Stock Investors Lose Faith, Pull Out Record Amounts

One of the hallmarks of the long market downturns in the 1930s and the 1970s has returned: Rank-and-file investors are losing faith in stocks.

In the grinding bear markets of the past, huge stock losses left individual investors feeling burned. Failures of once-trusted firms and institutions further sapped their confidence. Many disenchanted investors stayed away from the stock market, holding back gains for a decade or more.

Today's investors, too, are surveying a stock-market collapse and a wave of Wall Street failures and scandals. Many have headed for the exits: Investors pulled a record $72 billion from stock funds overall in October alone, according to the Investment Company Institute, a mutual-fund trade group. While more recent figures aren't available, mutual-fund companies say withdrawals have remained heavy.

If history is any guide, they may not return quickly.

"I don't have any confidence in buying any new stocks," says David Herrenbruck, a 52-year-old New York photographer at the peak of his ability to save and invest. Mr. Herrenbruck was a big believer in stocks in the late 1990s, but he was burned by the tech-stock meltdown. He has since moved much of his money to real estate, and he has recently invested in bonds and certificates of deposit. "If I have some cash lying around, it is going to be in CDs," he says.

Individual investors arguably form the bedrock of the market. It's difficult to pinpoint how much stock they hold, because they own shares through mutual funds, retirement accounts and other vehicles. But once retirement accounts are factored in, individuals likely account for half or more of all U.S. stock holdings, according to data from Birinyi Associates in Westport, Conn.

David Herrenbruck

Investors' discomfort with stocks has been growing for years, since just after the 2000 selloff of dotcom shares. From 2002 through 2005, investors put an average of $62 billion a year into U.S. stock mutual funds, less than half the annual level of the previous decade. Since 2006, investors have been pulling money out of U.S. stock funds at a rate of about $40 billion a year.

Such skittishness already promises to put a brake on the stock market's recovery, which could make it harder for companies to raise capital and could squeeze financial firms' profits. That, in turn, could delay the economy's emergence from the severe recession that began last year.

Individuals aren't the only ones who have become skeptical of stocks. Many of the buyers who pushed indexes to record levels this decade -- including private-equity firms and hedge funds -- also appear to be increasingly looking beyond stocks. College endowments and hedge funds, for example, have in recent years funneled more money into alternative investments such as real estate, commodities, art, and even farms and timberland.

Lessons Learned

There's no way to know how long individuals could stay away from shares. Their confidence could be restored more quickly than in the past, optimists say, pointing to policymakers' efforts to avoid repeats of the 1930s and 1970s. Federal officials have sought to stabilize financial markets by injecting hundreds of billions of dollars, slashing target interest rates for overnight loans to nearly zero and announcing plans to buy up mortgage-backed securities.

Also, today's individual investors are different than those of past eras. In the 1930s and 1970s, stock investing was the province of a minority of rich Americans. Now, thanks to 401(k) programs and other retirement plans, nearly half of U.S. families have stock holdings.

Some of the biggest nest eggs belong to baby boomers who are reaching retirement age. The market could receive a boost if many sidelined boomers, whose retirements could span decades, decide it is safe to shift sharply back to stocks. But if these investors believe their money will be safer stashed elsewhere for upcoming years, it could slow a market recovery.

Four-Decade Cycles

Peter Lush is among those steering mostly clear of company shares. The 61-year-old retiree in Georgia built up his retirement plan by investing in a fund that owned midsize stocks. Until recently, he says, he had much of his savings in a bond fund, and after corporate bonds took a hit, he moved the money into CDs. "Maybe now would be a good time to buy" stock, says Mr. Lush. "But I am scared, to tell you the truth."

Enthusiasm for shares has waxed and waned in long cycles, with previous flights from stocks occurring eight and four decades ago.

In 1932, the Dow Jones Industrial Average -- in those days a speculative index of relatively young companies -- had fallen 89% from its 1929 high. The 1930s brought bull markets followed by bears, taking back gains and sapping investor confidence.

The sustained troubles of the 1930s exposed scandals in speculative instruments. So-called investment trusts used investor money and borrowed funds to buy high-flying securities, sometimes buying stock in one another. Of the 1,183 investment trusts and other funds that existed from 1927 through 1936, more than half had failed by 1937, a government study showed. Goldman Sachs, which sponsored three prominent funds that lost most of their value, saw its reputation damaged for years.

The Dow didn't return to its 1929 high until 1954. New York University financial historian Richard Sylla recalls that even in the 1950s, some people were so spooked by the Depression that they were storing money in jars in the basement.

The stock recovery of the 1940s and 1950s became a speculative boom in the 1960s, marked by the so-called Nifty Fifty stocks that brokers said would rise for years. They didn't.

In 1966, the Dow flirted with the 1000 level, then shed 25%. That bull-and-bear pattern would repeat for 16 years amid inflation and soaring oil prices. Investor confidence was hammered again. There was scandal, too, including the early 1970s collapse of Bernie Cornfeld's mutual-fund empire, Investors Overseas Services, which at one point had assets of more than $2 billion.

Mutual-fund data from that period show investors reacted much as they have in recent years. After a market peak in 1968, people began putting less money than before into mutual funds, Investment Company Institute data show. By 1971, they were pulling more money out than they were putting in. From May 1972 through March 1980, total dollars in stock funds fell 42%. Mutual-fund executives worried that the industry might not survive.

Money started flowing in again in the 1980s, after the government encouraged broad market participation through 401(k) plans and other retirement programs. Individuals gradually embraced the idea of buy-and-hold investing, helping to usher in the stock boom of the 1990s.

Pax Americana

With the Cold War over and investments flowing across the globe, people believed they were in a long-running Pax Americana of world-wide prosperity and rising productivity. During the 1990s, investors added $1 trillion to mutual funds. The Dow Jones Industrial Average surged above 11000 in 1999, up tenfold from 1982. Owning anything but stocks looked foolish.

That confidence has been shaken by two bad bear markets in less than a decade. Between 2000 and 2002, the Dow fell 38% and the Nasdaq Composite Index shed 78%. This year's market collapse knocked 47% off the Dow in just over 12 months, returning stocks to 1997 levels. As of Friday, the Dow still was 39% off its 2007 record.

"The question is whether this series of very strong bear markets will cause investors to retrench as they did in the '70s," says Brian Reid, chief economist at ICI. "I think there will be some of that," he says, although perhaps not as bad as it was then.

People in the investment business hoped ordinary investors would return in large numbers when the market began recovering late in 2002. But this didn't happen.

In 2001, 53% of U.S. households held stock or stock funds, which turned out to be a peak. Now, about 46% of families own stocks, according to a report published last week by the ICI and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

The disaffection appears to be deepening. By the end of October, amid the most recent market collapse, retirement savers tracked by consulting group Hewitt Associates were sending 58% of their contributions to stock funds. That was down from 75% at the beginning of this year.

The decade's second bear market also brought big failures and scandals -- the end of venerable investment banks, an alleged $50 billion swindle by Wall Street stalwart Bernard Madoff -- to add to the collapses of Enron and WorldCom from earlier in the decade.

"For many investors, this has been a glimpse into the abyss," says Terrance Odean, a finance professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has studied the behavior of individual investors. "They have been told that if you save regularly for retirement and buy and hold, you will be fine. Now, people see a possibility that this will not be the case."

Weak Hands

The market has given Karin Kuder a good ride over the past two decades, but now she's through. Starting in 1989, Ms. Kuder contributed as much as she could to her retirement fund, up to 15% of each paycheck. In the 1990s, she chose aggressive stock funds, moving to a more conservative mix after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Early this year, even after she retired as a nurse at a naval air station in Jacksonville, Fla., Ms. Kuder still held 60% stocks and 40% bonds.

In March, she trimmed her stock holdings to 50% of her portfolio. In October, with her account down $40,000, she ran out of confidence. "It was the only money I had," Ms. Kuder says. "I wasn't sleeping."

She phoned her financial adviser and said she wanted to put all her money in a safe place. The adviser persuaded her to leave 20% in stocks and bonds, but the rest went to a five-year fixed annuity, similar to a certificate of deposit, guaranteeing 5.1% a year.

"You put in all those years, and it is just falling right away from you," Ms. Kuder says. "I was so fearful that I was going to lose everything."

When market analysts talk about who's buying and who's selling in times like these, they sometimes speak of "weak hands" and "strong hands." Weak hands bail out when the market declines, seeking what they see as safer havens. Strong hands are committed to the market for the long term, buying shares at what may turn out to be big discounts. Right now, the market is being driven by the exit of these weak hands. Lasting recovery will come when some of these weak hands -- or the next wave of younger investors -- step back in.

There are signs that even younger investors are growing more fearful of stocks lately. Risk aversion has been on the rise this decade among all age groups, according to last week's report from the ICI and SIFMA. Although it will be long before young people need to tap their retirement savings, the losses they've seen in the current bear market could temper their enthusiasm for stocks for years to come.

Bright Future

Harris Cohen, a 25-year-old project manager with Amtrak in Washington, D.C., opened an individual retirement account in 2001, when he was 18, and filled it with stocks he thought had a bright future, including Apple Inc. and Garmin Ltd. He bought mutual funds that invest in alternative energy companies and utilities. He didn't bother with bonds.

Harris Cohen

"I had a real good track record over five or six years, with increases from 10% to 20% a year," Mr. Cohen says. His portfolio has fallen about 40% over the past 18 months, he says.

