Professor Gyourko’s five myths:

1.  Housing is a great long-term investment.

2.  The homebuyer tax credit makes buying a house more affordable.

3.  Homeowners are better citizens.

4.  It’s safe to buy a house with a very low downpayment.

5.  Owning is always cheaper than renting.

You’ll have to read the op-ed to see his explanations.  An important qualification on his analysis is that in many cases what can be good for the buyer, such as putting no money down, may not be good for the economy if it results in additional foreclosures.

The ordinary American, if not the political class, recognizes that neither the Fed’s monetary actions nor the trillions in spending have helped them. Unemployment is in double digits. Former senior Bush economic adviser Larry Lindsey is reported to have estimated that Americans’ net worth has dropped $13 trillion since the beginning of the recession in December 2007. Americans suffer while speculators profit.

We are on the cusp of a dollar crisis.  President Jimmy Carter faced a similar crisis in his presidency. Carter ousted his own choice for Chairman of the Fed and appointed Paul Volcker to that position. Volcker recognized that the dollar crisis needed to be ended and instituted painful but necessary sound money policies.  President Reagan re-appointed Volcker and together they restored American prosperity. Volcker advises President Obama and can explain to the president why he must act now.

It has been well-known for decades that paper currency is a major source of disease transmission. During the life of the average dollar bill, it will be handled by hundreds, if not thousands, of people. It is hard to think of any physical object that is handled by more different people than paper currency. Millions become ill every year as a result of handling currency, and a not insignificant percentage of them die. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 36,000 Americans die each year from flu-related causes. How many people received the flu from paper currency? The precise percentage is unknown, but if it is just 10 percent, that still translates into a couple of million needlessly ill people and thousands of deaths.

The good news is that it is no longer necessary to use paper currency in the digital age. Payments of all types can be made by electronic means - with electronic banking; credit, debit and smart cards; and cell phones - all of which help the user avoid physical contact with dirty paper money. (Note: Most paper currencies are made largely from cotton cloth, which makes them very absorbent.)

The bad news is that government policies are slowing down and, in many cases, preventing the movement to the use of digital currencies. Most electronic payment systems require the user to have a bank account. For decades, the percentage of the population having a bank account grew, but that growth stopped a couple of decades ago as the government started its war on money laundering - which, ironically, resulted in the unintended consequence of requiring more people to handle dirty paper money.

Physical money is expensive to produce. It is subject to counterfeiting, easily stolen and costly to handle. As noted, it is a major transmitter of disease. A rational and responsible government would be doing everything possible to eliminate physical currency. But no - legislators and policymakers have put destruction of the citizen's financial privacy and tax collection above reducing the costs and dangers of physical currency.

People will only move away from paper currency when they can easily use an "electronic wallet" and have the ability to make non-identifiable and non-traceable transactions. As noted above, an electronic wallet can be a credit, debit or smart card - a cell phone or a PC. The electronic money can be held in an electronic chip within the cell phone or other device or in a depository account that can be in a bank, telecom company or some other depository institution. Encryption software has become sufficiently robust to protect users of digital money and is far safer than holding or handling physical cash.

In many parts of the world, monetary transfers by cell phone are becoming the norm - they are particularly useful for small payments. The Philippines has become a world leader in cell-phone payment systems and use. Cell-phone use is expanding at a very high rate through the developing world - already, in Africa, a third of the people have cell-phone subscriptions, most of which can be used for electronic payments. The fact is that the spread of digital technologies will soon make it possible for all paper currency to become obsolete, but unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen because of the global political class.

The politicians and international bureaucrats are increasingly limiting the ability of people to use non-highly regulated bank institutions as the depositories and clearinghouses for electronic money. As the political class demands ever-more-stringent and costly "know your customer" and other anti-money-laundering regulations, fewer and fewer people can qualify for bank accounts. The young, who have no financial track record; the poor; and those in transient occupations are particularly discriminated against and thus are forced to use inefficient, costly and unhygienic paper currency.

The political class is also increasingly requiring banks and other depository institutions to spy on their customers and reveal all transactions to government officials - which gives individuals about as much privacy as having all their expenditures posted on a public Web site. Almost everyone occasionally wants to keep some expenditures private; for example, not wanting a spouse or loved one to know how much one spent on a gift; making an anonymous or confidential contribution to a church, charity or other nonprofit group; or even using the Internet for legal gambling, porn, cigarette or alcohol expenditures, etc.

Encryption technology has developed to the point where electronic expenditures can be kept private if governments would only allow it. The fact is, people will not give up the use of paper currency, for good or bad reasons, until they know they will have the same anonymity with electronic money as they do with paper currency. Meanwhile, each year, millions of people needlessly get sick and thousands die because the folks who run Washington and the other world capitals are too dimwitted to understand the unintended consequences of their financial regulations - or are just plain callous.

The economic crisis of 2008-9 will no doubt spawn dozens of books. Here are two good early ones….

