WSJ's page one story on Bernanke's Princeton "Bubble Laboratory" is almost incoherent - 18-May-2008 - Generational Dynamics

There's barely a sentence in Friday's front page Wall Street Journal article entitled, "Bernanke's Bubble Laboratory: Princeton Protégés of Fed Chief Study the Economics of Manias," that makes any sense at all.

"First came the tech-stock bubble. Then there were bubbles in housing and credit. Chinese stocks took off like a rocket. Now, as prices soar on every material from oil to corn, some suggest there's a bubble in commodities.

But how and why do bubbles form? Economists traditionally haven't offered much insight. From World War II till the mid-1990s, there weren't many U.S. investing manias for them to look at. The study of bubbles was left to economic historians sifting through musty records of 17th-century Dutch tulip-bulb prices and the like.

The dot-com boom began to change that. "You were seeing live, in action, the unfolding of lots of examples of valuations disconnecting from fundamentals," says Princeton economist Harrison Hong. Now, the study of financial bubbles is hot."

I don't even understand how somebody write these sentences -- "From World War II till the mid-1990s, there weren't many U.S. investing manias for them to look at. ... The dot-com boom began to change that." -- and not even have the thought cross their minds, "Hmmmmm. Maybe the reason that there weren't bubbles from WW II to the mid-1990s is because the generations of survivors of the Great Depression were in charge."

How dense to do you have to be not to see something so obvious -- or at least ask the question and debate it?

And so, once again, we have some brilliant economics professors, this time from Princeton, who can't see the most obvious thing, right in front of their noses.

As I've said pointedly many times, mainstream economics and macroeconomics have been a total failure in predicting or explaining anything that's happened since the 1990s. Why did the dot-com bubble happen at all? No explanation. Why did it begin in 1995, rather than 1985 or 2005? No explanation. The obvious, simple explanation is that the early 1990s was the time when the generation of risk-averse survivors of the Great Depression all retired, all at once, but it never even crosses the minds of these people long enough to even debate it. It's such a difficult, abstract concept to these brilliant economics professors that they're totally oblivious to it.

Musty records

And this sentence from the article is a real laugh: In order to study bubbles, you have to look through "musty records of 17th-century Dutch tulip-bulb prices and the like." This statement captures the contempt that journalists, analysts, professors and economists have today for anything that happened before they were born, as if the world were created just for them.

Well, what about the 1920s stock market bubble mania? Are those records too musty as well?

To repeat what I've said before, if you go back through history, there are many small or regional recessions. But since the 1600s there have been only five major international financial crises: the 1637 Tulipomania bubble, the South Sea bubble of the 1710s-20s, the bankruptcy of the French monarchy in the 1789, the Panic of 1857, and the 1929 Wall Street crash.

These are called "generational crashes" because they occur every 70-80 years, just as the generation of people who lived through the last one have all disappeared, and the younger generations have resumed the same dangerous credit securitization practices that led to the previous generational crash. After each of these generational crashes, the survivors impose new rules or laws to make sure that it never happens again. As soon as those survivors are dead, the new generations ignore the rules, thinking that they're just for "old people," and a new generational crash occurs.

We're now overdue for the next generational crash, and it might occur tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year.

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc

"Bubbles don't spring from nowhere. They're usually tied to a development with far-reaching effects: electricity and autos in the 1920s, the Internet in the 1990s, the growth of China and India. At the outset, a surge in the values of related businesses and goods is often justified. But then it detaches from reality."

This is about as silly a paragraph as you can imagine. How was electricity "tied" to the 1920s bubble??? Where do they come up with this stuff? (It turns out that technology is tied to something completely different -- K-cycles -- as I explained in "System Dynamics and the Failure of Macroeconomics Theory.")

This reasoning is a logical fallacy that has a name: Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, which means, "After this, therefore because of this." In other words, if B occurs after A, then the fallacy is to conclude that A caused B.

Standard, mainstream economics, as practiced by standard, mainstream professors of economics at Princeton and other places, is FULL of Post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacies. Economists say, "Hmm. I don't understand why this recession occurred. Well, Congress did X the year before, so that must be the cause." Or, "Hmm. I don't understand why this real estate bubble occurred. Well, the Fed reduced interest rates in 2003, and that must be the cause." Of course, it never occurs to such people to wonder why other interest rate reductions didn't cause real estate bubbles, but that's what a logical fallacy entails.

