On September 17, 2007, with the following message ---
***
Seventy-five years ago this week, Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt took his campaign for the presidency to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.
It was a time when faith in the American economy was shaken – a time when too many of our leaders clung to the conventional thinking that said all we could do is sit idly by and wish that our problems would go away on their own.
But Franklin Roosevelt challenged that cynicism. Amid a crisis of confidence Roosevelt called for a "re-appraisal of values." He made clear that in this country, our right to live must also include the right to live comfortably; that government must favor no small group at the expense of all its citizens; and that in order for us to prosper as one nation, "...the responsible heads of finance and industry, instead of acting each for himself, must work together to achieve the common end."
This vision of America would require change that went beyond replacing a failed President. It would require a renewed trust in the market and a renewed spirit of obligation and cooperation between business and workers; between a people and their government. As FDR put it, "Faith in America, faith in our tradition of personal responsibility, faith in our institutions, and faith in ourselves demands that we all recognize the new terms of the old social contract."
Seventy-five years later, this faith is calling us to act once more.
We certainly do not face a test of the magnitude that Roosevelt’s generation did. But we are tested still. We meet at a time when much of Wall Street is holding its collective breath. Here at the NASDAQ and all across America, the tickers are being watched with heightened anxiety and considerable uncertainty. There is much anticipation about tomorrow’s meeting of the Fed, and with each new day, there is hope that the headlines will bring better news than the last.
It is a hope shared by millions of Americans, men and women, who have experienced this kind of anxiety and uncertainty long before it arrived on Wall Street. They are the families I meet every day who are working longer hours for a paycheck that isn’t getting any bigger and can’t seem to cover the rising cost of health care and tuition and taxes. They are the Maytag workers I’ve met in Galesburg, Illinois and Newton, Iowa – workers who believed they would retire and never have to work again; workers who now compete with their teenagers for minimum wage jobs at Wal-Mart because their factory moved overseas.
These Americans and many others were already struggling before the problems on Wall Street arose. Now they are looking at their homes and wondering if their greatest source of wealth will still have the same value in another year, or even another month. And we’re all wondering whether this will spill over to the wider economy.
So we know there is a need right now to restore confidence in our markets. We know there is a need to renew public trust in our markets. But I also think that this is another moment that requires, in FDR’s words, a re-appraisal of our values as a nation.
I believe that America’s free market has been the engine of America’s great progress. It’s created a prosperity that is the envy of the world. It’s led to a standard of living unmatched in history. And it has provided great rewards to the innovators and risk-takers who have made America a beacon for science, and technology, and discovery.
But I also know that in this country, our grand experiment has only worked because we have guided the market’s invisible hand with a higher principle.
It’s the idea that we are all in this together. From CEOs to shareholders, from financiers to factory workers, we all have a stake in each other’s success because the more Americans prosper, the more America prospers. That’s why we’ve had titans of industry who’ve made it their mission to pay well enough that their employees could afford the products they made. That’s why employees at companies like Google don’t mind the vast success of their CEOs – because they share in that success just the same. And that’s why our economy hasn’t just been the world’s greatest wealth creator – it’s been the world’s greatest job generator. It’s been the tide that has lifted the boats of the largest middle-class in history.
We have not come this far because we practice survival of the fittest. America is America because we believe in creating a framework in which all can succeed. Our free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. And so from time to time, we have put in place certain rules of the road to make competition fair, and open, and honest. We have done this not to stifle prosperity or liberty, but to foster those things and ensure that they are shared and spread as widely as possible.
In recent years, we have seen a dangerous erosion of the rules and principles that have allowed our market to work and our economy to thrive. Instead of thinking about what’s good for America or what’s good for business, a mentality has crept into certain corners of Washington and the business world that says, "what’s good for me is good enough."
In our government, we see campaign contributions and lobbyists used to cut corners and win favors that stack the deck against businesses and consumers who play by the rules. Massive tax cuts are shoved outside the budget window and accounting shenanigans are used to hide the full cost of this war.
In the business world, it’s a mentality that sees conflicts of interest as opportunities for profit. The quick kill is prized without regard to long-term consequences for the financial system and the economy. And while this may benefit the few who push the envelope as far as it will go, it’s doesn’t benefit America and it doesn’t benefit the market. Just because it makes money doesn’t mean it’s good for business.