Norberg, a knowledgeable Swede, provides a much more detailed account of the broader events of 2007-9, from the useful perspective of a non-American. He finds plenty of blame with all the major players in the U.S. financial system: politicians, who thoughtlessly pushed homeownership on thousands who could not afford it; mortgage loan originators, who relaxed credit standards; securitizers, who packaged poor-quality mortgage loans as though these were conventional loans; the Securities and Exchange Commission, which endowed the leading rating agencies with oligopoly powers; the rating agencies, which knowingly overrated securitized mortgages and their derivatives; and investors, who let the ratings substitute for due diligence. Senior management in large parts of the financial community lacked an attribute essential to any well-functioning financial market: integrity. But solutions, Norberg warns, do not lie in greater regulation or public ownership. Politicians and bureaucrats are not immune from the “short-termism” that plagues private firms.

The other book he praises, by the way, is Paul Krugman’s The Return of Depression Economics. And oddly, his list of Norberg’s villains doesn’t include one implied in the title: the Federal Reserve Bank, which issued the “easy money” that allowed the boom to happen. Purchase Financial Fiasco here or on Kindle.

The regulation of financial services failed conspicuously to prevent the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.  The Fed failed most conspicuously as it was charged with oversight of all the major banks, including notably Citigroup and Bank of America. Bank regulation now functions to insulate banks from the consequences of their own bad acts.  The regulatory system enables banks to engage in excessive risk taking.

The Obama Administration and Chairman Barney Frank of the House Financial Services Committee propose that an expanded role for the Fed and generally more of the same will improve matters. Instead, the proposed legislation will worsen the situation by codifying the status of the major financial institutions as “too-big-to-fail.”  It would thereby provide them with special legal status.  We have all seen this movie and how it ends.  Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had such a status and collapsed.  Do we need 20 more such disasters?

Three cheers for all those opposing this destructive piece of legislation. End “too-big-to-fail” instead.

Research finds more evidence for the efficacy of monetary as opposed to fiscal policy in ending recessions. And the studies on fiscal stimulus have shown more impact from tax cuts than from spending increases.

We also do not know whether the positive G.D.P. growth resulted partially or mainly from natural equilibrating mechanisms, rather than from monetary or fiscal policy. Much discussion of the recession presumes it will end only because government comes to the rescue.

In fact, the U.S. economy recovered from significant recessions before 1914, when monetary and fiscal policy had not even been invented. Economies can and do recover on their own, and intervention might make things worse by generating uncertainty and distorting the economy's allocation of resources.

A further caveat is that two elements of the fiscal stimulus — cash-for-clunkers and the $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers — probably shifted significant activity from the fourth quarter and beyond to the third quarter because consumers knew these provisions would expire soon. Thus the stimulus plausibly shifted the timing of economic activity without necessarily improving the long-term path.

The case for additional stimulus is weak. If further stimulus occurs, it should focus on changes in policy that make sense independent of the recession. This means reductions in tax rates rather than increases in expenditure. Repeal of the corporate income tax would be ideal.

Economy Snaps Long Slump

But buried on page C10 is a more skeptical view:

If the Obama administration were managing a company, it might have hoped the latest gross-domestic-product numbers would be greeted with cries of “great quarter, guys!”

At least the stock-market obliged, rising on the back of better-than-expected GDP data Thursday morning. But then bulls have become used to looking to Washington for inspiration. Zero rates and stimulus programs boost economic data as well as nudge money toward riskier assets.

Fully 2.2 percentage points of the third quarter’s 3.5% growth figure related to vehicle purchases and residential construction, both juiced by government support. Federal spending added 0.6%.

If these GDP data were company earnings, they would be what analysts euphemistically call “low quality.” Investors buying into the market off the back of them are ignoring weekly unemployment-claims data that came in above 500,000 again on the same day.

The danger is that all these short-term fixes leave the economy dangerously addicted to taxpayer-funded steroids. The circularity in the housing market, whereby Washington provides tax breaks to first-time buyers, guarantees most of the mortgages written, and then buys most of those, beggars belief, and suggests a worrying case of amnesia following the bursting of the housing bubble. (emphasis added)

Johan Norberg warned about the dangers of repeating the very mistakes that created the bubble and bust in the first place in Financial Fiasco: How America’s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis (available in hardcover, e-book, or Kindle).

The "Greenspan doctrine" on monetary policy says that the Fed should not attempt to check asset price surges ahead of time but just manage the aftermath if they turn out to be bubbles and eventually burst. Such bubbles are difficult to detect before they actually burst, and a consistent policy intended to check presumed bubbles would reduce the economy's long-term growth potential. The job of regulating asset prices rests with market participants whose interests motivate self-regulation against undue market-risk exposures.

But in a speech last week, Fed governor Don Kohn said that "central banks are being encouraged to 'lean against the wind' in the face of asset price bubbles. We need to be honest about our very limited ability to assess the 'fundamental value' of an asset or to predict its price. Research should help to identify risks and inform decisions about the costs and benefits from a possible regulatory or monetary policy decision attempting to deal with a potential asset price bubble."