In September, he began pulling back from stocks. Now, he has shifted his retirement savings to corporate bonds, a money-market fund and a few utility funds. He says he doubts he ever will view stocks the same way. "Even if the market were to rebound and the economy were to improve, I would be very loath to invest entirely in stocks," Mr. Cohen says.

While investor confidence is low, there are signs that it may have further to fall.

In 2001, people's hopes for stocks were extremely high. Only 5% of those surveyed expected average annual stock returns in the coming decade to be 5% or less, according to University of Oregon Prof. Paul Slovic, whose company, Decision Research, conducts the surveys. Today, nearly one-third of those surveyed expect such stock weakness, reflecting the decline in investor optimism.

But there is a surprising amount of optimism left. More than half of the small investors surveyed still expect annual gains of 10% or more over the next decade -- at, or above, historical averages.

At some point, these optimists may be right. Investors who jumped into the market at the height of the last love affair with stocks are still hurting. A $10,000 investment in 2000, into a fund tracking the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested, would be worth about $7,000, according to Morningstar Inc. Those who put $10,000 into the same index in 1982, at the end of the last decade of disaffection, would have more than $150,000.

—Shelly Banjo contributed to this article.

Write to E.S. Browning at jim.browning@wsj.com

A 21st Century Bretton Woods

Source: WSJ

There wasn't much to see in Bretton Woods in July 1944, when delegates from 44 countries checked into the sprawling Mount Washington Hotel for the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference. Almost a million acres of New Hampshire forest surrounded the site; there were free Coca-Cola dispensers, but few other distractions.

In this scene of rustic isolation, 168 statesmen (and one lone stateswoman, Mabel Newcomer of Vassar College) joined in history's most celebrated episode of economic statecraft, remaking the world's monetary order to fend off another Great Depression and creating an unprecedented multinational bank, to be focused on postwar reconstruction and development.

At the Final Plenary, a sea of black-tied delegates gave a standing ovation to British economist John Maynard Keynes, whose intellect had permeated the three weeks of talks. Lord Keynes paid tribute to his far-seeing colleagues, who had performed a task appropriate "to the prophet and to the soothsayer."

The Bretton Woods conference has acquired mythical status. To economic-history buffs, it's akin to the gathering of the founding fathers at the constitutional convention. To politicians anxious to make their marks upon the world, it's a moment to be richly envied. The recent calls from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy for a new Bretton Woods conference, to which the Bush administration has acceded, have caused TV crews to descend upon the old hotel, which has undergone a $50 million facelift. But Bretton Woods revivalism is nothing new. Indeed, it's a long tradition.

After the onset of the Latin debt crisis in 1982, U.S. Treasury Secretary Donald Regan floated the idea of a new Bretton Woods to steady the hemisphere's currencies. The following year, reeling from three devaluations of the franc, French President Francois Mitterrand declared, "The time has really come to think in terms of a new Bretton Woods. Outside this proposition, there will be no salvation." Mitterrand persisted in this grandiloquence over the next two years. He finally quieted down in 1985, when Margaret Thatcher dismissed his proposal as "generalized jabberwocky."

In the wake of the emerging-market crises of 1997-98, Bretton Woods nostalgia broke out again -- this time in post-Thatcher Britain. "We should not be afraid to think radically and fundamentally," Tony Blair opined. "We need to commit ourselves today to build a new Bretton Woods for the next millennium." The precise content of Mr. Blair's millennial ambition was, shall we say, vague. But no fellow leader was rude enough to say so.

Among acts of international economic statesmanship, perhaps only the Marshall Plan has been invoked more frequently. There have been calls for a Marshall Plan for postcommunist eastern Europe, a Marshall Plan for Africa, a Marshall Plan for the inner cities. Indeed, anybody wanting Washington to splurge finds Marshall exceedingly convenient.

But Bretton Woods has a richer and more rarefied cachet. It was about reordering the international system, not just mobilizing money for an enlightened cause. And whereas the Marshall Plan was an example of the unilateralism for which the U.S. is known, the Bretton Woods conference was a triumph of multilateral coordination. It featured countries as diverse as Honduras, Liberia and the Philippines (Keynes spoke disdainfully of a "most monstrous monkey-house"), though it did not include South Korea or Japan, important voices in today's economic summitry.

Both sides of the Bretton Woods achievement seem alluring today, yet both may be chimerical. The conference rebuilt the economic order by creating a system of fixed exchange rates. The aim was to prevent a return to the competitive devaluations best illustrated by the "butter wars." In 1930 New Zealand secured a cost advantage for its butter exports by devaluing its money; Denmark, its main butter rival, responded with its own devaluation in 1931; the two nations proceeded to chase each other down with progressively more drastic devaluations.

This beggar-thy-neighbor behavior added to the protectionism that brought the world to ruin, and the Bretton Woods answer was simple. In the postwar era, the dollar would be anchored to gold, and other currencies would be anchored to the dollar: No more fluctuating money, ergo no competitive devaluation. To undergird this system, the Bretton Woods architects created the International Monetary Fund, which was far more central to their ambitions than their other legacy, the World Bank. If a country's fixed exchange rate led it into a balance of payments crisis, the IMF would bail it out and so avert devaluation.

Today the idea of another monetary rebirth has much to recommend it. The credit bubble that has wreaked havoc on the world's financial markets has its origins in a two-headed monetary order: Some countries allow their currencies to float, while others peg loosely to the dollar. Over the past five years or so, this mixture created a variation on the 1930s: China, the largest dollar pegger, kept its currency cheap, driving rival exporters in Asia to hold their exchange rates down also. Thanks to this new version of competitive currency manipulation, the dollar-peggers racked up gargantuan trade surpluses. Their earnings were pumped back into the international financial system, inflating a credit bubble that now has popped disastrously.

Persuading China to change its currency policy would be a worthy goal for a new Bretton Woods conference. But currency reform is low on the agenda of the summit that the Bush administration plans to host on Nov. 15. (The administration styles this gathering a "G-20 meeting," ignoring the European talk of a Bretton Woods II.) The British and French leaders who pushed for the meeting want instead to talk about financial regulation -- how to fix rating agencies, how to boost transparency at banks and so on. But many of these tasks require minimal multilateral coordination.

If the Europeans shrink from demanding that China cease pegging to the dollar, it's perhaps because they anticipate the concession that would be asked of them. China isn't going to give up its export-led growth strategy for the sake of the international system unless it gets a bigger stake in that system -- meaning a much bigger voice within the International Monetary Fund and a corresponding reduction in Europe's exaggerated influence. When you strip out the blather about bank transparency and such, this is the core bargain that needs to be struck. Naturally, the Europeans aren't proposing it.

It will be up to the two great powers -- the U.S. and China -- to fashion the deal that brings China into the heart of the multilateral system. Here, too, is an echo of the first Bretton Woods, for underneath the camouflage of a multilateral process there was a bargain between two nations. Britain, the proud but indebted imperial power, needed American savings to underpin monetary stability in the postwar era; the quid pro quo was that the U.S. had the final say on the IMF's design and structure. Today the U.S. must play Britain's role, and China must play the American one.

There's a final twist, however. In the 1940s the declining power practiced imperial trade preferences; the rising power championed an open world economy. When Franklin Roosevelt told Winston Churchill that free trade would be the price of postwar assistance, he was demanding an end to the colonial order and the creation of a level playing field for commerce. "Mr. President, I think you want to abolish the British empire," Churchill protested. "But in spite of that, we know you are our only hope."

Today it is the rising power that pursues mercantilist policies via its exchange rate. China's leadership, which sits atop an astonishing $2 trillion in foreign-currency savings, could trade a promise to help recapitalize Western finance for an expanded role within the IMF. But China may simply not be interested. The future of the global monetary system depends on whether China aspires to play the role of Roosevelt -- or whether it prefers to be a modern Churchill.

What History Tells Us About the Market

Source: WSJ

July 9, 1932 was a day Wall Street would never wish to relive. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 41.63, down 91% from its level exactly three years earlier. Total trading volume that day was a meager 235,000 shares. "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," was one of the top songs of the year. Investors everywhere winced with the pain of recognition at the patter of comedian Eddie Cantor, who sneered that his broker had told him "to buy this stock for my old age. It worked wonderfully. Within a week I was an old man!"

The nation was in the grip of what U.S. Treasury Secretary Ogden Mills called "the psychology of fear." Industrial production was down 52% in three years; corporate profits had fallen 49%. "Many businesses are better off than ever," Mr. Cantor wisecracked. "Take red ink, for instance: Who doesn't use it?"

Banks had become so illiquid, and depositors so terrified of losing their money, that check-writing ground to a halt. Most transactions that did occur were carried out in cash. Alexander Dana Noyes, financial columnist at the New York Times, had invested in a pool of residential mortgages. He was repeatedly accosted by the ringing of his doorbell; those homeowners who could still keep their mortgages current came to Mr. Noyes to service their debts with payments of cold hard cash.

Just eight days before the Dow hit rock-bottom, the brilliant investor Benjamin Graham -- who many years later would become Warren Buffett's personal mentor -- published "Should Rich but Losing Corporations Be Liquidated?" It was the last of a series of three incendiary articles in Forbes magazine in which Graham documented in stark detail the fact that many of America's great corporations were now worth more dead than alive.

More than one out of every 12 companies on the New York Stock Exchange, Graham calculated, were selling for less than the value of the cash and marketable securities on their balance sheets. "Banks no longer lend directly to big corporations," he reported, but operating companies were still flush with cash -- many of them so flush that a wealthy investor could theoretically take over, empty out the cash registers and the bank accounts, and own the remaining business for free.

