[House Hearing, 110 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
THE FINANCIAL CRISIS AND THE ROLE OF FEDERAL REGULATORS
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT
AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
OCTOBER 23, 2008
__________
Serial No. 110-209
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/
index.html
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COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGHT AND GOVERNMENT REFORM
HENRY A. WAXMAN, California, Chairman
EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York TOM DAVIS, Virginia
PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania DAN BURTON, Indiana
CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut
ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland JOHN M. McHUGH, New York
DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio JOHN L. MICA, Florida
DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana
JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts TODD RUSSELL PLATTS, Pennsylvania
WM. LACY CLAY, Missouri CHRIS CANNON, Utah
DIANE E. WATSON, California JOHN J. DUNCAN, Jr., Tennessee
STEPHEN F. LYNCH, Massachusetts MICHAEL R. TURNER, Ohio
BRIAN HIGGINS, New York DARRELL E. ISSA, California
JOHN A. YARMUTH, Kentucky KENNY MARCHANT, Texas
BRUCE L. BRALEY, Iowa LYNN A. WESTMORELAND, Georgia
ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, District of PATRICK T. McHENRY, North Carolina
Columbia VIRGINIA FOXX, North Carolina
BETTY McCOLLUM, Minnesota BRIAN P. BILBRAY, California
JIM COOPER, Tennessee BILL SALI, Idaho
CHRIS VAN HOLLEN, Maryland JIM JORDAN, Ohio
PAUL W. HODES, New Hampshire
CHRISTOPHER S. MURPHY, Connecticut
JOHN P. SARBANES, Maryland
PETER WELCH, Vermont
JACKIE SPEIER, California
Phil Barnett, Staff Director
Earley Green, Chief Clerk
Lawrence Halloran, Minority Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
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Page
Hearing held on October 23, 2008................................. 1
Statement of:
Greenspan, Alan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve
Board; Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and
Exchange Commission; and John Snow, former Secretary of the
Treasury................................................... 11
Cox, Christopher......................................... 20
Greenspan, Alan.......................................... 11
Snow, John............................................... 36
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Cox, Christopher, chairman of the Securities and Exchange
Commission, prepared statement of.......................... 23
Greenspan, Alan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve
Board:
Letter dated November 4, 2008............................ 52
Prepared statement of.................................... 15
Lynch, Hon. Stephen F., a Representative in Congress from the
State of Massachusetts, article dated June 24, 2008........ 99
Sali, Hon. Bill, a Representative in Congress from the State
of Idaho, prepared statement of............................ 111
Snow, John, former Secretary of the Treasury, prepared
statement of............................................... 38
Towns, Hon. Edolphus, a Representative in Congress from the
State of New York, prepared statement of................... 108
Waxman, Hon. Henry A., a Representative in Congress from the
State of California, prepared statement of................. 3
THE FINANCIAL CRISIS AND THE ROLE OF FEDERAL REGULATORS
----------
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2008
House of Representatives,
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room
2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Henry A. Waxman
(chairman of the committee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Waxman, Maloney, Cummings,
Kucinich, Tierney, Watson, Lynch, Yarmuth, Norton, McCollum,
Cooper, Van Hollen, Hodes, Murphy, Sarbanes, Davis of Virginia,
Shays, Mica, Souder, Platts, Issa, Bilbray, and Sali.
Staff present: Phil Barnett, staff director and chief
counsel; Kristin Amerling, general counsel; Stacia Cardille,
counsel; David Rapallo, chief investigative counsel; Theo
Chuang and John Williams, deputy chief investigative counsels;
Roger Sherman, deputy chief counsel; Margaret Daum, counsel;
David Leviss, senior investigative counsel; Karen Lightfoot,
communications director and senior policy advisor; Caren
Auchman, communications associate; Daniel Davis, professional
staff member; Zhongrui Deng, chief information officer; Rob
Cobbs, Mitch Smiley, and Jennifer Owens, special assistants;
Brian Cohen, senior investigator and policy advisor; Earley
Green, chief clerk; Jennifer Berenholz, assistant clerk; Leneal
Scott, information systems manager; Larry Halloran, minority
staff director; Jennifer Safavian, minority chief counsel for
oversight and investigations; Brien Beattie, Molly Boyl,
Benjamin Chance, and Alex Cooper, minority professional staff
members; John Cuaderes, Nick Palarino, and Larry Brady,
minority senior investigators and policy advisors; Adam Fromm
and Todd Greenwood, minority professional staff members;
Patrick Lyden, parliamentarian and Member services coordinator;
and Brian McNicoll, minority communications director.
Chairman Waxman. The committee will please come to order.
Today is our fourth hearing into the ongoing financial
crisis. Our previous three hearings focused on the private
sector. Our first hearing examined the bankruptcy of Lehman
Brothers. We learned that this investment bank failed after it
made highly leveraged investments that plummeted in value.
Our second hearing examined the fall of AIG. We learned
that this huge insurance company was brought to the brink of
bankruptcy by speculation in unregulated derivatives called
credit default swaps.
Our third hearing, which we held yesterday, examined the
role of credit rating agencies. We learned that these firms
sacrificed their rating standards--and their credibility--for
short-term gains in sales volumes.
Each of these case studies is different, but they share
common themes. In each case, corporate excess and greed
enriched company executives at enormous cost to shareholders
and our economy. In each case, these abuses could have been
prevented if Federal regulators had paid more attention and
intervened with responsible regulations.
This brings us to today's hearing. Our focus today is the
actions and inaction of Federal regulators. For too long, the
prevailing attitude in Washington has been that the market
always knows best. The Federal Reserve had the authority to
stop the irresponsible lending practices that fueled the
subprime mortgage market, but it's long-time chairman, Alan
Greenspan, rejected pleas that he intervene. The SEC had the
authority to insist on tighter standards for credit rating
agencies, but it did nothing, despite urging from Congress.
The Treasury Department could have led the charge for
responsible oversight of financial derivatives. Instead, it
joined the opposition. The list of regulatory mistakes and
misjudgments is long, and the cost to taxpayers and our economy
is staggering.
The SEC relaxed leverage standards on Wall Street, the
Offices of Thrift Supervision and the Comptroller of the
Currency preempted State efforts to protect home buyers from
predatory lending. The Justice Department slashed its efforts
to prosecute white-collar fraud.
Congress is not exempt from responsibility. We passed
legislation in 2000 that exempted financial derivatives from
regulation, and we took too long, until earlier this year, to
pass legislation strengthening oversight of Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac.
Over and over again, ideology trumped governance. Our
regulators became enablers rather than enforcers. Their trust
in the wisdom of the markets was infinite. The mantra became
government regulation is wrong, the market is infallible.
Our focus today is financial regulation, but this
deregulatory philosophy spreads across government. It explains
why lead got into our children's toys and why evacuees from
Hurricane Katrina were housed in trailers fail filled with
formaldehyde.
Today we will ask our witnesses hard questions about the
regulatory decisions they made and they failed to make, but I
want them to know I value their public service and their
cooperation with the committee. Our committee house stayed busy
in recent weeks, as we have held hearings on the financial
crisis, and I want all the Members to know how much I
appreciate their involvement in these hearings.
It's not easy to travel to Washington when Congress is out
of session, especially with an election looming. But the issues
we are examining are of immense importance to our Nation, and I
am proud of the work we are doing, and especially the
contribution of members of the committee.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Henry A. Waxman follows:]
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Chairman Waxman. Mr. Davis, I want to recognize you.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me just say yesterday I agreed with your opening
statement and associated myself with it. Today I am in
disagreement with much of what you have to say.
Of all the hearings we have had so far on the causes and
effects of the economic crisis, I think today's testimony and
discussion gives us the opportunity to talk for the first time
about the systems and structures meant to maintain stability
and root out abusive practices in financial markets.
I hope this distinguished panel will help us cut to the
core of the financial problems we have encountered. At that
core lies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: Government-sponsored
enterprises that dominated the mortgage finance marketplace and
gave quasi official sanction to the opaque, high-risk
investments still radiating global toxic shock waves from the
epicenter of their subprime sinkhole. By the way, these were
areas where we did try to regulate in some on our side and were
stopped from the other side of the aisle from bringing
regulation in earlier.
Our earlier hearings have focused on important, but to be
honest, somewhat tangential issues, a unique case bailout, a
bankruptcy, flawed credit ratings, executive compensation, and
the cost of corporate retreats. No one is minimizing or
defending corporate malfeasance. We share the outrage of most
Americans at the greed that blinded Wall Street to its civic
duty to protect Main Street.
But this committee can take a broader view of the patchwork
of Federal financial regulators built by accretion after each
cyclical crisis and artificially subdivided behind Congress'
jurisdictional walls. No single agency, by action or omission,
caused this crisis, and no existing agency alone can repair the
damage or prevent the next, some believable, inevitable,
booming and bust.
It wasn't deregulation that allowed this crisis. It was the
mishmash of regulations and regulators, each with too narrow a
view of increasingly integrated national and global markets.
The words ``regulation'' and ``deregulation'' are not absolute
goods and evils, nor are they meaningful policy prescriptions.
The dynamic structure of our markets has made creating an
enduring regulatory system a perennial and bipartisan
challenge.
After the 1933 commercial bank failures, the Glass-Steagall
Act separated investment and commercial banking activities and
established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation,
restoring public confidence in the banking system.
But by 1999, the marketplace had outgrown these post-
depression rules. The increasingly global market led the
Congress and a Democratic president to adopt the Gramm-Leach-
Bliley Act, repealing Glass-Steagall, and allowing commercial
banks to diversify and underwrite in trade securities. That was
not regulation for deregulation's sake. These activities were
seen by many as actually reducing risk for banks through
diversification, and allowing banks to compete in a rapidly
globalizing marketplace.
When Enron and other scandals erupted earlier this decade,
Congress respond with Sarbanes-Oxley, putting new regulations
on public companies. The bipartisan Band-Aid approach to
oversight and regulation continued.
In the past few years, the market, as it tends to do,
changed again. New securities were created and traded and, once
again, analog government was out of sync with the digital
world.
While regulators pushed paper, the quants pushed electrons,
moving money around the globe at the speed of light. Free
markets are constantly evolving and innovating. Regulators by
law, bureaucratic custom or just bad habit tend to remain
static. Modernization to Federal regulatory structures have to
take account of the new global dynamics to restore the
transparency, confidence and critical checks and balances
necessary to sustain us as a great economic power.
All of our witnesses today voiced some level of alarm about
dangers to the total financial system posed by hyperactive
subprime lending and its high yield, high-risk progeny,
collateralized debt obligations, derivatives and other exotic
and other unregulated mortgage backed instruments.
Some of those were intentionally designed to slip between
existing regulatory definitions. Is a credit default swap an
investment vehicle or insurance agreement? Should they be
considered futures contracts regulated by the Commodities
Future Trading Commission or securities under the purview of
the SEC? Today's testimony should help us begin to answer these
questions and describe the shape and scope of a modern,
flexible, digital regulatory structure for the future. We need
smart regulation that aligns the incentives of consumers,
lenders and borrowers to achieve stable and healthy markets
based on transparency and good faith.
Mr. Greenspan, Mr. Snow, Mr. Cox, I hope you will give us
your thoughts on the core issues that led to this crisis, and,
more importantly, your ideas on a framework for the lean but
supple regulatory approach that can defect, and hopefully
protect, the irrational exuberance, over-the-top risk taking
and consequent collapse that inflicts such damage to our
economic life.
In this political season, the search for villains is
understandable, and, in some respects, healthy.
While we are at it, we might ask ourselves why the Congress
didn't convene these hearings last March when market turbulence
first turned toxics. There's plenty of blame to go around as we
try to unravel the wildly complex tangle of people, private
companies, government agencies and market forces that is
choking modern capitalism.
We have all played a part in this crisis, and, hopefully,
we have all learned invaluable lessons. But retribution needs
to be tempered by wisdom. There's an apocryphal tale by about
the great American industrialist, Andrew Carnegie, that I think
explains why. It seems one of his lawyers made a mistake in
drafting a contract that cost Carnegie $100,000. When he was
asked why he didn't fire the attorney, Carnegie replied,
``Well, I just spend $100,000 training him.''
Well, we are learning some expensive lessons and hopefully
will put them to good use.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Waxman. Mr. Davis----
Mr. Mica. Mr. Chairman, I have a unanimous consent request.
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman will state his unanimous
consent request.
Mr. Mica. Mr. Chairman, I would like to submit for the
record, and also distribute to the Members, a copy of a letter
which is signed by myself, in fact, all Members that are here
today, on our side of the aisle, and other leaders in Congress,
requesting the attorney general of the United States appoint a
general counsel, a special prosecutor. As you recall----
Chairman Waxman. The unanimous consent is to put the
document into the record?
Mr. Mica. Yes. If you recall, during the hearing----
Chairman Waxman. Over the objection--is there any
objection, because you are not recognized for a speech.
The unanimous consent request----
Mr. Mica. Well, I just wanted to explain that this hearing
is being hijacked.
Chairman Waxman. Well, there is objection, and the
gentleman is no longer recognized.
Mr. Mica. Coverage before----
Chairman Waxman. We have before us now----
Mr. Mica. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. After next week.
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman will cease his comments so
we can go ahead with our hearing.
Mr. Mica. Thank you for allowing me to successfully put
that thought.
Chairman Waxman. We are pleased to welcome for our hearing
today three very distinguished witnesses. Alan Greenspan,
former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, Dr. Greenspan
served as chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal
Reserve system for 18 years.
Under President Ford, Dr. Greenspan was the chairman of the
President's Council of Economic Advisors. He also served as
chairman of the National Commission on Social Security reform
and the Economic Policy Advisory Board under President Reagan.
He currently serves as president of Greenspan Associates, LLC.
Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange
Commission, Mr. Cox is currently the chairman of the Securities
and Exchange Commission. He was sworn in on August 3, 2005. Mr.
Cox was a Member of Congress for 17 years, serving in the
majority leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives. Under
President Reagan he served as a senior associate counsel in the
White House.
John Snow, former Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Snow is
the former Secretary of the Treasury under President Bush. Mr.
Snow served for 3 years in that position and worked closely
with the White House on a broad portfolio of economic policy
issues. Prior to becoming Treasury Secretary, Mr. Snow served
as chairman and CEO of CSX Corp. Mr. Snow also served at the
Department of Transportation during both the Nixon and Ford
administrations.
We are pleased to welcome the three of you today. Your
testimony will be in the record in its entirety. It is the
practice of this committee that all witnesses testify before us
do so under oath. So I would like to request the three of you
please to stand and raise your right hands.
[Witnesses sworn.]
Chairman Waxman. The record will indicate that each of the
witnesses answered in the affirmative.
We are here today in this hearing to hear from you and to
be able to question you. I want to thank each of you for
coming, because you have an enormous amount to contribute to
our understanding of the financial mess that we are in now, and
to give us our ideas of where we go for the future.
As I said, your prepared statements were going to be in the
record in full.
I am going to recognize each of you. We ordinarily ask that
oral presentations be no more than 5 minutes. We will keep a
clock, but we will not enforce that 5 minutes rigorously, but
we do want that clock to be there to inform you that the green
light is on for 4 minutes, the orange light means there's 1
minute left. When the red light is on, the 5 minutes has
expired.
If you are mindful of that fact, you might then contemplate
winding down, but we will not interrupt any of the witnesses'
presentations because what you have to say is so very
important, and you are the only three witnesses we have for
today's hearing.
Dr. Greenspan, we want to start with you. There's a button
on the base the mic. You are not inexperienced in testifying
before Congress, so I will recognize you to proceed as you see
fit.
Mr. Greenspan. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Waxman. Pull the microphone a little closer to
you.
STATEMENTS OF ALAN GREENSPAN, FORMER CHAIRMAN OF THE FEDERAL
RESERVE BOARD; CHRISTOPHER COX, CHAIRMAN OF THE SECURITIES AND
EXCHANGE COMMISSION; AND JOHN SNOW, FORMER SECRETARY OF THE
TREASURY
STATEMENT OF ALAN GREENSPAN
Mr. Greenspan. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I
appreciate having an extra few minutes, because I will run
slightly over. I will try to do it as expeditiously as
possible.
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Davis and members of the
committee, thank you for this opportunity to testify.
Mr. Shays. Could you just put the mic a little closer, Mr.
Greenspan. Thank you, that will help.
Mr. Greenspan. Thank you for this opportunity to testify
before you this morning. We are in the midst of a once in a
century credit tsunami. Central banks and governments are being
required to take unprecedented measures. You, importantly,
represent those on whose behalf represent economic policy is
made, those who are feeling the brunt of the crisis in their
workplaces and homes. I hope to address those concerns today.
This morning, I would like to provide my views on the
sources of the crisis, what policies can best address the
financial crisis going forward and how I expect the economy to
perform in the near and long term. I also want to discuss how
my thinking has evolved and what I have learned this past year.
In 2005, I raised concerns that the protracted period of
underpricing of risk, if history was any guide, would have dire
consequences. The crisis, however, has turned out to be much
broader than anything I could have imagined. It has morphed
from one grip by liquidity restraints to one in which fears of
insolvency are now paramount.
Given the financial damage to date, I cannot see how we can
avoid a significant rise in layoffs and unemployment. Fearful
American households are attempting to adjust as best they can
to a rapid contraction in credit availability, threats to
retirement funds and increased job insecurity.
All of this implies a marked retrenchment of consumer
spending, as households try to divert an increasing part of
their incomes to replenish depleted assets, not only in
401(k)'s, but in the value of their homes as well. Indeed, a
necessary condition for this crisis to end is the stabilization
of home prices in the United States. They will stabilize and
clarify the level of equity in U.S. homes, the ultimate
collateral support for the value of much of the world's
mortgage-backed securities.
At a minimum, stabilization of home prices is still many
months in the future. When it arrives, the market freeze should
begin to measurably thaw, and frightened investors will take
tentative steps toward reengagement with risk. Broken market
ties among banks, pension and hedge funds, and all types of
nonfinancial businesses, will become reestablished, and our
complex global economy will move forward.