This suggests a re-thinking of the Greenspan doctrine within the Fed. The recession that began in 2007 has been enormously costly in terms of output and job losses. It is not surprising that Fed economists are examining whether monetary policy could prevent such episodes in the future instead of simply "mopping up" after the fact.

It's well known that the Fed successfully averted economic meltdowns after Wall Street swooned on several occasions: the stock market crash of 1987, its intervention to resolve the LTCM failure during 1998 and the even sharper bursting of the stock price bubble in 2001.

However, memories of those "successful" Fed interventions may have spurred even larger subsequent surges in asset prices because of their moral hazard effects on investor attitudes toward risk. Although other factors such as ratings errors and improper SEC regulations were important contributing factors, the recent financial collapse would not have been as severe without prior Fed-induced moral hazard among investors. So should the Fed now be formally vested with the responsibility of containing asset price bubbles pre-emptively and regulating financial firms?

Economists have long lamented problems in assessing whether asset price increases constitute bubbles and in predicting the timing of asset price bubble bursts. Setting capital standards and ancillary regulatory frameworks for financial institutions is more art than science. Given economists' poor predictive ability in evaluating macroeconomic risks and setting appropriate capital buffers for financial institutions, the Fed is bound to eventually (and spectacularly) fail at preventing asset price bubble bursts followed by severe financial disruptions. Then calls for congressional investigations and oversight on monetary policy would threaten the Fed's independence.

Indeed, making the Fed a financial super regulator would only provide formal sanction to policies that have increased moral hazard effects in the first place. Once the current recession is over and the Fed has withdrawn its extra-normal initiatives to restore credit markets, the correct policy approach may be to do the exact opposite — to signal that there will be no super regulator for financial institutions and to formally prohibit the Fed from engaging in bailouts of non-bank financial firms. Such a formal stance by Congress on financial regulatory policy is the best bet for developing mechanisms for sustained and effective self-regulation by market participants.

Fed officials are probably well aware of the dangers of accepting responsibility for setting financial regulatory standards and using monetary policy to prick asset price bubbles. The dangers are in setting anti-bubble policies that are so draconian they reduce the economy's long-term growth potential and eventually fail to protect financial institutions and the economy from a large macroeconomic shock. Such failures could permanently compromise the Fed's independence in monetary policymaking.

Although Fed analysts will doubtless continue research on the causes of asset price bubbles, they would be foolish to accept formal responsibilities for pre-emptively containing asset price surges and becoming financial super-regulators.

As the Federal Reserve’s next meeting approaches in early November, an internal debate is brewing about how and when to signal the possibility of interest-rate increases.

The Fed has said since March that it will keep rates very low for an “extended period.” Long before it raises rates, however, it will need to change that public signal to financial markets.

Because the recovery is so young and is expected to be so weak, many central bank officials are comfortable, for now, keeping rates very low. But they are beginning to strategize about how to walk away from the “extended period” language.

My suggestion is that the Fed announce a path of gradual increases in the federal funds rate, say beginning next year and lasting for two years, until the rate is at some “normal level.”

This approach is different than what the Fed is likely to undertake; it will probably want to maximize “discretion,” the ability to adjust on the fly as conditions unfold.

My approach maximizes predictability and reassurance: it commits the Fed to shrinking the money supply and heading off future inflation. This reassures markets and takes substantial uncertainty out of the picture.

The problem with my approach is the pre-commitment: everyone knows the Fed could abandon a pre-announced path.

But such an announcement might still give markets useful guidance, and the Fed would know that any deviation would itself upset markets, and this might encourage adherence to the pre-commitment.

C/P Libertarianism, from A to Z

This view is a pipe dream. Most new regulation will do nothing to limit crises because markets will innovate around it. Worse, some regulation being considered by Congress will guarantee bigger and more frequent crises.

Government-Induced Moral Hazard Caused the Crisis

The Financial Crisis of 2008 did not occur because of insufficient or ill-designed regulation. Rather, it resulted from two misguided government policies.

The first was the attempt to promote homeownership. Numerous policies have pursued this goal for decades, and over time they have focused mainly on homeownership for low-income households. These policies encouraged mortgage lending to borrowers with shaky credit characteristics, such as limited income or assets, and on terms that defied common sense, such as zero down payment.

The pressure to expand risky credit was especially problematic because of the second misguided policy, the long-standing practice of bailing out failures from private risk-taking. This practice meant that financial markets expected the government to cushion any losses from a crash in mortgage debt. Thus, the historical tendency to bail out creditors created an enormous moral hazard.

One crucial component of this moral hazard was the now infamous "Greenspan put," the Fed's practice under Chairman Alan Greenspan of lowering interest rates in response to financial disruptions that might otherwise cause a crash in asset prices. In the early to mid-2000s, in particular, the Fed made a conscious decision not to burst the housing bubble and instead to "fix things" if a crash occurred.

