On September 7, Bloomberg Businessweek brought together four top economists and one eminent money manager and gave them the following tough assignment: fix the American economy. Eleven days before, at an annual gathering of central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyo., the influential University of Maryland economist Carmen M. Reinhart had presented a paper forecasting high unemployment, low housing prices, and very low growth through 2017.
That grim forecast was on the minds of our roundtable, which included Yale University professor Robert J. Shiller, author of Irrational Exuberance; Peter R. Orszag, who recently stepped down as director of President Obama's Office of Management & Budget; financial consultant and former Salomon Brothers Managing Director Henry Kaufman; and Professor Charles W. Calomiris, who is the Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia University. Pimco Managing Director William H. Gross, who runs the world's biggest bond fund, joined the group by telephone.
The discussion was moderated by Tom Keene, co-host of Bloomberg Surveillance. What follows is a condensed, edited transcript.How do we get out of this mess?
Bill Gross: You have to ask how we got into it -- and what Carmen Reinhart presented at the Jackson Hole conference was probably the best explanation: An expansion in credit, debt, and deregulating over the past 10 or 20 years got us here. It was a 10- to 20-year process moving in, and it will probably take a long time moving out. Some have suggested the Biblical seven years fat and seven years lean.
Peter Orszag, now that you are out in the real world, give us a time continuum.
Peter Orszag: I would agree with Bill that this is going to take a while. We are in the mode of years rather than quarters.
Henry Kaufman: I believe it will take time, but it need not take time. What can we do about the debt position of households, businesses, and the American government? We are unwilling to do drastic things that will improve the situation of households. You can do that by raising their income so they can meet their debt burdens. Or you can do something about the size of that debt. We don't have the capacity or the willingness to do that.
Charles Calomiris: What typically happens in these kinds of financial crises is that the problem switches from being a private-sector leveraging problem to a public-sector leveraging problem. That is the major handoff -- and we are in the middle of that handoff right now. So you could look at the private sector and find some room for optimism if the growth rate of the economy could get going.
The problem is that the public-sector debt is a terrible drain on the growth rate of the economy. And what we know from history is that when you get to the point where it starts looking like you are in an unsustainable fiscal path, the tax increases and high interest rates that come from that are a threat to long-term growth. So you get into a bad equilibrium driven by the public debt problem. Without drastic reforms to entitlement programs in the United States, we are really talking about something that will feel like the 1970s -- but last for 20 to 25 years.
Robert Shiller, tell us how housing links into this mess.
Robert Shiller: Housing is, for most people, the biggest part of their wealth. We went through a bubble-and-burst cycle -- that was the single biggest cause of this crisis. Now we have so many underwater, and so many unemployed, that it is creating a lack of confidence. One question is, should we reinstate the Home Buyer Tax Credit in an effort to push home prices up? That did succeed, but it seems to be unraveling at the other end, and I am afraid home prices may go down [further]. We should be thinking about modernizing our housing sector, improving the kind of mortgages we offer, and encouraging innovation.
Orszag: Let me return to the out-year fiscal problem Charles raised. Over the long term, it is clearly right that entitlements are the key issue, and we should talk about health care because that is the core of the long-term problem. But if you are looking at the next five or 10 years, the nature of our problem is fundamentally different. I don't think you are going to be able to get the majority of the fiscal adjustment necessary in 2015 or 2016 on the spending side of the budget.
Social Security changes will be gradually phased in and will protect current and near-retirees, which means their impact by 2015 is very modest. Most of the politically feasible Medicare and Medicaid offsets were part of the health-care bill, so the [odds] you are going to get a lot more by 2015 are not overwhelming. If you look at nondefense discretionary spending, even if you cut 5 percent from that, that is 0.2'percent of GDP. So the majority is going to have to come on the revenue side for the medium term.
Calomiris: I disagree with Peter when he says we just can't get more than a 5 percent cut in nondefense discretionary spending. Nonsense! During the Bush Administration and in the last two years, we have substantially increased government expenditures. Government expenditures as a fraction of GDP are way too high. We need to go back and think about where we were 10 years ago and think about rolling back those programs, because we are broke.
Orszag: Can I just jump in with some facts here? The increase from about 20 percent of GDP to roughly 24 to 25 percent of GDP in government spending over the past couple years came from a set of very temporary things that are not there in 2015 or 2016.
Calomiris: I wasn't just talking about the last two years.
Orszag: I understand, but go out to 2016. Half of the budget is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Take out net interest and you are at defense and nondefense discretionary spending. Defense already assumes a phasedown in the war. Nondefense discretionary spending is 4 percent of GDP. There is no plausible way you are going to get more than 0.2 percent or 0.3 percent of GDP on that.