Between then and now, however, to avoid severe
retrenchment, banks and other financial intermediaries will
need the support that only the substitution of sovereign credit
for private credit can bestow. The $700 billion Troubled Assets
Relief Program is adequate to serve that need. Indeed, the
impact is already being felt. Yield spreads are narrowing.
As I wrote last March, those of us who have looked to the
self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders
equity, myself especially, are in a state of shocked disbelief.
Such counterparty surveillance is a central pillar of our
financial markets state of balance.
If it fails, as occurred this year, market stability is
undermined.
What went wrong with global economic policies that had
worked so effectively for nearly four decades? The breakdown
has been most apparent in the securitization of home mortgages.
The evidence strongly suggests that without the excess demand
from securitizers, subprime mortgage originations, undeniably
the original source of the crisis, would have been far smaller
and defaults, accordingly, far fewer.
But subprime mortgages, pooled and sold as securities,
became subject to explosive demand from investors around the
world. These mortgage-backed securities, being subprime, were
originally offered at what appeared to be exceptionally high
risk-adjusted market interest rates. But with the U.S. home
prices still rising, delinquency and foreclosure rates were
deceptively modest. Losses were minimal. To the most
sophisticated investors in the world, they were wrongly viewed
as a steal.
The consequent surge in global demand for U.S. subprime
securities by banks, hedge and pension funds, supported by
unrealistically positive rating designations by credit
agencies, was, in my judgment, the core of the problem. Demand
became so aggressive that too many securitizers and lenders
believed they were able to create and sell mortgage-backed
securities so quickly, that they never put their shareholders'
capital at risk, and, hence, did not have the incentive to
evaluate the credit quality of what they were selling.
Pressures on lenders to supply more paper collapsed
subprime underwriting standards from 2005 forward. Uncritical
acceptance of credit ratings by purchasers of these toxic
assets has led to huge losses.
It was the failure to properly price such risky assets that
precipitated the crisis. In recent decades, a vast risk
management and pricing system has evolved, combining the best
insights with mathematicians and finance experts, supported by
major advances in computer and communications technology.
A Nobel Prize was awarded for discovery of the pricing
model that underpins much of the advance in derivatives
markets. This modern risk management paradigm held sway for
decades. The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in
the summer of last year, because the data inputted into the
risk management models generally covered only the past two
decades, a period of euphoria.
Instead, the model has been fitted more appropriately to
historic periods of stress, capital requirements would have
been much higher, and the financial world would be in far
better shape today, in my judgment.
When, in August 2007, markets eventually trashed the credit
agencies rosy ratings, a blanket of uncertainty descended on
the community. Doubt was indiscriminately cast on pricing of
securities that had any taint of subprime backlog--backing.
As much as I would have preferred otherwise, in this
financial environment I see no choice but to require that all
securitizers retain a meaningful part of the securities they
issue. This will offset, in part, market deficiencies stemming
from the failures of counterparty surveillance.
There are additional regulatory changes at this breakdown
of the central pillar of competitive markets requires in order
to return to stability, particularly, in the areas of fraud,
settlement and securitization.
It is important to remember, however, that whatever
regulatory changes are made, they will pale in comparison to
the exchange already evident in today's markets. Those markets
for an indefinite future will be far more restrained than with
any currently contemplated new regulatory regime.
The financial landscape that will greet the end of the
crisis will be far different from the one that entered it
little more than a year ago. Investors, chastened, will be
exceptionally cautious. Structured investment vehicles, Alt-A
mortgages, and a myriad of other exotic financial instruments
are not now, and are unlikely to ever find willing buyers.
Regrettably, also on that list are subprime mortgages, the
market for which has virtually disappeared. Home and small
business ownership are vital commitments to a community. We
should thus seek ways to reestablish a more sustainable
subprime mortgage market. This crisis will pass, and America
will reemerge with a far sounder financial system.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you very much, Dr. Greenspan.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Greenspan follows:]
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Chairman Waxman. Mr. Cox.
STATEMENT OF CHRISTOPHER COX
Mr. Cox. Thank you, Chairman Waxman, Ranking Member Davis
and members of the committee for inviting me to discuss the
lessons from the credit crisis and the lessons for the future
of Federal regulation.
I am pleased to join with former Chairman Greenspan and
with former Secretary Snow, who, together, have given more than
30 years in service to their country.
Chairman Waxman. Will you pull the mic a little closer.
Thanks.
Mr. Cox. The SEC's place in the regulatory structure is, of
course, different than the Federal Reserve and the Treasury.
The SEC sets the rules for disclosure of material
information by public companies. We set the rules for the
securities exchanges and the broker dealers, who trade on those
exchanges, and, above all, the SEC is a law enforcement agency.
The lessons of the credit crisis all point to the need for
a strong SEC, which is unique in its arms-length relationship
to Wall Street.
The genesis of the current crisis, as this committee has
highlighted in recent hearings, was the deterioration of
mortgage origination standards. As the SEC's former chief
accountant testified at one of your earlier hearings, if honest
lending practices had been followed, much of this crisis, quite
simply, would not have occurred.
The packaging of risky mortgages into complex structured
securities with AAA ratings spread the risks into the
securities markets, and what significantly amplified this
crisis around the globe was the parallel market in credit
default swaps, which is completely unregulated. Credit default
swaps multiplied the risk of the failure of bad mortgages by
orders of magnitude. And they ensured that when housing prices
collapsed, the effects cascaded throughout the financial
system.
Like each of you, I have asked myself what I would do
differently with the benefit of hindsight. There are several
things.
First, I think that every regulator wishes that he or she
had been able to predict the unprecedented meltdown of the
entire U.S. mortgage market which was the fundamental cause of
this crisis. Second, although I was not at the SEC in 2004 when
the voluntary Consolidated Supervised Entities Program was
unanimously adopted by the Commission, knowing what I know now
I would have wanted to question every one of the program's
assumptions from the start.
In particular, I would have wanted to question its reliance
on the widely used Basel standards for commercial banks and the
Federal Reserve's 10 percent well-capitalized standard for bank
holding companies. Those standards, as we have seen, proved
insufficient for commercial banks as well.
Third, knowing what I know now, I would have urged Congress
to pass legislation to repeal the credit default swaps loophole
in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Last month, I
formally asked Congress to fill this regulatory gap, and I
urged this committee to join in this effort, which cannot wait
until next year.
Fourth, I would have been even more aggressive in urging
legislation to require stronger disclosure to investors in
municipal securities. Individual investors account for nearly
two-thirds of this multi trillion dollar market, and yet
neither the SEC, nor any Federal regulator, has the authority
to insist on full disclosure. Most importantly, we have learned
that voluntary regulation of financial conglomerates does not
work. Neither the SEC nor any regulator has the statutory
authority to regulate investment bank holding companies, except
on a voluntary basis, and that must be fixed.
The current crisis has also highlighted what does work, in
particular, the SEC's regulation of broker dealers and its
protection of their customers. So in strengthening the role of
the SEC, Congress should build on that 74-year tradition, as
well on the agency's strong law enforcement and its public
company disclosure regime that provides transparency for
investors.
Finally, we have learned that for regulators to make
accurate predictions requires a comprehensive picture of
capital flows, liquidity and risks throughout the system. But
coordination among regulators, which is so important, is
enormously difficult in the current Balkanized regulatory
system.
Here, the organization of Congress itself is part of the
problem. Legislative jurisdiction is split so that banking,
insurance and securities fall within the province of the House
Financial Services Committee, and the Senate Banking Committee,
while futures fall under the Agriculture Committees in both the
House and the Senate. This long-running turf battle is one of
the reasons that credit default swaps aren't regulated.
But the Congress has overcome these jurisdictional divides
before in urgent circumstances with the appointment of a select
committee. As soon as possible, Congress should appoint a
select committee on financial services regulatory reform, that
includes representatives from all the affected jurisdictions.
As you know, I chaired such a committee for 2 years after
9/11, following which the House created the permanent Homeland
Security Committee.
A select committee could address these urgent questions
from a comprehensive standpoint. It could tackle the challenge
of merging the SEC and the CFTC, which I strongly support. This
would bring futures within the same general framework that
currently governs economically similar securities.
Mr. Chairman, these are some of the lessons learned during
this crisis and some of the future opportunities, but just as
important is dealing with the current emergency. The SEC is
using our new authority, under the Credit Rating Agency Reform
Act, to strengthen the ratings process. We have worked with the
Financial Accounting Standards Board on off-balance sheet
liabilities, fair-value standards in inactive markets and bank
support for money market funds.
We have, required disclosures of short positions to the SEC
and strengthened investor protections against naked short
selling, and we are working to establish one or more central
counterparties for credit default swaps. Our enforcement
division has over 50 subprime investigations underway, and we
have mounted a nationwide investigation to potential fraud in
the securities of the some of the Nation's largest financial
institutions.
This past year, the SEC brought the largest number of
insider trading cases in the agency's history and the second
highest number of cases overall. And our recently announced
preliminary settlements with some of the largest financial
institutions on Wall Street will return $50 billion to
investors in auction-rate securities. These will be, by far,
the largest settlements in the SEC's histories.
Mr. Chairman, the role of the SEC has never been more
important. I am humbled to work side by side with the dedicated
men and women who fight each day for the protection of
America's investors in our markets. Thank you for the
opportunity to discuss the role of the SEC and the lessons from
the current crisis. I will be happy to take your questions.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you very much, Mr. Cox. We will have
questions for you, all three of you, after all of you have
testified.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Cox follows:]
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Chairman Waxman. Mr. Snow. Is your microphone on? There's a
button.
STATEMENT OF JOHN SNOW
Mr. Snow. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member
Davis, members of the committee, it's an honor and a privilege
to be here with you today to talk about this issue of
extraordinary importance to the American people.
Millions and millions of Americans now realize that the
health of the financial system isn't some abstraction, it's the
stuff of real, day-to-day life for them.
We meet in an extraordinary time. Nowhere that I can
recall, during my adult lifetime, has the financial system been
so deeply troubled, so fractured, frozen.
The consequences of the frozen financial system, of course,
Mr. Chairman, are spilling over to the real economy, and we now
seem to be on a clear path to much slower growth rates,
probably going negative, if they are not negative already, with
significant consequences for the lives of our citizens, with
many jobs put in jeopardy, and the prosperity of the American
people put in jeopardy. But this is a global problem. This is
not just a U.S. problem, as the leaders of the world now
recognize.
I served, and was honored to serve, at the Treasury
Department from early 2003 until the middle of 2006. Treasury
doesn't have direct regulatory authority, as you know, but it
does have broad policy responsibilities.
One of the key responsibilities of Treasury is to try and
identify risks, the risks that threaten the health and
prosperity of the American people, the risks, the systemic
risks that could produce far-reaching contagion in the
financial system and spill over into the global economy, into
the U.S. economy.
I tried, when I was Treasury Secretary, to keep my eye on
what those risks were, the focus on them. Where we saw clear
visible risks, and some of you saw them as well with--I am
thinking here, of Congressman Shays, where we saw clear visible
risks as in the case of the GSEs, we acted.
I testified before the Congress in 2003. I testified again
in 2005. I gave countless speeches, had countless meetings with
Members of Congress pointing, out that the GSEs represented a
huge systemic risk, a risk that unfortunately grew during that
period, Mr. Chairman, as they continued to broaden out, an
extraordinary blowout, growth of their own investment, their
own investment portfolios.
I called for a strong regulator. We called for a
disclosure. We called for application of the securities laws.
We called for a regulator who would have authority over capital
standards. We called for a regulator who could limit the growth
of their portfolios. We called for a regulator who could limit
the lines of business they could get into, and, most
importantly, to deal with the implied guarantee, which was at
the heart of the problem, the fact their paper traded like U.S.
Government paper.
We called for a regulator with the ability to have a
restucturing through liquidation and bankruptcy of those
entities, sending a clear message to the markets that they
weren't, ``too big to fail.''
I think if we had acted then, Mr. Chairman, there may not
have been the need for this hearing today. I regret I wasn't
more effective in trying to persuade Congress of the need for
action to deal with the risk that I saw as the largest and most
visible systemic risk at the time.
Beyond Fannie and Freddie, we were also continuously on the
lookout for the problems that could emerge. As I thought about
the problems that could emerge in 2003 and 2004, it became
clear to me that we needed a new regulatory system. We needed
to change it.
We have a fractured regulatory system, one in which no
single regulator has a clear view, a 360-degree view of the
risks inherent in the system. We need to change that. We need
to move to a 360-degree view regulatory system.
During my time at Treasury, I commissioned a blueprint to
put that in place. I am pleased to see that now a version of
that have blueprint is before you, and I hope you will act on
it.
So, basically, Mr. Chairman, where we saw at Treasury in
our policy role, visible risks, as is with the GSEs, we acted,
we called for the strong regulator. Where the risks where
inchoate, where they were not yet clearly visible, we
recognized that a much stronger, mother effective regulatory
system should be put in place.
I look forward to responding to your questions. Thank you
very much.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you very much, Mr. Snow.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Snow follows:]
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Chairman Waxman. We will now proceed to questioning by the
Members. Without objection, the questioning of witnesses will
proceed as follows.
Questioning will begin with a 12-minute block of time for
each side with the chairman and the ranking member each having
the right to reserve time for later use.
I will start the questioning.
Dr. Greenspan, I want to start with you. You were the
longest-serving chairman of the Federal Reserve in history, and
during this period of time, you were, perhaps, the leading
proponent of deregulation of our financial markets. Certainly
you were the most influential voice for deregulation. You have
been a staunch advocate for letting markets regulate
themselves. Let me give you a few of your past statements.
In 1994, you testified at a congressional hearing on
regulation of financial derivatives. You said are, ``There's
nothing involved in Federal regulation which makes it superior
to market regulation.'' In 1997, you said, ``There appears to
be no need for government regulation of off-exchanged
derivative transactions.'' In 2002, when the collapse of Enron
led to renewed congressional efforts to regulate derivatives,
you wrote the Senate, ``We do not believe a public policy case
exists to justify this government intervention.'' Earlier this
year, you wrote in the Financial Times, ``Bank loan officers,
in my experience, know far more about the risks and workings of
their counterparties than do bank regulators.''
My question for you is simple, were you wrong?
Mr. Greenspan. Partially.
Chairman Waxman. Be sure the mic is turned on.
Mr. Greenspan. Sure. Partially, but let's separate this
problem into its component parts. I took a very strong position
on the issue of derivatives and the efficacy of what they were
doing for the economy as a whole, which, in effect, is
essentially to transfer risk from those who have very
difficulty--have great difficulty in absorbing it, to those who
have the capital to absorb losses if and when they occur. These
derivatives are working well. Let me put it to you very
specifically.
Chairman Waxman. So you don't think you were wrong in not
wanting to regulate the derivatives?
Mr. Greenspan. Well, it depends on which derivatives we are
talking about. Credit default swaps, I think, have serious
problems associated with them.
But, the bulk of derivatives, and, indeed, the only
derivatives that existed when the major discussion started in
1999, were those of interest rate risk and foreign exchange
risk.
Chairman Waxman. Let me interrupt you, because we do have a
limited amount of time, but you said in your statement that you
delivered the whole intellectual edifice of modern risk
management collapsed. You also said, ``those of us who have
looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect
shareholders' equity, myself especially, are in a ``state of
shock, disbelief.'' Now that sounds to me like you are saying
that those who trusted the market to regulate itself, yourself
included, made a serious mistake.
Mr. Greenspan. Well, I think that's true of some products,
but not all. I think that's the reason why it's important to
distinguish the size of this problem and its nature.
What I wanted to point out was that the--excluding credit
default swaps, derivatives markets are working well.
Chairman Waxman. Well, where did you make a mistake then?
Mr. Greenspan. I made a mistake in presuming that the self-
interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were
such is that they were best capable of protecting their own
shareholders and their equity in the firms.
And it's been my experience, having worked both as a
regulator for 18 years and similar quantities, in the private
sector, especially, 10 years at a major international bank,
that the loan officers of those institutions knew far more
about the risks involved and the people to whom they lent
money, than I saw even our best regulators at the Fed capable
of doing.
So the problem here is something which looked to be a very
solid edifice, and, indeed, a critical pillar to market
competition and free markets, did break down. And I think that,
as I said, shocked me. I still do not fully understand why it
happened and, obviously, to the extent that I figure out where
it happened and why, I will change my views. If the facts
change, I will change.
Chairman Waxman. Dr. Greenspan, Paul Krugman, the Princeton
Professor of Economics who just won a Nobel Prize, wrote a
column in 2006 as the subprime mortgage crisis started to
emerge.
He said, ``If anyone is to blame for the current situation,
it's Mr. Greenspan, who pooh-poohed warnings about an emerging
bubble and did nothing to crack down on irresponsible
lending.''
He obviously believes you deserve some of the blame for our
current conditions.
I would like your perspective. Do you have any personal
responsibility for the financial crisis?
Mr. Greenspan. Well, let me give you a little history, Mr.
Chairman.
There's been a considerable amount of discussion about my
views on subprime markets in the year 2000, and, indeed, one of
our most distinguished Governors at the time, Governor Gramlich
who, frankly, is, regrettably deceased, but was unquestionably
one of the best Governors I ever had to deal with--came to my
office and said that he was having difficulties with the
problem of what really turned out to be fairly major problems
in predatory lending.
Chairman Waxman. Well, he urged you to move with the power
that you as chairman of the Fed, as both Treasury Department
and HUD suggested, that you put in place regulations that would
have curbed these emerging abuses in subprime lending. But you
didn't listen to the Treasury Department or to Mr. Gramlich.
Do you think that was a mistake on your part?
Mr. Greenspan. Well, I questioned the facts of that. He and
I had a conversation. I said to him, I have my doubts as to
whether it would be successful.