It was inevitable, however, that a crash would ensue; the expansion of mortgage credit made sense only so long as housing prices kept increasing, and at some point this had to stop. Once it did, the market had no option but to unwind the positions built on untenable assumptions about housing prices. Thus government pressure to take risk, combined with implicit insurance for this risk, were the crucial causes of the bubble and the crash. Inadequate financial regulation played no significant role.

New Regulation Must Avoid Moral Hazard

If government-induced moral hazard caused the crisis, then new regulation should avoid creating or exacerbating this perverse incentive. Yet two components of proposed regulation will increase, rather than decrease, the chances for moral hazard.

One proposed change in regulation would give the Federal Reserve increased power to supervise financial institutions, especially bank holding companies such as Citigroup or Bank of America. This approach is a triumph of hope over experience. Why should an expanded Fed role be beneficial when the Fed erred so badly in the previous instance?

Defenders of an expanded Fed role will claim that, in the lead up to the crisis, the Fed did not have explicit powers to supervise and monitor non-bank financial institutions, and that such powers could have avoided the crisis.

Yet during the years before the crisis, the Fed had more than ample power to recognize the unprecedented level of risk that was building in the economy and to issue stern warnings, whether or not it had explicit regulatory authority. In fact, far from cautioning the market to behave, the Fed promoted the notion that it could solve any problems that might result from a bursting of the housing bubble.

Regulators are fallible. Alan Greenspan, once thought to be the Maestro, got it fabulously wrong. Ben Bernanke, regardless of the merit's of his stewardship, will not be Fed chairman forever. Centralized and expanded power to make things better is also centralized and expanded power to make things worse. In particular, any mistakes made by a powerful, centralized authority have a magnified impact because they distort the behavior of the entire market.

Just as problematic as granting the Fed additional powers is the proposal to allow the FDIC to resolve bank holding companies using taxpayer funds. Under the proposed arrangement, the FDIC rather than bankruptcy courts would be responsible for bank holding companies, and the FDIC would be authorized to make loans to failed institutions, to purchase their debts and other assets, to assume or guarantee their obligations, and to acquire equity interests. The funds would be borrowed from Treasury.

This means that FDIC resolution of bank holding companies would put taxpayer skin in the game, a radical departure from standard bankruptcy and an approach that mimics the actions of the U.S. Treasury under TARP. Thus, the new approach would institutionalize TARP.

The result will be that under the proposed system, bank holding companies would forever more regard themselves as explicitly, not just implicitly, backstopped by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Treasury. That is moral hazard in the extreme, and it will create an unprecedented incentive for excessive risk-taking by these institutions.

The Bankruptcy Approach

The only way to limit financial panics is to eliminate government-induced moral hazard, and that means letting failed institutions fail. Whether resolution is carried out by the FDIC or a bankruptcy court is not the crucial question; rather, it is whether that resolution process forces all the losses on the institution's stakeholders rather than bailing them out with taxpayer funds.

The standard objection to allowing failures is that some financial institutions are allegedly so large or interconnected that their failure causes a breakdown of the credit mechanism, thereby harming the whole economy rather than just transmitting losses that have already occurred. According to this view, letting Lehman Brothers fail was a crucial mistake that initiated the meltdown, and bailing out other financial institutions was a necessary evil to prevent even further chaos. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Rather than being a cause, Lehman's failure was merely the signal that time had come for the U.S. economy to pay the price for all the distortions caused by the misguided policies toward housing and risk. Given those distortions, a massive unwinding and restructuring was necessary to make the economy healthy again.

This restructuring required lower residential investment, declines in stock and housing prices, and shrinkage of the financial sector. All of this implied a recession, even without any impact of financial institution failures on the credit mechanism, and the recession meant that lending would contract, even without a credit crunch.

The bailout itself, moreover, caused much of the financial market turmoil. The announcement that the Treasury was considering a bailout scared markets and froze credit because bankers did not want to realize their losses if government was going to bail them out. The bailout introduced uncertainty because no one knew what the bailout meant. The bailout did little to make balance sheets transparent, yet the market's inability to determine who was solvent was a key reason for the credit freeze.

Thus letting Lehman fail was the right decision; bailing out Bear Stearns, Fannie, and Freddie in advance of Lehman, and the rest of Wall Street afterwards, were the mistakes. For all its warts, bankruptcy rather than bailout is the right way to resolve non-bank financial institutions. Any regulation that formalizes bailouts creates an enormous moral hazard and a black hole for taxpayer funds.

The Future

To limit future financial crises, policy must first avoid the distortions inherent in the attempt to expand homeownership. This means eliminating the Federal Housing Administration, the Federal Home Loan Banks, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, the Community Reinvestment Act, the deductibility of mortgage interest, the homestead exclusion in the personal bankruptcy code, the tax-favored treatment of capital gains on housing, the HOPE for Homeowners Act, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (the bailout bill), and the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan. None of this is sensible policy.

