We certainly should have known better. Historically, the price of American homes has risen at a rate similar to the annual rate of inflation. As the Yale economist Robert Shiller has pointed out, since 1890, discounting the housing boom after World War II, that rate has been about 3.3 percent. Why, then, did housing prices suddenly begin to hyperinflate? Changes in the reserve requirements of U.S. banks, and the creation in 1994 of special "sweep" accounts, which link commercial checking and investment accounts, allowed banks greater liquidity—which meant that they could offer more credit. This was the formative stage of the bubble. Then, from 2001 to 2002, in the wake of the dot-com crash, the Federal Reserve Funds Rate was reduced from 6 percent to 1.24 percent, leading to similar cuts in the London Interbank Offered Rate that banks use to set some adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) rates. These drastically lowered ARM rates meant that in the United States the monthly cost of a mortgage on a $500,000 home fell to roughly the monthly cost of a mortgage on a $250,000 home purchased two years earlier. Demand skyrocketed, though home builders would need years to gear up their production.
With more credit available than there was housing stock, prices predictably, and rapidly, rose. All that was needed for hypergrowth was a supply of new capital. For the Internet boom this money had been provided by the IPO system and the venture capitalists; for the housing bubble, starting around 2003, it came from securitized debt.
To "securitize" is to make a new security out of a pool of existing bonds, bringing together similar financial instruments, like loans or mortgages, in order to create something more predictable, less risk-laden, than the sum of its parts. Many such "pass-thru" securities, backed by mortgages, were set up to allow banks to serve almost purely as middlemen, so that if a few homeowners defaulted but the rest continued to pay, the bank that sold the security would itself suffer
little—or at least far less than if it held the mortgages directly. In theory, risks that used to concentrate on a bank’s balance sheet had been safely spread far and wide across the financial markets among well-financed and experienced institutional investors.6
The U.S. mortgage crisis has been labeled a "subprime mortgage crisis," but subprime mortgages were only a sideshow that appeared late, as the housing-bubble credit machine ran out of creditworthy borrowers. The main event was the hyperinflation of home prices. Risks are embedded in price and lurk as defaults. Even after the faith that supported a bubble recedes, false beliefs continue to obscure cause and effect as the crisis unfolds.
Consider the chemical industry of forty years ago, back when such pollutants as PCBs were dumped into the air and water with little or no regulation. For years, the mantra of the industry was "the solution to pollution is dilution." Mixing toxins with vast quantities of air and water was supposed to neutralize them. Many decades later, with our plagues of hermaphrodite frogs, poisoned ground water, and mysterious cancers, the mistake in that logic is plain. Modern bankers, however, have carried this mistake into the world of finance. As more and more loans with a high risk of default were made from the late 1990s to the summer of 2007, the shared level of credit risk increased throughout the global financial system.
Think of that enormous risk as ecomonic poison. In theory, those risk pollutants have been diluted in the oceanic vastness of the world’s debt markets; thanks to the magic of securitization, they are made nontoxic and so pose no systemic risk. In reality, credit pollutants pose the same kind of threat to our economy as chemical toxins do to our environment. Like their chemical counterparts, they tend to concentrate in the weakest and most vulnerable parts of the financial system, and that’s where the toxic effects show up first: the subprime mortgage market collapse is essentially the Love Canal of our ongoing risk-pollution disaster.
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Read the front page of any business publication today and you can see the mess bubbling up. In the United States, Merrill Lynch took a $7.9 billion hit from its mortgage investments and experienced its first quarterly loss since 2001; Morgan Stanley, Bear Stearns, Citigroup, along with many other U.S. banks, have all suffered major losses. The Royal Bank of
Scotland Group was forced to write down $3 billion on credit-related securities and leveraged loans, and Japan’s Norinchukin Bank suffered $357 million in subprime-related losses in the six months prior to September 2007. Even more of this pollution will become manifest as home prices continue to fall.