But to understand the process by which decisions are made
at the Fed, it's important to recognize what are lines of
responsibilities and lines of authority are within the
structure of the system. The Fed has incredibly--professional
large division, that covers consumer and community affairs. It
has probably the best banking lawyers in the business, in the
legal department, and an outside counsel of expert
professionals to advise on regulatory matters. And what the
system actually did was to try to corral all of this ongoing
information and to eventually filter into a subcommittee of the
Federal Reserve board----
Chairman Waxman. Dr. Greenspan, I am going to interrupt
you. The question I had for you is you had an ideology. You had
a belief that free, competitive--and this is shown--your
statement, ``I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free,
competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize
economies. We have tried regulation, none meaningfully
worked.''
That was your quote. You have the authority to prevent
irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime
mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others.
Now, our whole economy is paying its price. You feel that
your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you
had not made?
Mr. Greenspan. Well, remember, though, whether or not
ideology is, is a conceptual framework with the way people deal
with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need
an ideology.
The question is, whether it exists is accurate or not. What
I am saying to you is, yes, I found a flaw, I don't know how
significant or permanent it is, but I have been very distressed
by that fact. But if I may, may I just finish an answer to the
question----
Chairman Waxman. You found a flaw?
Mr. Greenspan. I found a flaw in the model that I perceived
is the critical functioning structure that defines how the
world works, so to speak.
Chairman Waxman. In other words, you found that your view
of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working.
Mr. Greenspan. Precisely. That's precisely the reason I was
shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with
very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally
well.
But let me just, if I may----
Chairman Waxman. Well, the problem is that the time has
expired.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. He wishes to answer. Can you just
let him answer.
Chairman Waxman. We have many Members.
Mr. Greenspan. If I could have just a minute. The reason,
basically, is this--Governor Gramlich said to me, that he had
problems. Indeed, I agreed that I had heard very much the same
thing. I frankly thought that when our meeting ended, that a
subcommittee of the board which supervises all of the various
aspects of consumer and community affairs within the Board of
Governors and the Federal Reserve system, would move forward
and prevent to the board as a whole, recommendations to be
made. That was not made, and I presumed, at the time, that
essentially the subcommittee didn't think it rose to the higher
level.
But, just quickly, to say that the overall view that I take
of regulation is that I took a pledge, when--I took an oath of
office when I became Federal Reserve chairman, and I recognized
that you do with that, what I did is I said that I am here to
uphold the laws of the land passed by the Congress, not my own
predilections.
I think you will find that my history is that I voted for
virtually every regulatory action that the Federal Reserve
board moved forward on. Indeed, I voted with the majority at
all times, and I was doing so because I perceived that was the
will of the Congress. In fact, you go back and you look at the
record, I felt required by my oath of office to adhere to what
I am supposed to do, not what I would like to do. And that is
my history, and I think the evidence very strongly supports
that.
Chairman Waxman. Well, I appreciate that. On the other
hand, you didn't get to vote on regulations that didn't put
before the Federal Reserve Board, even though you have the
legal authority for those regulations. That's more--not a
question but a comment.
Mr. Davis.
Mr. Issa. Mr. Chairman, Mr. Davis, I was just going to ask
if you needed more than the 12 minutes, because we had run
over, but it's done.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Thank you. Let me start with all of
you, but, Dr. Greenspan, I will start with you. I think what we
see now as laying a predicate for what I always fear happens
when there's a crisis, and that it is that Congress overreacts
to the situation.
It seems to me that it wasn't just deregulation that
allowed this crisis, it was the mishmash of regulations and
regulators with too narrow a view of the increasingly
integrated national global markets. But I would like to get all
of your reactions to the following.
In terms of legislation passed by the Congress, what
effects, if any, and were they right or wrong in Gramm-Leach-
Bliley, the Commodities Futures Modernization Act and our
failure to regulate Freddie and Fannie. If you would look at
those three all congressional actions or inactions, to what
effect, if any, did they have on this crisis and if there are
any suggestions you would make in the future in terms of how we
would proceed.
Mr. Greenspan. I have been talking at great length----
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Mr. Cox, let me start with you,
Chris.
Mr. Cox. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Regulatory gaps have been the be deviling solution to this
crisis now during the last year. It's been 1 year since we had
the all-time stock market high. Are you still having trouble
hearing?
During the past year, regulators have been cooperating at
the international level and within the Federal Government, and
Federal to State, more closely than ever before. But what we
are seeing is different parts of the elephant. We are trying to
integrate that as closely as we can.
The coordination is complicated by the fact that, first,
the agencies themselves administered different laws and
governed economically similar products in different ways.
Second, their jurisdiction comes to an abrupt stop and,
sometimes, the next regulatory agency doesn't pick up with
where that leads off.
One of the most significant regulatory gaps is the one to
which several of you have alluded here this morning, and that
is the gap in the 2,000 CFMA that left completely unregulated
and leaves open today as we meet here the $58 trillion notional
market in credit default swaps.
The reason that has turned out to be so important is not
simply the dollar amount of risk involved, but the fact that
its opaque, the fact that parties and counterparties don't know
where the exposures are. It makes it very, very difficult to
price risk throughout the system. It's why I think it's so
urgent that we address that gap, that we address the gap----
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Chairman Cox, that particular act
where we failed to address that was a mistake in retrospect, it
basically legalized gambling.
Mr. Cox. Well, I think it's important to note, as Chairman
Greenspan does, how much has changed since this was first look
at in the Clinton administration in 1999. Because back then, as
Chairman Greenspan points out, the credit default swaps market
had barely emerged.
It was a share of the total derivatives markets that was
too small to be noticed. It has grown enormously in the recent
years. It has doubled just in the last 2 years. So it's
absolutely urgent--now that we know how important it is in the
context of the current crisis and the difficulty that the
markets and the investors are having pricing risk that we bring
disclosure to this corner of the market, that we let the market
see where the risk is and market it accordingly.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Thank you. Mr. Snow, also on the
Freddie and Fannie issues, you have addressed that in your
opening markets.
Mr. Snow. Thank you, Congressman Davis. It seems to me the
root issue here, when you get right down to it, is risk and
leverage.
Nowhere in our financial regulatory system is there anyone
with full accountability and full 360-degree view on that
proposition, risk and leverage.
I saw that in my days at the Treasury Department. I
remember in 2005 sensing that there were developments in the
debt markets, the subprime and the mortgage markets that needed
to be better understood. I took what was deemed to be a fairly
extraordinary step and called in all of the substantive
regulators of the mortgage market.
I asked them to give their considered views on whether or
not undo risk was being created. We didn't yet have a housing
crisis. We didn't yet have a subprime crisis.
But I wanted to get their view that did eventually lead to
new guidance to the regulators.
But the Congressman was quoting me that no one of them had
that view. They had pieces of the puzzle. It's like the blind
man and the elephant. They are all touching a piece of it, but
they don't know what the big picture is. That's why I did
commission the effort to produce the blueprint for a new
regulatory system.
As you know, the Treasury has set up a new blueprint to
create some agency with that 360-degree view. With the GSEs, I
think we all made a mistake in not acting much, much more
earlier. If that strong regulator had been put in place in a
timely way, if the market had had more visibility----
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Well, let me ask this: If a strong
regulator had been put in earlier, would that really have
averted this crisis?
Mr. Snow. Nobody really knows for sure whether it would
have averted it, but I am confident that it would have been a
much different kind of crisis. Because the GSEs were the source
of such an extraordinary amount of risk in the system, risk
that wasn't really visible, risk that really wasn't seen to
most of the participants.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. And they had the appearance of
government backing?
Mr. Snow. And it absolutely had the appearance of
government backing, which was at the center of the risk
creation process. Because if you can borrow at government
rates, you can make money on any other instruments, any other
financial instruments.
So it created an incentive to borrow at an extraordinary
rate and then go out and buy all the paper you could get ahold
of. That's why we see the explosion, it's not an exaggeration,
in their for-profit activities, their own held portfolio that
went way beyond anything that was needed to carry on their
public policy mission of making the secondary market.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Dr. Greenspan, the Commodities
Futures Modernization Act, which passed Congress by an
overwhelming margin based the House on suspension. I think only
their view is a handful of dissenting votes signed by President
Clinton.
In retrospective, as we look at that, was this a question
of regulation, deregulation or just gaps in regulation where
you had so many stovepipes no one could actually see the total
landscape and things started to occur underneath it, and we
weren't able to react. And also, I would ask you about Freddie
and Fannie and their roles in this.
Mr. Greenspan. Well, it's important, when talking about a
regulation, not to talk in blanket terms, but to focus on
specific issues.
For example, as I mentioned before, the discussion that
came out of the original 2000 act relevant to derivatives,
actually has worked reasonably well with the exception of a
major change, which is credit default swaps.
In the year 2005, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
became quite concerned about the issue of the settlement
process on credit default swaps and started to try to get a
very significant improvement in the technologies which they
were involved with. That effort has continued considerably.
The reason why there's a big problem there is partly
because of the huge surge, as Chairman Cox says, it was
negligible in 2000, and they just, from, you know, 2 percent of
the total market, they are up over 10 percent now in a very few
years.
The problem basically is the credit default swap requires
that legally, when bankruptcy occurs, the person who has given
the protection has the legal right to the instrument.
That's fine, so long as you have a small amount of credit
default swaps. They are now running 10 times the size the
actual instrument being insured and because of the default they
are required to do cash settlements. But that's a voluntary
basis. It's not legally mandated.
In my judgment, it's very important that issue be resolved
because at some point, the voluntary agreement process is going
to break down, and we will have a very serious problem. So,
where I think critical regulatory issues have to occur is on
the legal question of defining the process by which the
resolution occurs.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. It didn't help that the rating
agencies were rating all of these instruments the way they
were. That made it look like less risk for the people that were
in the swaps.
Mr. Greenspan. Indeed it did. Yes.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. I will reserve the balance of my
time.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Davis.
Mrs. Maloney.
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I welcome all
the panelists. I have some questions for Mr. Snow, Mr. Cox and
Dr. Greenspan on market manipulation.
Dr. Greenspan, prior to the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers
last month, one of the largest bankruptcies in our history, was
the collapse of Enron. I want to ask you about Enron and your
views about the regulation of derivatives. After Enron's
collapse investigations by the State of California and other
States revealed widespread manipulation of energy markets by
Enron and other energy companies. Using schemes like Fat Boy,
Death Star, and Get Smarty, Enron created artificial shortages,
bypassed regulatory protections and drove energy prices sky
high.
At the time there was no regulation of Enron's trading in
energy derivatives. There was no public disclosure requirements
and no record keeping requirements. There were no anti-fraud or
anti-manipulation provisions. Basically there was absolutely no
oversight whatsoever, and what was there was removed. And what
happened is that Enron and other companies took advantage of
this lack of regulation and oversight.
In 2000, before the Enron collapse, I tried to close this
loophole. I offered an amendment at the Banking Committee which
would have required regulation of energy derivatives.
Unfortunately despite bipartisan support, the amendment failed.
After Enron other Members of Congress tried to close this
loophole, most notably Senator Feinstein, who introduced
amendments and legislation about trading in energy derivatives.
She tried to do this through freestanding bills and additional
amendments to other pieces of legislation.
Dr. Greenspan, you adamantly opposed these efforts. I would
like to show you a letter that you sent on September 18, 2002.
In this letter you stated that, ``public disclosure of pricing
data would not improve the overall price discovery process.''
You argued in these letters that ``disclosure would actually
increase the vulnerability of our economy to potential future
stresses,'' and despite Enron's abuses you said, ``We do not
believe a public policy case exists to justify this government
intervention.''
I sincerely believe that efforts such as my effort in the
Banking Committee and Senator Feinstein's efforts in the Senate
would have passed without your opposition. So, Dr. Greenspan,
in retrospect do you think you were right to oppose these
efforts to regulate energy derivatives?
Mr. Greenspan. Senator Feinstein said the same thing to me.
She's a longtime friend and we have debated this issue to
considerable extent.
First of all, the major problem I was having with the
energy derivative issue was that it was an electric power
problem. Electric power, as you know, cannot be stored and as a
result----
Mrs. Maloney. Excuse me, Dr. Greenspan, my amendment was
that--and my effort was that it be listed on the Commodities
Future Exchange. It was listed. Then there was an effort to
remove it from listing. So there was absolutely no knowledge of
what was happening in energy derivatives. So mine was a broader
one. It was not specifically to California.
Mr. Greenspan. OK. Let me do this----
Mrs. Maloney. So basically it was regulation of energy
derivatives.
Mr. Greenspan. I generally remember the issue, but I'd have
to go back and refresh my memory. And if I may, let me look at
it and come back to you as soon as I can if you allow me to do
so.
[The information referred to follows:]
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Mrs. Maloney. Thank you. I'd appreciate that.
Now in light of what has happened in the markets, do you
believe there should be some oversight and regulation of
derivatives in general?
Mr. Greenspan. Well, I have just cited one, the credit
default swaps.
Mrs. Maloney. OK. I have some questions for the others.
Thank you for your service.
Mr. Snow, you also opposed this effort, joining Dr.
Greenspan in another letter the next year. Here is what you
wrote: ``In our judgment the ability of private counterparty
surveillance to effectively regulate these markets can be
undermined by inappropriate extensions of government
regulation.''
Why was it inappropriate to require transparency and
disclosure for energy derivatives, Mr. Snow?
Mr. Snow. Thank you for the question. As is the case with
the chairman, I don't recall the ins and outs of your amendment
or the debate around it but----
Mrs. Maloney. In this case I'm asking about your statements
and letters where you said you opposed it----
Mr. Snow. But I don't have them with me and----
Mrs. Maloney. I'll get you a copy.
Mr. Snow [continuing]. I don't have your amendments or your
language. But generally let me respond this way.
There is always a balance when it comes to markets and
regulation. It's not in my view one or the other. It's finding
the right balance. And one of the arguments that always was in
the back of my mind whenever anybody proposed more regulation
is will this make the market work better or will it get in the
way of the way markets work? And there is what exists call a
moral hazard issue associated with regulation where the market
itself begins to look to the regulation to say, well, that's
the government's good housekeeping seal of approval on these
activities and when there is a perception of a government good
housekeeping seal of approval, some of the incentives for the
due diligence on the part of the counterparties gets
undermined.
I don't recall the specifics, but I think that was probably
what I was referring to.
Chairman Waxman. We'll be pleased to hold the record open
to get any further comments on this particular issue from both
Dr. Greenspan and Mr. Snow.
Mrs. Maloney. Mr. Waxman, may I request 30 seconds to ask
my question of Dr. Cox?
Chairman Waxman. Well, I think that would be 30 seconds to
ask the question and who knows how long to answer the question.
Mrs. Maloney. Then I will send it to you in writing.
Chairman Waxman. On the Republican side, Mr. Issa--Mr.
Mica.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Chairman, can I just make a unanimous
consent motion?
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman wishes to be recognized for
unanimous consent?
Mr. Shays. Because of the questioning that you allocated
each of you and our ranking member, you had to consume 11
minutes and 53 seconds and our ranking member 10 minutes and 14
seconds, and I'd like to make unanimous consent that both sides
be given another 10 minutes because I think it's important for
either you and us to be able to inject ourselves.
Chairman Waxman. Any objection to that very generous
unanimous consent? If not, that will be the order.
Mr. Mica, you're recognized.
Mr. Mica. Thank you. As I said at the beginning, I tried to
enunciate along with my request for unanimous consent to put in
a letter to request a special prosecutor to be appointed. I'm
truly disappointed that these hearings have been hijacked and
put off now until November 20th. November 20th is the date that
now has been chosen for the people to know who the real
culprits were. Let's put this out here. And I have a question
for all of the panelists. Do you know what comes before
November 20th?
Mr. Snow. The 19th.
Mr. Mica. Chris, you might recall. A little thing like an
election. What we don't want is the trail to lead to people who
have done the wrong thing. What we don't want is this committee
to hold people who started this whole mess, this fiasco,
accountable. What we've been doing is we're sort of tiptoeing
around the tulips when somebody's driven a bulldozer through
our financial garden.
Well, let's see. Chris, you weren't around--excuse me, Mr.
Cox, you weren't around. You two were around. Mr. Greenspan,
you go for two, well, three Presidents. How many years total?
Mr. Greenspan. Eighteen and a half.
Mr. Mica. Mr. Snow, when were you Secretary?
Mr. Snow. I was Secretary in February 2003 until the end of
June 2006.
Mr. Mica. OK. You testified a few minutes ago, Mr. Snow,
that you tried to regulate, right? That you tried to bring some
new regulation into this process. Did you know $178 million was
spent in 10 years by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lobby to
stop what you were trying to do? Did you know that?
Mr. Snow. I didn't know the number, Congressman, but I knew
there was a ferocious opposition.
Mr. Mica. The three of you, who is the big subprime
producer in the United States? Who? What private company?
Countrywide. I will answer it for you. Countrywide?
Mr. Snow. I'll agree.
Mr. Mica. Did any of you know that Countrywide was giving
preferential discounted loans to public officials and the heads
of a government-sponsored mortgage security agency? Did you
know that when you were in charge?
Mr. Greenspan. I did not.
Mr. Mica. Did you know that, Mr. Snow?
Mr. Snow. No, I didn't.
Mr. Mica. Well, Chris, you came along later. Did you ever
get one?
Do you know who the largest recipient of campaign
contributions is in 20 years from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
their political action organization? Do you know?
Mr. Greenspan. I do not.
Mr. Mica. Do you know?
Mr. Snow. I don't.
Mr. Mica. I said in 20 years. Maybe you're thinking it's
Senator Dodd because he was there 20 years. You know, it wasn't
Senator Dodd. Do you know who it was? Senator Obama in less
than 4 years.
Nobody wants to get to the bottom of this. Nobody wants to
stop the money trail. And I'm going to ask in a minute to put
in the record Exhibit A and it's called Follow the Money Trail.
For those of you who have difficulty distinguishing who
participated, I have pictures, photographs of the individuals
involved.
