Why The Low Interest Rates Mattered: Part I

This is the first of a two-part follow up to my previous post, where I argued that the Fed's low interest rate policy was a key contributor to the credit and housing boom.  Here, I want to show why the risk-taking channel of monetary policy is an important part of the story.  I will provide a more thorough summary of the Fed's role in the next post.  

The risk-taking channel of monetary policy helps us understand how the Fed's low interest rate policy worked to catalyze many of the other factors that contributed to the housing boom.  Yes, this was a perfect economic storm of sorts where financial innovation, weak governance, misaligned incentives, and globalization all came together to create the mother of all housing booms.  Yet, the role they played was largely dependent on the Fed holding the federal funds rate as low as it did for as long as it did.  How you ask? I will outsource to Barry Ritholtz to answer this question:

What Bernanake seems to be overlooking in his exoneration of ultra-low rates was the impact they had on the world’s Bond managers — especially pension funds, large trusts and foundations. Subsequently, there was an enormous cascading effect of 1% Fed Funds rate on the demand for higher yielding instruments, like securitized mortgages...

An honest assessment of the crisis’ causation and timeline would look something like the following:

1. Ultra low interest rates led to a scramble for yield by fund managers;

2. Not coincidentally, there was a massive push into subprime lending by unregulated NONBANKS who existed solely to sell these mortgages to securitizers;

3. Since they were writing mortgages for resale (and held them only briefly) these non-bank lenders collapsed their lending standards; this allowed them to write many more mortgages;

4. These poorly underwritten loans — essentially junk paper — was sold to Wall Street for securitization in huge numbers.

5. Massive ratings fraud of these securities by Fitch, Moody’s and S&P led to a rating of this junk as Triple AAA.

6. That investment grade rating of junk paper allowed those scrambling bond managers (see #1) to purchase higher yield paper that they would not otherwise have been able to.

7. Increased leverage of investment houses allowed a huge securitization manufacturing process; Some iBanks also purchased this paper in enormous numbers;

8. More leverage took place in the shadow derivatives market. That allowed firms like AIG to write $3 trillion in derivative exposure, much of it in mortgage and credit related areas.

9. Compensation packages in the financial sector were asymmetrical, where employees had huge upside but shareholders (and eventually taxpayers) had huge downside. This (logically) led to increasingly aggressive and risky activity.

10. Once home prices began to fall, all of the above fell apart.

It became readily clear to me once I dug into the data, legislative history, market activities, etc, that there was no one single factor that caused the collapse. Rather, an honest reading of events was that there were many, many failures occurring in a very specific order that contributed to what occurred.

Inadequate regulations and “nonfeasance” in enforcing existing regs were, as Chairman Bernanke asserts, a major factor. But in the crisis timeline, the regulatory and supervisory failures came about AFTER the 1% Fed rates had set off a mad scramble for yields. Had rates stayed within historical norms, the demand for higher yielding products would not have existed — at least not nearly as massively as it did with 1% rates.

Enough Said.