I get it – people are angry. Very, very angry. I’m angry too. And Wall Street sure makes a great scapegoat, hence the Occupy Wall Street protest. Wall Street is a symbol of the “greed and corruption” that took over America and caused this whole mess.
But let’s take a minute to examine the facts and see if we can’t find some better scapegoats:
- In 1997 Andrew Cuomo, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton, allowed Fannie Mae to reduce the standards by which they would secure loans. This helped create the entire subprime category. Was this a bad thing? Of course not – it allowed more people to leave the ghetto, move to the suburbs, and achieve the American Dream of owning a home. Who knew that “Dream” would turn into a nightmare in a mere decade. Cuomo is not Nostradamus. We can blame him of course, but he had good intentions despite the negative results.
- We can blame the Federal Reserve of course. They lowered interest rates after the dot-com bust so much that there was no way for anybody to achieve safe, steady returns using conservative investments like bonds. Everyone — you, me, retirees — wanted higher returns for their 401(k) and pension plan. So we went to the banks and said, What can we do? And the banks said, Well, you’re the ones asking for higher yields, so here it is. And they bundled together all the newly made subprime mortgages into mortgage-backed securities (MBS) so that the average guy could finally get some yield since the Federal Reserve was blocking all other alternatives. So if you want to occupy the Federal Reserve, go to Washington, D.C. Of course, they had good intentions too. They wanted people to stop buying bonds and start buying stocks. And it worked! Until it didn’t.
- And what about the banks who bundled together these mortgage-backed securities? I don’t know, you and I asked for those securities through our 401(k) plans. So they were just responding to demand, right?
Fine, so what about the hedge funds. Suddenly they saw these mortgage-backed securities yielding 10% and immediately bought them up. They were greedy! But weren’t they just trying to find safe returns for their investors? Either way, the hedge funds aren’t on Wall Street. Go occupy Greenwich, or Park Avenue — but not Wall Street.
But then investment banks like Lehman saw what the hedge funds were doing, and they started doing it too: scooping up as much yield as they could, risk be damned! Greed! Again though, this was a handful of CEOs, many of whom have been fired from their jobs. I’m not trying to apologize for them. But let’s make sure our anger is pointed in the right direction.
- Which now brings me to the biggest culprits yet: the accountants! Right in the middle of all of this mess, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) changed GAAP accounting rules so that you could no longer mark a mortgage-backed security according to your own statistical analysis. You had to start marking it down as soon as there were the slightest defaults and the paper started trading at lower values (this is called mark-to-market). Which meant that hedge funds trading in these illiquid securities could make just a few trades involving a hundred thousand dollars or so, and suddenly trillions of dollars would be wiped out of the value of the banks. Hedge funds gleefully took advantage of this accounting rule change, and tons of bank equity was wiped out. Once FASB changed the rule back (April, 2009) the banks (and all stocks) went straight up.
But how about this: You’re to blame too. That’s right, you. Why? Because you’re not investing in America! You’re irrationally scared. Why have there been 25 months in a row of redemptions from mutual funds? Why are P/E ratios relative to yields at their lowest levels ever? The stock market right now is irrationally low. Bond yields are at 1% (give or take) and the S&P 500 is yielding 2.3%. That wide a spread has never happened before. So please, get your money out from under the mattress, and stop un-investing in America.
And finally, people are saying the problem in the euro zone is a “repeat” of Lehman. On CNBC this week, I had to explain that Greece is a country, and that Lehman Brothers was a bank. You can’t liquidate a country, not very easily at least. The euro zone has problems but let’s put them in perspective:
