurting.

And although you don't really need the death blow, listen to or read a portion of Amy Goodman's interview with Matt Taibbi, a never-ending source of excellent information about exactly how Goldman Sachs crashed your future. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

TRANSCRIPT:

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the situation right down the street here, on Wall Street. While the US deficit topped one trillion dollars for the first time in the nation’s history, the blowout bonuses are back on Wall Street.

Well, not all of Wall Street, just at Goldman Sachs, the nation’s most powerful financial company, which reported the richest quarterly profit in its 140-year history: $3.44 billion between April and June.

Goldman Sachs announced Tuesday that it would set aside nearly $11.4 billion from its profits to pay bonuses. If Goldman continues to earn profits at the same level, its employees could each earn, on average, close to $770,000 this year, with senior executives and bankers being paid much more.

The average compensation amount is close to what it was during the boom in 2007, when Goldman set a Wall Street pay record.

Goldman’s record profits come just one month after it repaid $10 billion of TARP money to the US Treasury, and in so doing, freed itself from restrictions on year-end bonuses. Last year the firm also received $13 billion as part of the bailout of the failed insurance giant AIG and $28 billion in low-interest loans.

Well, we’re joined right now by Matt Taibbi. He’s a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and author of the new article “The Great American Bubble Machine.” The article examines Goldman Sachs’s role in the current economic crisis.

So, welcome to Democracy Now!, Matt.

MATT TAIBBI: Thanks for having me back.

AMY GOODMAN: Were you surprised when the profits were just posted yesterday of Goldman Sachs?

MATT TAIBBI: I was a little surprised that the number is a little higher than everybody expected, but I wasn’t surprised that they made an enormous profit. They had — they were the beneficiaries of massive government subsidies in the last year or so. And it would be actually kind of a surprise if they didn’t come out with a big number in this quarter, just because they’ve had such an enormous advantage. Not just this bank, but all the banks on Wall Street have had so much access to cheap money since the bailouts have started that it would be a surprise if they didn’t start making money.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s talk about the bailouts and the bonuses and how this happened for Goldman Sachs. That’s what you lay out in a remarkable article that you’ve just written.

MATT TAIBBI: Right. Well, one of the things that people have to remember is, how do banks make their money? They have to pay depositors, normally, to get their money, and then they try to invest that money and make money, make their profits on the spread between those two costs. Goldman has access to an enormous amount of cheap money from the government, because they have asked—because they converted to a bank holding company status last year.

That made them eligible for about $28 billion in federally backed loans, as you — sorry, in federally backed debt, as you mentioned in your intro, which means that they have access to money that is incredibly cheap, so their cost of capital is incredibly low. And they take that cheap money, and they lend it back to the economy at higher rates, and they make money on the spread. And because so many of their competitors, like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, are now no longer in existence, they’re able to dominate the market in ways that they never were before.

So they’re taking all these advantages, and instead of — you know, the implicit idea last year with the bailouts was that these banks would take these advantages and that they would use that money to kickstart the economy. Instead, they’ve just decided to keep all the money and turn it into bonuses.

And I think that’s something that everybody has to examine now.

Read the rest here.

Suzan
_________________

Is the Awarding of Bonuses to the Revealed Criminals at the "Gangster Mega-banks" Psychological Warfare (PsyOps)?

Because it surely seems like it to me (and a few others). Gretchen Morgenson speaks plainly in the pages of Sunday's New York Times, which interestingly enough did absolutely no investigative reporting along these lines when the glamour boys Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan were spinning the golden finance lies leading us to this precipice. Did anyone mention the New York Times' two-tiered reporting system yet? Like when the Times' sultry Judy Miller was leading the country down the primrose path (at the behest of Dick Cheney's man Ahmed Chalabi) to the War On Iraq? Or do we just accept that sometimes the New York Times actually reports straight news? (Or am I making too many connections too quickly?)

“As we are unpeeling what was happening on Wall Street, we may see that Wall Street didn’t find the safety from litigation risk that it hoped to find in securitization,” said Kathleen Engel, a professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University. “I think there is potential for liability if borrowers can engage in discovery to see exactly how much the sponsors were shaping the practices of the lenders.”

. . . IT is hard not to be dismayed by the fact that two years into our economic crisis so few perpetrators of financial misdeeds have been held accountable for their actions. That so many failed mortgage lenders do not appear to face any legal liability for the role they played in almost blowing up the economy really rankles. They have simply moved on to the next “opportunity.”

And what of the giant institutions that helped finance these monumentally toxic loans, or arranged the securitizations that bundled the loans and sold them to investors? So far, they have argued, fairly successfully, that they operated independently of the original lenders. Therefore, they are not responsible for any questionable loans that were made.