You testified in 2003, September 10th, and you came back
and testified again asking for regulation. Did you ever see--
and you did it before the whole committee. Did you ever see the
proceedings of October 6, 2004, of one of the subcommittees of
Financial Services and hear the now chairman, Mr. Frank, and
what he said about what kind of risks some of these speculative
investments posed? Did you ever see that?
Mr. Snow. I don't believe I did.
Mr. Mica. I recommend you all go on YouTube and see that
hearing of October 6. Mr. Frank said there's no risk. Mr. Frank
said we ought to roll the dice. Maxine Waters, a member of the
committee, did you hear what she said? She said, ``If it ain't
broke, don't fix it.'' Did you hear that, Mr. Greenspan? Did
you hear those comments?
Mr. Greenspan. I did not.
Mr. Mica. Did you hear them, Mr. Snow?
Mr. Snow. No, I didn't.
Mr. Mica. You ought to see that and you ought to see the
language one of the members of the committee used about how he
was mad because people were proposing legislation. Well, I will
tell you the language that he used is the language that people
are using out there that want folks held accountable.
Now, this is a nice dog and pony show and maybe it's
theater, but people want someone held accountable. They want
people to go to jail who brought down our financial markets. Do
you agree we should have some means for those folks to pay
who've ripped us off? Could you answer my question?
Mr. Greenspan. That's not the type of thing--issue with
which I deal.
Mr. Mica. Thank you.
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Mica. Could I just have them answer----
Chairman Waxman. Just a minute, Mr. Mica. Mr. Mica, just a
minute. You've asked your questions and your time is up. Now I
will give the opportunity of the witnesses to answer them but
not to have you continue to engage them. Your time is up.
Mr. Cox, do you want to respond to it?
Mr. Cox. Certainly. Aggressive law enforcement is now
needed more than ever. The SEC is a law enforcement agency
dedicated to making sure that anyone who broke the securities
laws is held accountable, and we are very, very busy on that
right now.
Mr. Snow. Any criminal behavior, fraudulent behavior
obviously ought to be investigated and acted upon by the
appropriate authorities.
Mr. Mica. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back the balance
of my time.
Chairman Waxman. The Chair yields himself some of the
generous time that's been allotted to us to say that we've held
four hearings and we have two more scheduled. We have them
scheduled after the election. But this isn't an issue that's
going to go away after the election. It's one we seriously need
to examine. And we have sent a request for further documents
from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and we are going to hold a
hearing on them and the role they played in this current crisis
as well as hedge funds. But I think what we have heard from Mr.
Mica is a political statement, not one looking into the real
issues. It's a political statement. And just to put the facts
in perspective, the explosion in subprime lending was primarily
driven by Wall Street, and the majority of those loans were
originated by unregulated mortgage brokers. According to the
Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, in 2006 during the height of
the subprime boom, Fannie Mae purchased 2.5 percent of subprime
loans, Freddie Mac .4. Combined they purchased a total of 2.9
percent of the subprime loans. In 2007, Fannie Mae increased
its purchases of subprime loans to 11.2 percent while Freddie
Mac increased it to 2.5. So their combined purchase total went
up to 13.7 percent of subprime loans. These are hardly market
driven--driving numbers. Both companies also invested in
subprime securities created by Wall Street. Again, they were
not the dominant factor in Wall Street. In 2006 their combined
market share was less than 25 percent of the secondary market.
I point those facts out not in any way to excuse Fannie Mae
or Freddie Mac and the responsibility they have. We're going to
look at their responsibility. But they were not the cause of
the financial crisis. And I'd be interested to know if any of
the three witnesses believe that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was
the cause of our financial crisis. They certainly played a role
in it, but do any of you believe they were the cause of this
financial crisis?
Dr. Greenspan.
Mr. Greenspan. I think it was a significant factor but not
the primary cause.
Chairman Waxman. Mr. Cox.
Mr. Cox. I would agree with that. I think there's no
question that the GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, played a
significant role in the subprime crisis and in fact in the
creation of structured securities and the market for those.
Chairman Waxman. Let me hear from Mr. Snow on that.
Mr. Snow. I agree with that. There's no single cause of
this. Many, many things contributed to it, but one of the
primary contributors among all the contributors is certainly
the role of Fannie and Freddie.
Chairman Waxman. I agree with the three of you, and that's
why we are going to look at those issues. But I don't think it
makes a difference that we're looking at it after the election
or before the election. We are going to look at hedge funds
after the election and we've got a problem we have to deal
with. That is not connected to this election calendar unless of
course you want to make it a connection to the electoral
calendar, which is the purpose of the gentleman from Florida.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, can I yield myself----
Chairman Waxman. Mr. Davis.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Mortgage brokers were regulated;
they were just regulated at the State level, isn't that right?
So it wasn't that they didn't have any regulation. Their
regulation was at the State. And as I've said before, one of
the problems here--these were stovepipes. Nobody had a view of
what anybody else was doing, and when you regulate these
entities at the State level nobody has a view of what's going
on nationally. I'd asked Secretary Snow prior had Fannie and
Freddie been brought under control earlier, there's no question
this crisis would not have been to the dimensions it was and
you would agree with that, don't you, Mr. Secretary?
Mr. Snow. I agree with that.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Mr. Mica.
Mr. Mica. First of all, did you all know too that Fannie
Mae was cooking the books and increasing the mortgages that
they were putting out, the subprime, so that they could get
bonuses and walk away with tens of millions of dollars in
compensation? Did you know that, Mr. Snow?
Mr. Snow. Well, I know there was an investigation by the
regulator----
Mr. Mica. Yeah, I have a copy of that.
Mr. Snow [continuing]. That found some irregularities in
the accounting practices----
Mr. Mica. Fannie Mae was pumping out these subprimes.
Fannie Mae was a government-sponsored mortgage security
operation and then competing with folks like Lehman Brothers;
so you had them discounting the amount of capital they had as a
reserve from 10. They didn't do that, now. I guess Andrew Cuomo
did that. But you had them discounting their reserve from 10 to
2\1/2\ and you had them pumping out there no doc, no down
payment subprime loans; is that not the case? And then who
follows? Wall Street, who's trying to--in our system they are
trying to make a buck, so they are discounting----
Mr. Cox. Congressman Mica, with respect to cooking the
books, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued Fannie Mae
for fraud in one of the largest settlements in the history of
the SEC.
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Mica. I have a unanimous consent request. All I'm
asking, Mr. Chairman, as I mentioned, this in my first round--
--
Chairman Waxman. State your unanimous consent request.
Mr. Mica. I ask unanimous consent that Exhibit A, Follow
the Money, and I guess we could do--the pictures be included in
the record.
Chairman Waxman. Without objection, what you seek to submit
for the record, some article called Follow the Money, will be
put into the record. It's called Exhibit A.
Mr. Cummings.
Mr. Cummings. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And today,
Mr. Chairman, I just want to--I want to ask questions that my
constituents would ask, all of those that are losing their
investments, unable to get student loans, businesses unable to
get lines of credit, businesses going out of business, people
losing their jobs. I want to ask some questions on behalf of
them. And I'm going to direct my questions to you, Mr. Cox. I
want to ask you about your position on regulating derivatives,
especially credit default swaps, which now amounts to greater
than the world's annual economic output weighing in at $54
trillion as of September. You've given the committee very
strong testimony urging greater regulation in this area. By the
way, I completely agree with you. As our hearing on AIG
demonstrated, the lack of regulation of credit default swaps
has created chaos in the financial markets all around the
world.
My question is where have you been all these years? Mr.
Cox, last month you announced that the SEC would begin
requiring hedge fund managers, broker dealers, and
institutional investors to disclose their credit default swap
holdings. That's a terrific step. That's real, real nice. But
you took that step after Senator McCain said, ``he has betrayed
the public trust,'' and after Carly Fiorina, the former head of
Hewlett-Packard, said that you were, ``asleep at the switch.''
I want to know--and then of course it was after--you made these
decisions after Senator McCain to his credit saying that the
first thing he would do as President was to fire you.
Now, you became SEC chairman over 3 years ago. Why didn't
you act sooner to require the disclosure of credit default
swaps?
Mr. Cox. Thank you. As you know, I have been in the
vanguard of regulators and indeed I believe I'm the first
Federal regulator incumbent to call for this legislation. But
we would have liked to have known what we know now I think
years ago. If you wish me to answer explicitly where was I, I
was here with you. Indeed I was vice chairman of this committee
when Congress had the opportunity to do what I'm asking
Congress to do now, which is close this regulatory hole.
Mr. Cummings. But I'm talking about the 3 years that you
were there. We paid your salary. The taxpayers, the ones that
are losing their homes right now, paid your salary for 3 years.
I know what Mr. Mica said. He kept telling you you weren't
there; so I'm going to excuse you, I'm going to excuse you. I'm
talking about the times you were there.
Mr. Cox. During the time I have been chairman, what we have
seen is a market that was completely unregulated outside the
jurisdiction of the SEC. I have to live within the statutory
authorities that Congress gives me, that this market has grown
substantially, that it has created risk that is difficult for
markets to appraise.
Mr. Cummings. OK. I only have a limited amount of time.
Mr. Cox. I would just redouble my challenge--my request to
Congress--all I can do is tell you what I see as chairman that
we don't have authority to do. We don't have authority to
regulate credit default swaps because Congress hasn't given us
that authority. I think Congress----
Mr. Cummings. Well, let me--Mr. Cox, let me ask you about
what you could do. Your predecessor, Bill Donaldson, before he
left he set up a task force specifically to look into the
problem of financial derivatives such as credit default swaps,
in March 2005, a few months before you became SEC chairman. The
Financial Engineering News reported that the SEC had assembled,
``people from each SEC division,'' Corporation Finance,
Enforcement, Market Regulation, and Investment Management to
look at issues relating to the derivatives market and the
implication of the growth of credit derivatives. What happened
to that task force under your leadership?
Mr. Cox. We have increased the number of people that are
focused on risk in the derivatives----
Mr. Cummings. What happened to the task force? Is it still
in existence?
Mr. Cox. The number of people focused on risk, Congressman,
are increased under my chairmanship.
Mr. Cummings. Well, let me tell you what your staff says,
the ones that come to work every day that we pay. Let me tell
you what they said. They said we have been told by former SEC
staff that you failed to support the work of the task force. In
fact, you basically defunded the whole Office of Risk
Assessment that had been assembled for the task force. In July
2006, you testified at the Senate Banking Committee hearing,
you took a completely different position. You said there should
be no interference with the investment strategies or operations
of hedge funds, including their use of derivative trading,
leverage, and short selling.
Are you now telling us, sir, that you were mistaken 2 years
ago when you expressed opposition to any regulation of
derivative trading?
Mr. Cox. First, I don't think that's an accurate
representation of my position. Second, the Office of Risk
Assessment was not ever responsible for specifically looking at
derivatives. The Office of Risk Assessment when I came to the
SEC had seven people. It has seven people now. But what we have
done is increased throughout the agency the number of people
that are focused on risk assessment. We've done that in each of
the divisions and offices that you've named. It's a vitally
important function and it's one to which the agency and I are
still strongly committed. But there are more people doing this
now than ever before.
With respect to hedge fund regulation, I have strongly
supported the efforts of the SEC to get at this even though we
have inadequate legal authority. We put out rules that got to
the margin of our authority that regulated hedge fund advisers
in order to do this. Those rules were struck down by the court.
But as a result of standing up for those rules, as I did, we
now have almost all of the hedge fund advisers voluntarily
registered. I think we need legislation, however, to----
Mr. Cummings. I wish I had more time.
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Souder is recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Souder. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. One of the huge
challenges, you've referred to the moral hazard and risk, and
the frustration you're hearing here and across America is the
irresponsibility and greed of people in Wall Street and other
people who were risk takers has endangered the lives, the jobs,
the savings of just millions of Americans. I have a letter from
one of the many thousands of e-mails lobbying me for my vote of
a lady from my hometown of Grabel, where I grew up, and she
said, I turned down a bigger house. I don't understand. We've
lived so cautiously, and now we're asking in effect what you
all referred to as to take the moral hazard. I took two tough
votes for this rescue bill and voted ``yes.'' It may have
endangered my career. I did it because I was worried about the
people in my district. But they are legitimately angry that
people seem to sit here hearing after hearing, well, it wasn't
my responsibility and that you kind of knew it was happening.
Whether it was Congress or here or there, but they're furious.
And I have a couple of questions we've been going through
hearing after hearing in different angles with this. And Mr.
Cox or my friend Chris, has the SEC, your law enforcement
agency, initiated any investigations and attempts, without
getting into specifics, without saying where they are, since
August and we have had this crisis, have you started the
process to see whether there is any legal culpability of some
of the people who have caused this mess?
Mr. Cox. That is an intense national focus right now from
the SEC's Washington headquarters and our 11 regional offices.
We have over 50 subprime investigations underway. We also have
a coordinated national effort, coordinated also with criminal
authorities and with other civil law enforcement authorities in
the States to look at manipulation and fraud in the securities
of the Nation's largest financial institutions. As you know,
this crisis has particularly beset the financial sector. The
volatility in the market has particularly been visited upon the
financial sector. The crisis in banking, the credit crisis that
we're living through, is a mortal danger to many of these
institutions. And so determining the extent to which violations
of the law may have contributed to this and holding anyone who
violated the law accountable is of vital importance, and we are
admitting massive resources to it.
Mr. Souder. We were hearing yesterday in the rating
authorities, as we saw AIG--I mean in AIG we had in July they
are paying bonuses, in August they're broke, in September they
are getting bailed out at $61 billion. It is inconceivable to
me with a business background and knowing how they were exposed
that there wasn't knowledge in the rating services. The number
of loans that went out doubled in a short period of time. The
interest rates go up. Anybody with a slight investigation would
have known that they were bundling, that they were doing things
that were probably illegal in the sense of taking origination
fees, high interest loans, packing them higher than the value
of the house. And it isn't just the culpability of the people
in the direct subprime. It's a culpability of the people who
knew what they were buying who were pretending to see no evil,
hear no evil, report no evil, and the question is even in an
unregulated market my belief is that many of them are criminal.
We have talked a lot of different things in the credit swaps
and so on. But one of the questions here is where are the
corporate boards? Those of us who believe in the private sector
believe that there was supposed to be some kind of corporate
check on the stockholders.
Do any of you have any suggestions of what we might be
looking at here because clearly they were asleep at the wheel,
that if anything else, cooperation; that the fault firings on
Merrill Lynch and others only dealt with that they committed a
crime and that we seem to have locked in a corporate structure
of hedge fund for management that you win if you do well and
you win if you lose; that we have to have tougher
accountability in some way. And I wonder if any of you have any
suggestions because this is critical as to how much government
is going to do this because if the private sector does not have
a mechanism to hold people accountable, if the private sector
rewards any type of thing and the moral hazard goes to the
taxpayers, we have a problem. Do any of you have any
suggestions?
Mr. Greenspan. Well, if I may, Congressman, the markets
have already punished the people whom you are referring to. A
lot of these products have disappeared and they probably will
never return. Some of the fees that were charged and paid when
euphoria and essentially which led to significant greed showed
up, they're gone. And I suspect that we are going to find that
this is a very chastened market and that many of the problems
that we've observed during the euphoria stage of the expansion
will not be back if--at any time if ever.
Mrs. Maloney [presiding]. The gentleman's time has expired.
The Chair recognizes Mr. Kucinich for 5 minutes.
Mr. Kucinich. I thank the gentlelady. Apropos of Mr.
Greenspan's comments that the markets are punishing people, our
constituents are getting punished. They're losing their homes.
And Mr. Greenspan, you have well acquitted yourself as a
spectator but I'm not sure you've done that with respect to
your being a participant. The epicenter of the financial
crisis, as we understand, is the securitization of home
mortgages. There are about 10 million homes that are still in
jeopardy. In your testimony you blame securitizers, banks,
credit rating agencies, risk management models, but what about
your role as head of the Fed? In your testimony you spoke of
the Fed structure having the best banking attorneys, expert
outside counsel. According to the Federal Reserve Web site, the
Fed has one of the finest research staffs, 450, half of them
Ph.D.'s, but under your term as head of the Fed, public and
private debt exploded from $10.5 trillion to $43 trillion. Yet
as documented by Jim Oleske in his book called ``Yeah, Right,''
you, Mr. Greenspan, promoted adjustable rate mortgages that
fueled the subprime market. You said in February 2004,
``American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater
mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed rate
mortgage. The traditional fixed rate mortgage may be an
expensive method of financing a home.''
In June 2005, you stated, ``Although we certainly cannot
rule out home price decline especially in some local markets,
these declines were they to occur would not have substantial
macroeconomic implications.
In September 2005, you stated, ``The vast majority of
homeowners have a sizable equity cushion with which to absorb a
potential decline in housing prices.''
The next year in May 2006, you said, ``We are not about to
go into a situation where prices will go down,'' speaking about
housing. ``There is no evidence home prices are going to
collapse.''
By mid-2006 there was evidence that the housing market was
beginning to have trouble. But you said in October 2006, ``The
worst may well be over. I suspect we're coming to the end of
this down trend.''
One month later in November 2006, you said, ``It looks as
though the worst is behind us. The global economy is in
extraordinarily good shape. Things don't look so bad.''
Now, Mr. Greenspan, before the collapse of the housing
bubble didn't you also say that the United States has not
experienced housing slumps to justify your policy that there
would be no bubble and can you tell this committee when it
occurred to you that there was a housing bubble?
Mr. Greenspan. Well, first let me correct several issues
here which I regret have been carried on for quite a
significant period of time.
Mr. Kucinich. Could you speak closer to the mic?
Mr. Greenspan. Yes, I'm sorry. First with respect to
adjustable rate mortgages, it is true as you point out that I
gave a speech which was essentially constructed by--it was
reporting on a Federal Reserve staff study which is stating the
obvious, that if you're going to be somebody who can only live
in a home for 2 years before you move elsewhere, you may--you
should look at the adjustable rate mortgage issue. The point,
however, is it then came out that I was trashing the 30-year
mortgage. A week later I appeared at the Economic Club of New
York with a thousand people and I basically said that the
remarks that I made the previous week clearly did not mean I in
any way was talking about----
Mr. Kucinich. With all due respect, Mr. Greenspan, did you
retract what you said?