Graham summarized it this way: "...stocks always sell at unduly low prices after a boom collapses. As the president of the New York Stock Exchange testified, 'in times like these frightened people give the United States of ours away.' Or stated differently, it happens because those with enterprise haven't the money, and those with money haven't the enterprise, to buy stocks when they are cheap."

After the epic bashing that stocks have taken in the past few weeks, investors can be forgiven for wondering whether they fell asleep only to emerge in the waking nightmare of July 1932 all over again. The only question worth asking seems to be: How low can it go?

Make no mistake about it; the worst-case scenario could indeed take us back to 1932 territory. But the likelihood of that scenario is very much in doubt.

Robert Shiller, professor of finance at Yale University and chief economist for MacroMarkets LLC, tracks what he calls the "Graham P/E," a measure of market valuation he adapted from an observation Graham made many years ago. The Graham P/E divides the price of major U.S. stocks by their net earnings averaged over the past 10 years, adjusted for inflation. After this week's bloodbath, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is priced at 15 times earnings by the Graham-Shiller measure. That is a 25% decline since Sept. 30 alone.

The Graham P/E has not been this low since January 1989; the long-term average in Prof. Shiller's database, which goes back to 1881, is 16.3 times earnings.

But when the stock market moves away from historical norms, it tends to overshoot. The modern low on the Graham P/E was 6.6 in July and August of 1982, and it has sunk below 10 for several long stretches since World War II -- most recently, from 1977 through 1984. It would take a bottom of about 600 on the S&P 500 to take the current Graham P/E down to 10. That's roughly a 30% drop from last week's levels; an equivalent drop would take the Dow below 6000.

Could the market really overshoot that far on the downside? "That's a serious possibility, because it's done it before," says Prof. Shiller. "It strikes me that it might go down a lot more" from current levels.

In order to trade at a Graham P/E as bad as the 1982 low, the S&P 500 would have to fall to roughly 400, more than a 50% slide from where it is today. A similar drop in the Dow would hit bottom somewhere around 4000.

Prof. Shiller is not actually predicting any such thing, of course. "We're dealing with fundamental and profound uncertainties," he says. "We can't quantify anything. I really don't want to make predictions, so this is nothing but an intuition." But Prof. Shiller is hardly a crank. In his book "Irrational Exuberance," published at the very crest of the Internet bubble in early 2000, he forecast the crash of Nasdaq. The second edition of the book, in 2005, insisted (at a time when few other pundits took such a view) that residential real estate was wildly overvalued.

The professor's reluctance to make a formal forecast should steer us all away from what we cannot possibly know for certain -- the future -- and toward the few things investors can be confident about at this very moment.

Strikingly, today's conditions bear quite a close resemblance to what Graham described in the abyss of the Great Depression. Regardless of how much further it might (or might not) drop, the stock market now abounds with so many bargains it's hard to avoid stepping on them. Out of 9,194 stocks tracked by Standard & Poor's Compustat research service, 3,518 are now trading at less than eight times their earnings over the past year -- or at levels less than half the long-term average valuation of the stock market as a whole. Nearly one in 10, or 876 stocks, trade below the value of their per-share holdings of cash -- an even greater proportion than Graham found in 1932.

Those numbers testify to the wholesale destruction of the stock market's faith in the future. And, as Graham wrote in 1932, "In all probability [the stock market] is wrong, as it always has been wrong in its major judgments of the future."

In fact, the market is probably wrong again in its obsession over whether this decline will turn into a cataclysmic collapse. Eugene White, an economics professor at Rutgers University who is an expert on the crash of 1929 and its aftermath, thinks that the only real similarity between today's climate and the Great Depression is that, once again, "the market is moving on fear, not facts." As bumbling as its response so far may seem, the government's actions in 2008 are "way different" from the hands-off mentality of the Hoover administration and the rigid detachment of the Federal Reserve in 1929 through 1932. "Policymakers are making much wiser decisions," says Prof. White, "and we are moving in the right direction."

Investors seem, above all, to be in a state of shock, bludgeoned into paralysis by the market's astonishing volatility. How is Theodore Aronson, partner at Aronson + Johnson + Ortiz LP, a Philadelphia money manager overseeing some $15 billion, holding up in the bear market? "We have 101 clients and almost as many consultants representing them," he says, "and we've had virtually no calls, only a handful." Most of the financial planners I have spoken with around the country have told me much the same thing: Their phones are not ringing, and very few of their clients have even asked for reassurance. The entire nation, it seems, is in the grip of what psychologists call "the disposition effect," or an inability to confront financial losses. The natural way to palliate the pain of losing money is by refusing to recognize exactly how badly your portfolio has been damaged. A few weeks ago, investors were gasping; now, en masse, they seem to have gone numb.

The market's latest frame of mind seems reminiscent of a passage from Emily Dickinson's poem "After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes":

This is the Hour of Lead --
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons recollect the Snow --
First -- Chill -- then Stupor -- then the letting go.

This collective stupor may very likely be the last stage before many investors finally let go -- the phase of market psychology that veteran traders call "capitulation." Stupor prevents rash action, keeping many long-term investors from bailing out near the bottom. When, however, it breaks and many investors finally do let go, the market will finally be ready to rise again. No one can spot capitulation before it sets in. But it may not be far off now. Investors who have, as Graham put it, either the enterprise or the money to invest now, somewhere near the bottom, are likely to prevail over those who wait for the bottom and miss it.

Corrections & Amplifications:

Charles Schwab Corp. had $600 million of cash freely available at the parent-company level as of June 30. An earlier version of this story incorrectly said the total was $27.8 billion.

Fed Rethinks Stance on Popping Bubbles

Source: WSJ

The Federal Reserve and academics who give it advice are rethinking the proposition that the Fed cannot and should not try to prick financial bubbles.

"[O]bviously, the last decade has shown that bursting bubbles can be an extraordinarily dangerous and costly phenomenon for the economy, and there is no doubt that as we emerge from the financial crisis, we will all be looking at that issue and what can be done about it," Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said this week.

The bursting of this decade's housing bubble, which was accompanied by a bubble of cheap credit, has wrought inestimable economic damage. The U.S. economy was faltering before the crisis in credit markets recently intensified, rattling financial markets and sending home prices down further. Even if the government's decision to take stakes in major banks works, it could take weeks for money to flow freely again.

"A recession at least of the magnitude of 1982 is quite likely," said ITG economist Robert Barbera. The recession that ended in 1982 lasted 16 months -- twice as long as the 1991 and 2001 recessions -- and saw the unemployment rate rise to 10.8% from 7.2%.

While it is too soon to pronounce an about-face in Fed thinking, policy makers' views clearly are evolving. The Federal Reserve's longtime line on financial bubbles has been that they were impossible to identify. Even if the central bank could identify a bubble, policy makers said, trying to lance it would be far worse for the economy than letting the bubble run its course and dealing with the consequences.

Economists' view that central banks shouldn't meddle with financial bubbles was informed by the Fed's disastrous efforts to pop the stock-market bubble in the late 1920s, which led to the 1929 stock-market crash and contributed to the Great Depression. That view was reinforced when the Bank of Japan's pricking of the late 1980s' stock-market bubble shepherded in a decade of economic stagnation.

"[T]he degree of monetary tightening that would be required to contain or offset a bubble of any substantial dimension appears to be so great as to risk an unacceptable amount of collateral damage to the wider economy," former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan said in 2002.

The Fed's view on bubbles helped fuel what became known as "the Greenspan put" -- the conviction among investors that the Fed would let them take excessive risks and step in as custodian if the bets they made went awry. By giving market participants an incentive to assume greater risk than they would have otherwise, the Fed's laissez-faire position on bubbles may have contributed to the surge in credit that helped push housing prices skyward in the first half of this decade.

Part of the problem was that the Fed applied the lessons of the dot-com bubble to housing and credit, says Harvard University economist Jeremy Stein. When Internet stock prices collapsed in 2000, the economic fallout was contained, because the use of leverage -- borrowing money to magnify bets -- was limited. The housing market is far more dependent on credit, and therefore leverage. As the issuance of mortgages expanded, and investors plunged money into complex securities based on those loans, matters got dangerously out of hand.

Identifying bubbles is tricky, with some seemingly irrational price spikes turning out to be justified. Policy makers need to be careful of valuing their judgment over the collective judgment of the market, because efforts to quash prices could interfere with the crucial role markets play in relaying information and allocating capital.

In recent years, economists have made headway in identifying incipient bubbles. Princeton University's Jose Scheinkman and Wei Xiong have shown how bubbles lead to overtrading -- whether day trading dot-com stocks or flipping condos -- and this might be a useful alert. Researchers at the Bank for International Settlements have flagged excessive credit growth signaling a bubble.

Once authorities identify a bubble, the next step is figuring out how to deal with it. Fed officials appear uncomfortable with the idea of raising interest rates to prick a bubble, because rates affect a wide swath of economic activity, and a bubble may be confined to just one area.

"Monetary policy, for which we in the Federal Reserve are responsible, is a blunt instrument with economy-wide effects," said Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Gary Stern. "We should not pretend that actions taken to rein in those asset-price increases, which seemingly outstrip economic fundamentals, won't in the short run curtail to some extent economic growth and employment."

Fed officials are leaning toward regulating financial firms with more of a focus on how they are contributing to risk throughout the financial system. This approach could also have drawbacks, said Princeton economist Hyun Song Shin.

"These Wall Street people are very intelligent, and their incentives are so vast that they're going to find a way to go around the rules you set down," he said. "Leaning against the wind by raising interest rates in the face of what seems like a credit boom is one way of at least damping down on potential excesses."