But this argument is growing tougher to defend. Some legal experts point to a number of cases in which plaintiffs contend that firms involved in the securitization process, like trustees hired to oversee the pools of loans backing securities, worked so closely with the lenders that they should face liability as members of a joint venture. And these experts see a rising receptiveness to this argument by some courts.

“As we are unpeeling what was happening on Wall Street, we may see that Wall Street didn’t find the safety from litigation risk that it hoped to find in securitization,” said Kathleen Engel, a professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University. “I think there is potential for liability if borrowers can engage in discovery to see exactly how much the sponsors were shaping the practices of the lenders.”

. . . fighting a foreclosure on their home of 25 years that they say was a result of an abusive and predatory loan made by NovaStar Mortgage Inc. A lender that had been cited by the Department of Housing and Urban Development for improprieties, like widely hiring outside contractors as loan officers, NovaStar ran out of cash in 2007 and is no longer making loans.

Also named as a defendant in the case is the initial trustee of the securitization that contained the Jordans’ loan: JPMorgan Chase. In 2006, the bank transferred its trustee business to Bank of New York Mellon, which is also a defendant in the case. The Jordans are asking that all three defendants pay punitive damages.

“We contend that the trustee has direct liability on the theory that even though they were not sitting at the loan closing table, they were involved in the securitization and profited from it,” said Sarah E. Bolling, a lawyer in the Home Defense Program at the Atlanta Legal Aid Society who represents the Jordans.

“The prospectus had been written before the loan was closed. If this loan was not going to be assigned to a trust, it would not have been made.”

IN their legal briefs, the trustees have made the traditional argument that their relationship with NovaStar was not a joint venture and that they are not responsible for any problems with the Jordans’ loan.

A JPMorgan spokesman declined to comment on the case but said that because the bank was no longer the trustee, it was not directly involved in the litigation. A spokesman for Bank of New York Mellon also declined to comment.

Doesn't seem like it could be much clearer, so where are these borrowers who "can engage in discovery to see exactly how much the sponsors were shaping the practices of the lenders?" I'm awaiting their entrance.

Mark Crispin Miller (my secret love) fills us in on whatever's missing from today's puzzle. (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

A few short months ago Goldman Sachs was deemed too big to fail, and allowed to sink its fangs into the public vein. Not only did it receive direct assistance from lowly tax-payers like you and I, the gaggle of Goldman alumni that run the Treasury Department and implemented the Troubled Asset Relief Program funneled tens of billions to insurance giant AIG to assure that it could cover about 13 billion in Goldman’s losses. Goldman paid back the TARP loans — because caps on executive pay are a form of socialism, of course — but is still making hay on the public dime, specifically on the sale of $28 billion worth of subsidized debt courtesy of the FDIC.

But today, as the New York Times put it, “up and down Wall Street, analysts and traders are buzzing” about the fact that Goldman is reporting “blowout profits” to the tune of $3.4 billion in the 2nd quarter. In a masterful bit of understatement, the Washington Post notes that “the New York investment bank profited from turmoil in the financial markets, the absence of former rivals and the continued support of the federal government.”

It’s good for Goldman’s shareholders and great for its traders — according to the WaPo, “Goldman said it set aside $6.65 billion for employee compensation in the second quarter.” But for everyone else? Not so much.

And not only because of the costs borne by the public, not only for the moral hazard this kind of crony capitalism represents, not just for the unfairness inherent in the pervasive reverse socialism we’re seeing these days, but also because of the lessons that support has left unlearned. Protected from the fallout of their bad bets, Wall Street’s casinos are open for business again. Just this week, Bloomberg reported that Morgan Stanley was trotting out another “Collateralized Debt Obligation” backed by shaky loans that’s again getting a AAA rating (if you have no idea what that means, see my piece from last October titled, “How Wall Street’s Scam Artists Turned Home Mortgages Into Economic WMDs”).

Read more.

If you can stand it.

Suzan

Shadow Statistics (True or False: U.S. Economic Statistics Lie)

From Smart Money we are treated to "secret" (no, not really) information: the numbers are rigged (and they have been for a very long time) - unless you listen to the people working for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (Some people prefer the U-6 definition of real unemployment statistics.) For an inflation calendar and a wise essay by a foxy penguin on stupid things promulgated by the rightwingnuts click here.

My friend Utah Savage has a comment on our current situation that at first made me laugh (in astonishment), and then, cry. Thanks for the heartfelt, woman! (Emphasis marks added - Ed.)

How’s the economy treating you? Chances are, your answer is colored largely by three things: whether you’re working (if you want to), how much you’re making and how quickly your expenses are rising. Economists rely heavily on the same factors to judge the nation’s health. At last count, 9.4% of the workforce is jobless. Compared with a year ago, the goods and services we produce are worth 5.7% less while the ones we buy are 0.7% cheaper. Two bright people might see sharply different things in those numbers. To one, the shrinking economy is a healthy unwinding of past excess, for example, while to another it’s a dangerous downturn that calls for bold government action. But what if the numbers themselves are something we should be debating? In the alarming view of a vocal few, America’s economic measures are misstated -- rigged, really.