It’s bad for business when boards allow their executives to set the price of their stock options to guarantee that they’ll get rich regardless of how they perform. It’s bad for the bottom line when CEOs receive massive severance packages after letting down shareholders, firing workers and dumping their pensions; or when they throw lavish birthday parties with company funds.
It’s bad for competition when you have an Administration that’s willing to approve merger after merger with barely any scrutiny. Such an approach stifles innovation, it robs consumers of choice, it means higher prices, and we have to guard against it.
And it’s bad for the market when there are over $1 trillion worth of loopholes in the corporate tax code, or when some companies get to set up a mailbox in a foreign country to avoid paying any taxes at all. This means a greater share of taxes for Americans and small businesses that are trying to compete but can’t afford to lobby their way to more loopholes.
It also means that investment goes to the companies that are best connected instead of the ones that are most productive. Economics 101 tells us special interest politics distorts the free market. After all, why would an oil company invest in research for alternative fuels that could save our environment when they can get billions of dollars in subsidies to keep drilling for oil and gas?
These anti-market, anti-business practices are wasteful, unproductive, and antithetical to the very spirit of capitalism. They benefit the undeserving few at the expense of hardworking Americans and entrepreneurs who play by the rules.
In fact, the danger with this mentality isn’t just that it offends our morals, it’s that it endangers our markets. Markets can’t thrive without the trust of investors and the public. At a most basic level, capital markets work by steering capital to the place where it is most productive. Without transparency, that cannot happen. If the information is flawed, if there is fraud, or if the risks facing financial institutions are not fully disclosed, people stop investing because they fear they’re being had. When the public trust is abused badly enough, it can bring financial markets to their knees. We all suffer when we do not ensure that markets are transparent, open and honest.
We saw this during the dotcom boom of the 90s when conflicts of interest between securities analysts, whose research was supposed to guide investors, and the banks they worked for led investors to doubt the markets in general.
We saw it during the Enron and WorldCom scandals when major public companies artificially pumped up their earnings, disguised their losses and otherwise engaged in accounting fraud to make their profits look better – a practice that ultimately led investors to question the balance sheets of all companies.
And we cannot help but see some reflections of these practices when we look at the subprime mortgage fiasco today.
Subprime lending started off as a good idea – helping Americans buy homes who couldn’t previously afford to. Financial institutions created new financial instruments that could securitize these loans, slice them into finer and finer risk categories and spread them out among investors around the country and around the world.
In theory, this should have allowed mortgage lending to be less risky and more diversified. But as certain lenders and brokers began to see how much money could be made, they began to lower their standards. Some appraisers began inflating their estimates to get the deals done. Some borrowers started claiming income they didn’t have just to qualify for the loans, and some were engaging in irresponsible speculation. But many borrowers were tricked into glossing over the fine print. And ratings agencies began rating bundles of different kinds of these loans as low-risk even though they were very high-risk.
Most everyone knew that some of these deals were just too good to be true, but all that money flowing in made it tempting to look the other way and ignore the unscrupulous practice of some bad actors
And yet, time and again we were warned this could happen. Ned Gramlich, the former Fed governor who sadly passed away two weeks ago, wrote an entire book predicting this very situation. Repeated calls for better disclosure and stronger oversight were met with millions in mortgage industry lobbying. Far too many continued to put their own short-term gain ahead of what they knew the long-term consequences would be when those rates exploded.
Those consequences are now clear: nearly 2.5 million homeowners could lose their homes. Millions more who had nothing to do with this could see the value of their own home decline – with some estimates projecting a cost of nearly $164 billion, primarily in lost home equity. The projected cost to investors is nearly $150 billion worldwide. And the impact on the housing market and wider economy has been so great that some economists are now predicting a possible recession – a prediction all of us hope does not come to pass.
There are a number of lessons that we must learn from this going forward. We know that much of this could have been avoided if the market operated with more honesty and accountability. We also know we would have been far better off if there were greater transparency and more information had been available to the American people.
To that extent, I believe there are a few steps we should take to prevent future crises of this kind and restore some measure of public trust in the market:
MORE HERE --->
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post_group/ObamaHQ/CWc4
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