A Short Banking History of the United States

Source: WSJ, by John Steele Gordon

We are now in the midst of a major financial panic. This is not a unique occurrence in American history. Indeed, we've had one roughly every 20 years: in 1819, 1836, 1857, 1873, 1893, 1907, 1929, 1987 and now 2008. Many of these marked the beginning of an extended period of economic depression.

The Granger Collection

President Andrew Jackson destroying the Bank of the United States. Lithograph, 1828.

How could the richest and most productive economy the world has ever known have a financial system so prone to periodic and catastrophic break down? One answer is the baleful influence of Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson, to be sure, was a genius and fully deserves his place on Mt. Rushmore. But he was also a quintessential intellectual who was often insulated from the real world. He hated commerce, he hated speculators, he hated the grubby business of getting and spending (except his own spending, of course, which eventually bankrupted him). Most of all, he hated banks, the symbol for him of concentrated economic power. Because he was the founder of an enduring political movement, his influence has been strongly felt to the present day.

Consider central banking. A central bank's most important jobs are to guard the money supply -- regulating the economy thereby -- and to act as a lender of last resort to regular banks in times of financial distress. Central banks are, by their nature, very large and powerful institutions. They need to be to be effective.

Jefferson's chief political rival, Alexander Hamilton, had grown up almost literally in a counting house, in the West Indian island of St. Croix, managing the place by the time he was in his middle teens. He had a profound and practical understanding of markets and how they work, an understanding that Jefferson, born a landed aristocrat who lived off the labor of slaves, utterly lacked.

Hamilton wanted to establish a central bank modeled on the Bank of England. The government would own 20% of the stock, have two seats on the board, and the right to inspect the books at any time. But, like the Bank of England then, it would otherwise be owned by its stockholders.

To Jefferson, who may not have understood the concept of central banking, Hamilton's idea was what today might be called "a giveaway to the rich." He fought it tooth and nail, but Hamilton won the battle and the Bank of the United States was established in 1792. It was a big success and its stockholders did very well. It also provided the country with a regular money supply with its own banknotes, and a coherent, disciplined banking system.

But as the Federalists lost power and the Jeffersonians became the dominant party, the bank's charter was not renewed in 1811. The near-disaster of the War of 1812 caused President James Madison to realize the virtues of a central bank and a second bank was established in 1816. But President Andrew Jackson, a Jeffersonian to his core, killed it and the country had no central bank for the next 73 years.

We paid a heavy price for the Jeffersonian aversion to central banking. Without a central bank there was no way to inject liquidity into the banking system to stem a panic. As a result, the panics of the 19th century were far worse here than in Europe and precipitated longer and deeper depressions. In 1907, J.P. Morgan, probably the most powerful private banker who ever lived, acted as the central bank to end the panic that year.

Even Jefferson's political heirs realized after 1907 that what was now the largest economy in the world could not do without a central bank. The Federal Reserve was created in 1913. But, again, they fought to make it weaker rather than stronger. Instead of one central bank, they created 12 separate banks located across the country and only weakly coordinated.

No small part of the reason that an ordinary recession that began in the spring of 1929 turned into the calamity of the Great Depression was the inability of the Federal Reserve to do its job. It was completely reorganized in 1934 and the U.S. finally had a central bank with the powers it needed to function. That is a principal reason there was no panic for nearly 60 years after 1929 and the crash of 1987 had no lasting effect on the American economy.

While the Constitution gives the federal government control of the money supply, it is silent on the control of banks, which create money. In the early days they created money both through making loans and by issuing banknotes and today do so by extending credit. Had Hamilton's Bank of the United States been allowed to survive, it might well have evolved the uniform regulatory regime a banking system needs to flourish.

Without it, banking regulation was left to the states. Some states provided firm regulation, others hardly any. Many states, influenced by Jeffersonian notions of the evils of powerful banks, made sure they remained small by forbidding branching. In banking, small means weak. There were about a thousand banks in the country by 1840, but that does not convey the whole story. Half the banks that opened between 1810 and 1820 had failed by 1825, as did half those founded in the 1830s by 1845.

Many "wildcat banks," so called because they were headquartered "out among the wildcats," were simple frauds, issuing as many banknotes as they could before disappearing. By the 1840s there were thousands of issues of banknotes in circulation and publishers did a brisk business in "banknote detectors" to help catch frauds.

The Civil War ended this monetary chaos when Congress passed the National Bank Act, offering federal charters to banks that had enough capital and would submit to strict regulation. Banknotes issued by national banks had to be uniform in design and backed by substantial reserves invested in federal bonds. Meanwhile Congress got the state banks out of the banknote business by putting a 10% tax on their issuance. But National banks could not branch if their state did not allow it and could not branch across state lines.

Unfortunately state banks did not disappear, but proliferated as never before. By 1920, there were almost 30,000 banks in the U.S., more than the rest of the world put together. Overwhelmingly they were small, "unitary" banks with capital under $1 million. As each of these unitary banks was tied to a local economy, if that economy went south, the bank often failed. As depression began to spread through American agriculture in the 1920s, bank failures averaged over 550 a year. With the Great Depression, a tsunami of bank failures threatened the collapse of the system.

The reorganization of the Federal Reserve and the creation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation hugely reduced the number of bank failures and mostly ended bank runs. But there remained thousands of banks, along with thousands of savings and loan associations, mutual savings banks, and trust companies. While these were all banks, taking deposits and making loans, they were regulated, often at cross purposes, by different authorities. The Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the FSLIC, the SEC, the banking regulators of the states, and numerous other agencies all had jurisdiction over aspects of the American banking system.

The system was stable in the prosperous postwar years, but when inflation took off in the late 1960s, it began to break down. S&Ls, small and local but with disproportionate political influence, should have been forced to merge or liquidate when they could not compete in the new financial environment. Instead Congress made a series of quick fixes that made disaster inevitable.

In the 1990s interstate banking was finally allowed, creating nationwide banks of unprecedented size. But Congress's attempt to force banks to make home loans to people who had limited creditworthiness, while encouraging Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to take these dubious loans off their hands so that the banks could make still more of them, created another crisis in the banking system that is now playing out.

While it will be painful, the present crisis will at least provide another opportunity to give this country, finally, a unified banking system of large, diversified, well-capitalized banking institutions that are under the control of a unified and coherent regulatory system free of undue political influence.

Ultimatum by Paulson Sparked Frenzied End

One of the most tumultuous weekends in Wall Street's history began Friday, when federal officials decided to deliver a sobering message to the captains of finance: There would be no government bailout of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Complete Coverage

Read more about Wall Street in Crisis.

Officials wanted to prepare the market for the possibility that Lehman could simply fail. The best way to do that in an orderly way would be to get everyone together in a room.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and his top New York lieutenant, Timothy Geithner, summoned some 30 Wall Street executives for a 6 p.m. Friday meeting at the Fed's offices in Lower Manhattan.

"There is no political will for a federal bailout," Mr. Geithner told the assembled executives, according to a person familiar with the matter. "Come back in the morning and be prepared to do something."

Over the next 48 hours, these marching orders developed into a nerve-wracking test of the ability of the U.S. financial system to hold itself together amid the worst series of shocks it has faced in decades.

By taking the rescue option off the table, the U.S. government was declaring that there are limits to its role as backstop-in-chief. A week earlier it had seized mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and months prior had brokered the sale of Bear Stearns & Co. to J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. But now, Washington appears to want Wall Street to largely fix its own problems, and feels that flailing institutions shouldn't expect the government to commit money to save them.

"We've re-established 'moral hazard,'" said a person involved in the talks, referring to the notion that the government should eschew bailouts, since financial firms might take more risks if they're insulated from the consequences. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing? We're about to find out."

One immediate impact: As Lehman's future darkened, Merrill Lynch & Co., another vulnerable firm, raced into the arms of Bank of America Corp.

This account of the weekend's events was compiled from interviews with Wall Street executives, traders, government officials and other participants in the talks.

Barring some last-minute, late-night alternative, Lehman will likely file for liquidation, people familiar with the situation said.

The storied firm's decline occurred in slow motion this year. Heavily exposed to troubled real-estate investments, the firm tried to raise fresh capital, only to be thwarted. The most recent disappointment came last Monday when a possible deal with a Korean bank faded, sending Lehman's shares down 45% the next day. They had already fallen 80% since the start of 2008.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, when Mr. Paulson called Wall Street CEOs to give them early notice of his no-bailout stance, some argued to him that the government needed to structure a rescue like that of Bear Stearns, according to people familiar with the matter. To prevent Bear Stearns's collapse in March, the Fed agreed to put up $30 billion to help complete the acquisition of the failing bank by J.P. Morgan Chase.

Repeating that move with Lehman, however, would create a terrible precedent, Mr. Paulson worried. Which other firms would take that as a cue to ask for U.S. government help -- and from what other industries? Detroit auto makers were already knocking at the door.

Mr. Paulson was also irked that Wall Street saw him as someone who would always ride to the rescue. And because Lehman's troubles have been known for a while, Mr. Paulson felt the market had had time to prepare.

In addition, Lehman had access to special emergency lending from the Fed -- something Bear Stearns didn't have when it was struggling. This was another reason Mr. Paulson there shouldn't be a Bear-like rescue for Lehman.

The government's no-bailout decision emerged as serious obstacle for Lehman's two most likely buyers, Bank of America and Barclays PLC. Indeed, this past Friday, federal officials monitoring talks to sell Lehman to Bank of America realized that deal probably wouldn't be consummated without federal backing.

That triggered the call for the Friday-evening meeting of financial titans. The gathering was attended by at least 30 executives, a Who's Who of Wall Street.