The accusation goes like this: Surveyors collect the nation’s data and statisticians compile and report it. Politicians naturally want the numbers to show improvement. Not being able to change the facts, they focus on the handling of facts, pressuring statisticians to change their measurements. It’s not quite one grand conspiracy but decades of minor ones compiled. Today’s reports are so perverted, the theory holds, that the numbers have detached from common experience.

Pollyanna Creep

If the theory has a chief architect, it is John Williams, a semi-retired grandfather of five living in Oakland, Calif. The son of a chainsaw importer, Williams sold the family business in the 1970s and began consulting for corporations, recalculating government economic data to arrive at what he says were more reliable measures, and with them, truer forecasts. Today Williams runs Shadow Government Statistics (ShadowStats.com) from his home. For $175 a year subscribers get economic data and analysis adjusted to back out the accumulated effects of what Williams has dubbed the Pollyanna Creep - Pollyanna being the orphan protagonist of the 1913 children’s book who learns to play the “glad game” to find cheery perspectives on life’s sorrows. In other words, he provides figures he feels are properly miserable, to offset government ones he says are too prettied-up.

If Williams is right, unemployment is over 20%, gross domestic product is shrinking by 8% and consumer prices are jumping by nearly 7%. His forecasts border on apocalyptic. The government is creating so much new money, he says, that the all but inevitable result is hyperinflation, where “your highest denomination, the $100 bill, becomes worth more as toilet paper than money.” Buy physical gold, he advises.

Whether we believe the forecasts or not, the possibility of a Pollyanna Creep has serious implications. Social Security payments are just one benefit adjusted each year for increases in the cost of living. If the figures hadn’t been corrupted, says Williams, checks might be close to double what they are.

Williams has managed to attract plenty of press. A year ago, Harper’s magazine featured a cover drawing of a grinning Uncle Sam fondling numeral-shaped party balloons, with the headline, “Numbers Racket: Why the Economy is Worse Than We Know.” The story centered on Williams’ data. The San Francisco Chronicle followed with “Government Economic Data Misleading." Last fall in the London Times: “Forget Short-Sellers and Manipulators, Pollyanna Creep Could Be the Culprit.”

Government statisticians are frustrated. “Economic Data Seems Accurate” doesn’t make for a catchy headline, so the press, they say, are too quick to give credence to conspiracy theories. “We go out of our way to be transparent,” says Thomas Nardone, who during 32 years at the Bureau of Labor Statistics helped implement many of the changes in calculating the unemployment rate. "We’d be remiss if we didn’t make changes,” he says. “I’ve never seen measurement changes that were politically motivated.”

Katherine Abraham served as commissioner of BLS during the Clinton Administration. Commissioners, unlike the statisticians who work for them, are political appointees. Now a professor at University of Maryland, Abraham says she did see political pressure, but rarely, and never with results. Once, she says, a prominent lawmaker told her the BLS might get more funding if it would agree to propose changes that reduce the appearance of inflation. Abraham says she rebuffed the offer.

Decide for yourself. Here’s a roundup of measurement changes at the heart of Williams’ claims, along with responses from people who work closely with the measurements. I’ll focus on unemployment and inflation, but not GDP, since the chief flaw with it, according to Williams, is how problems with the inflation measure overstate real, or after-inflation, growth. (There’s a different case to be made - that GDP measures some fairly undesirable things, like the cost of war and divorce lawyers, and so isn’t a great proxy for economic well-being -- but I’ll save that subject for another day.)

Disappearing Jobless?

About 13 million people were unemployed during the Great Depression, or around 25% of the work force, but those are fairly recent estimates. At the time, the government simply didn’t track data like it does today, which made it difficult to judge whether things were getting better or worse. Two main developments in the 1930s made tracking unemployment feasible. The first was an improvement in the way statistics are used to turn a relatively small sample into a faithful representation of the larger population.

That allowed for the use of surveys. The second was the notion of basing one’s status as part of the unemployed work force on actions. Whether someone wants to work, after all, is a subjective thing. Whether they’re looking for work is not.

Today the BLS reports six measures of unemployment, called U-1 through U-6, for which the definition of unemployment gradually broadens. For example, 4.5% of the work force has been unemployed for 15 weeks or longer and is actively looking for work (U-1), while 15.8% is unemployed if we count those who say they want work but aren’t looking, and those who work part-time for lack of full-time options (U-6).

