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Economix Blog: Simon Johnson: Choosing the Next Head of the Federal Reserve

May 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

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Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and co-author of “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You.”

The race is on to determine who will succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. Mr. Bernanke’s term expires at the end of January 2014 and, while he might still decide he wishes to stay on, indications from the White House increasingly suggest that a change will be made — most likely with a preliminary decision in the next few months.

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The leading candidates are Janet Yellen, current vice chairwoman of the Fed; Timothy Geithner, former Treasury secretary and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; and Lawrence Summers, former Treasury secretary (under President Clinton) and former head of the National Economic Council (under President Obama).

None of these candidates has made or is likely to make a clear statement about the critical issue for the next decade – how the Federal Reserve should view the financial sector, particularly the various potential causes of systemic risk. This is unfortunate, because the role of the central bank has changed considerably in recent decades, and how to deal with global megabanks will be central to the macroeconomic policy agenda going forward.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the mounting threat to the economy was inflation. At the end of the 1970s, the newly appointed Fed chairman, Paul A. Volcker, and his colleagues decided to bring down inflation through tight monetary policy. This was considered highly contentious at the time, but looking back, it seems sensible.

Inflation is a regressive tax – it hits relatively poor people hardest, in part because they lack access to investments that are good hedges against inflation (like real estate and some kinds of equity). It also distorts all kinds of economic activity and makes it hard to plan for the future. Bringing down inflation was costly – higher interest rates caused a recession, with many jobs lost. But the result was a long period of relatively low inflation.

Through at least the end of the 1960s, people at the top of the Fed thought there was a stable trade-off between inflation and unemployment, so policy makers could lower unemployment by allowing inflation to creep higher. That turned out to be illusory.

Not many people argue in favor of high inflation today.

At an event in his honor last week, Mr. Volcker was interviewed by Donald Kohn (a former vice chairman of the Fed; the two of them and I belong to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Systemic Resolution Advisory Committee) and emphasized the way in which the policy consensus had shifted by the late 1970s. (I recommend watching the video of this interview, which should be available in a few days on the event Web site.) Mr. Volcker was characteristically modest – and also typically perceptive. When everyone on Main Street sees a problem every day, this helps concentrate the minds of people in power.

The issue today is not control over inflation. There is no sign yet that the crisis of 2008 and resulting easy monetary policy has pushed up inflation, in part because people’s expectations regarding future inflation remain remarkably low and stable.

But the post-Volcker environment of low inflation and low interest rates ushered in a period of hyper-sized finance, both in terms of financial-sector growth relative to the economy and the size of our largest financial institutions. The problems associated now with too-big-to-fail banks, broadly defined, are in part an unintended consequence of successful monetary policy in the 1980s and ’90s. Of course, financial deregulation also played a significant reinforcing role.

More than three years ago, Mr. Volcker himself proposed one of our more significant efforts at re-regulation — what is now known as the Volcker Rule, which is designed to take some very high-risk activities out of financial institutions that are central to the functioning of the economy. On Wednesday, Mr. Volcker referred to the lack of progress in putting his eponymous rule into action as a disgrace.

The problem is that the economic rise of very big banks – the only financial institutions that would be adversely affected by the Volcker Rule, which would limit their “proprietary trading” – also greatly increased their political power. The Volcker Rule was enshrined in the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, but our regulators are a fragmented lot, and in the details of rule-writing, the banks have played regulator vs. regulator with great skill.

More broadly, the new head of the Fed needs to be able and willing to confront the financial sector before threats become too large. Inflation was very much in everyone’s faces in the late 1970s. Inflation is often referred to as a hidden tax, but it’s relatively transparent compared with what happens with the buildup on financial sector risk.

In the boom, people working at megabanks receive very high levels of compensation. In a huge financial crash, there are bailouts – various forms of downside protection – for those people and their creditors. Everyone else has to confront a deep and nasty recession, or worse. This is even more regressive than higher inflation, but it is also less obvious than the falling purchasing power of what is in your wallet and your checking account (i.e., the result of inflation).

Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, has made clear his skepticism of our current financial system – he and Harvey Rosenblum have also made very sensible reform proposals. He would be the ideal candidate to become next Fed chair. Unfortunately, the political power of megabanks means Mr. Fisher is unlikely to be called upon. (In a debate sponsored recently by The Economist, I supported Mr. Fisher’s views and carried the readers’ vote, 82 percent to 18 percent. I doubt that this outcome will sway even the editorial policy of that magazine.)

Eventually, we will need Mr. Fisher or someone with similar views, and a president willing to nominate such a person. Before we get there, however, it seems unavoidable that another destructive credit cycle will ensue.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/choosing-the-next-head-of-the-federal-reserve/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Today’s Economist: Simon Johnson: Dropping the Ball on Financial Regulation

December 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment

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Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and co-author of “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You.”

With regard to financial reform, the outcome of the November election seems straightforward. At the presidential level, the too-big-to-fail banks bet heavily on Mitt Romney and lost; President Obama received relatively few contributions from the financial sector, in contrast to 2008. In Senate races, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sherrod Brown of Ohio demonstrated that it was possible to win not just without Wall Street money but against Wall Street money.

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Perspectives from expert contributors.

More broadly, this political shift coincides with and matches a significant change of views within the regulatory community. To pick these up, you need to listen carefully, but the signs are unmistakable.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is firmly in the hands of sensible people. The Federal Reserve governor Daniel Tarullo is making all the right noises, including about the need for a cap on the nondeposit liabilities of our largest banks. Even Bill Dudley, the president of the New York Fed and a former Goldman Sachs executive, now acknowledges that too-big-to-fail is still with us. If the New York Fed is getting past denial, we are making progress.

At the Treasury Department, however, the tone and the content of messages on financial reform sound increasingly discordant. Recent signals suggest that appeasing powerful players within the financial sector is still high on the agenda for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

See, for example, the recent decision to exempt foreign-exchange swaps and forwards from the rules that will apply to most other over-the-counter derivative transactions. Read the response by Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets; he is exactly on target, as usual. I join him in recommending the reporting by Silla Brush of Bloomberg News on the issue.

The highest-profile issue remains the process to appoint a new chairman at the Securities and Exchange Commission. As anticipated in my post two weeks ago, Mary Schapiro announced on Monday that she would step down as chairwoman. Elisse Walter, already an S.E.C. commissioner, was immediately named as interim chairwoman – a step that many reformers saw as reasonable. This means that the president has some time to get a new chairman lined up; there is no need for a rushed decision.

The Treasury Department appears to have backed away from its earlier support for Mary Miller, and she is now reported to have withdrawn. She would have been a weak and inappropriate candidate, as I explained in my post last week.

The Treasury’s new candidate is Sallie Krawcheck, a former executive in the financial services industry. The campaign to appoint Ms. Krawcheck is already in full swing, and she is currently visiting people on Capitol Hill. Ms. Krawcheck is known to be good on the need to reform money markets – a key issue for the S.E.C. going forward. She has also been critical of management in some of our largest banks, at least in what she says on Twitter.

This week she supported Charles Schwab’s reform proposal for money market funds. It’s surprising that a potential nominee for such a prominent policy position is allowed to tweet. But perhaps it is also helpful, as we know very little about what she would do as S.E.C. chairwoman.

Ms. Krawcheck, who held senior positions at Bank of America and Citigroup, is on the advisory board of Gold Bullion International – a company that makes it easy for investors to own gold and other precious metals. Perhaps her experience and current position mean she has a healthy skepticism about the debt and equity currently on offer from very large banks.

But does she really understand how our financial system became so dangerous and what it would take to better protect investors? Ms. Krawcheck would be placed in charge of our principal markets regulator and made responsible for setting its agenda and answering to Congress. Yet she has never been a regulator or prosecutor; she has never sought to craft rules or dealt with Congress. What about her purely industry-based background suggests that she would be capable of marshaling the S.E.C.’s formidable staff to follow through on her tweets?

