Big swinging deregulators

” ‘As Treasury secretary starting in 1999, [Larry Summers] shepherded a couple of bills that helped deregulate financial markets, and he has made it clear that he doesn’t buy the notion that these laws caused the financial crisis.” — David Leonhardt, New York Times, 25 November 2008 (more here)

In this weekend’s NYT Magazine, Summers’ old boss, Bill Clinton, takes full responsibility for the failure to regulate credit derivatives, those most opaque and easily abused of financial instruments.  We already knew that Summers, his predecessor Robert Rubin, and Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan backed the blanket exemption of credit derivatives from regulation.  What we did not know until this week, however, was just how much they regarded financial deregulation as a holy sacrament.  (OK, so we did know that about “Alan Shrugged” Greenspan.)

A Washington Post feature on Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission at the time, makes this plain.  In 1998 Born wrote a “concept paper” pondering the possible merits of derivatives regulation, prompting a circling of the wagons by Summers, Rubin, Greenspan, and Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Arthur Levitt:

‘In early 1998, Born’s plan to release her concept paper was turning into a showdown. Financial industry executives howled, streaming into her office to try to talk her out of it. Summers, then the deputy Treasury secretary, mounted a campaign against it, CFTC officials recalled.

‘”Larry Summers expressed himself several times, very strongly, that this was something we should back down from,” [Born aide Daniel] Waldman recalled.

‘In one call, Summers said, “I have 13 bankers in my office and they say if you go forward with this you will cause the worst financial crisis since World War II,” recounted [Michael] Greenberger, a University of Maryland law school professor who was Born’s director of the Division of Trading and Markets.’

Cognitive capture, anyone?

The paper was released, and it didn’t cause a crisis.  Unregulated credit default swaps, on the other hand . . .

Mark Thoma has a synopsis of the Post story on Economist’s View.  (Hat tip: Baseline Scenario.)

(For a helpful primer on the rise and fall of the original BSDs, see Daniel Gross’s Slate column of 25 September 2008.)

Tags: alan greenspan, brooksley born, credit derivatives, david leonhardt, deregulation, larry summers, mark thoma, robert rubin, willem buiter