The first view is that governments simply lost control of the situation, either through incompetence or because politicians were pursuing their own agendas. This is the view heard most frequently from the political right – for example, from people who think that the main problem in the run-up to the financial meltdown of 2008 was government housing policies.
In the United States, among the candidates still competing for the Republican Party’s nomination to challenge Barack Obama in November’s presidential election, Ron Paul stands out for arguing consistently that government is the problem, not the answer, with regard to banking. If the government were removed more fully from the financial sector (including abolishing the Federal Reserve), he argues, the economy would function better.
The second view is that the financial sector lobbied long and hard for deregulation in recent decades, and spent a great deal of time and money persuading politicians that it constituted the safe and modern approach to banking. According to this view, government policies did not fail; on the contrary, they operated exactly as intended – and as bought and paid for.
If this view is correct, the kind of policy prescription recommended by Ron Paul is less appealing. Unless you think that a modern financial sector really can operate with absolutely no regulation of any kind (including, presumably, the rules for banks that come with deposit insurance), the real problem is not government officials’ policy preferences, but what financial-sector lobbyists are able to persuade officials to do.
Fresh evidence supporting the second view is now available in the form of a recent study by Deniz Igan and Prachi Mishra of the International Monetary Fund. In “Three’s Company: Wall Street, Capitol Hill, and K Street,” the authors look at the data – lots of it – on lobbying by financial-sector companies in the US.
Legislators, of course, have different preferences about what kinds of laws to support, which can make it hard to study mechanisms of political influence precisely. But Igan and Mishra approach the problem in a clever way – they look for instances when elected officials switched their position on legislative proposals that surfaced more than once. And they devote a lot of effort to figuring out what caused this switch.
In addition to analyzing information about lobbying expenditures, the authors map out the network connections of lobbyists (known collectively as “K Street,” because so many have their Washington offices there) and legislators. For example, lobbyists were often previously employed by legislators on their staffs.
The results are simply staggering – although surely not a surprise to professional lobbyists. A big increase in lobbying expenditures helps to persuade legislators to switch their votes. And “whether any of the lobbyists working on a bill also worked for a legislator in the past sways the stance on that bill in favor of deregulation.”
It is deregulation, of course, that financial firms want – fewer rules and less oversight of any kind. And it really is all about whom you know, and how you know them. In particular, your value as a lobbyist seems to depend very highly on whom you worked with in the past. Igan and Mishra find “spending an extra dollar is almost twice as effective in switching a legislator’s position if the lobbyist is connected to the legislator compared to the case where the lobbyist is unconnected.”
The revolving door between Congress and lobbying firms appears to have been central to how the financial sector became deregulated, which effectively allowed excessive risk-taking in the run-up to the crisis. In another paper, Igan and Mishra, working with Thierry Tressel, found that firms taking more risks before 2008 were also engaged in more lobbying.
Essentially, financial firms have been buying the right to take on more risk. When things go well, executives in these firms get the upside – mostly in terms of immediate compensation, because few executives are compensated on the basis of risk-adjusted returns. That means that when the risks materialize and the firms suffer losses, the costs fall on taxpayers.
Ron Paul is right to point to imbalances of power and massive distortions within the financial sector. He is also correct that many government policies favor relatively few big firms – and favor them in a way that encourages excessive and dangerous risk-taking.
But Paul and others are wrong to argue that the government is the ultimate cause of all financial evil. Executives in financial firms want to take big risks. They like arrangements under which they win even when they lose.
Big financial firms can more readily buy the necessary political protection (in the form of deregulation), enabling them to become even bigger and more dangerous. This incentive structure has only become more extreme since the financial crisis of 2008.
Simon Johnson, a former chief economist of the IMF, is
co-founder of a leading economics blog, http://BaselineScenario.com, a
professor at MIT Sloan, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for
International Economics, and co-author, with James Kwak, of 13 Bankers.