In the article, the implication of the word "tied" is that the bubble was caused by electricity and autos, or at least was caused by something that gave rise to electricity and autos AND the bubble. This connection is made simply because they both happened at the same time.

The Great Bubble of the 1960s-1970s

Using this reasoning, one could argue that a huge bubble should have occurred in the 1960s-70s. There were huge developments in mainframe computers and minicomputers at that time, and almost every organization was running part of its business with the aid of computers. The Xerox machine was revolutionizing office procedures. Countries in Europe and Asia were recovering from WW II, and their economies were surging. America went off the gold standard. It was a perfect time for a bubble, but of course the bubble never happened. Why not?

The obvious reason is that the people running businesses and financial institutions at that time were all Great Depression survivors. But this possibility is never even suggested or debated. That's absolutely incredible to me.

But that's the way mainstream economics works. When the economists don't understand something, they say, "Gee, what was going on at the same time, or just before? That must be the cause."

This is all that mainstream economics does, and that's why it's always wrong. As I keep saying, mainstream economists didn't predict and can't explain the 1990s bubble or anything significant that's happened since then, including the current mess. Economists have almost a 0% success record. They poke around like a blind man in a room full of chairs, and every time they move, they trip and fall.

""The two most important characteristics of a bubble," says [Princton economist] Wei Xiong, are: "People pay a crazy price and people trade like crazy." ...

According to a model he developed with Mr. Scheinkman, investors dogmatically believe they are right and those who differ are wrong. And as one set of investors becomes less optimistic, another takes its place. Investors figure they can always sell at a higher price. That view leads to even more trading, and, at the extreme, stock prices can go beyond any individual investor's fundamental valuation."

I hope we didn't waste any taxpayer money developing a model that says that "investors ... believe they are right and those who differ are wrong."

This stuff tells you absolutely nothing why these bubbles occur. Once again we have the situation where the totally obvious explanation, the generational explanation, isn't even debated. Instead, you come up with crap like the above. This is what we get from Ben Bernanke's Princeton Department of Economics. It's really sickening.

Speech by Fed Governor Frederic S. Mishkin

"But," you may be thinking, "this is just a newspaper article. You're being unfair criticizing the article about the speech, when you should be looking at the actual sources.

Fair enough. Let's take a look at the actual speech, given by Fed Governor Frederic S. Mishkin on Thursday.

"Over the centuries, economies have periodically been subject to asset price bubbles--pronounced increases in asset prices that depart from fundamental values and eventually crash resoundingly. Because economies often fare very poorly after a bubble bursts, central bankers need to think hard about how they should address such bubbles."

"Financial history reveals the following typical chain of events: Because of either exuberant expectations about economic prospects or structural changes in financial markets, a credit boom begins, increasing the demand for some assets and thereby raising their prices.4 The rise in asset values, in turn, encourages further lending against these assets, increasing demand, and hence their prices, even more. This feedback loop can generate a bubble, and the bubble can cause credit standards to ease as lenders become less concerned about the ability of the borrowers to repay loans and instead rely on further appreciation of the asset to shield themselves from losses.

At some point, however, the bubble bursts. The collapse in asset prices then leads to a reversal of the feedback loop in which loans go sour, lenders cut back on credit supply, the demand for the assets declines further, and prices drop even more. The resulting loan losses and declines in asset prices erode the balance sheets at financial institutions, further diminishing credit and investment across a broad range of assets. The decline in lending depresses business and household spending, which weakens economic activity and increases macroeconomic risk in credit markets.5 In the extreme, the interaction between asset prices and the health of financial institutions following the collapse of an asset price bubble can endanger the operation of the financial system as a whole."

What he describes here is very important, the "feedback loop" that occurs when a credit bubble to be formed:

This is all true, but it's about the silliest stuff imaginable. It's like saying that what happens when it's raining is that water drops fall onto things, with the result that things get wet. That's about as deep as it gets with these mainstream economists.

These are all things that happen before and during a bubble, but he's implying (sort of) that they cause the bubble, which is a Post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. And if he's not really assigning cause, then he's simply stating a collection of useless facts.

I'm going to raise the same question I asked earlier: Why was there no bubble in the 1960s and 1970s? I seem to vaguely recall some exuberant expectations in the computer field. And economists are always referring to "The Great Inflation of the 1970s," so there was plenty of asset appreciation. Why was there no bubble? Why was there no feedback loop? Why didn't lenders become less concerned about borrowers' ability to repay loans?