In addition, policy must end its proclivity to bail out private risk-taking. This second task is difficult, since it requires policymakers to "tie their own hands." Specific changes in policies and institutions can nevertheless support this goal. The first is avoiding new regulation that makes bailouts more likely. A second is repealing all existing financial regulation, since this would signal markets that they, and only they, can truly protect themselves from risk.

The third and perhaps most important way to reduce moral hazard is to eliminate the Federal Reserve. As long as the Fed exists, it will regard itself as, and be regarded as, the economic insurer of last resort. In a world with perfect information, appropriately humble central bankers, and an absence of political influence on monetary policy, such a protector might enhance the economy's performance on average.

In the world we live in, none of these conditions will hold consistently, so the potential for policy-induced disasters is large. The U.S. economy prospered for its first 125 years without a central bank. It's time to try that approach again.

Total losses from the bailout of Fannie and Freddie are likely to exceed $250 billion — as much as the cost to the taxpayer of all bank failures in American history combined.

Fannie and Freddie infected capital markets and spread through every sector of the banking system. Before the bursting of the housing bubble, holdings of government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) securities — bonds and mortgage-backed securities as well as preferred stock — constituted more than 150% of core capital for insured banks.

It was not only the commercial banking system that was stuffed with toxic GSE holdings; it was also many of the investment banks. More than 50% of Maiden Lane One, the toxic assets that the Federal Reserve guaranteed in order to persuade JPMorgan to buy Bear Stearns, are GSE securities.

Additionally, more than 40% of money market mutual fund holdings were in the form of GSE securities.

The threats to the stability of the mutual fund industry were not simply a result of Lehman's failure. Had the government not bailed out Fannie and Freddie, many funds would have "broke the buck."

Save A Chinese Bank

Quite simply, Washington fostered an environment where if Fannie and Freddie caught a cold, the banking system would catch a fever.

Fannie and Freddie were the weak links in our domestic financial system. They were also the vehicles that carried excess world savings into America's housing market.

At the height of the bubble, almost 60% of newly issued GSE debt was purchased outside the U.S. One of the largest purchases of that debt was the Chinese Central Bank.

What did Fannie and Freddie do with their foreign borrowings? They invested in the subprime mortgage market.

At the height of the bubble, Fannie and Freddie purchased more than 40% of the private-label subprime mortgage-backed securities. Between the two of them, they were the largest single source of liquidity for the subprime market.

Interestingly enough, the very vintages of subprime loans that performed the worst — 2006 and 2007 — were the years in which Fannie and Freddie entered the market in force.

With their massive leverage, Fannie and Freddie were levered more than 100-to-1 — a disaster waiting to happen.

Why then were foreign investors so willing to trust their money to Fannie and Freddie? Quite simply, they were assured by U.S. Treasury officials that their losses would be covered.

Ultimately, Fannie and Freddie were not bailed out in order to save our housing market; they were bailed out in order to protect the Chinese Central Bank from taking losses. Without the implicit federal guarantee of Fannie and Freddie, trillions of dollars of global capital flow would not have been funneled into the U.S. subprime mortgage market.

Protect Taxpayers

Some might argue that the problem with Fannie and Freddie was fixed with last year's regulatory reform bill. That bill created a new regulator, one with increased supervisory powers, including the ability to wind down a GSE, and independence from the congressional appropriations process, letting the regulator raise additional funding.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As one of the drafters and negotiators for that bill while on the staff of the Senate Banking Committee, I can say that there was a shared awareness by all parties that the bill was insufficient to prevent the failure of Fannie and Freddie.

It was not the best bill that could be crafted. It was the best bill that could pass, given the continued strength of Fannie and Freddie apologists in Congress.

Nothing in the bill would have prevented the GSEs' massive accumulation of subprime mortgage-backed securities. Nor would the bill have deterred the GSEs from purchasing the many whole loans that have soured on them.

With their "strengthened" affordable-housing goals, the bill encourages GSEs to extend those purchases.

Had the reform bill that passed been signed into law years earlier, we would be in the same spot with Fannie and Freddie.

Most of the worst economic and financial crises in American history have involved real estate. Such is likely to be the case in the future. Reform of Fannie and Freddie is imperative so that American taxpayers will not be on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars for the next real estate bubble.

I am pleased that Gov. Crist values Cato’s ratings because we work hard to make them accurate and nonpartisan. But the radio ad is making many fiscally conservative Floridians scratch their heads because of the governor’s recent policy actions.

The governor earned his Cato grade in last year’s report mainly because of his large property tax cuts and moderate spending approach. The grade was based purely on quantitative data on revenues, general fund spending, and tax rate changes.

However, since I wrote the report in mid-2008, the governor seems to have fallen off the fiscal responsibility horse.