More broadly, what is Ms. Krawcheck’s view on the reform agenda put forward in early October by Mr. Tarullo? Aside from her tweets and short comments, I have not seen any clear statement on policy priorities from her. Nor does her track record suggest which way she would go.

And whom would she hire as head of enforcement? The S.E.C. needs to get its game back. This organization is a distinguished safeguard of public interest that has fallen on hard times – mostly through deregulation, underfunding, industry capture and a revolving door. Continuing the turnaround begun under Ms. Schapiro will require expert skills and a strong vision. No one can be above the law – including the country’s most powerful and best connected executives.

There is a huge political risk in this appointment. In terms of high-profile positions dealing with financial regulatory issues, the head of the S.E.C. ranks behind only the Fed chairman and the Treasury secretary.

Does President Obama want to make the same mistake at the S.E.C. that President George W. Bush made at the Federal Emergency Management Agency before Hurricane Katrina? Do his advisers want to wake up every morning worrying if an S.E.C. scandal or breakdown in competence or inappropriate wording will become what the second Obama term is remembered for?

Anyone genuinely seeking to protect the president should want the strongest possible candidate – on his or her merits – for this position.

Ms. Schapiro helped stabilize the situation, but a great deal of work remains. Ms. Krawcheck’s nomination would mostly be a way to make prominent people in the financial sector happy. Perhaps she would surprise them – and us – with real reform. But why play such games?

Some distinguished Americans are available to take the job of leading the S.E.C. I’ve written before about Neil Barofsky, Dennis Kelleher and Gary Gensler, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. I also heartily recommend Harvey J. Goldschmid, a former S.E.C. commissioner with an outstanding résumé on many fronts. (Disclosure: Mr. Goldschmid and I both serve in unpaid positions on the systemic risk council, founded by Sheila Bair.)

Ms. Bair would also be outstanding at the S.E.C. – although the country would be well served if she were to become our next Treasury secretary.

For a president serious about financial reform – including responsible policy and effective enforcement – the choice is simple. Nominate Ms. Bair as Treasury secretary and Mr. Barofsky, Mr. Goldschmid, Mr. Gensler or Mr. Kelleher as head of the S.E.C.

We need to restore confidence in all dimensions of our public markets. Financial markets are far too important to be left to the financiers.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/dropping-the-ball-on-financial-regulation/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Today’s Economist: Simon Johnson: Mary Miller vs. Neil Barofsky for the S.E.C.

November 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment

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Simon Johnson is the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management and co-author of “White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You.”

The Obama administration is floating the idea that Mary J. Miller, under secretary for domestic finance at the Treasury Department, could become its nominee to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ms. Miller, a longtime executive in the mutual funds industry, has served in the Treasury under Timothy Geithner since February 2010.

Today’s Economist

Perspectives from expert contributors.

Ms. Miller represents the financial sector’s preferred approach to financial reform — some talk but very little by way of serious effort. She has no time for people who are serious about making the financial system safer. And there is no willingness to really face down powerful people on Wall Street.

Her potential candidacy faces three major obstacles: Neil Barofsky, money market funds and the new momentum for reform.

Neil Barofsky, above, former inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, and Mary J. Miller, below, a Treasury under secretary, possible candidates to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, have sharply divergent views on tough regulation.Mark Wilson/Getty Images Neil Barofsky, above, former inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, and Mary J. Miller, below, a Treasury under secretary, possible candidates to head the Securities and Exchange Commission, have sharply divergent views on tough regulation.Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News

Mr. Barofsky is the most important obstacle, because as soon as you think about him you see an instantly plausible chairman for the S.E.C. The former special inspector general for the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, he is an experienced prosecutor who understands complex financial fraud. For example, he brought Refco Inc. executives and their legal advisers to justice in the mid-2000s (Refco was a commodities giant where top people engaged in accounting fraud). And he’s tough — he took on Colombian drug traffickers early in his career.