In fact, why were there no important bubbles at all from 1945 to 1995? If you've been studying economics your whole life, and you're a professor of economics, and you're a Fed governor, and you're a respected economist around the world, then why don't you answer the question? Why were there no bubbles until 1995, and then there was the dot-com bubble and the housing and credit bubbles? What answers do your macroeconomic models give you?

Once again, the obvious answer is that all the risk-averse Great Depression survivors retired in the early 90s, and were replaced in senior management positions by risk-seeking Boomers. But this is waaaaaaay too abstract and difficult for the world class mainstream economists to debate or even think about.

Regulating bubbles

Continuing with Mishkin's speech, Mishkin says that "asset price bubbles can be hard to identify." Maybe some are, but the dot-com bubble was obviously a bubble in 1996 when Alan Greenspan made his "irrational exuberance" statement. So Mishkin is making excuses here. It's actually quite easy to identify the major bubbles, and I'll explain how later in this article.

Mishkin gives these reasons why raising interest rates, and other monetary tools, are not effective policies when a bubble is identified:

"Second, even if asset price bubbles could be identified, the effect of interest rates on asset price bubbles is highly uncertain. Although some theoretical models suggest that raising interest rates can diminish the acceleration of asset prices, raising interest rates may be very ineffective in restraining the bubble, because market participants expect such high rates of return from buying bubble-driven assets.12 Other research and historical examples (which I will discuss later) have suggested that raising interest rates may cause a bubble to burst more severely, thereby increasing the damage to the economy.13 Another way of saying this is that bubbles are departures from normal behavior, and it is unrealistic to expect that the usual tools of monetary policy will be effective in abnormal conditions. The bottom line is that we do not know the effects of monetary policy actions on asset price bubbles."

This is a very interesting paragraph when you understand that bubbles are caused by generational changes. When risk-seeking generations (like the Boomers and Gen-Xers) come into power, Fed interest rates are just part of the noise that these people ignore. If you're lying on your mortgage loan application, or if you're defrauding the public with worthless CDOs, then it makes no difference at all what the Fed funds rate is. So Mishkin is certainly correct that monetary or Fed policy will have no impact whatsoever on a generational bubble.

Instead, Mishkin recommends the adoption of regulations to "prevent future feedback loops." He says:

"More generally, our approach to regulation should favor policies that will help prevent future feedback loops between asset price bubbles and credit supply. A few broad principles are helpful in thinking about what such policies should look like. First, regulations should be designed with an eye toward fixing market failures. Second, regulations should be designed so as not to exacerbate the interaction between asset price bubbles and credit provision. For example, research has shown that the rise in asset values that accompanies a boom results in higher capital buffers at financial institutions, supporting further lending in the context of an unchanging benchmark for capital adequacy; in the bust, the value of this capital can drop precipitously, possibly even necessitating a cut in lending."

This paragraph contains another logical fallacy, circular reasoning. He's already described the feedback loop with high asset prices and increased credit, but then he refers to research that finds that banks have more money to lend at such times. They would need more money anyway to increase credit.

It's been clear for years that economists don't have a clue about regulating bubbles. There were plenty of regulations enacted in the 1930s, but as the Boomers took charge, they were all repealed or ignored. The amount of fraud occurring in the real estate and credit bubbles was massive and pervasive, and occurred at every level. That fraud is still occurring (see below), and so new regulations are useless, and probably harmful.

Identifying bubbles

Economists these days are likely to say that it's impossible to identify a bubble. And yet, I knew in 2002 we were in a stock market bubble, and I knew in 2004 we were in a real estate and credit bubble. If it's so hard to identify a bubble, then how the hell did I know? And Alan Greenspan knew that there was a stock market bubble in 1996 when he made his "irrational exuberance" speech. How did he know?

The parts of Mishkin's speech that I quoted so far are merely vacuous, but when it comes to the subject of identifying bubbles, Mishkin should be a standup comedian.

"Earlier, I pointed out that a bubble could be hard to identify. Indeed, I think this is especially true of bubbles in the stock market. Central banks or government officials are unlikely to have an informational advantage over market participants. If a central bank were able to identify bubbles in the stock market, wouldn't market participants be able to do so as well? If so, then a bubble would be unlikely to develop, because market participants would know that prices were getting out of line with fundamentals."