In particular, Crist approved a huge $2.2 billion tax increase for the fiscal 2010 budget, even though he had promised that $12 billion in federal “stimulus” money showered on Florida over three years would obviate the need for tax increases.

About $1 billion of the tax increases are on cigarette consumers, which will particularly harm moderate-income families. The rest of the increases are in the form of higher costs for often mandatory services, such as automobile registration, which is really just a sneaky form of tax increases.

These tax increases will be particularly painful to Floridians in the short-term because of the recession. But Crist has also jeopardized the state’s long-term finances with his expanded subsidies for hurricane insurance. Hurricanes are a major challenge in Florida, but giving big subsidies to coastal property owners, driving private insurers out of the state, and guaranteeing a massive state bailout when the next hurricane hits strikes me as the height of fiscally irresponsibility.

More on the Crist campaign here.

Executive pay has emerged, once again, as a major issue in Washington. This week Treasury and the Federal Reserve announced new regulations designed to oversee and limit executive pay at thousands of financial institutions. This is deeply ironic, because today's pay woes are the direct result of prior government intervention.

In 1993, Congress decided it would use the tax code to "improve" (i.e., reduce) executive compensation in publicly traded companies. Its vehicle was the Budget Reconciliation Act, a key provision of which became Section 162(m) of the Internal Revenue Code.

Noting that executive compensation levels had received negative "scrutiny and criticism" from the public, the new law targeted what it called "excessive employee remuneration." It did so by limiting the ability of public companies to deduct executive compensation for its top employees unless the compensation was paid out in a form that Congress found acceptable. Salary was bad. Stock options were tax favored.

Specifically, corporations were barred by law from deducting as a normal business expense any salary payments of over $1 million. Stock options, however, qualified for the corporate tax deduction without limitation. Much maligned today, stock options then were said to be "performance based" and therefore exempt from the new tax rules.

The new tax law immediately led to a tectonic shift in the way CEOs and other top U.S. executives were paid. Stock and stock options became the dominant feature of executive compensation packages.

The impetus for changing the executive compensation laws back then was exactly the same as it is today. Politicians wanted pay lower and wanted to change the executive compensation model to "fix" the risk-taking proclivities of top managers.

In 1992, the government thought that managers were too risk averse. Stock options were seen as the magic bullet for making managers act more aggressively in the shareholders' interests. Today, many in Congress are blaming U.S. executives for causing the financial crisis precisely by engaging in "excessive" risk-taking. What they fail to mention is that it was Congress's own tinkering with the tax code that led to the very compensation packages that incentivized the risk-taking.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke asserted this week that "compensation practices at some banking organizations have led to misaligned incentives and excessive risk-taking, contributing to bank losses and financial instability." Mr. Bernanke promised that the government "is working to ensure that compensation packages appropriately tie rewards to longer-term performance and do not create undue risk for the firm or the financial system."

Other government interference has made the executive compensation problem even worse. A provision in the 1992 tax law required that executives meet certain "objective" performance measures in order to qualify for incentive-based (tax deductible) pay. In the scramble to come up with objective metrics on which to base executive pay, cottage industry "executive compensation consultants" emerged as the most important architects of executive compensation plans.

The compensation consultants promised to design pay programs that did things like "drive the right behaviors" by corporate management, which meant assuming more risk to maximize shareholder value. Public companies hired droves of consultants to analyze pay schemes and design pay packages that created incentives to maximize share prices. Consultants came to be viewed as essential to boards of directors that wanted to implement appropriate—and tax qualified—performance measures.

The most successful consultants are those who can justify the biggest salary increases for the top executives of the companies that hired them. Researchers at the University of Southern California recently found that the median CEO compensation is $1.5 million in companies not using executive compensation consultants, $3 million in companies that purchase general survey data from such consultants but do not directly retain them, and $4.2 million in companies that retain consultants.

Some companies use multiple consultants. The USC study found that the more consultants a company hires, the more it pays its top executives. About one-quarter of Fortune 250 companies hire multiple compensation consultants.

Activist investor Carl Icahn summed the situation up well when he recently observed on his Web site that "the use of these compensation consultants, gives both boards and CEOs the appearance of legitimacy for their decisions to award massive pay packages to lackluster CEOs, making it appear that these decisions are objective and scientific, which they absolutely are not."

The government also has tried to regulate executive compensation by requiring greater disclosure of the details of compensation plans. Perversely, this too has contributed to an increase in executive pay.

How so? No self-respecting board of directors is willing to admit that their company's CEO is below average. So anytime the new disclosures indicate that an executive's pay is below average in any way, a pay increase is ordered.

Since the early 1990s, government regulation of executive compensation has encouraged greater share-price volatility and risk-taking by U.S. corporate executives and led directly to higher, rather than lower, levels of executive compensation. Nevertheless, the Obama administration is now seeking an even greater role in overseeing and regulating executive pay.

In June, Gene Sperling, a top aid to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, told the House Committee on Financial Services that "our goal is to help ensure that there is a much closer alignment between compensation, sound risk management and long-term value creation for firms and the economy as a whole."