Calomiris: We agree that entitlements are where all the action is, Peter. I am just saying, arguing that we need to raise taxes to solve our problem is not a good idea. Arguing that we are going to spend more money to solve this problem is acting like we are in an aggregate demand problem when we are in a very long-term growth problem.
Orszag: I don't think the solution is just on the revenue side. The point is, the medium-term fiscal problem is fundamentally different from the long-term fiscal problem.
Calomiris: There is only one fiscal problem, and it is long-term. If you cut entitlements, the market will reward you. It doesn't care about the next two years.
Kaufman: One of the big issues on the housing front is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I don't think we are going to modernize Fannie and Freddie very soon. Fannie and Freddie hold the preponderance of mortgages in the United States. They provide a subsidy to households. If you turn it over to the private sector, households will have to pay more.
Gross: I almost totally agree with Henry on this one. And I take it from a market perspective: Non-Fannie and Freddie mortgages trade in the 6-to-8 percent category, as opposed to the 3-1/2-to-4 percent category [for Fannie and Freddie mortgages]. Those that argue for a more private orientation toward housing, that may be fine 10 to 15 years out. But over the next five years, the private market can't really step in for Fannie and Freddie.
Calomiris: I understand that point, but I disagree with the conclusion. To me the problem preventing the private market from getting started taking over the burden is a lack of loss recognition. Because Fannie and Freddie are effectively government agencies, they are willing to pretend to continue the game in ways that the private sector wouldn't. Remember, the leveraging we saw in the 2000s was driven by government subsidies. Fannie, Freddie, and the FHA went to unprecedented leveraging limits. And we don't want to continue that. What we want to do is make the tough decisions to accept the losses that exist, write down mortgages. And when we do that we can restart the private mortgage [sector].
Gross: That is not sufficient. What has been recognized in the private market is that housing prices can go down and not simply up. To suggest that we recognize losses and go on our merry way is --
Calomiris: Let me clarify. I am not saying just an accounting exercise. I am talking about a fiscal exercise. I am talking about actually subsidizing the recognition of losses. So, the Mexican government in 1999 did a program where they did loss sharing with private creditors, which accelerated the recognition of losses and absorbed some percentage of the loss. It was very effective. That is the kind of program I have in mind.
Shiller: The Dodd-Frank bill calls for a HUD study of shared appreciation mortgages [in which the lender loans money in return for a share of the future increase in the property value]. Let's think about it. We got into this crisis partly because homeowners were heavily leveraged in the only asset they hold, their home. If home prices fall, they are going to be underwater and they are going to be panicking. So the HUD study, which is supposed to come out about the end of this year, will lead to a change in household mortgage financing. We could also encourage more rentals; then people could hold a diversified portfolio. That would bring us into the 21st century with more logical and sensible portfolios for households.
Kaufman: You are absolutely right. But when I listen to you, there is a timeline attached. You talk about some things that may be done, but before they begin more than a year will have elapsed.
Shiller: Roosevelt did things fast. He created the 30-year mortgage within months of his taking office. We need that kind of spirited innovation.
Well, spirited leadership and innovation, we turn to Peter Orszag. Where is it, Peter? How do we get rhetorical leadership that jump-starts us?
Orszag: Well, there is a rhetorical component, but there is also a legislative or policy component. The problem there is structural -- a culture in Washington where people don't work together as well as they did in the past. Layer on top of that our political system, [which] never has been good at gradual long-term problems, and you have two structural problems facing our policy process.
Shiller: Sounds awfully pessimistic.
Orszag: We need to devise ways to overcome that, but I don't think there is going to be a knight in shining armor who rides in and fixes that.
Shiller: I thought the Dodd-Frank [financial reform bill] was an inspiration. You can criticize it, but it wasn't a dysfunctional Congress that did that.
Charlie Calomiris just fell off his chair over there.
Calomiris: Are we talking about the Dodd-Frank bill that was just passed? That 2,300-page monstrosity is the worst piece of legislation ever passed in U.S. history, and that is saying something. And I would wager that Bob hasn't really read it. I would like to talk about each section, Bob. I wonder, have you really read it?
Shiller: I can't claim to have read all of it, but I have read a lot of it, yes.
Kaufman: That legislation leaves a lot to be desired. The most difficult issue was Too Big to Fail, and that was not dealt with. We are going to be creating even bigger financial institutions, and the role of the smaller institution will diminish. And that leads me to something that Peter said. The President now is trying to do something to help small business, to provide some additional funding. The fact is, financial concentration has increased so much that relatively few financial institutions hold a massive amount of the financial assets of the U.S.
Big institutions are not geared to finance small business. They are geared to garner savings and investments and push them out on a wholesale basis. We would have moved toward solving the problem if we had broken up the large institutions where they are not too big to fail.