Reprinted from http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/09/creating-effective-regulation-imperative-issue-federal-reserve.html#more-6339
The only positive aspect of the public contest to pick a successor for Ben Bernanke that the White House has inexplicably sparked is that economists are acknowledging that the next head of the Fed must act to create (not "restore") effective regulation by the agency. It is long past time to have a serious discussion about the collapse of regulation by the Fed. In this column I make the first of what will become four points. First, the consequences of the Fed's regulatory collapse have proven catastrophic for our Nation. Second, the Fed's supervisory structure inherently creates a conflict of interest identical to the one that existed in the Savings and Loan (S&L) debacle until Congress and the President decided the conflict was intolerable and eliminated it in 1989. Third, the supervisory culture of the Fed ensures recurrent supervisory failure -- and the Fed's economists are largely responsible for these failures. Fourth, the Fed's economists' dogmas and ignorance of fraud mechanisms have combined to create to create intensely criminogenic environments. The Fed does not simply fail to prevent the epidemics of control fraud that cause our recurrent, intensifying financial crises -- its policies are so perverse that they aid the fraud epidemics.
Absent the Fed's Supervisory Collapse There Would Have No Crisis
The world would be a vastly better place had the Fed been run by competent regulators. There would have been no hyper-inflated bubble, no financial crisis and no Great Recession. This is not a heroic hypothetical. We know how competent financial regulators reacted to a growing practice of savings and loans (S&Ls) making endemically fraudulent "low" and "no" "doc" loans in 1990-1991. We know how competent regulators reacted to growing appraisal fraud by S&Ls in the early-to-mid 1980s. The examiners of the West Region of the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) identified a new, dangerous practice known as "no" or "low" "doc" (documentation) loans. Our examiners realized that such loans inherently produced severe "adverse selection" and that the inevitable consequence was that such loans had a "negative expected value" (in plain English that means that the lender would invariably lose money). Our examiners also realized that this meant that no honest lender would make such loans -- but that the officers leading "accounting control frauds" would find such loans to be the optimal fraud "ammunition." OTS was in the middle of stopping an epidemic of accounting control fraud (largely based on making fraudulent commercial real estate loans) in 1990-1991, so the "no doc" loans represented a "second front." Nevertheless, the OTS West Region diverted some of its already overwhelmed resources to address the "no doc" loans before they could become epidemic. By 1991, we had substantially driven such loans out of the industry.
Similarly, the S&L regulators recognized immediately the implications of widespread appraisal fraud. Only lenders and their agents can induce widespread appraisal fraud. Honest lenders can prevent widespread appraisal fraud by well proven means that the industry has perfected for many decades. Only a fraudulent lender would inflate appraisals, for the appraisal is the great protection from loss for an honest lender. The officers leading an accounting control fraud, however, often find it optimal to inflate the appraisal. This means that appraisal fraud represents a superb "signal" of the presence of accounting control fraud. The S&L regulators worked closely with honest appraisers to identify and prevent appraisal fraud. We prioritized any S&L with widespread inflated appraisals for intense examination designed to identify and document the broader loan fraud.
The Fed had immense advantages compared to the S&L regulators during the debacle. By the early part of the decade of the 2000s the industry called its endemically fraudulent "no doc" loans "liar's loans." This was equivalent to the mortgage lenders placing a giant blinking red neon sign in front of the Fed saying "stop us before we steal again." They had the advantage of our experience and analytics. They did not have to reinvent any wheels or engage in the trial and error practices we used to learn how to counter epidemics of accounting control fraud employing liar's loans and inflated appraisals.
The Fed received repeated warnings that had no analog during the S&L debacle.
From 2000 to 2007, a coalition of appraisal organizations " delivered to Washington officials a public petition; signed by 11,000 appraisers". [I]t charged that lenders were pressuring appraisers to place artificially high prices on properties [and] "blacklisting honest appraisers" and instead assigning business only to appraisers who would hit the desired price targets (FCIC 2011:18).
Consider how early that warning came -- 2000 -- before the Enron-era collapses began. The warning is also unambiguous. It is a clear, widespread fraud by lenders that only makes sense if the officers controlling the lender are engaged in an underlying practice of making widespread fraudulent loans. The appraisers aggressively took the warning contained in their steadily growing petition to the public, the lending industry, and Congress and the regulatory agencies.
In September 2004, the FBI sounded its own alarm. It warned that mortgage fraud was becoming "epidemic" and predicted that it would cause a financial "crisis" if it were not contained.
In early 2006, the mortgage lending industry's own anti-fraud experts (MARI) issued its famous five warnings that were sent in writing to every significant home lender.
"[1] Stated income and reduced documentation loans " are open invitations to fraudsters. [2] It appears that many members of the industry have little historical appreciation for the havoc created by low-doc/no-doc products that were the rage in the early 1990s. Those loans produced hundreds of millions of dollars in losses for their users.
[3] One of MARI's customers recently reviewed a sample of 100 stated income loans upon which they had IRS Forms 4506. When the stated incomes were compared to the IRS figures, the resulting differences were dramatic. Ninety percent of the stated incomes were exaggerated by 5% or more. More disturbingly, almost 60% of the stated amounts were exaggerated by more than 50%. [4] These results suggest that the stated income loan deserves the nickname used by many in the industry, the "liar's loan."
[5] Federal regulators of insured financial institutions have expressed safety and soundness concerns over these loans."
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