Mr. Geithner laid out two potential scenarios. One involved an orderly dismantling of Lehman that would essentially end its existence. But he also suggested that Wall Street firms come up with their own solution -- perhaps by joining forces among themselves to remove Lehman's riskiest and most toxic assets. That move would make Lehman more attractive to potential buyers, but would also require Wall Street firms to commit their own scarce money to the cleanup.

Mr. Paulson told the group it was in their interest to find a solution. "Everybody is exposed" to Lehman, Mr. Paulson said, according to two people in attendance.

Most of the Wall Street executives present at the meeting listened and asked questions, but didn't show what hand they might play. The meeting broke up just after 8 p.m. Friday.

Finding a Buyer

Saturday morning, the CEOs and their closest advisers reconvened at about 9 a.m. and broke into groups to discuss various scenarios. Lehman representatives weren't present.

One group focused on the possible dismantling of Lehman; it included both government officials and Wall Street representatives. Among the things the group discussed was having every bank borrow from the Fed under an emergency lending provision it has offered since the collapse of Bear Stearns. With that borrowed money, the banks would buy up Lehman's assets, preventing it from filing for bankruptcy.

The other main track focused on finding a buyer. Either Barclays or Bank of America would buy Lehman's "good assets," such as its stock-trading and analysis business, people familiar with the matter say. Lehman's more toxic real-estate assets would be placed in a "bad" bank containing about $85 billion in souring assets. Other Wall Street firms would inject some capital into the bad bank to keep it afloat. The goal would be to avoid a flood of bad assets pouring into the market, pushing prices even lower.

But getting Wall Street firms to cooperate among themselves, without government assistance, was proving tough. Several CEOs openly questioned why they should bear the cost of Lehman's problems when others who also face exposure -- such as institutional investors, hedge funds and foreign investors -- aren't being asked to do the same.

Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack raised serious questions, saying that this time it was Lehman and next time it would be Merrill, according to people in attendance. "If we're going to do this deal, where does it end?" he said, according to a person familiar with the matter. Other bankers in the room felt the same way, this person added.

By noon on Saturday, Bank of America hadn't budged from its position that it needed government support to consummate a deal. The bottom line: It was effectively out of the running.

Outside the Fed's downtown New York headquarters, a fortress-like building of stone and iron, a fleet of black limousines waited for the bankers inside. At one point, they blocked the narrow streets around the building, causing a traffic jam that had to be broken up by the Fed's uniformed guards.

Bankers and Fed staffers milled outside, smoking cigarettes and talking on their cell phones about subjects such as counterparty risk, a normally arcane matter of contract law, suddenly front and center. On one occasion, in the men's bathroom, a trio of bank CEOs debated the merits of a rescue plan.

The bond- and derivative-trading heads of major investment banks, assuming that a deal to save Lehman was a diminishing possibility, gathered to discuss how to deal with their exposure to minimize havoc Monday when markets opened.

Shortly after 5 p.m., a clutch of Fed staffers left the building. The day hadn't gone well. The government and potential buyers remained miles apart, mainly due to the bailout issue. Wall Street executives left in cars parked in a garage to avoid being photographed by the waiting press.

One person in the Fed meetings Saturday night described them as "the world's biggest game of poker."

With different doomsday scenarios being batted around the meeting rooms, some participants felt the government would blink and do a bailout. "This is going to go down to the last second," one participant said.

With Bank of America backing away from a deal, the enormity of a potential bankruptcy filing by Lehman started settling in. Even understanding Lehman's current trading positions was tough. Lehman's roster of interest-rate swaps (a type of derivative investment) ran about two million strong, said one person familiar with the matter.

Overnight, the outlines of possible deals started to crystallize. The idea that Wall Street firms would fund a "bad bank" full of Lehman's problematic assets was dead. Unlike when Wall Street firms stepped in to bail out hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management a decade ago, today's banks are much weaker. Some were loathe to provide support when a rival like Barclays might still buy Lehman.

By Sunday morning, the U.K.'s Barclays looked like the sole potential buyer. That further minimized the chances of a government bailout: If the Bush administration wouldn't help to fund a Wall Street solution, aiding a foreign buyer was even less likely.

Lehman employees followed their firm through news reports. One manager said he was encouraging his staff to show up Monday and hang tough for a few more days. "It is not like there are a million jobs to go to," he said.

The Chance to Transform

Barclays pushed ahead, eager at the chance to transform itself into a U.S. powerhouse at potentially a fire-sale price. Its advisers thought the U.S. Treasury could be persuaded to support a foreign buyer. By Sunday morning in London, after working around the clock for three days, the British bank -- whose roots date to the late 1600s as a goldsmith banker in London -- thought it had a shot. Documents were drawn up to pitch the deal to investors and journalists.

During the afternoon on Sunday, two Fed policeman wheeled a large, double-decker cart filled with cakes, cookies, sandwiches, chips and bottles of water into the Fed building.

But soon after, Barclays was threatening to walk as it argued with the Fed and Treasury over seemingly mundane matters, such as whether it would have to hold a shareholders' meeting to ratify any deal. Barclays was still insisting on some kind of federal financing.

By the middle of Sunday afternoon, Barclays was out. Its plan -- to buy Lehman's subsidiaries -- was contingent on government support, which wasn't coming.

At a meeting held at the Fed offices, Mr. Paulson, Mr. Geithner and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox addressed a group of about one dozen banking chiefs. Their message was steadfast: They would not put up money to assist in salvaging Lehman. In the meetings with Mr. Paulson were his chief of staff, Jim Wilkinson, and two advisers, Dan Jester and Steve Shafran, both of whom used to work at Goldman Sachs.

Somber Mood

The mood turned somber as it became clear that the group would have to turn its attention to dismantling Lehman in a way that didn't seriously disrupt the financial system. Soon the group began discussing the mechanics of such a plan.

A sense of foreboding descended over the rival bankers. They focused on the fear that drove down shares in Lehman, worried that would now spread to Merrill, another storied name facing losses from mortgage-related holdings, despite the reputation of its wealth-management business.

"I think the government is playing with fire," said a top executive of a big bank.

The worry for Merrill, said people briefed on the conversations, was that as its stock tumbles, its credit rating could change, increasing its cost of borrowing. Faced with rising borrowing costs -- a key expense for giant Wall Street financial firms -- its business might be severely crimped. As well, as concerns mount, its trading partners might stop doing business with it.

Many in the room began to wonder when Merrill would sell itself. "Tonight, or tomorrow?" said one of these people in an interview. In fact, within a few hours, the bankers learned that Merrill was in talks to be acquired by Bank of America.

As word that a Barclays deal was off filtered across Wall Street, traders scrambled to extricate themselves their various financial transactions with Lehman. Traders at many Wall Street firms were told to come to work immediately.

The European Central Bank was also in a state of high alert on Sunday, with employees in divisions from money-market operations to financial stability camped out in the bank's 37-story glass-and-steel tower in Frankfurt, preparing for what Monday might bring. "We are in the hands of the Americans," said one employee.

Mixed Economic Data Show A Changing Business Cycle

By JON HILSENRATH and KELLY EVANS

September 8, 2008; Page A2, WSJ

The U.S. economy looks like it is traveling along two tracks.

If you look at output -- the amount of goods and services Americans produce -- the economy has been rising at a decent clip. But people aren't feeling it in their wallets because the factors driving their own incomes -- such as jobs and wages -- are under strain.

The point has been underscored by a slew of economic reports released in the past few weeks. The government's measure of inflation-adjusted gross domestic product expanded at a surprisingly robust 3.3% annual rate in the second quarter. Exports were a big driver, in particular exports of industrial supplies and capital goods.

Yet employment has fallen for eight straight months by a cumulative 605,000 jobs. More than half of the losses have been in manufacturing. You might expect manufacturing employment to hold up better during an export boom. But it isn't.

With job losses mounting, companies are cutting back on hours and getting tough on wages. Year-to-year personal income growth has slowed from more than 7% a couple of years ago to a little more than 4% in July, not enough to keep up with inflation.

In theory, output and income should go up and down together. If the economy is still expanding, why are so many households being squeezed?

One answer is that the business cycle itself is changing. Recessions in the past used to follow a predictable script. Business would slow or inventories would go up too much and catch companies flat-footed. As their own productivity dropped, they would belatedly respond by cutting back on workers. Then, as the process fed on itself, everything would go down together -- output, employment, income and productivity.

The 2001 recession changed the script -- productivity held up surprisingly well throughout. Companies cut back ahead of the business slowdown and kept doing it even after demand started rising again. The productivity they managed to squeeze out of existing workers bolstered output, even as it strained households.

The same thing seems to be happening again: To the surprise of many economists, worker productivity is rising, not falling.

"There seems to be a change in how businesses operate," says Dean Maki, economist for Barclays Capital. With better technology, businesses get ahead of inventory buildups or demand slowdowns more quickly. The declining influence of unions is also putting management in a position to fire workers more quickly.

Associated Press

A customer holds his wallet as he pumps gas at a Shell gas station in Menlo Park, Calif.

The result: While incomes are getting squeezed, the output per hour of workers was up at an annual rate of more than 3% in the first half of the year.

More than ever, it seems, this puts the brunt of a downturn on workers. But there are important upsides to the shift. Better productivity helps bolster corporate profits, so while the stock market is weak it hasn't collapsed as have stock markets elsewhere in the world this year. It also helps restrain inflation and give the Federal Reserve leeway to keep interest rates low and help the economy heal.