Mr. Greenspan. I did.
Mr. Kucinich. Well, I've got here from USA Today, if we
could put it up on the screen, relative to what you were just
saying. You said ``I'd reproduce that speech word for word
today.'' Now, I'm not sure----
Mr. Greenspan. No. The point at issue is that speech per se
taken literally is an unexceptional speech. It essentially said
obviously if you've got interest rates rising significantly,
then you would basically run into the problem----
Mr. Kucinich. Here's your words, Mr. Greenspan. On one hand
you're saying there was no connection. On the other hand you're
saying you would reproduce that speech word for word today.
When did you know there was a housing bubble and when did you
tell the public about it? Answer the question.
Mrs. Maloney. The gentleman's time has expired. Mr.
Greenspan can answer, but your time has expired.
Mr. Kucinich. When did you tell the public about it?
Mr. Greenspan. If I may respond, that speech was
essentially a report on a staff study which if you read today
you would find or should find it was exceptional. The problem
with respect to my arguing for adjustable rate mortgages as a
general proposition is false. I went before this Economic Club
of New York just days later and very significantly pointed out
that the 30-year mortgage is the most important mortgage we
have and that whenever I took out a mortgage I didn't take out
an adjustable mortgage because I thought it was too risky.
Chairman Waxman [presiding]. The gentleman's time has
expired.
Mr. Kucinich. With all due respect, and maybe some other
Member could take this up, he didn't actually respond to the
question about when he knew there was a housing bubble.
Mr. Greenspan. The housing bubble became clear to me
sometime in early 2006 in retrospect. I did not forecast a
significant decline because we had never had a significant
decline in prices, and it's only as the process began to emerge
that it became clear that we were about to have what
essentially was a global decline in home prices.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Kucinich.
Mr. Sali.
Mr. Sali. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Gentlemen, I hope you
keep in mind that 5 minutes is a pretty short time to get
through some questions. I would like to get through a couple of
items pretty quickly.
It was mentioned earlier in testimony that there was a
great level of expertise in your agencies and you would all
agree that's a great deal more than anything we have here in
Congress in terms of the level of expertise and the number of
people working on those issues; is that correct? Do you all
agree with that? You're all saying yes. OK.
Well, Mr. Mica just rattled off a list of what I think most
people would consider are fairly important things, and each of
you said that you knew nothing about it. Would you agree that's
in spite of all the expertise some sort of failure on the part
of the three agencies that you're involved with?
Mr. Snow. Congressman, let me start this time. I don't
think I could have been clearer, as some of you know, about the
huge threat to the financial system posed by the GSEs. I was up
here, testified a number of times, gave speeches on it, called
for action over and over and over again. I don't think I could
have been clearer.
Mr. Cox. If I may respond with respect to the GSEs, in both
the 108th and 109th Congresses, as a member of the relevant
committees of jurisdiction, I joined with Congressman Shays in
cosponsoring legislation by Representative Baker that was
designed to give the GSEs a strong regulator--we have all seen
the importance of a strong regulator for the GSEs, for Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac, but that legislation was making its way
through the Congress as early as 2003 when I originally
sponsored the bill. I note that I got a chance to vote for it
in the Financial Services Committee in 2005. I note that it
passed the House on a bipartisan basis in this November 2005
right after I left and became chairman of the SEC. And I also
read with chagrin in the newspaper the sad tale of exactly how
it was prevented from coming to a vote in the Senate or at
least the influence that was brought to bear to make sure that
legislation never happened. But the House did its part, I'd
want to point out. I think many of the Members here did and I
certainly very early on saw that important task, as did
Secretary Snow and I'm sure Chairman Greenspan and many others
here. The role of the GSEs is now abundantly clear to just
about everybody in retrospect because the Federal Government
had to bail them out.
Mr. Sali. Mr. Cox, I guess in looking at Idaho's mom and
pop investors who have lost so much of their hard-earned
savings, their retirement funds, while some of the corporate
CEOs have received golden parachutes and those kinds of things,
what do you say to the people in Idaho who have lost their
investment? I mean are the people that have caused this--is
somebody going to go to jail?
Mr. Cox. There's no question that somewhere in this
terrible mess many laws were broken. Right now the criminal
authorities and the civil authorities not only in the Federal
Government and the State governments but in other countries
because this is now, as you know, a matter of attention of
international focus are working to make sure that law breakers
are held accountable and people are brought to justice. The SEC
has anti-fraud authority that we are very aggressive about
using. As I mentioned earlier, we have over 50 subprime
investigations underway right now and we also have a nationwide
dragnet involving all 11 of our regional offices and our
headquarters, working in coordination with other law
enforcement authorities. But cleaning up the mess through law
enforcement after the fact, while important, is not ideal. And
the best thing that we can do of course, as many of you are
focused on, indeed this hearing is focused on this, is to infer
lessons from what happened and prevent anything like this
astonishing harm can happen again.
Mr. Sali. The chairman is taking us in a direction that
indicates he thinks we need more regulation, that perhaps we
need more people out there doing regulating with more
authority. And I guess I would challenge each of you in the
three agencies that you have represented, I think you have
sufficient authority--with perhaps exception of the GSEs you
had sufficient authority to probably avoid most of the troubles
that we have seen. And I guess what the chairman suggested, it
begs the question if we didn't get the job done with enough
authority to get it done, how will giving more regulators more
power do anything different when each of you said you weren't
even aware of all the things that Mr. Mica pointed out that
were a tremendous problem? How do you respond to that?
Mr. Snow. Congressman, let me take a crack at it. As I said
in my period at the Treasury, it became clear to me that no
single regulator had a clear view, had a 360 view of the
problem. When I invited the various mortgage market regulators
to come and talk to me about what they saw in the subprime
markets and with respect to these new instruments, the interest
only and mortgage amortization and so on, no one had a clear
view of it. They had differing and very different views of it.
My suggestion here is that nobody sees the whole picture and we
ought to put in place some institution of our government that
has a clear view of transparency on risk and leverage in the
system. When you get right down to it, this is about excessive
risk and excessive leverage and nobody saw because no regulator
has that full scope of authority had the full field of view.
Mr. Greenspan. If I may just add a word or two, I think
that it's interesting to observe that we find failures of
regulation all the time, and one of the reasons is a very
significant amount of regulation in the economic area is based
on a forecast to know in advance whether or not particular
products will go bad or the cycle will turn. If we are right 60
percent of the time in forecasting, we're doing exceptionally
well. That means we are wrong 40 percent of the time, and when
you observe the extent of the broad failure, the difficulty is
that nobody can forecast. And if you try to take a look at what
the private sector does it's precisely the same thing that goes
on in government.
We at the Federal Reserve had a much better record
forecasting than the private sector, but we were wrong quite a
good deal of the time and that is reflected in how one views
what the appropriate regulatory authorities are because unless
you can anticipate the types of problems that are going to
happen, it's very difficult to know what to do. And I think
that's the problem that this type of thing confronts and I
don't see any way in which that's going to be fundamentally
changed. We can try to do better, but forecasting is never--
never gets to the point where it's 100 percent accurate.
Mr. Sali. Chairman Greenspan----
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Cox. Mr. Chairman, may I answer on behalf of the SEC?
Chairman Waxman. Yes. The time for asking questions has
expired, but we will allow the answers to the questions.
Mr. Cox. I just want to respectfully disagree with the
premise of the question that there is adequate regulatory
authority in our current regulatory system for the regulators
to deal with the problems that we're seeing in the markets
today. There are significant regulatory holes, significant
regulatory gaps. We have seen them, for example, with respect
to the fact there is no statutory regulator whatsoever anywhere
in the system for investment bank holding companies. We've seen
it with respect to credit default swaps, a $58 trillion market
with no regulator. There has been allusion made to the fact
that in the mortgage brokerage market there is not adequate
regulation. And certainly with respect to the multi-trillion
dollar market in municipal securities, there is--the SEC and no
one has any authority just to require disclosure to investors
of what they're getting. It's not really a simple question of
more or less regulation. Once you've got a regulated industry,
which we do in financial services, then when you create these
big what were pockets that then become a whole universe of
unregulated activity it's really distortive.
So you've got to have a system that actually hangs together
and makes sense. You can't regulate futures in one way and then
economically equivalent securities in another way with
different margin rules and so on and expect all of this not to
produce discontinuities or disruptions in the market. So there
is an enormous opportunity to fix this problem in Congress.
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Mica. Mr. Chairman, I have a unanimous consent----
Chairman Waxman. I'm sorry. You will have to hold off on
that. You can make it later.
The Chair yields himself some time because there was a
representation made about my view of regulation and the
gentleman from Idaho said I want more regulation. Well, I want
smart regulation. But I want to point out that what I'm hearing
from our witnesses today is they just didn't know. They
couldn't make projections about what the future was or they're
not always right. The truth of the matter is there were a lot
of warning signs. And we have a large staff in some of these
agencies. For example, the Federal Reserve has one of the
finest economic research staffs in the United States, including
a staff of 450, about half of whom are Ph.D. economists. The
reasons why we set up your agencies and gave you budget
authority to hire people is so that you can see problems
developing before they become a financial crisis. To tell us
afterwards when we are now faced with the disaster that we're
seeing that you couldn't have foreseen it, it just doesn't
satisfy me.
Now, Mr. Cox has come in with a whole long list of
regulations he'd like to see in place that make a lot of sense
to me because they sound reasonable. I wanted to have Mr.
Arthur Levitt here. He couldn't be here, but I can't imagine he
would have had too much of a difference of opinion on the
proposals that you've made. But the reality is, Mr. Cox, you
weren't doing that job of proposing these regulations
beforehand. You didn't either anticipate the problem or you
agreed with the philosophy that we don't need regulation, the
markets could correct themselves. So I just want to suggest--
and I'm not really asking a question. I really want to suggest
to my colleagues for them to say that there's no way you could
have known what was going on, there's no way you could have
acted, there is a long list of warning signs and prominent
economists were saying things should have been done and this
problem is going to get out of hand, and yet the Federal
Reserve, the SEC, the Department of Treasury and other agencies
didn't act, and to say now we need regulations is helpful.
I also want to say something about the GSEs because I think
it's a political point that's been thrown out there for
politics. It's about as--to say the GSEs started this whole
crisis is about as accurate as saying that offshore drilling
will solve our energy crisis. It's a political argument. It's
not a factual one. And I'd like us to go into the facts.
Sometimes by looking at the facts we can learn from what
happened and hopefully not repeat the mistakes in the future.
I gather Mr. Cox and others are suggesting we have a task
force, that we bring everybody together to redo all our
regulatory system. Well, that may make sense but it is
certainly dealing with closing the barn door after the--
whatever the metaphor is, after the horses or cows have already
escaped. We're already in the mess and now we've got to figure
out how to get out of it and learn from the past, not rewrite
it.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Can I yield myself a few minutes?
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman is recognized.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Let me just say I mean we're talking
culpability here. What was Congress doing all this time?
Chairman Waxman. Yes, good point.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. I mean I think at this point we had
all the warning signals that everybody else did, and the
inability to move particularly on Freddie and Fannie where the
warnings came from the administration on down constantly,
warnings in the newspapers, warnings from economists, and we
had party-line votes in the Senate not to move forward on
regulating that aspect which all of our witnesses said----
Chairman Waxman. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. Davis of Virginia. I'd be happy to.
Chairman Waxman. Well, the law that was being proposed was
adopted in the House by a bipartisan vote overwhelmingly.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. In the Senate it was----
Chairman Waxman. And in the Senate it was bipartisan as
well for those who opposed it, and we couldn't--those of us who
supported legislation--get enough votes to stop a filibuster
because of Democrats and Republicans.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, let me reclaim my
time. I mean, look, it was the chairman of the Financial
Services Committee who said there wasn't a problem, and we've
been through all this. But rather than culpability, it lies all
around. And I just came in the room as you were going through--
lecturing Mr. Cox and others on culpability. I think we all
agree there's a lot of blame to go around here but it doesn't
lie with any party or any agency. This was global in its
nature. It even for the mortgage brokers goes back to State
regulation. You can go back to New York. What were they doing
during this time period as well? What we need to focus on is
what are we going to do from here on out? And we're hearing a
lot of rhetoric about regulation, deregulation. The fact of the
matter, we're dealing with so many silos here that nobody gets
the whole picture. It reminds me of 9/11 where everybody knew a
little bit of everything but nobody knew the whole story. And
as we listened to people that have been intimately involved
with this, that seems to be what they are saying.
I would give my remaining time to Mr. Sali.
Chairman Waxman. You have 15 seconds.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. So 15 seconds for a quick question.
Mr. Sali. For the three of you, is the best that we can
hope for here that because you rely on projections that
whatever regulation we give, and I hope we will be smart about
it and not be in overhanded with this--overly harsh with this,
is the best we can expect, though, a regulation that will have
a 40 percent chance of being wrong no matter what happens, as
Chairman Greenspan has said? Do you all three agree with that
premise?
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired, but we
will let the witnesses answer.
Mr. Greenspan. I obviously agree with it. I made the
statement.
Chairman Waxman. Mr. Cox.
Mr. Cox. That's a little more quantitative than I feel
comfortable being in, estimating the future probability of
success of regulation. But I think the point that it's a
fallible human process always has to humble anyone in Congress
or anyone in regulation. Nonetheless when we look at it
structurally, it's just very clear we can do a much better,
more rational job. And we have to take a look at the fact that
this system of regulation was fundamentally designed in the
1930's and 1940's. The markets have changed a great deal. It is
time to have a thorough going--restructuring that rationalizes
all this and closes the regulatory gaps.
Mr. Snow. I think regulators need more transparency on the
risks and the leverage in the financial system. I think some
regulators should be given responsibility for assessing broad
systemic risks and the ability to step in where they see the
risk management function being abused, too much leverage being
created in some aspect of some businesses' behavior, as you now
have with the GSEs, to step in and stop it. That's what we lack
today, I think.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you.
Mr. Mica. Mr. Chairman, I have my unanimous consent.
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman will have to hold until
after we finish with the other Members.
Mr. Mica. I have to ask after each timely----
Chairman Waxman. No. Why don't you wait until all the
Members have had a chance to ask questions and then----
Mr. Mica. I just want to put this one page in from the Wall
Street Journal that mentions you and me and today's hearing.
Chairman Waxman. You have one page and that's it?
Mr. Mica. Yes, sir.
Chairman Waxman. Without objection, your one page will be
made part of the record.
And the Chair will only comment that the statement that
everybody has responsibility means nobody has responsibility.
It's like saying a criminal acted without personal
responsibility because the society caused all the problems that
led that person to act that way. That's the way I hear it.
And let me also point out the Republicans controlled the
Congress for 12 years. It's only the last 2 years the Democrats
have been in power and we have had a Republican administration
for 8 years, and I can see why you don't want to hold any party
responsible but I just think that fact ought to be out there.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, as long as we're doing
facts, the Commodities Futures Modernization Act was signed by
President Clinton by--Democrats, by the way, controlled the
Senate for the first 2 years of the Bush administration. Let's
not get into partisanship. Why don't we focus--I'm responding
to what the chairman is saying. I have tried to stay away from
that today. I think we need to focus on the issues. That's what
the public is interested in. They are tired of this partisan
carping back and forth.
Chairman Waxman. We will stop the harping and go to Mr.
Tierney for his questions.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Greenspan, I don't think all of it was relative to
forecasting on that, and I want to go back over a little bit
about the irresponsible subprime lending, which I think many or
most experts have indicated they think that is the root cause
of this crisis. I think when I looked at your testimony you
said subprime mortgage organizations were undeniably the
original source of the crisis, so I assume that you agree.
Mr. Greenspan. I do.
Mr. Tierney. And Mr. Cox has said this. He said the current
credit crisis began with the deterioration of mortgage
orientation standards. And Mr. Snow cited lax lending practices
as one of the causes of the financial crisis.
So when Mr. Waxman was discussing that with you, Dr.
Greenspan, in response to the question of why you hadn't used
the regulatory authority that Congress gave you in 1994 to rein
in the irresponsible subprime lending, you said I took an oath
that I am here to uphold the law of the land, the will of the
Congress, not my own predilections. But you had a clear
directive to act. I went back and checked. The law of the land
as of 1994, the Homeownership Equity Protection Act, Title 15,
United States Code, Chapter 41, subchapter 1, part b, section
1639, subsection 11(2) and all that, it says this. It says that
the Board, meaning your board, by regulation or order, shall,
not may, but shall prohibit acts or practices in connection
with refinancing of mortgage loans that the Board finds to be
associated with abusive lending practices or that are otherwise
not in the interests of the borrower.
Now, you had a nice conversation where you said, well, Mr.
Gramlich came in, he came into the conversation where he
requested that you send bank examiners out on this. You didn't
do that. But then you said to Mr. Waxman that you spoke of
sending them up to the committee thinking they would come back
and that you would act, and then you also said you voted for
regulations.
But unfortunately, the regulations on which you voted in
2001, they dealt only with high cost mortgages. That leaves
like 99 percent of subprime mortgages totally off the table.
You didn't deal with deceptive tease rates, you didn't deal
with balloon payment loans, you didn't deal with prepayment for
homeowners who wanted to refinance before their rate goes up.
So I guess the question again to you is, you had Mr.
Gramlich's cautions, you had the Treasury Department and the
Housing and Urban Development office all asking you to use the
authority that Congress gave you as a mandate, not a wish, but
a mandate. So can you still say I guess that you thought that
you were carrying out the law of the land and the will of
Congress as opposed to having your own ideology sort of
influence, not having strong enough regulation that you didn't
bring to the Board and you didn't press for stronger regulation
of the unsavory subprime loans?