The metaphor is not lost on those touched by debt pollution. In December 2007, Chip Mason of Legg Mason, one of the world’s largest money managers, said that the U.S. Treasury should put $20 billion into a "structured investment vehicles superfund" to boost investor confidence.
As more and more risk pollution rises to the surface, credit will continue to contract, and the FIRE economy—which depends on the free flow of credit—will experience its first near-death experience since the sector rose to power in the early 1980s. Because all asset hyperinflations revert to the mean, we can expect housing prices to decline roughly 38 percent from their peak as they return to something closer to the historical rate of monetary inflation. If the rate of decline stabilizes at between 6 and 7 percent each year, the correction has about six years to go before things stabilize, leaving the FIRE economy in need of $12 trillion. Where will that money be found?
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Bubbles are to the industries that host them what clear-cutting is to forest management. After several years of recession, the affected industry will eventually grow back, but slowly—the NASDAQ, for example, at 5,048 in March 2000, had recovered only half of its peak value going into 2007. When those trillions of dollars first die and go to money heaven, the whole economy grieves.
The housing bubble has left us in dire shape, worse than after the technology-stock bubble, when the Federal Reserve Funds Rate was 6 percent, the dollar was at a multi-decade peak, the federal government was running a surplus, and tax rates were relatively high, making reflation—interest-rate cuts, dollar depreciation, increased government spending, and tax cuts—relatively painless. Now the Funds Rate is only 4.5 percent, the dollar is at multi-decade lows, the federal budget is in deficit, and tax cuts are still in effect. The chronic trade deficit, the sudden depreciation of our currency, and the lack of foreign buyers willing to purchase its debt will require the United States government to print new money simply to fund its own operations and pay its 22 million employees.
Our economy is in serious trouble. Both the production-consumption sector and the FIRE sector know that a debt-deflation Armageddon is nigh, and both are praying for a timely miracle, a new bubble to keep the economy from slipping into a depression.
We have learned that the industry in any given bubble must support hundreds or thousands of separate firms financed by not billions but trillions of dollars in new securities that Wall Street will create and sell. Like housing in the late 1990s, this sector of the economy must already be formed and growing even as the previous bubble deflates. For those investing in that sector, legislation guaranteeing favorable tax treatment, along with other protections and advantages for investors, should already be in place or under review. Finally, the industry must be popular, its name on the lips of government policymakers and journalists. It should be familiar to those who watch television news or read newspapers.
There are a number of plausible candidates for the next bubble, but only a few meet all the criteria. Health care must expand to meet the needs of the aging baby boomers, but there is as yet no enabling government legislation to make way for a health-care bubble; the same holds true of the pharmaceutical industry, which could hyperinflate only if the Food and Drug Administration was gutted of its power. A second technology boom—under the rubric "Web 2.0"—is based on improvements to existing technology rather than any new discovery. The capital-intensive biotechnology industry will not inflate, as it requires too much specialized intelligence.
There is one industry that fits the bill: alternative energy, the development of more energy-efficient products, along with viable alternatives to oil, including wind, solar, and geothermal power, along with the use of nuclear energy to produce sustainable oil substitutes, such as liquefied hydrogen from water. Indeed, the next bubble is already being branded. Wired magazine, returning to its roots in boosterism, put ethanol on the cover of its October 2007 issue, advising its readers to forget oil; NBC had a "Green Week" in November 2007, with themed shows beating away at an ecological message and Al Gore making a guest appearance on the sitcom 30 Rock. Improbably, Gore threatens to become the poster boy for the new new new economy: he has joined the legendary venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which assisted at the births of Amazon.com and Google, to oversee the "climate change solutions group," thus providing a massive dose of Nobel Prize–winning credibility that will be most useful when its first alternative-energy investments are taken public before a credulous mob. Other ventures—Lazard Capital Markets, Generation Investment Management, Nth Power, EnerTech Capital, and Battery Ventures—are funding an array of startups working on improvements to solar cells, to biofuels production, to batteries, to "energy management" software, and so on.