It also makes it harder to read a business cycle. The collection of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research who date recessions debated for months about the beginning and end of the last downturn because of the striking disconnect between output and income.

"If you dated it based on the labor market you'd have it be one of the longest recessions in history, and that didn't feel right," says Christina Romer, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley. The group finally decided November 2001 -- when output growth restarted -- was the point at which the recession ended, making the eight-month slowdown one of the shortest on record.

But the debate hasn't gone away. "What matters to individuals more than anything else is the behavior of the labor market," says John Lonski, chief economist at Moody's Investor Service. "If I were the NBER I would simplify the entire process and focus on the labor market. From the perspective of the economy and social welfare it's labor-market behavior that matters the most."

There are other factors at play now, including confusion about how statisticians measure all of these trends. Some economists are skeptical of the 3.3% annualized increase in gross-domestic-product growth registered in the second quarter. The figure, produced by the government's Bureau of Economic Analysis, is out of line with another BEA figure called gross domestic income -- a measure of the income earned by businesses and households.

In theory, the two figures should go up and down together. But gross domestic income expanded at a much smaller 1.9% annual rate in the second quarter, after contracting the two previous quarters. The income number might have been skewed as government statisticians try to make sense of the massive write-offs being recorded by banks. The output number might also have been skewed, for instance by big shifts in the trade environment and the price of oil. Data revisions could ultimately show output wasn't as strong as it now appears.

Statistics aside, it is also possible output won't hold up under the pressures building against the U.S. economy, even with better productivity. Exports have been the bright light in the growth picture. But the global economy is slowing.

Neil Soss, a Credit Suisse economist, notes that three quarters of the economy's growth in the past year came from an improved trade position. "How much can I count on that for the future?" he asks.

Meantime, the strain on incomes might finally be catching up to households. They will clearly be helped by the drop in gasoline prices, but tax rebates have run their course and the housing and credit squeezes run unabated.

Adjusted for inflation, consumer spending -- the biggest driving force of growth -- contracted in June and July. It hasn't contracted for an entire quarter since late 1991. That 17-year run is now being put to the test. If consumers crack, output and income might finally meet up again -- in recession.

How Low Interest Rates Contributed to the Credit Crisis

WSJ: ETHAN PENNER

"What inning are we in?" How many times have we all heard that inane question asked and answered in the credit-driven downturn that we've been suffering through for over a year now?

We've heard many answers from financial industry and government leaders, such as "the worst is behind us," or "we'll not need to raise any further capital" -- only to learn in short order that our leaders really did not have the ability to make the market bend to their will.

To understand exactly what is happening, one needs to properly understand what occurred in the late stages of the prior cycle. Interest rates had been driven to historical lows in the U.S. and throughout the world. The cause of this can be debated. However, it is clear that economic globalization, with the migration of jobs to low-wage nations, had a profound impact on inflation, and thus on interest rates.

In general, low interest rates are beneficial, as the low cost of capital encourages business borrowing for research and development, capital investment or expansion initiatives, which lead to job growth. Low interest rates also reduce the cost of homeownership, and, in fact, the cost of servicing any debt at all, thereby freeing up capital for more productive uses.

The flip side of a low-interest rate environment is that it reduces the absolute level of returns that are available to investors. This has significant implications for the massive wave of baby boomers, which holds many billions of dollars in retirement savings, either through direct investment or through managed pension-fund systems.

It is estimated by those in the pension-fund world that in order to meet the retirement needs of those baby boomers, their investments will need to yield a minimum of 8% per annum. When their money was set aside with this yield target in mind, rates on U.S. Treasuries hovered at high levels. However, in our most recent low-rate period, with U.S. Treasuries yielding 4% and below, achieving 8% became quite a challenge. The threat of not achieving it became both real and quite frightening for those whose retirement livelihood depends upon their pensions.

With a large portion of pension-fund asset allocations directed toward fixed-income investments that were yielding closer to 4%, the pressure to achieve an overall 8% on their portfolios drove investment managers to allocate large pools of capital to the strategies that promised higher returns. Even beyond the pension investment world, the global investor base had become comfortable in the last cycle with the notion that achieving an annual 20% or greater yield was possible. Thus huge amounts of investment capital migrated to funds promising lofty returns, and fund managers were pressured to advertise a 20% targeted yield or risk not attracting any capital.

It can be argued that it was the low interest-rate environment that actually fueled the huge boom in the hedge-fund and private-equity world that we've witnessed in the past decade. A major flaw in all this was that targeted returns became disconnected from the risk-free U.S. Treasury yield benchmark, to which all investments are implicitly pegged.

There is a direct relationship between returns and risk. If a five-year U.S. Treasury bond is yielding 8%, as it once did, a five-year corporate AAA-rated bond must provide a yield higher than 8% for it to be attractive to an investor, given its increased credit risk. And, further out on the risk spectrum, a five-year investment in a closed-end private equity fund must provide a much higher yield still -- perhaps as high as 20%.

If, however, the yield on the five-year Treasury bond falls to 3%, then the competitive market is set up such that yields on the more risky assets move down in relation, and a AAA-rated, five-year corporate bond will surely no longer be available at a yield above 8%. By extension, the yields available/achievable by the private equity fund, without taking heightened risk, must also fall to a number far below 20%.

Yet, in a low-rate environment, investors still insisted on this high yield target, and, in competing for capital, investment managers strived to achieve it -- mostly through the use of increased leverage or the acquisition of assets with greater risk profiles.

The system became burdened with the need to produce high returns, with many investors chasing that magic 20%, in spite of the fact that the yield targets had little to do with the realities of the low-rate environment.

The preferred formula for manufacturing high returns in a low-rate environment is actually quite simple: utilize large amounts of leverage. If, for example, you can buy an asset that produces a cash-flow yield of 6.5%, and leverage that 9:1 at a cost of borrowing of 5%, you've achieved your 20% target. This use of excessive leverage to capitalize upon low rates, and the easy availability of credit, began in the period after 9/11. Policy makers moved assertively to counteract the potentially devastating effect that tragedy might have had on our economy.

As investors scoured the market for assets with yields of 6.5%, the competition drove prices higher and yields lower. Investors started to buy assets with yields of 5%-5.5%, just barely above the cost of debt. They would justify the price by either borrowing still more or by creating a pro forma budget that reflected a plan for increasing revenues in time to levels that would achieve and surpass that 6.5% level, and that would ultimately produce the magic 20%.

The risk became that those ambitious growth goals would not be met -- and the buyer of the asset would be stuck with an overpriced and overleveraged investment, and a suboptimal yield.

As the market became more frenzied and prices continued to escalate in this competition to find yield, opportunistic buyers stepped in to buy an asset, almost without regard for its ability to create a suitable yield. They figured that someone flush with capital and in need of assets would buy it from them shortly at a quick-flip profit. These asset flippers, or traders, employed very little equity, and were granted large amounts of leverage for their activity, which had proved to be quite brilliant for a time.

Ultimately, as is always the case, there comes a time when someone rears his or her head and questions the sanity of a deal, and by implication, the entire market. At that moment, when everyone is fully invested and market participants have become most complacent about risk-management concerns, everything turns and the party ends abruptly. And thus begins the reversing of the leverage-driven run-up in asset values, with valuations ultimately returning to a level that is sensible and not predicated upon either excessive leverage or pro forma assumptions that everything will work out just perfectly.

Today, the pendulum has clearly swung very hard. Credit availability and cost have moved from one extreme to the other. In time, credit spreads will moderate, as lenders, whoever they will be in the next cycle, motivated by the need to earn revenue, will begin competing for good credits once again. Sadly, the benefits of this reduction in spread will more than likely be offset by an increase in the levels of real rates as the signs of inflation continue to appear.

In the meantime, we are still in the midst of what some analysts have dubbed "The Big Unwind," during which our system unwinds the excessive leverage of the past half-decade. We will likely see asset levels continue to adjust lower in order to come into alignment with today's more conservative lending environment and produce yields that would attract investment capital. There is no silver bullet that government or the financial community can shoot to bring this to a quick end.

Bagehot's Lessons for the Fed

By RONALD MCKINNON

Source: WSJ

No one needs to be reminded about the bad financial-market news. Sharp cuts in the federal funds rate down to 2.25% have provoked a flight from the dollar, and a weakening of the dollar against most foreign currencies. Every day brings word of new write-downs and write-offs, and the Federal Reserve has rolled out a bewildering variety of stratagems to help. But the economy is not responding positively.

What strategy or rule should the Fed be following to help the economy recover from recession, or curb what is now a spectacular inflation in commodity markets?

Walter Bagehot

For a decade before 2003, the Fed more or less did follow a rule, which was formulated by my colleague John Taylor of Stanford University. The Taylor Rule specifies how the fed funds interest rate by itself can smooth mild business cycles.

It presumes that the Fed aims for 2% annual inflation in the CPI. Thus, with an average short-term real interest rate of 2%, the fed funds rate should average about 4% in the "steady state."

At the top of the business cycle, or to combat a surge in inflation, the rate should be raised by 1.5 percentage points for every one percentage point of inflation above the 2%. It should be lowered during a cyclical downturn accompanied by deflation. The Taylor Rule worked well in facilitating high, noninflationary growth through the two-term Clinton presidency and most of the first term of George W. Bush.

Then – with CPI inflation at the putative target of 2% and moderately robust real economic growth of 2.7% – the Fed began cutting the fed funds rate in 2003. It was down to 1% at the end of the year and into early 2004 – a full three percentage points less than what the Taylor Rule would have prescribed. Worse, the Fed failed to raise interest rates fast enough or far enough in 2005 into 2006, even as inflation gained momentum, with a surge in output from unsustainable household spending stimulated by the housing bubble.