Most recently, he confronted Mr. Geithner over how TARP was carried out — pushing for answers on why bailout terms were so favorable for big banks and so unfavorable for everyone else. He also pursued a number of securities fraud cases, including one involving Colonial Bank, which illegally obtained more than half a billion dollars from TARP. Mr. Barofsky’s office stopped that fraud in its tracks and eventually obtained one of the few high-level convictions resulting from the financial crisis.

Mr. Barofsky’s account is published in his highly readable book, “Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.” Mr. Barofsky understands as much about finance as anyone in the industry, and no one would ever think he was captured by the worldview of big banks.

Mr. Barofsky is a lifelong Democrat who has enjoyed bipartisan support in Congress. Since I suggested Mr. Barofsky’s name in a post last week, there has been an outpouring of support. A petition that Credo Action has put online urging President Obama to appoint an S.E.C. chairman who will hold Wall Street accountable, and naming Mr. Barofsky as a worthy choice, had more than 35,000 signatures by Wednesday morning.

The petition also recommends former Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware and Dennis Kelleher of Better Markets — both of whom I endorsed here last week — and it expresses support for Sheila Bair, who would be terrific for the job (in a separate column last week, I said she was one of five people who deserve serious consideration to be Treasury secretary).

The White House does not like to take public suggestions of names for prominent positions; the Washington way is to do everything behind closed doors. And Mr. Barofsky is not popular with Mr. Geithner, precisely because he has stood up to authority for all the right reasons.

“Barofsky is exactly what the S.E.C. needs to restore its tattered reputation as a guardian of the capital markets,” said Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

Still, considering Mr. Barofsky as a potential nominee makes the case for Ms. Miller look very weak.

She has no experience as a regulator or as an enforcer of the law. She has never worked on securities fraud. And she has no track record of standing up to powerful vested interests; in fact, she helped push the recent JOBS Act, which greatly undermines the protections available to investors. In addition, her work experience is entirely within the mutual fund industry — 26 years at T. Rowe Price. And a major agenda item now for the S.E.C. is mutual funds and how to make them less vulnerable to the kind of runs that occurred in September 2008. (For a primer, please see my recent column for Yahoo Finance.)

The mutual fund industry does not want reform, and it worked long and hard to keep Mary Schapiro, the departing S.E.C. chairwoman, from pushing forward some sensible ideas. After outside pressure was brought to bear, including by Ms. Bair’s Systemic Risk Council (of which I am a member), there are signs that the S.E.C. will finally at least issue some proposed changes for public comment.

I do not know where Ms. Miller stands on money-market reform; indeed, from her public remarks it is very hard to know precisely where she is on any reform issue. It would be most unfortunate to put her in at the S.E.C. precisely when the mutual fund industry is about to come in for some serious scrutiny. The optics, as they say in Washington, would not be good.

More broadly, there is a new push for financial reform — even from people who are close to Wall Street. In a wave of speeches and other statements (some you have seen and some you will see soon), voices are being raised against the too-big-to-fail approach and related causes of financial fragility. In particular, a speech last month by Daniel K. Tarullo, a governor of the Federal Reserve, seems to have released a great deal of pent-up creative thinking within the official sector.

Size caps for big banks are definitely on the drawing board, at least along the lines that Mr. Tarullo identified, which would limit nondeposit liabilities at any one institution relative to the size of our economy.

Given this momentum for responsible reform, does President Obama really want to appoint a financial services executive — with a nonexistent or weak track record on reform — to a prominent public policy and enforcement position?

As Steven Ramirez has pointed out, Big Finance went all in for Mitt Romney and against Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Elizabeth Warren, elected to the Senate in Massachusetts. This was a comprehensive electoral defeat for Wall Street; whenever its behavior was at stake, people voted for change. And the contributions of the Wall Street community did not seem to produce the outcomes it wanted.