Mr. Greenspan. Well, let's take the issue of unfair and
deceptive practices, which is a fundamental concept to the
whole predatory lending issue.
The staff of the Federal Reserve, the best in the business
as far as I am concerned, looks at that statement and then says
how do they determine as a regulatory group what is unfair and
deceptive? And the problem that they were concluding and
therefore were raising with the staff of the Congress was the
issue of maybe 10 percent or so are self-evidently unfair and
deceptive, but the vast majority would require a jury trial or
other means to deal with it and that rulemaking--can I finish
my sentence?
Mr. Tierney. The debate was over. The law passed. The
debate between your office and Congress was over. In 1994, the
Congress passed a law telling your board and you to actually do
something about it and it wasn't done. I guess the evidence of
that is--we have that situation, and I don't want to--I share
with Mr. Davis the desire not to get political about this, but
Mr. Mica and others sort of went off on this GSE thing here.
1994 I guess was a Democratic Congress instructed you to do
that. It wasn't done. 1995 to 2006, the Republicans are in.
They don't pressure to do it. Nothing got done in that respect.
But the core part of this problem is the irresponsible subprime
lending.
Then in 2007, when Democrats take control, a bipartisan
group in the House passes by a significant margin a directive
to you. They basically write your regulation for you and tell
you, by that time you are gone, but tell the Board what it
should do in terms of dealing with subprime mortgages. It
passes by a huge bipartisan vote in the House, 291 to 127, but
it doesn't go anywhere in the Senate because the Bush
administration opposes it and kills it and then they don't deal
with it then.
In 2005, back when the Republicans were still in charge,
Mr. Oxley made an effort to have a bipartisan group do
something about subprimes because the Fed Board wasn't doing
it, and in his own language the White House gave him what he
said was the one finger salute on that. It wouldn't deal with
it. But it still passed the House by 331-90, so you had a
bipartisan group in the House that wanted to deal with it.
So I think that if we are going to talk about what happened
here, there was at some point somebody who didn't want to
regulate, but a group at least in the House of Representatives
that did.
I understand my time is up. Thank you.
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Bilbray.
Mr. Bilbray. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Gentleman, I appreciate you pointed out that even though it
may look small, the iceberg that we call the toxic twins,
Freddie and Fannie Mae, had a much more substantial impact than
appearances may first appear. So that scuttling of the ``good
ship economy'' can be traced back to an incident that can be
related though those toxic twins, that iceberg, Freddie and
Fannie.
But even with that damage done and the severe damage done
to the economy by that small little low profile thing called
the iceberg, Freddie and Fannie, there was other things that
could have helped to mitigate this impact. I guess the quality
control, the safety inspections, to make sure that the good
ship was able to take this kind of hit doesn't appear to have
been there to the level we want.
Mr. Cox, I realize that the SEC has just recently been
granted the authority to regulate the credit rating agencies,
the ones who are supposed to be inspecting the craft and
telling us that it is safe to use. In your testimony, in the
testimony we heard yesterday, it was clear that the credit
rating agencies are not significantly regulated and that there
were major abuses of the independent raters.
Considering the level of Federal regulations to these
independent, so-called independent assessments, and how
important that is, do you think that you have significant
authority now to regulate them? Do you think there is enough
transparency for not only regulators, but also investors, to
know exactly what they are buying and do you have the ability
to regulate them appropriately now, or do you need more
regulation and more authority to be able to create more
transparency?
Mr. Cox. We do have the authority that we need in this
area. One of the first things that I did when I became chairman
is work with the Congress and urge the passage of this
legislation. There was a move afoot in the industry to develop
a voluntary code of conduct as a way to stop the legislation,
and I put the SEC strongly on record in support with the
chairmen of the authorizing committees in both the House and in
the Senate.
That legislation was signed in my second year as chairman.
We immediately went to work using the authority to register the
credit rating agencies with us, and in fact beat the deadline
in the statute by a month to put out the first rules under the
statute. We inspected the big three in this industry and
produced this report, which was the basis for much of the
questioning yesterday.
We looked through 2 million e-mails, some of which we
provided to this committee, to discover what was going on in
this industry, and then to propose even more thoroughgoing new
rules that will govern many of the problems that we have seen
here. Without even waiting for the notice and comment period
and the implementation of the rules to take effect, we have
worked with the industry to put those reforms into place, and
as I think you saw yesterday, this is a much chastened industry
because of what has gone on and the impact on the markets and
investors.
Mr. Bilbray. Now you were talking about one of the problems
with regulation is not just how much we have, but where it is
and the ability to respond. You squeeze off one part of the
private sector with regulation here and they tend to find
another place where all at once it starts blossoming, blooming
and growing out of control. Much with the swaps were a good
example.
Do you think now we have the flexibility for regulators to
be able to move laterally over to respond to these kind of
bubbles as they are created by our regulation being at one
location or another, or do you need more flexibility to be able
to respond to those? Gentleman? Either one.
Mr. Cox. I don't think the current regulatory system works
when it comes to integration and cooperation and sharing of
information. The SEC, even before we had the avalanche of
problems in 2008 in the industries that we regulated and that
the Federal Reserve regulates, began work with the Fed on a
memorandum of understanding to share information, because it
was, as someone alluded to here earlier, too much like the
blind man and the elephant. Everyone had a good view of their
part of the problem, but by law they were focused only on that
part and not on the total picture.
So in addition to having the regulatory gaps filled, which
is of vital importance, there also has to be a much more
seamless integration.
Mr. Bilbray. So a lot of parallel to what we saw on 9/11
where the Intel people were not sharing information and no one
group had all the information, we are running into the same
thing here. There has been a proposal by Mr. Issa to have a
bipartisan commission, like the 9/11 Commission, not only to
look at what has happened in the past and do a report within
that 1 year, but also stay in force for 5 years to avoid this.
Gentleman, do you have any comment about us approaching
this with that general bipartisan view so we avoid the
bickering that you have seen up here today?
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired, but we
would like to hear answers to the question.
Mr. Greenspan. I don't have any response to that.
Mr. Cox. I think it is vitally important, as this hearing
is doing today, as your other hearings have done, and as you
have proposed and Congressman Issa has proposed, to understand
it is very complex how all of these things have happened around
the world. History is going to tell us eventually a lot more
than we know even today.
It is also important to do the other piece of what you have
described, and that is to confront it in an empirical way. That
is what ``bipartisan'' in this context I think means. We have
to make sure that we are after the facts and that we are
willing to infer the tough lessons from those facts.
Finally, I would say, make sure that you have a forward-
looking approach. If all that we do is look backward and say
``that is who shot John,'' and we don't protect the economy,
investors, our kids and grandkids whose debt is getting run up
right now, then that will be a new failure on top of all that
is happening.
Chairman Waxman. Mr. Snow.
Mr. Snow. I have nothing to add.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you. The gentleman's time has
expired.
Mr. Yarmuth.
Mr. Yarmuth. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
With all apologies to my New England colleagues here, I
feel like I am looking out there at three Bill Buckners, the
first baseman for the Red Sox who let the ball go through his
legs and cost his team the championship. All of you let the
ball go through your legs. You didn't want to let the ball go
through your legs, you didn't try to let the ball go through
your legs, but it got through. And it is important that we do
try to find out why it got through, whether it took a bad
bounce, or whether there was something fundamentally wrong with
the way you and others played the ball.
Some of these things I understand were unforeseeable. There
is no question about that. But some of them were very
foreseeable. And I want to refer to the credit rating agencies,
because we knew beginning at least in 2001 when Enron was given
a superior rating 4 days before it collapsed, and we knew it in
subsequent events. In 2002, the SEC published its own report
which found serious problems--I am sorry, 2003. But before that
in 2002 the Lieberman committee in the Senate issued a report
on these problems. And the SEC was actually moving it seemed
like with good intentions and with intelligence to create some
authority to regulate the credit rating agencies. And in 2005
they issued a proposed rule that never was acted on.
Mr. Cox, why was that not acted on?
Mr. Cox. Well, the SEC cannot create for itself authority
over credit rating agencies. The proposed rule was a
designation of NRSROs, but it was not legislative authority to
regulate what until the fall of last year was an unregulated
industry. Legislation was needed to do that.
As a Member of Congress, I strongly supported that
legislation going back even before Enron, because I saw what
happened in Orange County with the largest municipal bankruptcy
in American history. There, just as with Enron, up until the
event itself, the debt was rated top grade, AAA. These problems
have been recurrent.
What was absolutely necessary and what I took on full tilt
when I became chairman, was getting authority to make that a
regulated industry, not an unregulated industry, and we have
been using our authority to great effect since we have gotten
it.
Mr. Yarmuth. I appreciate that, and I agree that the steps
you are taking are commendable and I think they make sense. But
your predecessor, William Donaldson at the SEC, he wrote a
letter to Congress in 2003 and said he did have ample authority
to regulate credit rating authorities because he could
decertify them if he found that they weren't doing the job
properly.
So you did have authority, maybe not specific legislative
authority, but you had authority to use the certification
process, didn't you?
Mr. Cox. The certification process was the basis--remember,
in that period there were essentially three main rating
agencies and they were already there. So rubber stamping them
as ``certified'' was rather circular and tautological. What was
under development, as I mentioned earlier, was a program of
voluntary compliance, a code of conduct. This was in fact being
developed on an international basis.
Even though I am currently the chairman of the Tech
Committee of the International Organization of Security
Commissions and I have a deep and abiding respect for the work
of IOSCO, I saw immediately that a voluntary code of conduct
was going to be as nothing against what this industry needed,
which was actual regulation. And I am very, very pleased that
the Congress gave the SEC that authority, which it never had
before.
Make no mistake, credit rating agencies did not have a
regulator, were not regulated, and all that they were going to
get was volunteer. Volunteer regulation does not work. We have
seen it over and over again.
Mr. Yarmuth. I would agree with that. I still don't
understand the fact--I don't understand your point that you
couldn't decertify these agencies. You say basically the
certification was a rubber stamp. What if you took the rubber
stamp away?
Mr. Cox. Well, the rule concerning the designation of
NRSROs was essentially limited to that. You know, you have to
credit the agency for trying to move into that space. But what
happened in 2005 is that we finally got legislation moving, and
that clearly made more sense than trying to do something
without any authority.
Mr. Yarmuth. So that is why you dropped the rulemaking
process? That is why you stopped that?
Mr. Cox. Yes. The focus was on getting the legislation
passed, which actually happened very, very quickly. And, as I
said, we beat the deadline in the statute for putting out
rules. We moved very, very quickly.
Mr. Yarmuth. My time has expired. Thank you.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you are, Mr. Yarmuth.
Mr. Platts.
Mr. Platts. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate you and
the ranking member's efforts on investigating this crisis
facing our country and appreciate all three of our witnesses.
There has been a lot of discussion, Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac and the lack of sufficient regulatory authority and how
that has played into helping to create this crisis. I would
like to address a similar issue about regulatory authority, but
how maybe overaggressive regulatory efforts helped create it,
and specifically get your input on the Community Reinvestment
Act.
Mr. Cox, you shared in your testimony that if honest
lending practices had continued and we hadn't gotten to where
there was almost no lending practices being used for these no-
down-payment, no documentation loans, that played a huge role
in where we are today.
Back home, I have had numerous banking officials, bank
board members, address with me the Community Reinvestment Act,
that in essence they are being forced by the bank regulators to
engage in making loans, to have a specific or certain part of
their portfolio, to risky applicants, and they are in essence
being forced by the regulators to make loans that they would
not otherwise make and that they know are at great risk of
default.
So I would be interested in each of your opinions on that
role in this crisis, big or small, and is it something we
should be looking at, reforming the way the Community
Reinvestment Act is being enforced and implemented by the
regulators?
Mr. Greenspan. Well, you know, it is instructive to go back
to the early stages of the subprime market, which has
essentially emerged out of the CRA.
The evidence now suggests, but only in retrospect, that
this market evolved in a manner which if there were no
securitization, it would have been a much smaller problem and
indeed very unlikely to have taken on the dimensions that it
did.
It wasn't until the securitization became a significant
factor, which doesn't occur until 2005, that you have this huge
increase in demand for subprime loans, because remember that
without securitization there would not have been a single
subprime mortgage held outside of the United States; that it is
the opening up of this market which created a huge demand from
abroad for subprime mortgages as embodied in mortgage-backed
securities.
Now, we didn't know that the deterioration in the standards
was occurring until 2005, because you look now at the
outstanding subprime mortgages and it is very obvious that
those that were made in 2004 and earlier have not turned out to
be an incredibly difficult issue. In other words, the real
toxic mortgages occur with the huge increase in securitization
and largely the demand from abroad and to whatever extent
Fannie and Freddie were involved, from them as well.
So, it strikes me that if you go back and ask yourself how
in the early years anybody could realistically make a judgment
as to what was ultimately going to happen to subprime, I think
you are asking more than anybody is capable of judging. And we
have this extraordinarily complex global economy which, as
everybody now realizes, is very difficult to forecast in any
considerable detail.
Mr. Chairman, I know I agree with you in the fact that
there were a lot of people who raised issues about problems
emerging. But there were always a lot of people raising issues,
and half the time they are wrong. And the question is, what do
you do?
I mean, you point out quite correctly that the Federal
Reserve had as good an economic organization as exists, and I
would say in the world. If all those extraordinarily capable
people were unable to foresee the development of this critical
problem, which undoubtedly was the cause of the world problem
with respect to mortgage backed securities, I think we have to
ask ourselves, why is that? And the answer is that we are not
smart enough as people. We just cannot see events that far in
advance. And unless we can, it is very difficult to look back
and say why didn't we catch something?
I think it is a very, very difficult problem with respect
to supervision and regulation. We cannot expect perfection in
any area where forecasting is required, and I think we have to
do our best, but not expect infallibility or omniscience.
Mr. Platts. Can Mr. Cox and Mr. Snow answer the question?
Chairman Waxman. Yes. If Mr. Cox and Mr. Snow, if you wish
to respond to the question outstanding?
Mr. Cox. I am sorry, Congressman Platts, do you want to
restate the question?
Mr. Platts. Specifically on CRA and going forward. And, Dr.
Greenspan, I am not asking if we could have predicted it. In
going forward, should we be looking at reforms to the Community
Reinvestment Act? What my local bankers are saying, they feel
very pressured by regulators to make loans they know are not
good loans and risky loans and likely to be defaulted or have
been defaulted in the past.
Mr. Cox. Well, I would just point out the obvious which is
that the SEC does not regulate lending or credit or mortgages.
But on the more general point of whether or not legislation
needs to be carefully drafted and carefully conceived so that
it does not create risk in the system, I have abundant
agreement, and as the investors' advocate, obviously when that
kind of legislation or those kind of regulatory policies lead
to the creation of new risk that otherwise wouldn't exist,
investors are indeed very ill-served.
Mr. Platts. Thank you.
Mr. Snow. Congressman, I actually think it is a much
broader phenomena, and in the risk of being maybe a little
controversial here, you know, we have had a policy in the
United States to promote homeownership for a long time. That is
a good thing. Administrations of both stripes and Congresses of
both stripes have continued to push for policies that would
encourage homeownership. We see that very much in the Tax Code.
We saw that with GSEs. We saw it in a number of ways.
I think the larger problem here, frankly, is that we have
probably somewhat overdone that without reference to the
consequences that commitment to housing has created for the
country as a whole. I think we have to rethink that balance,
how do we promote housing appropriately while at the same time
encouraging savings rates and prudent borrowing practices. And
I could go on and on.
Thank you very much.
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Davis, you seek recognition for 1 minute?
Mr. Davis of Virginia. One minute, yes.
Dr. Greenspan, you made an interesting comment. The Federal
Reserve has probably the best economic organization in the
world, and yet you couldn't reach any agreement on seeing this
coming and predicting it.
Let me ask this question to all three of you, because as I
have gone through the testimony, it looks like the regulatory
regimes, it wasn't a question of deregulation, re-regulation,
overregulation. The regulatory regimes that were set up appear
to be too fragmented, too stove-piped, too non-communicative,
so that no one could see the problems arising in total,
everybody saw a piece of that, until it was too late. Is that a
fair statement?
Mr. Greenspan. I am not sure, Congressman. I think that we
all had as much information as probably was available. So I am
not clear by any means that if you combine the levels of
ignorance, that you somehow enhance insight.
I mean, for example, as I just was mentioning, we now know
that the subprime mortgages that were originated in 2004 and
earlier are not our problem. These are data that are available
only now. We didn't know that at the time. And I am not sure
that merely conglomerating everybody's insights--and as I said,
I have dealt with many different organizations, and if the
Federal Reserve at the level of technical capability is not
capable of confronting this type of problem, I think it is
telling us something about the nature of the problem which
itself is incapable of being handled in the way we all would
like.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Mr. Cox.
Mr. Cox. I think I am going to answer the question from a
slightly different angle so as not to disagree any more than I
have to with the answer that Dr. Greenspan has just given. I
think it stands on its four corners and there is a logic to it,
but I see more in your question.
In the last few months in the caldron of these crises,
events have been moving on not just a day-to-day basis, but an
hour-to-hour basis. The coordination of information and the
demands that has placed on regulators are very high. So when
you are looking at the safety and soundness of banks, as the
Fed does, when you are looking at what is going on inside a
broker-dealer, as the SEC does, you are concerned with now the
fact that things can change in a matter of hours. Everything
that was there this morning could be gone by the evening.
You need to know what the liquidity issues are, what the
funding position is for a firm, and when the Fed has some of
those firms and the SEC has other of those firms, we don't get
the same clear picture of what is going on in the market in
real time that I think we need.
So it is fine these statistics are all published and
everyone has access to them and we can all understand it
eventually, but you have to do this in real time. The
President's working group was formed to deal with crises like
this. It has been an ongoing meeting of the President's working
group for several months now. We have all been working 20 hours
a day, 7 days a week since March. So we just need all the tools
we can get to coordinate better.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Cox.