Now with rising inflation, falling output and the flight from the dollar, the U.S. economy has been knocked off the moorings that the Taylor Rule had provided. Although the Taylor Rule still correctly shows that the Fed cut interest rates too much in 2007-2008, it understates the appropriate level of the interest rate. Moreover, its two key implicit assumptions – that equilibrium interest rates can always be found to clear markets, and that the foreign exchanges can be ignored – are no longer valid. At least temporarily, when so many financial markets have now seized up, Taylor's Rule has lost its ability to provide an unambiguous guide to the Fed.

But all is not lost.

Fast backward 135 years to 1873, when Walter Bagehot, the eminent Victorian institutional economist and constitutional scholar, wrote "Lombard Street." The London capital market was the center of world finance under the gold standard. Bagehot described the intricacies of how money markets worked, including counterparty risks and all that – but he also prescribed how the Bank of England should confront major financial crises.

Bagehot called a seizing up of internal markets "a domestic drain" (of gold), and the flight of capital abroad "an external drain." He wrote that "The two maladies – an external drain and an internal – often attack the money market at once." And what, he asked, should be done when this happens?

"We must look first to the foreign drain, and raise the rate of interest as high as may be necessary. Unless you can stop the foreign export, you cannot allay the domestic alarm. . . . And at the rate of interest so raised, the holders – one or more – of the final bank reserve must lend freely.

"Very large (domestic) loans at very high rates," Bagehot advised, "are the best remedy for the worst malady of the money market when a foreign drain is added to a domestic drain. Any notion that money is not to be had, or that it may not be had at any price, only raises alarm to panic and enhances panic to madness. But though the rule is clear, the greatest delicacy, the finest and best skilled judgment, are needed to deal at once with such great and contrary evils."

How does Bagehot's Rule apply to today's credit crunch? Bagehot was worried about gold losses to foreigners that would cause domestic credit markets to seize up even more and, worse, weaken the pound in the foreign exchanges. Now, foreigners are disinvesting from private U.S. financial assets, which itself worsens conditions in American markets. Additionally, foreign central banks, to stem the appreciations of their currencies against the dollar, are building up large dollar exchange reserves – much of which are invested in U.S. Treasury bonds.

But U.S. Treasurys are the prime collateral for borrowing and lending in the multitrillion dollar U.S. interbank markets. Thus there is a foreign "drain" of prime collateral from the already-impacted private U.S. markets. The depreciating dollar also greatly exacerbates inflation in the U.S.

Consequently, there is a strong case for raising the fed funds rate as much as is necessary to strengthen the dollar in the foreign exchanges – as Bagehot would have it – and to cooperate with foreign governments to halt and reverse the appreciations of their currencies against the dollar.

By slashing interest rates too much in 2007-2008, the Fed has accentuated the foreign drain and thus made the alleviation of the domestic drain more difficult. Yet, despite this mistake, Bagehot would approve of other actions the Fed has taken to deal with the domestic drain by unblocking specific impacted domestic markets. These include (1) swapping Treasury bonds for less safe private bonds, (2) opening its discount window to shaky borrowers, and (3) maybe even rescuing Bear Sterns. He would also approve of the relaxation of capital constraints on Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac and so on, for mortgage lending. Yet these measures will be insufficient if the foreign drain continues.

To repeat Bagehot's Rule: "very large (domestic) loans at very high rates are the best remedy for the worst malady of the money market when a foreign drain is added to a domestic drain." The Fed, and the U.S. government more generally, have so far got it only half right.

Housing Prices and Monetary Policy

Governor Frederic S. Mishkin

At the Forecaster’s Club of New York, New York, New York

January 17, 2007

Enterprise Risk Management and Mortgage Lending

Over the past ten years, we have seen extraordinary run-ups in house prices. From 1996 to the present, nominal house prices in the United States have doubled, rising at a 7-1/4 percent annual rate.¹ Over the past five years, the rise even accelerated to an annual average increase of 8-3/4 percent. This phenomenon has not been restricted to the United States but has occurred around the world. For example, Australia, Denmark, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have had even higher rates of house price appreciation in recent years.

Although increases in house price have recently moderated in some countries, they still are very high relative to rents. Furthermore, with the exception of Germany and Japan, the ratios of house prices to disposable income in many countries are greater than what would have been predicted on the basis of their trends. Because prices of homes, like other asset prices, are inherently forward looking, it is extremely hard to say whether they are above their fundamental value. Nevertheless, when asset prices increase explosively, concern always arises that a bubble may be developing and that its bursting might lead to a sharp fall in prices that could severely damage the economy.

This concern has led to an active debate among monetary policy makers around the world on the appropriate reaction to the run-ups in house prices that we have recently seen in many markets: Should central banks raise interest rates? And how should they prepare themselves to react if housing prices decline? These are the issues that I will address today. The views I will express are my own and not necessarily those of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee.

Home prices, like other asset prices, have important effects on output and inflation. Home prices affect the economy in two primary ways. First, when they begin rising, the expectation of further appreciation tends to become built into the market. That expectation boosts demand for homes, which stimulates new construction and aggregate demand. Of course, the sustained rise in prices can simultaneously sow the seeds of a market correction by making houses progressively less affordable relative to income, thereby limiting the demand for them and restraining additional construction. Second, higher home prices increase household wealth, thus stimulating consumer spending, another component of aggregate demand.

Because central banks are in the business of managing total demand in the economy so as to produce desirable outcomes on inflation and employment, monetary policy should accordingly respond to home prices to the extent that these prices are influencing aggregate demand and resource utilization. The issue of how central banks should respond to house price movements is therefore not whether they should respond at all. Rather, the issue is whether they should respond over and above the response called for in terms of objectives to stabilize inflation and employment over the usual policy time horizon. The issue here is the same one that applies to how central banks should respond to potential bubbles in asset prices in general: Because subsequent collapses of these asset prices might be highly damaging to the economy, as they were in Japan in the 1990s, should the monetary authority try to prick, or at least slow the growth of, developing bubbles?

I view the answer as no.

I will outline some conventional arguments for and against reacting to asset prices over and above their direct and foreseeable effects on inflation and employment. I will also discuss some additional reasons why central banks should not overly emphasize house prices in particular. Although I come down squarely on the side of those who oppose giving a special role to house prices in the conduct of monetary policy, I do think that central banks can take steps to ensure that sharp movements in the prices of homes or other assets do not have serious negative consequences for the economy.

There is no question that asset price bubbles have potential negative effects on the economy. The departure of asset prices from fundamentals can lead to inappropriate investments that decrease the efficiency of the economy. For example, if home prices rise above what the fundamentals would justify, too many houses will be built. Moreover, at some point, bubbles burst and asset prices then return to their fundamental values. When this happens, the sharp downward correction of asset prices can lead to a sharp contraction in the economy, both directly, through effects on investment, and indirectly, through the effects of reduced household wealth on consumer spending.

Despite the clear dangers from asset price bubbles, the question remains as to whether central banks should do anything about them. Some economists have argued that central banks should at times "lean against the wind" by raising interest rates to stop bubbles from getting out of hand. They argue that if a bubble has been identified, then raising interest rates will produce better outcomes. For instance, William White, of the Bank for International Settlements, has said that "monetary policy might rather be used in a highly discretionary way to respond to growing imbalances that were judged by policymakers to threaten financial instability."² Although central banks have generally not argued that interest rates should be raised aggressively to burst asset price bubbles, statements suggest some central bankers believe some leaning against the wind might be warranted. For example, in the second half of 2003 and the first half of 2004, a minority of members of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England argued for raising interest rates more than could be justified in terms of the Bank of England's objectives for inflation over its normal policy horizon. They said that such a move would help lower the probability of house prices rising further and make it less likely that a house price collapse would occur later. Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, did not advocate leaning against the wind but did suggest that, to prevent a buildup of financial imbalances, a central bank might extend the horizon over which inflation is brought back to target. Statements from officials at the European Central Bank also have suggested that the possibility of an asset boom or bust might require longer than the usual one to two years in assessing whether the price stability goal was being met.

The recent case of the Sveriges Riksbank, the Swedish central bank, is particularly interesting. I studied the Riksbank in a report on monetary policy written with Francesco Giavazzi for the Swedish parliament before I came to the Federal Reserve Board.³ We found that communications by the Riksbank suggested to market participants that it was actually adjusting monetary policy to lean against the wind of rapid increases in home prices. On February 23, 2006, the Executive Board of the Riksbank voted to raise the repo rate 25 basis points (0.25 percentage points). This monetary policy action was accompanied by a statement acknowledging that the inflation forecast was revised downward. In fact the Inflation Report published on the same day also showed that inflation forecasts had been revised downward and were below the 2 percent target at every horizon. The Executive Board's statement pointed out that "there is also reason to observe that household indebtedness and house prices are continuing to rise rapidly."⁴ It then said: "Given this, the Executive Board decided to raise the repo rate by 0.25 percentage points at yesterday's meeting." Not surprisingly, market participants took this statement to mean that the Riksbank was setting the policy instrument not only to control inflation but also to restrain house prices. A similar reference to house prices in explaining the decision to raise rates was made in the press release of January 20, 2006.

The above statements suggest that some central bankers advocate that asset prices, and in particular, house prices, should have a special role in the conduct of monetary policy over and above their foreseeable effect on inflation and employment. There are several objections to this view.

