PREFACE TO THE 2019 EDITION

The Financial Crisis of 2008 has spawned thousands of pages about what caused the worst economic events since the Great Depression. Most explanations blame the crisis on either government regulation or government deregulation. Either government forced private sector banks and financial institutions to extend credit to risky borrowers or the removal of government oversight allowed greed to run amok via risky loans, corrupted credit ratings, and complex mortgage-backed securities and derivatives that were poorly understood.

I find these stories fundamentally unsatisfying. Yes, government forced banks to extend mortgages to home-buyers who normally would not have qualified for a mortgage. But banks seemed eager to make these loans, including financial institutions who were not facing government mandates. Yes, government reduced oversight which allowed banks to make increasingly risky loans. But why would banks lend recklessly and put their survival at risk?

These narratives ignore how government bailouts in the decades preceding the crisis encouraged risky lending using borrowed money. While there has been deregulation, government is still heavily involved in financial markets. The problem is that government policy is only free-market when there are gains to be made. When there are losses, government policy is socialist, creating a safety net for some of the richest people in human history. The result is crony capitalism masquerading as the real thing.

At the heart of the story I tell in this book is a simple idea—if you don’t think you’re going to pay for your mistakes, you’ll make more of them.

I try to show how government policies caused investors to believe they would be protected from their mistakes. My claim is that government’s treatment of financial institutions in the decades preceding the crisis distorted the natural feedback loops of profit and loss that balance risk-taking with prudence. The result was a lot more risk-taking and a lot less prudence. Most of the players felt they had little skin in the game. In almost all cases, the bailouts came as expected, confirming the feeling that risk was low.

By removing the downside risk, especially for creditors—investors who lend money expecting a fixed amount of income in return—government policy allowed investors to use borrowed money rather than their own. As a result, many people were able to play with other people’s money—the homeowners who financed their homes with little or nothing down, the mortgage companies who sold risky mortgages to others, the financial institutions that sold bundled mortgages to investors, and even the investors who bought those financial instruments. Ultimately, the only participant unable to place the risk of these activities onto someone else was the taxpayer. And even taxpayers were able to avoid some of the pain because government debt imposed those costs on future taxpayers.

It is tempting then, to blame Washington, not Wall Street for the mess that followed. Some so-called free-marketers defend bankers, arguing that they merely responded to the incentives created by public policy. But Wall Street is not a passive observer of the political scene or the regulatory environment. Wall Street executives sit on the board of the Federal Reserve, fund political campaigns, and chat on the phone with the secretary of the Treasury. Wall Street lobbied relentlessly for the incentives that they responded to. Yes, the financial sector responded to the rules of the game. But the financial sector helps write the rules of the game.

This book was originally published in 2010 in essay form while I was a professor of economics at George Mason University and a scholar at George Mason’s Mercatus Center. The only thing I have changed of significance in this version is to correct an error: Washington Mutual and not just Lehman Brothers was allowed to go bankrupt.

The main thing that has changed in my thinking since 2010 is an increased skepticism about attempts to explain the complexity of economic outcomes and an increased awareness of our human tendency to adopt narratives we find pleasing. Certainly, many factors beyond those identified here contributed to the crisis. But the influence of past bailouts that I focus on here has been insufficiently appreciated, partly because of the challenge of measuring expectations with any precision and partly because it’s a narrative that doesn’t fall neatly into the standard narratives that the crisis was caused by too much regulation or too little.

What I have tried to do here is collect the evidence that is available on how past bailouts influenced decision making. Is the evidence persuasive? Like much social science research, there is an inherent complexity in the events preceding 2008 that is probably unresolvable. But I hope I have made clear in this book that the decades before the crisis were not some free-market paradise.

The fact of government involvement via bailouts is surprisingly easy to forget. Alan Greenspan, in testimony before Congress in the aftermath of the crisis, conceded that the collapse of financial markets had caused him to question his principles, a reference presumably to the self-regulating nature of markets.