Mr. Snow. I agree with you, Congressman Davis. I will be
clear. I think we have too many stovepipes in the financial
market regulatory system, with the left hand not knowing what
the right hand knows. And I agree with Chairman Greenspan about
the complexity of regulation. I used to be a regulator of an
agency, Mr. Chairman, you know well, NTSA, and I have an
appreciation of the burdens and complexities of regulation.
But it does seem to me that we have regulators, I think the
chairman said, Chairman Cox mentioned this earlier, regulating
under different jurisdictions and with different bodies of law
the same thing. Equivalent things ought to be regulated on an
equivalent basis.
We also have the turf battles. This was clear just last
week in an article in the Washington Post, Mr. Chairman, on the
subject of the swaps market and who would regulate the swaps
market. We had the three agencies, according to this article,
in serious conflict about who should have the jurisdiction.
Now, I think it is time to overhaul the regulatory system.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you very much.
Ms. Norton, but as I understand it, Mr. Yarmuth had a
unanimous consent request?
Mr. Yarmuth. I ask unanimous consent that it be placed in
the record the report of the Senate Committee on Government
Affairs from October 8, 2002, which relates to the committee's
request that the SEC implement rules to regulate the credit
rating agencies. Mr. Cox said that they moved in an expeditious
way. He may have, but the SEC was asked to do that in 2002.
Chairman Waxman. Without objection, the document will be
made part of the record.
Ms. Norton.
Ms. Norton. This is a question for all three of you. I will
be using language from Dr. Greenspan, but it is for all of you.
I agree that all of us are often not smart enough. I don't
agree that because of the stovepipe quality of regulation,
there was no way in which this could have been seen. My
question really goes to remedy, and particularly to remedy as
events unfold.
Dr. Greenspan, you have said that regulation by its nature
is ineffective because it cannot actually predict problems, and
you have indicated the percentage of predictability, and I
think that is pretty good, too. I am interested in what happens
as events occur and nothing happens.
For example, 14 years ago, in 1994, GAO published a 2-year
study, 200 pages, exhaustive study, entitled ``Financial
Derivatives: Actions Needed to Protect the Financial System.''
I am interested in the financial system. We have seen the
collapse of the financial system. We are coming back for a lame
duck session at the end of a President's term because we think
we are seeing perhaps the collapse of the economy itself. Now,
I am really into remedy at this point.
The GAO, I want to quote it. ``Derivatives are rapidly
expanding''--this is 1994--``and increasingly affected by the
globalization of commerce and financial markets. The sudden
failure or abrupt withdrawal from trading of any of these large
dealers could liquify the problems in the markets and could
also pose risk to others, including the financial system as a
whole. The Federal Government would be likely to intervene to
keep the financial system functioning. In cases of severe
financial stress, intervention could result in a financial
bailout paid for by the taxpayers.''
That is the only remedy we have now, huge intervention into
the market system of the kind none of us would have desired.
The GAO, of course, wasn't alone in warning. Representative
Markey had a hearing. Representative Oxley, a Republican from
Ohio, asked the question then about bailout, the only remedy we
now have, how realistic is the threat of a taxpayer bailout?
And you, Dr. Greenspan, said ``negligible.'' Those are your
words. ``Short of a virtually inconceivable situation, one
cannot envisage where taxpayer funds would show up.''
Four years, of course, ago we saw the collapse of Long-Term
Capital Management and Enron. Now AIG, $140 billion worth of
essentially bailout.
Now, I am going to ask you in light of the fact that these
are new instruments that people say none of us understand
because people who are outside of your and my sphere made them
up, could you regulate now? At one point along this timeframe
should some form of regulation have taken place? Could you
regulate now? Do you understand enough of what happened to
regulate now? And I would appreciate your insight into what
form you think regulation should begin to take. What should we
do now that we are faced with bailouts as the only remedy that
the Federal Government has?
Mr. Greenspan. First of all, on derivatives, remember in
1994 and indeed pretty much throughout maybe 2004, even 2005,
the major part of derivatives were interest rate and foreign
exchange derivatives, and they are still functioning rather
well. In other words, the problem that has emerged----
Ms. Norton. Well, the GAO talked about it , they did this
in 1994.
Mr. Greenspan. I understand that. I think they were
mistaken. In other words, that was one of the forecasts that
didn't go right. In other words, the types of things they were
raising----
Ms. Norton. What did go right is they said you could see a
bailout and the collapse of our financial system. That was
predicted. That happened.
Mr. Greenspan. Remember, the point I am trying to make is
the only areas where we are running into some problems, which
are curable, frankly, by resolving certain structural problems
which the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is working on, is--
--
Ms. Norton. How would you advise this committee, this
Congress, to begin to do the appropriate, intelligent
regulation or remedy seeking, whatever you call it?
Mr. Snow, you seem to wish to answer that question as well.
Mr. Snow. I think there are a number of things that can be
done and should be done. The securitization market is a good
market. It shouldn't be disestablished in any way. But it seems
to me, Congresswoman Norton, it would work an awful lot better
if the original loan, the people who make the loans initially--
--
Ms. Norton. What about them?
Mr. Snow. Kept some skin in the game. You know, we used to
have something that functioned real well in this country called
Bank Credit Committees where the question would be asked can
the borrower repay the loan? How will the borrower repay the
loan? What is the collateral the borrower has for the loan?
That is good banking practices.
One of the unintended consequences I think of the
securitization market is that function isn't being carried on
nearly as effectively as it once was.
So a suggestion for you would be when somebody originates a
loan and then sends it off to the securities market, keep a
percentage of that loan.
Something else that seems to me should be done in the name
of transparency and openness to get our markets working better:
When investment banks and banks are selling these products into
the market and also hedging those projects by going on the
other side, there ought to be transparency. They ought to be
telling the marketplace, yeah, we are selling you these things,
but we are also hedging them. That would provide useful
information to the would be buyers of those issuers.
So I have a lot of suggestions for you I can give you for
the record.
Ms. Norton. Mr. Cox didn't get a chance to answer.
Chairman Waxman. Do you have something you want to add to
this, Mr. Cox, briefly?
Mr. Cox. First of all, I strongly believe with former
Secretary Snow that the movement from the originate to hold
model to the originate to securitize model contributed to the
breakdown in market discipline, and as he very
straightforwardly put it, if you don't have skin in the game,
you are just passing off the risk to someone else and then you
are inclined to take more risk. And that built risk into the
system we have seen has been dangerous.
Second, I think it is very important for us to build future
ways to understand complex securities from the investor's
standpoint. Right now, analysts are unable to track with
complex structured securities the underlying assets and the
risk in them. There is no tracking right now, for example, on a
loan-by-loan basis of whether the loan amount is more or less
the property value, whether the loan is current. With data
tagging, this could be accumulated and the securities valued by
analysts so that investors would understand and the market
would be able to price the risk of these structured securities.
Ms. Norton. Mr. Chairman, can I put in the record the
document from which I quoted from the GAO in 1994, Financial
Derivatives: Action Needed to Protect the Financial System?
Chairman Waxman. Without objection, that document will be
made in put in the record.
Ms. Watson. Mr. Chairman, matter of personal privilege,
please. I notice there is a banner up down on the other side,
and I remember being asked to take a banner down that I had.
What is your procedure for banners that are put up by
members?
Mr. Issa. The gentleman has left.
Ms. Watson. I would like the chairman to respond.
Mr. Issa. The gentleman has left.
Ms. Watson. No, I still would like the chairman to respond.
Can everyone do that from time to time? Can any Member?
Chairman Waxman. If you will a yield to me, I wasn't aware
of it. I don't know that we have standard. I hear the point you
are making, and the banner has been taken down.
It is now the Chair's opportunity to recognize Mr. Cooper.
And I consider that a great opportunity, so I do recognize Mr.
Cooper.
Mr. Cooper. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
As important as it is to learn from the mistakes of the
past, I think people are even more concerned about trying to
prevent or avoid crises in the future.
The crisis I am worried about could be even bigger than the
subprime mortgage and financial crisis we are facing today. The
crisis I am worried about is probably best exemplified by this
official U.S. Treasury document that comes out every year, but
very few Americans, very few Members of Congress have ever seen
or heard about this document.
It is called the Financial Report of the U.S. Government.
It is available for free on the Treasury or GAO Web site. And
yet it seems to be a deep, dark secret in Washington, despite
the fact that this is the only official U.S. Government
document that actually uses real accounting, accrual
accounting, to describe our problem, and the only one that
contains audited numbers. All the rest of the budget documents
we use around here don't meet those standards.
Well, why is this document such a deep, dark secret? And it
is not classified. It is hidden in the public domain. Perhaps
if we did classify it, some spy would try to steal it and then
it would get more publicity. But why is this document so
hidden? Because it contains such bad news.
Now, this document goes out under the signature of the
Secretary of the Treasury. This particular one was signed by
former Secretary Snow. The deficit that all the politicians
talked about that year was $316 billion. The deficit contained
in this document was $760 billion, over twice as large. And the
debt is also much worse, because that year the debt was, the
official statutory debt was something like $8 trillion. Here
the fiscal gap is $46 trillion.
So, my question for each of the panelists is this:
Secretary Snow, your predecessor lost his job in part because
he cared so much about budget deficits. On your watch, did you
do anything to publicize this report, to make sure that
everybody in America knew the real story about the real numbers
for America?
Mr. Snow. Thank you for that, calling attention to that
report. You asked me what I did. One thing I did was to send it
to you, as I recall, to call your attention to it back then in
2005 or 2006.
It is a serious subject, it is a deeply serious subject,
because the systemic risk associated with the unfunded
liabilities, and that is what that report deals with, primarily
the unfunded liabilities. The promises we have made to the
future that we have not provided for would swamp any problem we
have ever seen financially, handily.
Mr. Cooper. Mr. Secretary, my time is so limited, only four
Members of Congress get this officially. More Members of
Congress were briefed on the ultra-secret NSA wiretapping than
on this document. You were kind enough to write me a letter
after you left office saying how important it is to get this
information out, but there is no evidence of any press
conference or any public statement that I could find that you
made while you were Secretary of the Treasury to get the word
out.
Mr. Cox, Chairman Cox, you are well aware that every public
company in America has to meet certain strict disclosure
standards. They have to use real accounting. Well, the Federal
Government has exempted itself for many years from these
standards. And wasn't it the first plank in the Contract with
America to stop these Federal Government exemptions from the
laws that apply to regular Americans?
So here we are in the situation where the Federal
Government is the only large entity in America, for profit or
nonprofit, government or nongovernment, that has successfully
exempted itself from real accounting standards. Have you done
anything in your tenure at the SEC to highlight the real
numbers for America?
Mr. Cox. Indeed, just on the point that you made about the
Contract with America, specifically that was about making sure
that Congress didn't exempt itself from the rules that apply to
everybody also.
But I just so strongly agree with you that for the entire
time that I served here in Congress, I mailed that report in
the form of an annual report of the U.S. Government to my
constituents every year. And I also made it available to every
Member of Congress so that they could do the same with their
constituents.
Now, obviously because the SEC does not have authority to
oversee books of the Federal Government, this is a Treasury
report, so it is not the SEC's province. But as a Member of
Congress, every single year I sent that out to my constituents
instead of the promotional mailings that people get from their
Senators and Representatives. People very much want to see
that. I couldn't agree with you more.
Mr. Cooper. Well, if you are so informed about these
numbers, what is the current fiscal gap for the United States
of America?
Mr. Cox. It is changing very rapidly.
Mr. Cooper. Give me a ballpark number.
Mr. Cox. I just met with Director Nussle and talked to him
about what would be the impact----
Mr. Cooper. Ballpark is fine. Give me a number.
Mr. Cox. The scoring of the $700 billion that the Congress
just approved will have such a material impact on this that the
ballpark is rather enlarged.
Mr. Cooper. So you don't know. The last report said $54
trillion.
Chairman Greenspan, you were the longest serving chairman
of the Federal Reserve in our history. You are a well-known
financial expert. What did you do in your tenure to help
Americans and help Congress understand the real numbers for
America?
Mr. Greenspan. Congressman, I took a version of that, which
is essentially the--you are talking about the accrual system,
and that then gets reflected in the cash system in the
forecasting structure.
What I have argued for for quite a significant period of
time is that we have underfunded for Medicare, which is a very
significant part of the numbers that you are concerned about,
by half. In other words, in order to actually honor all of the
promises that are being made to the next generation, the Baby
Boom Generation who are retiring, we would have to either cut
benefits by 50 percent, raise taxes to a point which probably
cannot fundamentally be sustained, and therefore we are looking
at as the underlying meaning of these types of reports, is we
essentially promised to the American people far more than we
can deliver.
And I am very fearful that unless and until we solve this
problem, before everyone retires, the large numbers of people
who will not be able to get what they are fundamentally
promised still have time to make adjustments in their
retirements. But if we wait until the hammer falls on us with
the inexorable grind of the numbers, I think we are doing a
very great disservice to the American people.
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Issa.
Mr. Issa. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. For the gentleman from
Tennessee and perhaps for the Chair, it would be interesting
under GAAP accounting on the balance sheet what we would do
with the House-Senate and other buildings here in Washington.
Would they be on at set-side or liability side?
Chairman Greenspan, thank you for your many years of
service. Today people seem to want to think that you were
somehow a partisan for the Bush administration. I am never sure
which Bush administration they are talking about here when they
somehow think your many years of great service should be
clouded by your inability along with the rest of us to properly
predict this crisis.
My questions today are mostly going to be limited to the
future. First of all, as Mr. Bilbray said a little while ago, I
am calling for and have a draft bill which is being circulated
with all the Members here today, saying that this, and I think
this is evidenced here today, is not something Congress will
deal well with. There are too many interests, such as Freddie
and Fannie, such as all the other parts of this moving target,
that I think we need to rise above Congress in suggestions for
how much we regulate and for how much transparency we have.
I would hope that sort of each of you would comment on
whether or not you support taking it out of the hands both of
the next administration and of Congress, at least in part, in
order to do the after-action, as we did with 9/11.
What I would like to specifically ask you though on, and
this is also for Chairman Cox, there are a number of modeling
systems that are at your disposal today and more you are
looking at. Chairman Cox, I believe the XBLR system is one you
are familiar with that is being developed.
But should the Congress bring to bear additional resources
for each of you and for other agencies so that your predictive
modeling and your doomsday scenarios, and specifically for you,
Chairman Greenspan, the doomsday scenario we now live with
undoubtedly could have been modeled but wasn't predictively
modeled by any of the agencies of government and delivered to
Congress.
Should we be in fact investing in that kind of modeling? In
other words, micro-modeling of everybody's product and
derivative products, but macromodeling of if in fact there is a
hiccup of 6 percent in the California market for homes and it
ripples throughout the United States, then what could or would
happen? If that modeling is available today, please tell me.
Otherwise tell me, do you think we should be investing in that?
Mr. Greenspan. It is not available. Indeed, Congressman,
earlier this year I raised the question about modeling
procedures for the economy, and the econometric work that is
being done has essentially been restricted to taking the whole
history and assuming that it is homogenous and therefore you
can get some insight.
What is very evident to me, and I think increasingly
others, is that the way the economy functions in the period of
expansion is really quite different from what happens on the
way down. And I should think that we will find that we could
model the euphoria stage, as I like to put it, and the fear
stage, and they are really quite different, and I think we
would find that we learn a great deal about specifically the
fear stage, because we do have numbers of episodes in the past.
Our major problem is that we don't have a third model which
tells us which of those two are about to happen. And the reason
essentially is that a financial crisis must of necessity be
unanticipated, because if it is anticipated, it will be
arbitraged away, and if a financial crisis by definition is a
discontinuity in asset prices, then it means from 1 day to the
next people were surprised. Something fundamentally different
happened.
I think that, and I have argued this, and I am not saying
whether the government resources are relevant to this, I think
the academic community could do it surely as well. And what we
do have to understand is that our view of the way an economy
functions is not properly modeled by what we now have.
Just let me say quickly, the Federal Reserve has an as
sophisticated a modeling structure and capable people as any
organization I am aware of. It did not forecast what is
happening.
Mr. Issa. I see. As a pilot, by the way, I know that a
landing is not just a takeoff in reverse.
Mr. Greenspan. That is a very good analogy, I think.
Mr. Issa. Mr. Cox.
Mr. Cox. Well, you alluded to XBRL, and I will just point
out that is not a modeling system, but it could contribute very
much to the construction used for models. The SEC is focused on
moving us from the bare bones disclosure that we have right
now, which is just paper data, and tagging each element of the
elements of a financial statement so that computers can do work
on behalf of people that the people don't even have to mine. It
will deliver results to them.
It will permit you instead of looking at the financial
statements of one company or financial reports about one
security, to instantly do comparative analysis. It will vastly
improve as a result risk analysis in the market and by
regulators, and we are very focused on it for that reason.
With respect to modeling all of the risk in the system, I
suppose at some point you run up against the problem of trying
to create such a level of exactitude that you rebuild the whole
world in all of its complexity. That is probably an aspiration
that we ought not to have. Therefore, we have to recognize that
computer modeling is going to always have its weaknesses, and
we have certainly seen that in the last year. We have seen it
in a lot of the risk models that people relied on. We saw it in
Long-Term Capital Management. We have seen it many times over.
A lot of those things required more human input.
Chairman Waxman. Do you have any comment on that before we
move on?
Mr. Snow. Just very briefly.
Chairman Waxman. Is your mic on? If you forget to look to
turn on your mic, you might forget to look at your model.
Mr. Snow. I share the basic thrust of your question here,
which is can't we do better? Can't we find ways to do better?
It seems to me, and this is retrospective, the question is
leverage in the system. When loans and debt gets to be some
fraction of GDP, it probably ought to send off some signals,
because GDP represents the earning power, the debt represents
the obligations.
Congressman Cooper talked to us about future obligations
that vastly--that rise at a very significant rate relevant to
the GDP of the United States. That sort of thing in rough and
ready terms we should be able to model and have signals go off.