Simon Johnson: 自由主義和游說
華盛頓—在全球金融危機爆發以來的三年中，關於到底是什麼出了問題，人們提出了兩種觀點。理解這兩種觀點是很重要的，因為它們對政客——從而對全球經濟未來的健康和穩定——有著無與倫比的影響力。
第一種觀點是，政府完全失去了對事態的控制，政府沒能勝任，政客則在追求自身利益。持這一觀點的大多是政治右派——比如那些認為2008年金融大崩壞的主要問題出在政府住房政策的人。
在美國共和黨內爭奪11月與奧巴馬競選總統人選的候選人中，羅恩·保羅（Ron
Paul）一直宣稱，對於銀行業出現的狀況，政府本身就是問題，而不是問題的答案。他指出，如果政府能更徹底地從金融部門離開（包括撤銷美聯儲），那麼美國經濟將運轉得更好。
第二種觀點是，近幾十年來，金融部門一直在努力游說去監管化，花了大量的時間和金錢說服政客這才是安全而現代化的銀行業方式。根據這一觀點，政府政策並沒有失靈，相反，起到了預期的效果——游說團體花錢收買所要達到的效果。
如果這一觀點正確，那麼羅恩·保羅提出的政策藥方就沒什麼吸引力了。除非你認為現代金融部門真的可以在完全沒有任何形式監管（包括銀行不必對存款提供保險）的情況下運轉，否則，真正的問題就不在於官員的政策偏好，而在於金融部門游說集團有能力說服官員出台這樣的政策。
IMF的伊甘（Deniz Igan）和米什拉（Prachi
Mishra）的最新研究中提出了新的証據支持第二種觀點。在這篇題為《三個人的公司：華爾街、國會山和K街》（Three’s Company: Wall Street,
Capitol Hill, and K Street）的報告中，兩位作者研究了大量關於美國金融部門公司游說的數據。
當然，立法者關於採用何種法律給予支持的偏好是不同的，這使得精確研究政治影響機制變得十分困難。但伊甘和米什拉用一個十分巧妙的辦法處理了這個問題——他們尋找黨員官員對立法建議的立場改變超過一次的例子，並花了大量精力尋找立場改變背后的原因。
除了分析關於游說支出的信息外，兩位作者還挖掘出了游說集團（被稱為“K街”，因為大量游說集團的華盛頓辦事處都設在那裡）和立法者的關系網。比如，游說者通常是立法機關的前工作人員。
研究結果讓人難以相信——不過職業游說者大概不會感到驚奇。游說支出的大量增加有助於說服立法者改變立場。“某法案的游說者是否是從前的立法者會影響對該法案的立場，使之偏向於去監管化。”
當然，去監管化正是金融公司之所欲——不管什麼類型的規則和監督，越少越好。這完完全全是一件你認識多少人、和他們交情如何的事情。特別是，你作為游說者的價值與你過去的工作背景有著非常緊密的聯系。伊甘和米什拉發現“在立法機關有關系的游說者和沒有關系的游說者相比，前者花錢讓立法者改變立場的效果比后者好一倍。”
國會和游說集團之間的旋轉門似乎是金融部門逐漸去監管化的關鍵，而去監管化又導致了過度的風險承擔，引發了危機。在另一篇論文中，伊甘、米什拉和特雷塞爾（Thierry Tressel）一起發現，在2008年之前承擔風險越多的公司，在游說中用力也最多。
從本質上說，金融公司是在用錢買承擔更多風險的權利。當事情朝好的方面發展時，這些公司的高官們就能平步青雲——大部分體現在立刻獲得的豐厚報酬中，因為很少有高管是根據經風險調整的回報獲得報仇的。這意味著當風險成為現實，公司遭遇損失時，代價全落在了納稅人身上。
羅恩·保羅指出金融部門中間存在嚴重的權力失衡和扭曲，這是正確的。他還指出，大量政府政策的受益者是極少數大公司——使它們能夠過度承擔高風險——這也是正確的。
但保羅等人就此認為政府是所有金融亂象的終極根源，這就不正確了。金融公司高管想要承擔大風險。他們想要的安排是，即使他們失敗了，仍然能得利。
大型金融公司早就買通了必要的政治保護（打著去監管化的旗號），這使得它們不斷壯大，也不斷變得更危險。這一激勵結構在2008年金融危機爆發后變得更加極端了。
Simon
Johnson是前IMF首席經濟學家，領先經濟學博客http://BaselineScenario.com聯合創始人，麻省理工學院斯隆管理學院教授，彼得森研究所國際經濟學研究員，與郭庾信合著有《13位銀行家》。