This is just what the regulators told us back in 1992. Current proposals will no doubt result in even higher percentages of executive compensation coming from stock and option schemes rather than from salaries. History teaches that the most profound consequences of new compensation regulation will be unintended. It also teaches that as bad as private ordering may have worked in getting executive compensation right, the results of central planning have been even worse.

Now that the taxpayer is the most significant shareholder in these companies, the top priority for Washington, as representative of the taxpayer, should be to see these companies return to profitability.  Quite simply, if these companies are not profitable, that loss will fall on the taxpayer, as shareholder.

And of course, without the ability to retain talent, it is all the more likely that these companies will not maintain profitability.  I suspect the competitors of these seven are already eyeing their best talent.  And let’s not kid ourselves, leaving these companies stocked with mediocre employees will not help taxpayers get their money back. 

In trying to punish the bailed-out  companies, we are also punishing ourselves.  This is one of the very reasons we should never have bailed them out in the first place:  once we are the owners, there fate and ours are linked.

How could this be? After all, by November 1929, the stock market had started to recover, and by mid-April 1930, it had reached its pre-crash level. Contrary to the received wisdom, massive government failure — not the stock market crash — pushed the United States into the Great Depression. It was the Federal Reserve that ushered in that terrible nightmare. During the course of the Great Depression, the money supply contracted by 25%. This sent the economy into a deflationary death spiral, with the price level falling 25%.

The Federal Reserve was not the only culprit. In the name of saving jobs, the Smoot-Hawley trade bill became law in June 1930. That intervention increased U.S. tariffs by over 50%. It was quickly followed by the imposition of retaliatory tariffs in 60 other countries. In consequence, world trade collapsed and the unemployment rate in the U.S. surged from 7.8% in June 1930 to 24.7% in 1933.

In addition to the Smoot-Hawley tariff wedge, the Hoover administration and the Democratic Congress imposed the largest tax increase in U.S. history, with the top tax rate on income jumping from 25% to 63% in 1932. If these government policies weren't destructive enough, the Roosevelt administration's New Deal created regime uncertainty because major policies were being changed so rapidly. As a result, investors were afraid to commit funds to new projects and private investment collapsed.

Far from saving the patient, government intervention came close to killing it. But you wouldn't know it from listening to the current discourse about the Panic of 2008-09. Indeed, politicians and pundits throughout the world have unfortunately dialed back to the Great Depression and drawn on the false lessons of history for policy guidance and justifications for their mega-interventions.

In consequence, the key enabler of both the Great Depression and the Panic of 2008-09 — namely the Federal Reserve — is scheduled to become America's systemic risk regulator. This is the world upside down. The Federal Reserve is the systemic risk.

The true lesson to be drawn from business cycle history is that, if left to run their natural course, severe downturns are followed by rapid snapbacks. For example, during the 1921 recession, wholesale prices, industrial production, and manufacturing employment fell by 30% or more, reaching their low in mid-1921. But, absent government intervention, the economy recovered naturally, and by early 1922, it had fully recovered, from its mid-1921 low.

Never mind. The crisis has energized the interventionists. One of the most hyper-active is French President Nicolas Sarkozy. In addition to leading the charge to impose wage controls on top bankers, he has grand visions. He wants to move away from the "fetichism of GDP". The Sarkozy conjecture is that GDP metrics don't measure "happiness".

To correct that alleged flaw, President Sarkozy appointed a "Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress". It is led by two Nobel laureates: Columbia University's Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard's Amartya Sen. The Commission's report, which was issued in September 2009, presents the known shortcomings associated with national income accounting, including the GDP metrics. That said, the Commission failed to produce any new, reliable measures that account for overall economic health. The commission will, no doubt, go down as a typical Sarkozy fireworks display, with no measured "happiness" at the end of the performance.

For the foreseeable future, GDP metrics, as well as other standard economic measures, will remain center stage for economists and policy makers. President Hu of China made this clear in a speech on climate change before the U.N. General Assembly in September 2009. While bowing to "greenery", China's President Hu stressed that developing countries should "go for growth".

This was a cold shower for President Sarkozy and other interventionists. After all, GDP growth and levels of GDP per capita are closely, and positively, associated with metrics that measure the vitality of free markets and the ease of doing business (see the accompanying table). And that's not all. Economic growth is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. As the accompanying chart indicates, prosperity (measured by standard metrics) affects life expectancy (health) in a positive way.

A reliable picture of an economic state of affairs can be obtained by constructing a misery index using standard measures: the sum of the inflation rate, plus the lending (interest) rate, plus the unemployment rate, minus the annual percentage change in GDP per capita.

As an example, the misery index for New Zealand is presented in the accompanying chart for the period 1980-2008.

By the early 1980s, New Zealand's economy was suffering from interventionism and its misery index was at record levels. Then Roger Douglas took over the reins at the Ministry of Finance and pushed through dramatic free-market reforms.