This is a hilarious argument. Mishkin says that central bankers are no more able to detect bubbles than ordinary investors are. Well, Greenspan saw the dot-com bubble in 1996, and he saw the real estate and credit bubbles in 2004-2005, but "the market participants" didn't do so. This is just another dumb statement.

But in that article, I actually started with something easier to see, the S&P Price Earnings index, with the following graph, which I've posted many times before:

Now, can Mishkin or anyone else possibly look at this graph and say, "Duh! I have no idea whether we're in a stock market bubble."? It's utter nonsense.

The above graph is modified from the one you've seen before -- a web site reader modified my graph to fill in the purple and green colors. He wrote to me as follows:

This is exactly what the Law of Mean Reversion means. The historic average of the P/E1 (price divided by one-year trailing earnings) is about 14. From 1995 to the present, it's averaged around 25. You don't have to be a Fed Governor or a Princeton professor of economics to see that there's a bubble. Why is it that I can see it, and my web site reader can see it, but Bernanke and Mishkin can't see it?

Is Greenspan the last economist?

You know, back in 2004-2005 I was commenting on all of Greenspan's speeches. I agreed with some things, disagreed with other things, but his speeches always made sense and contained real content. But I've heard barely a single coherent statement from any economist since Greenspan. This speech by Mishkin was ridiculous, and the recent statements by economics Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz verged on total absurdity.

Alan Greenspan said some remarkable things as Fed chairman. Actually, they didn't seem remarkable at the time, but compared to what we've been hearing lately, they're incredible.

Well, admittedly Greenspan used circular reasoning when he discussed the housing bubble in 2004, but at least he recognized the possible existence of a housing bubble -- something that no one else fathomed throughout 2005 and 2006.

And then there was Greenspan's incredible reversal of opinion in February 2005. That was quite possibly the most significant speech of this entire decade, and yet I've never seen a single article (except on this web site) mention it, or a single commentator comment on it.

Greenspan had previously said that after making his "irrational exuberance" remark in 1996, he and the Fed had decided not to deal with the bubble, but to wait until the bubble burst, and then deal with its consequences -- by lowering interest rates to near-zero. In 2004, he expressed satisfaction with this strategy and concluded "that our strategy of addressing the bubble's consequences, rather than the bubble itself, has been successful."

During 2004, he began to express increasing concern, and in February 2005, he reversed himself completely with the statement, "The dramatic advances over the past decade in virtually all measures of globalisation have resulted in an international economic environment with little relevant historical precedent." He didn't predict a crash at that time, but he repudiated his previous reasoning and said, in essence, that he had no idea what was going on in the world.

Can you imagine Ben Bernanke admitting to any such reversal of opinion? Can you imagine any of these other mainstream economists doing it? None of them has the spine.

By August 2005, Greenspan discussed the danger of risk aversion, when he said: "Any onset of increased investor caution elevates risk premiums and, as a consequence, lowers asset values and promotes the liquidation of the debt that supported higher asset prices. This is the reason that history has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of low risk premiums."

This is exactly what happened what happened with the credit crunch in August of last year. Do you remember how everyone was caught by surprise by the credit crunch? And yet, Greenspan specifically predicted it two years earlier.

Even after leaving the Fed, Greenspan has often spoken out. For example, in September 2007, he admitted that macroeconomic forecasting is a failure, which is something that I've been saying for a long time, for much the same reasons that Greenspan gave.

The point I'm making here is that Greenspan said things of substance, whether I agreed with him or not -- but they had substance. His reasoning was powerful, and made economic sense.

But no one since then is anything like that. Whether it's Bernanke or Mishkin or Stiglitz or any of the others I've commented on, they say things that are hopelessly ridiculous. Why is that? Is there something in the water that's making economists increasingly stupid?

What's wrong with mainstream economists?

I'm becoming increasingly convinced that they must be hiding their own complicity in what happened, and possibly committed fraudulent acts themselves.

It's already become very well-known how much fraud occurred in the financial and real estate industries already.

The housing bubble was caused by massive fraud throughout the entire financial and real estate industries, from top to bottom, whether it was homeowners lying on their applications, construction firms colluding with appraisers and brokers to get kickbacks by over-valuing homes, lenders who resold mortgages without checking any of the claims, lenders who adopted predatory lending practices, granting loans to people with no hope of making payments, investment banks that securitized loans based on the assumption that real estate prices would rise forever, ratings firms and monoline insurers that took fat fees to lie about these potentially worthless securities.