A special role for asset prices in the conduct of monetary policy requires three key assumptions. First, one must assume that a central bank can identify a bubble in progress. I find this assumption highly dubious because it is hard to believe that the central bank has such an informational advantage over private markets. Indeed, the view that government officials know better than the markets has been proved wrong over and over again. If the central bank has no informational advantage, and if it knows that a bubble has developed, the market will know this too, and the bubble will burst. Thus, any bubble that could be identified with certainty by the central bank would be unlikely ever to develop much further.

A second assumption needed to justify a special role for asset prices is that monetary policy cannot appropriately deal with the consequences of a burst bubble, and so preemptive actions against a bubble are needed. Asset price crashes can sometimes lead to severe episodes of financial instability, with the most recent notable example among industrial countries being that of Japan. In principal, in the event of such a crash, monetary policy might become less effective in restoring the economy's health. Yet there are several reasons to believe that this concern about burst bubbles may be overstated.

To begin with, the bursting of asset price bubbles often does not lead to financial instability. In research that I conducted with Eugene White on fifteen stock market crashes in the twentieth century, we found that most of the crashes were not associated with any evidence of distress in financial institutions or the widening of credit spreads that would indicate heightened concerns about default.⁵ The bursting of the recent stock market bubble in the United States provides one example. The stock market drop in 2000-01 did not substantially damage the balance sheets of financial institutions, which were quite healthy before the crash, nor did it lead to wider credit spreads. At least partly as a result, the recession that followed the stock market drop was very mild despite some severely negative shocks to the U.S. economy, including the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the corporate accounting scandals in Enron and other U.S. companies; the scandals raised doubts about the quality of information in financial markets and ultimately did indeed widen credit spreads.

There are even stronger reasons to believe that a bursting of a bubble in house prices is unlikely to produce financial instability. House prices are far less volatile than stock prices, outright declines after a run-up are not the norm, and declines that do occur are typically relatively small. The loan-to-value ratio for residential mortgages is usually substantially below 1, both because the initial loan is less than the value of the house and because, in conventional mortgages, loan-to-value ratios decline over the life of the loan. Hence, declines in home prices are far less likely to cause losses to financial institutions, default rates on residential mortgages typically are low, and recovery rates on foreclosures are high. Not surprisingly, declines in home prices generally have not led to financial instability. The financial instability that many countries experienced in the 1990s, including Japan, was caused by bad loans that resulted from declines in commercial property prices and not declines in home prices. In the absence of financial instability, monetary policy should be effective in countering the effects of a burst bubble.

Many have learned the wrong lesson from the Japanese experience. The problem in Japan was not so much the bursting of the bubble but rather the policies that followed. The problems in Japan's banking sector were not resolved, so they continued to get worse well after the bubble had burst. In addition, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that the Bank of Japan did not ease monetary policy sufficiently or rapidly enough in the aftermath of the crisis.

A lesson that I draw from Japan's experience is that the serious mistake for a central bank that is confronting a bubble is not failing to stop it but rather failing to respond fast enough after it has burst. Deflation in Japan might never have set in had the Bank of Japan responded more rapidly after the asset price crash, which was substantially weakening demand in the economy. If deflation had not gotten started, Japan would not have experienced what has been referred to by economist Irving Fisher as debt deflation, in which the deflation increased the real indebtedness of business firms, which in turn further weakened the balance sheets of the financial sector.

Another lesson from Japan is that if a burst bubble harms the balance sheets of the financial sector, the government needs to take immediate steps to restore the health of the financial system. This should involve structural improvements in the way banks operate, not bailing out insolvent institutions. The prolonged problems in the banking sector are a key reason that the Japanese economy did so poorly after the bubble burst.

A third assumption needed to justify a special focus on asset prices in the conduct of monetary policy is that a central bank actually knows the appropriate monetary policy to deflate a bubble. The effect of interest rates on asset price bubbles is highly uncertain. Although some theoretical models suggest that raising interest rates can diminish the acceleration of asset prices, others suggest that raising interest rates may cause a bubble to burst more severely, thus doing even more damage to the economy. An illustration of the difficulty of knowing the appropriate response to a possible bubble was provided when the Federal Reserve tightened monetary policy before the October 1929 stock market crash because of its concerns about a possible stock market bubble. With hindsight, economists have viewed this monetary policy tightening as a mistake.

Given the uncertainty about the effect of interest rates on bubbles, raising rates to deflate a bubble may do more harm than good. Furthermore, altering the trajectory of interest rates from the path predicted to have the most desirable outcomes for inflation and employment over the foreseeable horizon has the obvious cost of producing deviations from these desirable outcomes.

Because I doubt that any of the three assumptions needed to justify a special monetary policy focus on asset prices holds up, I am in the camp of those who argue that monetary policy makers should restrict their efforts to achieving their dual mandate of stabilizing inflation and employment and should not alter policy to have preemptive effects on asset prices.

However, there is a further reason why I believe that a central bank should not put too much focus on asset prices. Such a focus can weaken its public support, making it harder for it to successfully conduct monetary policy to stabilize inflation and employment.

A central bank that focuses intently on asset prices looks as if it is trying to control too many elements of the economy. Part of the recent successes of central banks throughout the world has been that they have narrowed their focus and have more actively communicated what they can and cannot do. Specifically, central banks have argued that they are less capable of controlling real economic trends in the long run and should therefore focus more on price stability and damping short-term economic fluctuations. By narrowing their focus, central banks in recent years have been able to increase public support for their independence. A central bank that expanded its focus to asset prices could potentially weaken its public support and may even cause the public to worry that it is too powerful and has undue influence over all aspects of the economy.

Too much focus on asset prices might also weaken support for a central bank by leading to public confusion about its objectives. When my co-author and I conducted our evaluation of monetary policy in Sweden, I directly observed this problem. I heard over and over again in interviews with participants from different sectors of Swedish society that the statements about house prices by the Riksbank confused the public about what it was trying to achieve.

My discussion so far indicates that central banks should not put a special emphasis on prices of houses or other assets in the conduct of monetary policy. This does not mean that central banks should stand by idly when such prices climb steeply. Rather my analysis suggests that central banks can take steps to make it less likely that sharp movements in asset prices will have serious negative consequences for the economy.

Instead of trying to preemptively deal with the bubble--which I have argued is almost impossible to do--a central bank can minimize financial instability by being ready to react quickly to an asset price collapse if it occurs. One way a central bank can prepare itself to react quickly is to explore different scenarios to assess how it should respond to an asset price collapse. This is something that we do at the Federal Reserve.

Indeed, examinations of different scenarios can be thought of as stress tests similar to the ones that commercial financial institutions and banking supervisors conduct all the time. They see how financial institutions will be affected by particular scenarios and then propose plans to ensure that the banks can withstand the negative effects. By conducting similar exercises, in this case for monetary policy, a central bank can minimize the damage from a collapse of an asset price bubble without having to judge that a bubble is in progress or predict that it will burst in the near future.

Another way that a central bank with bank supervisory authority can respond to possible bubbles is through prudential supervision of the financial system. If elevated asset prices might be leading to excessive risk-taking on the part of financial institutions, the central bank, as in the case of the United States, can ask financial institutions if they have the appropriate practices to ensure that they are not taking on too much risk. Working through supervisory channels has the advantage not only of helping make financial institutions better able to cope with possible asset price declines but possibly also of indirectly restraining extreme asset prices if they have been stimulated by excessive bank financing. Also, reminding institutions to maintain risk-management practices appropriate to the economic and financial environment could potentially help lessen a buildup of excessive asset prices in the first place.

Even if the central bank is not involved in the prudential supervision directly, it can still play a role through public communication, particularly if it has a vehicle like the financial stability reports that some central banks publish. In these reports, central banks can evaluate whether rises in asset prices might be leading to excessive risk-taking on the part of financial institutions or whether distortions from inappropriate tax or regulatory policy may be stimulating excessive valuations of assets. If this appears to be happening, the central bank's discussion might encourage policy adjustment to remove the distortions or encourage prudential regulators and supervisors to more closely monitor the financial institutions they supervise.

Large run-ups in prices of assets such as houses present serious challenges to central bankers. I have argued that central banks should not give a special role to house prices in the conduct of monetary policy but should respond to them only to the extent that they have foreseeable effects on inflation and employment. Nevertheless, central banks can take measures to prepare for possible sharp reversals in the prices of homes or other assets to ensure that they will not do serious harm to the economy.

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Footnotes

1. House prices are measured with the repeat-transaction price index of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. Return to text

2. William R. White (2004), "Making Macroprudential Concerns Operational," speech delivered at the Financial Stability Symposium sponsored by the Netherlands Bank, Amsterdam, October 25-26 (www.bis.org/speeches/sp041026.htm). Return to text

3. Francesco Giavazzi and Frederic S. Mishkin (2006), "An Evaluation of Swedish Monetary Policy between 1995 and 2005" report published by the Riksdag (Swedish parliament) Committee on Finance; refer to Sveriges Riksbank (2006), "Assessment of Monetary Policy," press release, November 28, www.riksbank.com/templates/Page.aspx?id=23320. Return to text

4. Sveriges Riksbank (2006). "Repo Rate Raised by 0.25 Percentage Points," press release, February 23, www.riksbank.com/templates/Page.aspx?id=20502. Return to text

5. Frederic S. Mishkin and Eugene N. White (2002), "U.S. Stock Market Crashes and Their Aftermath: Implications for Monetary Policy," NBER Working Paper Series 8992. Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, June; also in William Curt Hunter, George G. Kaufman, and Michael Pomerleano, eds., Asset Price Bubbles: The Implications for Monetary, Regulatory, and International Policies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 53-80. Return to text