These set the stage for a significant initial fall in New Zealand's misery index. The second stage of the decline in the index occurred during Ruth Richardson's tenure as Minister of Finance in 1991-93, when she pushed through a number of additional liberal economic reforms. In late 1999, the Labour Party, with Helen Clarke at the helm, took power in New Zealand, where it stayed entrenched until November 2008. During that long stretch, the dramatic economic reforms of the late-1980s and early-1990s were eroded away and New Zealand's misery index more than doubled.

President Hu took note of the main lesson of economic history: "go for free markets" and prosperity and longevity will follow.

The big news is that net college prices — what students pay after aid– have actually decreased over the last 15 years. While sticker prices were rising much faster than incomes and inflation, what students were actually paying dropped. The implication of this is so obvious that Mr. Magoo couldn’t mistake it: Student aid, much of which comes through taxpayers, enables schools to charge ever-higher prices with near impunity.

Back to the Quick and the ED. To some degree, Miller sees declining net price as a triumph for federal aid, making college more affordable even as prices explode:

This story should be encouraging for legislators that fought hard to win Pell Grant increases over the last few years. The steepest decreases in net price occur beginning in the 2007-2008 academic year, the same time Congress began passing legislation that boosted the maximum Pell Grant award several times. This at least suggests that the money spent on the program did play some role in lessening the financial burden for students and was not completely eaten up by sticker price increases.

On the flip side, Miller at least acknowledges that:

The net price figure also lessens the pressure on schools to actually take proactive steps to lower their costs. If the price you list isn’t actually what you charge, then why should anyone care what the listed price is and how high it gets? Net price thus serves as a kind of smokescreen that gets colleges at least partially off fo[r] charging an arm and a leg.

So what’s wrong with this analysis? 

Most important is that Miller softpedals the aid effect, suggesting that the main negative consequence of  ever-increasing assistance is that it bleeds off a bit of the pressure for schools to lower costs. But it likely has a much more destructive effect than that, not just curbing efficiency pressures, but enabling schools to constantly charge and spend more.  It’s a likelihood that student-aid defenders try to dispel by citing studies that cover very short periods of time, or that simply pronounce that we don’t know that it happens. That it probably happens, however, has been borne out empirically, and it’s readily ackowledged by prominent higher educators including former Harvard president Derek Bok, former Stanford vice president William F. Massy, and former University of Iowa president Howard Bowen. Indeed, the latter’s “law” couldn’t be more blunt: “Universities will raise all the money they can and spend all the money they raise.”

Miller’s other major failing is that he completely ignores that all this aid has to come from somwhere, and that “somewhere” is largely taxpayers. (OK, first it’s China.) Just to give you a sense of the impact on taxpayers, College Board data show that between the 1998-99 and 2008-09 academic years, total federal aid — including grant money recipients don’t have to pay back, and loans they (sometimes) do — rose from $61.1 billion to $116.8 billion. Add state aid to that, and the total goes from $66.6 billion to $126.2 billion.

And what are some of the major downsides of these forced third-party payments? Miller mentions a few pricing difficulties for students, but makes no mention of the potentially huge negative consequences for the nation: Encouraging lots of people to attend college who simply aren’t prepared for it; cranking out many more degrees than the job market demands; and potentially slowing economic growth by taking funds from productive uses and giving it to efficiency-averse colleges and students. 

The big finding in the latest College Board data, which the Quick and the ED nails, is that net college prices have been going down. The important story, however, is that this is bad news for the country. Unfortunately, the Quick and the Ed misses that almost completely.

NEW YORK — The Obama administration plans to order companies that have received exceptionally large amounts of bailout money from the government to slash compensation for their highest-paid executives by about half on average, according to people familiar with the long-awaited decision.

The administration will also curtail many corporate perks, including the use of corporate jets for personal travel, chauffeured drivers and country club fee reimbursement, people familiar with the matter have said. Individual perks worth more than $25,000 have received particular scrutiny.

The American people have every right to be upset about generous compensation packages for executives at financial firms that are being kept alive by subsidies and bailouts.

But their ire should be directed at the bailouts, because that is the policy that redistributes money from the average taxpayer and puts it in the pockets of incompetent executives. Unfortunately, rather than deal with the underlying problems of bailouts and intervention, some politicians want to impose controls on salaries. This might be a tolerable second-best (or probably fifth-best) outcome if the compensation limits only applied to companies mooching off the taxpayers, but some politicians want to use the financial crisis as an excuse to regulate compensation at firms that do not have their snouts in the public trough.

This would be a big mistake. So long as rich people make money using non-coercive means, politicians should butt out. It should not matter whether we are talking about Tiger Woods, Brad Pitt, or a corporate CEO. The market should determine compensation, not political deal making. Markets don’t produce perfect outcomes, to be sure, but political intervention invariably produces terrible outcomes.

I debate this further on CNBC:

C/P The Hill