This fraud, this depravity, permeated EVERY financial institution at EVERY level, almost without any exception. Is it possible that the same amount of fraud didn't also permeate university Economics departments?

These professors of economics were smart enough to become professors of economics, and to understand the complex financial models that were being developed, but today they're too stupid to say anything coherent about them.

Writing for this web site, and writing about this massive fraud, has not only sickened me, but has made me about the most cynical person on earth. These economists can't possibly be as stupid as their statements, so they must be lying to cover up their own complicity and fraud.

Incidentally, let's be clear about this: The worst fraud occurred in 2007, when everybody already knew that these CDOs were becoming worthless. This realization only caused the financial institutions to speed up their activities, before it might be too late for the managers to get their fat bonuses.

And the fraud is continuing today, and is being encouraged by government regulators. Thanks to false statements by financial institution executives, worthless assets are still on the books at high valuations, defrauding investors who count on these valuations to decide whether to invest in the financial institution's stock. And government regulators are specifically saying that financial institutions should not write down their assets until they have to.

That's why this whole business about new regulations is nonsense. And it's why we might as well assume that university economics departments are participating in the fraud as much as everyone else is.

'Greenspeak' and 'Lenscap stupidity'

There's one other point relevant to this discussion, and that's the "Greenspeak" or "Fed speak" joke that journalists and analysts make, and that Greenspan himself has mentioned.

According to this view, Greenspan was impossible to understand because he used convoluted language. This whole subject is totally ridiculous. Maybe while he's talking you can't understand what he's saying, but anyone can read his speeches over and over again, as I've done, and understand everything that he's saying. For hotshot financial reporters at the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or on CNBC to say that they can't figure out what Greenspan is saying is simply an admission of their own stupidity.

Israel's Defense Minister Amir Peretz (right) looks through binoculars with the lens cap on. On the left is the army's new Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi. They're reviewing a military drill in the Golan Heights. (Feb 2007) (Source: msnbc.com)

What these financial reporters and analysts are exhibiting is what I've been calling "lenscap stupidity." This refers to a February, 2007, photo showing Israeli defense minister Amir Peretz spending a half-hour military briefing looking through binoculars with the lenscap on. How stupid do you have to be to keep looking through binoculars with the lenscap on?

And remember, this was the guy in charge of the armed forces during Israel's disastrous 2006 war with Lebanon. No wonder Israel panicked, went to war with no plan, and stumbled from one strategy to another. The Defense Minister was looking at the war through binoculars with the lenscap on.

Looking at facts through binoculars with the lenscap on has several advantages. It lets you imagine any facts you want, and ignore any facts you want.

The same lenscap stupidity is exhibited by Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal, by Steve Lieseman at CNBC, and by economists like Mishkin and Stiglitz. The reason that they say such moronic things is that they're looking at the facts through binoculars with the lenscap on.

I guess what I'm coming to realize is this: Love him or hate him, Alan Greenspan is the last economist in recent times who actually looks at the facts. He seems to be the last economist not to exhibit lenscap stupidity.

And that probably also means that he's the last major economist not to have participated in fraudulent activities himself.

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 18-May-2008
WSJ's page one story on Bernanke's Princeton "Bubble Laboratory" is almost incoherent

Musty records

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc

The Great Bubble of the 1960s-1970s

Speech by Fed Governor Frederic S. Mishkin

Regulating bubbles

Identifying bubbles

Is Greenspan the last economist?

What's wrong with mainstream economists?

'Greenspeak' and 'Lenscap stupidity'

More on the stock market bubble

Web Log Pages

	Generational Dynamics
	Forecasting America's Destiny ... and the World's

\| HOME \| WEB LOG \| COUNTRY WIKI \| COMMENT \| FORUM \| DOWNLOADS \| ABOUT \|

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 18-May-2008 WSJ's page one story on Bernanke's Princeton "Bubble Laboratory" is almost incoherent

Musty records

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc

The Great Bubble of the 1960s-1970s

Speech by Fed Governor Frederic S. Mishkin

Regulating bubbles

Identifying bubbles

Is Greenspan the last economist?

What's wrong with mainstream economists?

'Greenspeak' and 'Lenscap stupidity'

More on the stock market bubble

Web Log Pages

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 18-May-2008
WSJ's page one story on Bernanke's Princeton "Bubble Laboratory" is almost incoherent