Bernanke was Right

Before selling off in the afternoon yesterday, the stock market came close to finishing at its highest point since the very beginning of the year. Since March 17, the S&P 500 has gained over 10%. Not bad for two months’ work.
I think this is a good opportunity to ask if Ben Bernanke’s policies were right, and his actions helped alleviate the worst of the recent credit crunch.
Let me add that I don’t necessarily believe this, and it’s way too early to judge, but now is a good time to take a step back and look at the evidence. Let’s make the argument in his favor and see how well it stacks up. If Bernanke was correct, then his handling of this mess would be far superior to anything handle by the overrated maestro, Alan Greenspan.
Most of the superficial evidence suggests that the financial outlook is much better than it was two months ago. Stock prices are up. Gold is down. Volatility is way down. The microscopic yields on short-term Treasuries have somewhat faded. Inflation is still moderate. Or I should say, the government’s inflation reports are still quite moderate. Best of all, the initial estimate for first-quarter GDP wasn’t nearly as bad as the worst that bears were expecting.
None of these points, by itself, confirms Bernanke’s actions, but taken together, they do give the Fed a nice case to rest on. Let me again say that this isn’t an argument for an economic resurgence, but it’s looking at the worst that we had during the credit crunch. As for me, I don’t care too much for the arcana of monetary policy. If it works, I’m for it.
The weekend of March 15-16 was when we learned that Bear Stearns had gone under and was sold to JPMorgan Chase for $2 a share. This was later bumped up to $10 a share. On Monday, March 17, the S&P 500 dropped to 1276.60, which was just above its closing low from the week before. Then on Tuesday, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by 75 basis points, which brought the Fed Funds target down to 2.25%. That Dow soared over 420 on Tuesday.
To understand Ben Bernanke is to realize that he’s a student of the Great Depression. For economists, the Depression has long been a puzzle. Why did everything go so badly all at once? According to theory, it wasn’t supposed to happen. That’s the difficulty is that to understand the Depression, you need to discard your textbooks.
On the occasion of Milton Friedman’s 90th birthday, Bernanke said:

Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.

The reason why Bernanke was saluting Friedman and Anna Schwartz, was that they were the ones who pinpointed the role that the Fed played during the Great Depression. According to Friedman, the Depression started off as a garden variety recession, but the Fed allowed the money supply to contract by one-third. This turned the recession into a Great Depression. When their theory first appeared in the 1960s, it was quite controversial. The inflation of the 1970s gave monetarism much more credibility, and by 1976, Friedman had won the Nobel Prize.
According to Milton Friedman, one of the key moments of the Depression came in late 1930. There was run on the Bank of United States. By the way, I didn’t leave out an article, that’s the correct name of the bank, the Bank of United States. It was named that way to fool immigrants into believing that the bank was backed by the government.
The bank was allowed to fail, and bank runs then multiplied. As the banks failed, the money supply shrank. It’s as if the Fed raised rates, which is the opposite of what they should have done. According to Friedman, the Bank of United States was in bad shape, but it wasn’t that bad. Depositors eventually received 94 cents on the dollar. Bad, but not awful.
Let’s jump ahead 78 years. You can see why Bernanke was so concerned about Bears’ failure. The idea of a bank run is perfectly analogous to the issue facing a collapse of bear, but there is the issue of counter-party risk. We should also discuss the issue of whether Bear was bailed out. We often hear about the socializing or risk and the privatization of profit. Let’s recall that in the United States, a great deal of profits, up to 35%, is already socialized. Also, selling a bank of $2 a share can hardly be called a bailout. Though I do have an issue with the Fed backing JPMorgan’s purchase of Bears’ more questionable assets. The environment between now and then speaks for itself.
In March, gold reached an all-time high of $1,033 an ounce. Since then, the yellow metal has backed off to less than $890. At one point on March 20, the yield on the three-month Treasury bill got down to 0.2%. That’s not a misprint. That means that the government could borrow $200,000 for roughly $1 a day. So even though there were complaints of cutting rates too much, market forces were happy to go even lower.
The Fed has for the time being, stopped at 2%. T-bill rates have now risen to roughly 1.8%.
The VIX, which measures implied volatility, has recently dropped below 20. On March 17, it got to 35.6.
I’m not ready to give Bernanke a passing grade just yet, but I happily concede that the worst of the storm has passed.

Posted by on May 15th, 2008 at 11:30 am


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