Williams takes issue with a 1994 change that coincided with a shift to computerized data collection from pencil and paper. Until then, a discouraged worker was someone who wanted to work but had given up looking because there were no jobs. The BLS tightened the restrictions with additional questions, which reduced the ranks of discouraged workers by half. As Williams puts it, “The Clinton administration dismissed to the non-reporting netherworld about five million discouraged workers.” Add those in, he says, and unemployment approaches Great Depression levels.

Nardone, the longtime BLS economist who today serves as assistant commissioner for current employment analysis, says the 25% unemployment rate often cited for the Great Depression is based on research that corresponds with today’s U-3, the unemployment rate most commonly reported by the media. It stands at 9.4%, recall - not close to Depression-era levels.

The 1994 changes did reduce the ranks of discouraged workers, but also introduced a new category: the marginally attached, who want jobs but aren’t looking for reasons like transportation problems and child-care requirements.

The most commonly watched measure (now U-3, before the change U-5) is mostly unaffected, since it doesn’t include discouraged workers. The benefit of the changes, explains Steven Haugen, a BLS economist, is a less subjective measure of discouragement, and some additional ways to judge whether the nation is not only working, but working up to its ability. Williams says the change reduced the broadest measure of unemployment in a way that “doesn’t match with public perception, and for good reason.”

For a BLS paper describing changes to its unemployment measure, see here.

Rent, Geometry and Hedonism

The same agency that reports unemployment, the BLS, also reports the consumer price index. It tracks changes in the prices of more than 8,000 goods and services, from apples in New York to gasoline in San Francisco. There are several variants of the CPI index. For example, CPI-W weights things like fuel more heavily to better reflect the commutes of workers, and is the basis for Social Security adjustments. CPI-U, the measure most often reported in the media, includes items a typical urban consumer might buy, and determines adjustments to inflation-indexed Treasury bonds. Note that “core” inflation, which excludes food and fuel, isn’t used as the basis for any federal spending program (and isn’t called “core” by the BLS, which reports but doesn’t seem to especially prize the measure).

Most CPI criticism is based on three changes that affect all indexes. In 1983 the BLS replaced house prices with something called owners’ equivalent rent to measure the cost of shelter. Williams and other critics say it understates the cost, since house prices, until recently, had outpaced rents.

John Greenlees, a BLS economist, says the new method is the most widely used among developed nations and is meant to fix a flaw in the old one. The CPI is supposed to measure things people buy to use, not things they invest in. For many people, houses are a little of both. The new measure attempts to isolate the portion of housing expenditures that best reflects the cost of living.

Williams says the purchase price of housing is an important factor in determining a constant standard of living, and he doubts the ability of “the government to accurately calculate how much a person would pay to rent his own house.”

Another change: In 1999 the BLS adopted a geometric mean formula to replace its arithmetic mean one. The new method weights goods less as their prices rise, and is supposed to reflect patterns of consumer substitution.

Critics say that treats consumers as if they’re no worse off when they switch to hamburger from steak. Greenlees says the analogy is flawed; the methodology allows substitution only between similar goods in the same region - from steak in Chicago to a different type of steak in Chicago, and not to hamburger. The old measure was really an overstatement of price increases, one that assumed consumers don’t react at all to higher prices, he says. Also, the impact is relatively small. The BLS has continued to calculate prices under both methodologies and says over five years ended 2004 the new measure reduced CPI growth by 0.28 percentage points a year. Williams says geometric weighting has moved the CPI away from measuring a constant standard of living. He says that when the effects are combined with those of other changes, like increased price surveying among discount stores (which he contends offer poorer service and thus a lower standard of living than the shops they replaced) the overall impact is larger than the BLS states.

Finally, in 1999 the BLS began using what it calls hedonic adjustments. Williams explains the approach with a dash of sarcasm: “That new washing machine you bought did not cost you 20% more than it would have cost you last year, because you got an offsetting 20% increase in the
pleasure you derive from pushing its new electronic control buttons instead of turning that old noisy dial.” He calls the impact on CPI “substantial.”

Greenlees says the name “hedonic” was an unfortunate choice, since the technique has little to do with making judgments about pleasure. It’s designed to measure the quality difference between goods when one is discontinued and must be replaced in the index with another that’s not quite the same. Adjustments can push the index in either direction, but Greenlees says the overall impact since the change has been a tiny increase in the CPI -- about 0.005% a year. Williams says some hedonic adjustments are indeed necessary, like when the size of a box of crackers changes from 12 ounces to 10 ounces. But more theoretical adjustments, he says, “overstate the quality of what the public is buying."

The BLS has published a 17-page paper countering what it calls misconceptions about the CPI. Find it here.

Williams suspects his charges motivated the paper, and has issued a response — a rebuttal to the rebuttal, if you like — here.

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Suzan
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