There is a view in Washington that politicians need Wall Street and its money — to start campaigns, to provide a wall of financing at critical moments and to help create a generous endowment for post-presidential activities. Without a doubt, this has been the pattern in the past.

But in this big country there are many diverse business sectors — and lots of people willing to give money without asking for special-interest favors.

Choosing a new chairman of the S.E.C. is the perfect time for President Obama to decide whether, despite everything, to go for the status quo — which brought us to our current economic predicament — and nominate Ms. Miller for the S.E.C. Or does he really want effective change? In that case, he should nominate Mr. Barofsky or someone who can match his stellar qualifications.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/mary-miller-vs-neil-barofsky-for-the-s-e-c/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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G-20 Seeks Broader Solution for Europe Debt Crisis

October 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

After offering piecemeal solutions for more than a year, the G-20 finance ministers are now seeking a broader plan to prevent the crisis from engulfing big countries like Spain, which saw its sovereign credit rating cut anew on Thursday, a move that may deepen the impact of the debt crisis on European banks.

The United States Treasury Secretary, Timothy Geithner, who is attending the meetings, has said a solution is needed to prevent Europe’s troubles from infecting the rest of the world.

Finance Minister Francois Baroin of France said after talks on Friday that officials had “already come to some agreements that will be very important,” but he did not provide specifics.

The weekend discussions are a precursor to a crucial summit meeting planned for Oct. 23 in Brussels by European leaders.

While they were not expected to produce all the solutions, officials want to strike a deal soon to increase the size of a Europe-wide bailout fund for troubled countries and banks, known as the European Financial Stability Facility. They also want to force Europe’s banks to raise more capital and require private investors to take larger-than-anticipated losses on their holdings of Greek government bonds to avoid running up the bill to taxpayers.

Financial markets seemed to believe that the Europeans were getting serious about a solution: stock markets have risen recently on hopes for a deal, especially after German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy pledged last weekend to deliver a plan. Major European stock indexes closed up for the week and Wall Street was higher in midday trading Friday.

But investors reading between the lines see further complications, especially for Europe’s banks. Banks charge that new capital requirements will force them to curb lending to consumers and businesses, hurting already weak economic growth. But some are already selling assets and various businesses to raise money to meet them.

On Friday, Standard Poor’s downgraded the credit rating of the biggest French bank, BNP Paribas, citing its “material” exposure to Italy, which faces similar problems to Greece, but on a much-larger scale.

In an assessment of five major French banks, including Société Générale and Crédit Agricole, S.P. said that all of their financial profiles had weakened as a result of more difficult economic and funding market conditions ahead. The agency also said that it believed the French government was ready to provide them with “extraordinary support” if needed.

Also Friday, the Fitch ratings agency said it would review various ratings for Deutsche Bank, BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Credit Suisse, and Barclays, citing “increased challenges the financial markets are facing” as a result of economic developments and regulatory changes.

That followed the announcement by Standard Poor’s that it was downgrading Spain’s sovereign rating again, to AA- from AA, amid signs that harsh austerity measures may tip the country into a recession. The decision is ill-timed for the many European banks that together hold about $637 billion worth of Spanish government debt.

The banking industry has been girding to battle with European policymakers and regulators in the coming days, especially over a plan that would force the banks to take losses on their holdings of Greek debt of up to 60 percent — much more than a 21 percent loss agreed to under an accord reached by European leaders in July as part of a second Greek bailout.

Several of the continent’s biggest banks, including BNP Paribas and Société Générale, have said they are ready to take losses of around to 50 percent. But most banks that hold Greek debt would have to sign off on a new deal, and an agreement is not certain.

Bankers are particularly angered by two additional proposals from the European Banking Authority, which has come under fire for overseeing flimsy tests on the safety margins of Europe’s banks.