Greenspan conveniently forgot that he himself had been an important distorter of market forces that might otherwise have led to more stability. In addition to monetary policy that pushed interest rates down when the stock market was struggling (the so-called Greenspan put), he orchestrated the rescue of Long-Term Capital Management. Despite his reputation as a free-market ideologue, Greenspan testified before Congress in 1995 urging the rescue of the American banks who had lent money to Mexico:

This program, in my judgment, is the least worst of the various initiatives that present themselves as possible solutions to a very unsettling international financial problem. Our concerns are not so much with potential losses to the US taxpayer, which we believe will be minimized, but with what economists call moral hazard—when the active involvement of an external guarantor distorts the incentives perceived by investors … I see no viable alternative to the type of program that is being presented to the Congress if the financial erosion is to be stanched before it threatens to become a wider problem.

Greenspan was only a free-market ideologue when it helped Wall Street. Otherwise, he believed in intervention.

Some observers have pointed out that investors are capable of stupid decision making even without the promise of a bailout. You don’t need the expectation of a bailout for people to follow the herd when asset prices are rising, to make bad decisions, and to lose all their money. So past bailouts may not have been relevant to the crisis of 2008. Perhaps. But even if you believe that people ignored the prospect of being bailed out, it’s important to understand the effects and costs of bailouts even when people don’t anticipate them.

Letting people lose their money has to be a crucial centerpiece of any financial system. Investors who make imprudent decisions and get wiped out no longer get to allocate scarce capital through imprudent risk-taking in the future. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb has observed, this pruning of bad investors improves decision making even if people are blind to the riskiness of their decisions. Letting bad investors lose all their money means that the worst decision makers are sent home. Letting losers go bankrupt improves the allocation of capital even if the players fail to notice the incentives.

Bailouts keep bad decision makers alive to play another day. Bailouts encourage banks to be entangled with other banks—the systemic risk that allow banks to impose risks on other banks. That entanglement justifies future bailouts. Capital gets allocated poorly because the worst decision makers remain at the table. Bailouts encourage excessive leverage—the other people’s money that reduces the incentive for prudence for those who are paying attention. So even if you discount the importance of bailouts as an underlying cause of the crisis, they still distort financial markets in very unhealthy ways.

An important issue I did not address in the original version of this book is the net impact of bailouts on taxpayers. As of June 2018, ProPublica estimates that the bailouts of over 900 financial institutions have resulted in about $90 billion in net revenue for the government through interest, dividends, paybacks, and sales of government-acquired assets. This has led some to conclude that the bailouts were costless or even profitable. Such calculations ignore the opportunity cost of government funds—that the money being lent out at below market rates could have been used elsewhere.

But the more important point is that the cost to the taxpayer is not the true cost of a bailout. The true cost is the disruption of the incentives of profit and loss with the resulting misallocation of capital. I believe the bailouts of the past encouraged reckless investment in the housing sector. There should have been investments in other things—more efficient cars, better medical devices, or whatever investors would have chosen besides housing. Instead, we got more and bigger houses. That’s a bad exchange. That those investments in other things and subsequent human benefits did not occur is the real cost of the bailouts of the past.

Bailouts have another cost—they undermine the credibility of democracy. They tell the citizens that some people—the politically powerful—are worthy of a do-over, while others must suffer the consequences of their actions. Bailouts are the symptoms of crony capitalism. I prefer the real thing—a system where everyone plays by the same rules of profit and loss.

Despite the passage of Dodd-Frank, it is widely believed that we have done little to eliminate the expectation of future bailouts for large financial institutions. That allows the largest financial institutions to continue to gamble implicitly with taxpayer money. My hope is that if the public understands how bailouts encourage excessive borrowing and the imprudent allocation of capital, politicians will be less eager to allow investors to escape without paying a price when the next crisis arises.

I am grateful to the Mercatus Center for the support I received in writing this essay and the freedom they gave me to pursue whatever explanations and causes I found plausible. And I am grateful to the Hoover Institution and the Hoover Institution Press for support and for this book.