One proposal would require lenders to raise their capital buffers to around 9 percent from 6 percent now, or be forced into the undesirable position of taking money from their governments. Another would require lenders to value all their sovereign debt holdings at current market prices, as part of a “stress test” to ensure that Europe’s banks have enough capital to insure against large-scale losses if the crisis were to spread to the big euro zone countries like Italy.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/business/global/g20-seeks-broader-solution-for-europes-debt-crisis.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Sheila Bair’s Bank Shot

July 9, 2011 by Leave a Comment

It was midmorning on a crisp June day, and Bair, the 57-year-old outgoing chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — the federal agency that insures bank deposits and winds down failing banks — was sitting on a couch, sipping a Starbucks latte. We were in the first hour of several lengthy on-the-record interviews. She seemed ever-so-slightly nervous.

Long viewed as a bureaucratic backwater, the F.D.I.C. has had a tumultuous five years while being transformed under Bair’s stewardship. Not long after she took charge in June 2006, Bair began sounding the alarm about the dangers posed by the explosive growth of subprime mortgages, which she feared would not only ravage neighborhoods when homeowners began to default — as they inevitably did — but also wreak havoc on the banking system. The F.D.I.C. was the only bank regulator in Washington to do so. During the financial crisis of 2008, Bair insisted that she and her agency have a seat at the table, where she worked — and fought — with Henry Paulson, then the treasury secretary, and Timothy Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, as they tried to cobble together solutions that would keep the financial system from going over a cliff. She and the F.D.I.C. managed a number of huge failing institutions during the crisis, including IndyMac, Wachovia and Washington Mutual. She was a key player in shaping the Dodd-Frank reform law, especially the part that seeks to forestall future bailouts. Since the law passed, she has made an immense effort to convince Wall Street and the country that the nation’s giant banks — the same ones that required bailouts in 2008 and became known as “too big to fail” institutions — will never again be bailed out, thanks in part to new powers at the F.D.I.C. Just a few months ago, she went so far as to send a letter to Standard Poor’s, the credit-ratings agency, suggesting that its ratings of the big banks were too high because they reflected an expectation of government support. If a too-big-to-fail bank got into trouble, she wrote, the F.D.I.C. would wind it down, not bail it out.

As an observer of the financial crisis and its aftermath, I have frankly admired most of what she tried to do. She was tough-minded and straightforward. On financial matters, she seemed to have better political instincts than Obama’s Treasury Department, which of course is now headed by Geithner. She favored “market discipline” — meaning shareholders and debt holders would take losses ahead of depositors and taxpayers — over bailouts, which she abhorred. She didn’t spend a lot of time fretting over bank profitability; if banks had to become less profitable, postcrisis, in order to reduce the threat they posed to the system, so be it. (“Our job is to protect bank customers, not banks,” she told me.) And she was a fierce, and often lonely, proponent of widespread mortgage modification, for reasons both compassionate (to help struggling homeowners stay in their homes) and economic (fewer foreclosures would help the troubled housing market recover more quickly).

I thought something else as well: with her five-year term as F.D.I.C. chairwoman drawing to a close — her last day was July 8 — she never really got her due. The rap on her was always that she was “difficult” and “not a team player.” There were times, in Congressional testimony, when she disagreed with her fellow regulators even though they were sitting right next to her. Her policy disputes with other regulators were legion; in leaked accounts, Bair was invariably portrayed as the problem. In “Too Big to Fail,” for instance, the behind-the-scenes account of the financial crisis by the New York Times business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bair is described as one of Geithner’s “least favorite people in government.” As Paulson, Geithner and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, raced to bail out banks and companies like A.I.G., Bair resisted, fearing that they were being overly generous by putting the interests of bondholders over those of taxpayers. I couldn’t help recalling that the last female financial regulator to be labeled difficult was Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the mid-1990s. Fearful that derivatives were becoming a threat to the financial system, Born wanted to regulate them but was stiff-armed by Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin.

Joe Nocera is an Op-Ed columnist for The Times and the co-author of “All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=83b11278ea12c696d42bbf7b5a23886f

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