But no model I think could ever be really anywhere close to
perfection at figuring out where the market is going to go. The
problem right now in the financial markets is the banks and
financial institutions hold all this paper. The market has said
that paper is a lot riskier than you the banks thought it was.
So the market has driven down the value of that paper. And as
long as the housing problems continue, it continues to drive
down the value of the paper. Nobody really knows where the
bottom is, and only the market will have the capacity to figure
that out.
I don't think you can really model anywhere near with
perfection, as has been said, but you always ought to look at
the assumptions, the assumptions finely on point. The
assumptions in the models of many of our banking institutions
that housing prices would keep rising and rising and rising
probably should have been seen as a mistake.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Issa. Your time has
expired.
Mr. Van Hollen.
Mr. Van Hollen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank all of you
gentleman for your testimony. I think these hearings are
important to try and figure out what went wrong and to hold
individuals and institutions accountable, and, most importantly
to try and figure out how we can learn from the mistakes that
were made.
Mr. Cox, I had some questions for you with respect to the
capital requirements and leverage rules in place for investment
banks. I am sure you have seen the quote that you made on March
11, 2008, where you said, ``We have a good deal of comfort
about the capital cushions at these firms,'' referring to
investment banks, ``at the moment.'' Three days later, as you
know, Bear Stearns was drained of most of its cash. They had to
enter into this quick marriage with J.P. Morgan Chase, along
with about $29 billion of taxpayer dollars infused as part of
the deal.
With that in mind, I want to ask you about the rule
changes, the leverage rule changes that were made by the SEC in
2004 where you loosened the leverage requirements, allowing
these banks to borrow big, big amounts of dollars and to take
even bigger, bigger risks with those dollars.
From where you sit now, do you believe that decision in
2004 was a mistake?
Mr. Cox. I repealed the program. We did away with the
program because based on experience, the program had two flaws.
The first was really baked into the statutory scheme. The SEC
did not have the statutory authority to do most of what it was
doing on a mandatory basis.
Second, the metrics.
Mr. Van Hollen. If I could, I am asking a slightly
different question. There were two pieces to that deal, as I
understand it, right? One was changing the net capital rule to
allow more borrowing. And as part of that it was supposed to be
balanced by more SEC oversight. Let me just ask you on first
part, did you think it was wise?
You weren't there at the time. Was it wise of the SEC to
change the capital requirement rules and allow much more
leverage, was that wise?
Mr. Cox. Well, you are correct that I was not there at the
time, and so I have to ascribe to the Commission, which voted
unanimously to do this in 2004, the best motives. It was very
clear that at that time----
Mr. Van Hollen. I am just asking you based on what you know
today. Was that a mistake or not?
Mr. Cox. Yes. I have said that the program was
fundamentally flawed. We know this in hindsight because we saw
that, as you mentioned, for example, Bear Stearns met the
capital requirements, met the liquidity requirements in the
program.
It used the internationally accepted Basel standards that
other banks have relied upon. And, yet, those metrics did not
help us in the week of March 10th when the liquidity of Bear
Stearns in the space of 2 days went from $12 billion to $2
billion.
Mr. Van Hollen. Now, I understand and agree with you that a
voluntary program is not--doesn't give you the kind of leverage
that you want in terms of oversight. But it was the only
oversight that was part of that deal.
In other words, I think, based on what you just said, I
think it was a mistake to loosen the capital requirements and
allow all of this borrowing. But what was agreed at the time
was that the SEC would take on greater oversight
responsibilities. It was a voluntary program.
And, in light of that, I just wanted to read to you from
the New York Times, the October 3rd article from this month
that says, ``The supervisory program under Mr. Cox was a low
priority. The office had not completed a single inspection
since its was reshuffled by Mr. Cox more than a year and a half
ago.''
They go on to say, despite the fact it had the weaknesses
you talk about, former officials, as well the Inspector
General's report--that was issued in connection with Bear
Stearns--``I have suggested that a major reason for its failure
was Mr. Cox's use of it.'' And they quote Mr. Goldschmidt, one
of the former SEC Commissioners saying, ``In retrospect, the
tragedy is that the 2004 rulemaking gave us the ability to get
information that would have been critical to sensible
monitoring, and, yet, the SEC didn't oversee well enough.''
That was a quote from a former SEC Commissioner, who said that
given the fact that those were the tools you did have at your
disposal, you just didn't use them adequately to protect
investors.
I would like you to respond to that.
Mr. Cox. Well, I have had occasion to talk to Commissioner
Goldschmidt, and I think I understand his views more fully than
are represented there about the program, because while he voted
to create it, and while he understood the problems with the
voluntary program and so on, he also recognizes what really is
needed right now.
I also want to correct something that has been said several
times that is a factual matter that everybody needs to
understand, and that is that the 2004 rule change--again, I was
not at the Commission in 2004 when this change occurred, but
it's just a fact about it that it did not loosen leverage
requirements on investment bank holding companies. That's not
at all what happened, because, prior to 2004, there were no
requirements of any kind that the SEC placed on investment bank
holding companies. They had no regulation.
As I pointed out several times today, by statute they have
no regulator. And up until 2004, when this voluntary program
was created, there was absolutely nothing.
So what was created in 2004 was at least more than existed
before. As we have seen, it was not nearly enough, and I think
it used the wrong metrics. I think that has been amply
illustrated.
In terms of reshuffling the program or dismantling it or
what, I think that must refer to some other program, because
the Consolidated Supervised Entities Program, during my
chairmanship, was increased in terms of its staffing by over 30
percent. We focused more resources on this, recognizing its
importance.
Mr. Tierney [presiding]. Thank you very much. Thank you,
Mr. Van Hollen.
Mr. Hodes, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Hodes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Greenspan, during your tenure at the Fed, we went from
irrational exuberance to an unregulated Wild West of subprime
lending, Wall Street gone wild, and here we are.
You said in your excellent book that you had a libertarian
opposition to most regulation. Now, you said that on page 373.
By the time we got to the epilogue, you seem to have changed
that view somewhat. And, today, we talked about infallibility,
the inability to predict risk, because we were infallible human
beings.
And also, in your epilogue, you said, ``Modern political
reality requires elected officials to respond to virtually
every economic aberration with a government program.''
Well, we are now in an unprecedented economic crisis. We
have just passed a bailout, which I opposed. You supported an
unprecedented ideological upside-down turn of events in terms
of the massive nature of that government intervention in the
free markets, following, apparently, the Lincoln philosophy,
the purpose of government is to do what the free markets cannot
or will not do so well for themselves.
Yet the fundamental problem, a mortgage foreclosure crisis,
is still raging in this country all over the country. Those
subprimes, which you talked about, are still being foreclosed
on. It slopped over into the AAAs and the prime mortgages. We
have seen record job losses, and it strikes me that until we
deal with the mortgage foreclosure crisis we are not going to
really get a handle on things.
Now, back in December, you said that you favored spending
government money to assist Americans struggling to make
mortgage payments without fundamentally changing market
structure. You said, I don't know if it would work, but it
would certainly help people. It would help their incomes. It
would help their personal state without affecting the structure
of the way markets are behaving and the way the adjustment
process is going on.
With all that as background, what do you think we need to
do now to get to the root, the cause of the mortgage
foreclosure crisis? And do you agree that we need to do that,
not just deal with the institutional help we provided, but deal
with that crisis in order to solidify things?
Is the button pressed?
Mr. Greenspan. Sorry about that.
The foreclosure crises is basically the result of the
decline in prices of homes, because clearly it impacts on the
amount of equity that is in the homes. And, obviously, as
prices fall, generally we are seeing an ever increasing number
of American households whose mortgages exceed the value of
their homes. That will stop only as prices stabilize, and they
will.
But prior to that, we still have a rise in foreclosures,
and we will, and it strikes me that anything that can be done
to confront that issue is valuable not only to the homeowner,
obviously, but also to the lender, because nobody gains from
foreclosure.
I recall, before we had all of the securitization and the
like, when, for example, most of the loans were made by savings
and loans, when the borrower got into trouble, the holder of
the mortgage recognized that if foreclosure occurred that he
would lose as well. And they got together and essentially
resolved what a new mortgage would look like.
So anything that can be done in the area of bringing the
people together, which is far more difficult--and I think as
Secretary Snow was saying--we have servicers who are too far
removed from the borrower. And we have to find ways in which we
can cut through that issue to resolve it.
But there is nothing like a stabilization of home prices to
resolve this issue. Until that happens we have more
difficulties. We are clearly in a position where, as I
mentioned in my prepared remarks, we have several months to go
at least. And as I said earlier, as you point out, that
ultimately what you don't want to do is restructure the market
because, for example, if you alter the mortgage contract, it's
going to cost future borrowers much higher interest rates.
And my view is that if we just give transfer payments to
people who are in difficulty, that would be a way to carry over
the difficulty of transition during this period when prices are
still declining.
So I would say that it's a short-term problem, it's not a
long-term problem. Indeed, there are numbers of scenarios which
are basically saying that if the rate of mortgage foreclosures
slows down, even though it's still increasing, what happens is
that the number of homeowners who fall into foreclosure start
to decline. We are not there yet, but we are getting close.
Mr. Tierney. Thank you very much.
Mr. Murphy, you are recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Murphy. Thank you very much.
Mr. Chairman, I want to ask one retrospective question and
one prospective question, because my constituents certainly are
interested in how we got to this situation we are in, but I
think most of our constituents are much more interested in how
we move forward from here.
I want to come back to this issue, Mr. Cox, of the CSE
program. Understanding that you have terminated the program due
to certain systemic failures, inability to do the job that it
set out to do, the report from the Inspector General's office
specific to the oversight that was done on Bear Stearns is
troubling not for the systemic failures, but for the practical
failures that occurred in your office's efforts to try to
figure out what was happening at Bear Stearns.
The Inspector General says that the SEC ignored numerous
potential red flags, that it allowed Bear Stearns to do some of
the audits themselves, rather than being done by the SEC, that
the SEC didn't perform reviews in a timely fashion.
And I certainly understand your problem in that even with
that information, the SEC doesn't have all the tools necessary
to make the corrective changes that you might want to make, but
at the very least the Inspector General notes that the lack of
information that the SEC got through its work, specifically
with Bear Stearns, had the result of ``depriving investors of
material information that they could have used to make well-
informed investment decisions.''
Building on Representative Van Hollen's questions, what do
you make of the Inspector General's specific findings on the
lack of oversight at Bear Stearns? Did you know about those red
flags, and how troubling is it to you, those specific findings
as to that one company?
Mr. Cox. Well, with the exception of the last one that you
referred to, with respect to the annual review of the 10-Ks, as
you will note from the footnotes to those particular items in
the report, they occurred before I became chairman.
This was a new program. It was put in place in 2004. It was
meant, as I mentioned a moment ago, to provide a window into
what was going on at the holding company level.
I think it's important, that first, you asked what I think
of the Inspector General's recommendations and report. We have
either already implemented or are implementing all of the
recommendations. I would think that having such a report----
Mr. Murphy. But do you think there's a specific failure--
forget putting aside the problems of the program itself. Was
there a specific problem with respect to the oversight that you
could have done with respect to Bear Stearns that would have
given information to at least outside investors that would have
been useful?
Mr. Cox. I think the things that you are describing, they
fall into two categories. They were sort of procedural and
paperwork issues that need to be corrected, and those are, you
know, operational and probably not ultimately material.
Then there are those things that go to whether or not the
risk assessment function is being properly performed. There the
fundamental question was, could the SEC have better foreseen
the mortgage meltdown that other regulators didn't see, and
could we have, you know, used different metrics, different
scenarios, for stressing the portfolios, for taking a look at
what was going on inside the firm?
I wish that we had been able to predict the mortgage market
meltdown. But, you know, failing that, I don't think that the
program itself would have had a different outcome. Unless you
could go in as a regulator and actually regulate the investment
bank holding company, all that was being done then was
reviewing, according to the program metrics, and the SEC rather
aggressively managed against those metrics. So the Inspector
General found at all times all of the CSE firms were well above
the capital requirements and the liquidity requirements of the
program.
Mr. Murphy. Before my time expires, let me then go to a
little bit broader question.
Understanding that our inability to manage risk and
leverage to allow some of these firms like Bear Stearns to get
so large that they became a part of this new category called
``too big to fail''--this is a question for the panel--what do
we do, going forward, to address this issue of firms that are
too big to fail? And how do I answer my constituents' concerns
who say, aren't we just now setting a precedent, which allows
these major financial firms in the future to make these same
types of risks that they made that got themselves into this
position, because we have now set up a precedent that we are
going to come in rescue them? How do we address that issue?
Mr. Greenspan. I think that is a very important question.
If, indeed, there are firms in this country which are too
big to fail, it necessarily means that investors will give them
moneys at lower interest rates, because they are perceived to
be guaranteed by the Federal Government. The result of that is
they have a competitive advantage over smaller firms, and that
creates huge distortions in the system.
So the question is, is it feasible to eliminate too big to
fail? That's a, you know, once you have gone down this road,
everyone is not going to believe you. But, remember, we used to
argue strenuously that Fannie and Freddie were not backed by
the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government because that's
what the law said. The markets didn't believe that.
Mr. Murphy. What would we do if we wanted to eliminate too
big to fail, if we wanted to? What would be the first steps we
would take?
Mr. Greenspan. Well, I think the first thing you would have
to say, as a minimum, you would have to eliminate these--the
larger institutions' subsidy effectively, and one way to do
that is to either raise capital charges or to raise fees, but
you cannot allow it to go on without very serious consequences.
At the end of the day, there has to be something which
penalizes those firms which move above the level where they
become too big to fail, and that raises very, very large
questions.
Chairman Waxman [presiding]. Thank you very much, Mr.
Murphy.
Mr. Sarbanes.
Mr. Sarbanes. Thank you. Thank you to the panel. Thank you,
Mr. Chairman.
We have been talking a lot about this metaphor, the blind
man and the elephant. I don't really buy that, because I think
what--I certainly don't buy it as an explanation for what
happened. I think it's being used as kind of an excuse to pass
the buck and sort of say, well, nobody could see the whole
picture, so we were each compromised in our ability to take
action that would have mattered and made a difference, but the
hearing testimony today just confirms to me that in each part
of the world that you each had a clear perspective on, you had
tools that you could have used, which if you had used them,
might have averted the situation, or certainly lessened its
impact.
So we keep putting it off when we didn't have a model that
worked. We had to develop new models, and they couldn't be
developed as quickly as needed and so forth.
Dr. Greenspan, you talk about how, I think you said, we are
not smart enough as people to predict where these things are
going and so forth. Well, I mean, that may be true when it
comes to understanding the full extent of the securitization of
these subprime mortgages, how things would kind of spin from
there, but certainly we are smart enough as people to have put
basic underwriting standards in place or to have preserved
basic underwriting standards. I mean, that doesn't take a lot
of smarts, really, and we certainly are that smart, but you
didn't do that when people were coming to you that you respect
and were saying, we have to take some steps here to make sure
that these subprime mortgages are being judged accurately in
terms of their danger.
So, I mean, you have responded a few times to that, but
respond again to me, because I don't understand that. I think
that if you had taken some action with tools that you had
available to you, that it would have acted to push back against
the securitization demand or appetite that you have described.
You sort of said, well, what happened was you had this huge
appetite from the securitizers to package these things up and
market them around the world to get better yields, and that's
what kicked in in 2005 and 2006 and 2007, and that just kind of
overwhelmed the system.
But if in 2003, 2004 and 2005, and during those periods
when you were being asked to exercise more aggressively these
tools of oversight with respect to the lending standards, if
that had been done, that would have acted as a kind of firewall
against this pressure that was coming from the securitizers,
and it might have made a difference.
So, if you could speak to that, I would appreciate it.
Mr. Greenspan. Well, remember, we did not know the size of
the subprime market probably until late 2005.
In short, we had no data that was worthwhile in the public
sector. We had, for example, HMDA data on mortgage holders that
you are familiar with, but we had no indication that the
subprime market had soared to the level that it did until very
late in 2005. In retrospect, we now know with the data we have
that subprime mortgages constituted about 7 percent of total
originations for mortgages in the United States. By 2005, it
had gotten up to 20 percent, and we didn't know that at the
time.
Mr. Sarbanes. Well, I appreciate that. My time is going to
run. Let me just followup on that quickly, because certainly
you are not suggesting that it's only when a problem gets to be
of a certain--in other words, if you see the fact that even in
a handful of circumstances, basic traditional principles of
honest underwriting and lending standards are being
compromised, it shouldn't be that the fact that the size of
that problem, volume of it, it hasn't reached a certain
threshold that satisfies you that you don't need to take
action. You ought to be taking action just based on what's
happening here, which if it had happened, would have begun a
process of oversight and vigilance that might have prevented
this thing, when it got to a certain size, from having a
particular impact.
Now, I am about to run out of time. Let me just close with
this observation, Mr. Chairman, if you will indulge me for a
second.
What concerns me, and I have read some of your writings, is
you have conceded that there was a flaw in your ideology
earlier today with respect to the situation of bad actors,
right? But what you haven't conceded is I think a flaw in the
ideology that suggests that the market will always punish the
bad actors, or at least not allow for the fact that if you put
a driver in a car and they drive recklessly, and maybe they
have a car crash, it's going to punish them and maybe they will
learn their lesson.
But in the meantime, a lot of innocent bystanders can get
run over. I think that's what happened. There's a lot of the
American people out there who feel like innocent bystanders,
and they have been hurt.
Thank you.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Sarbanes.
Mr. Snow. Mr. Chairman, can I just----
Chairman Waxman. Yes.
Mr. Snow. Since Congressman Sarbanes mentioned Treasury in
his opening comments, suggesting we, too, were not on the
watch, let me just go back to a point I have tried to make over
and over again, Congressman. That is we were on the watch. When
we saw a large systemic risk, we called it to the attention of
the Congress.
We couldn't have been clearer. I could not have been
clearer about the risk posed by the GSEs. I called it to the
attention of Congress in a number of testimonies. We didn't
duck our responsibilities. We assumed them, and we put a lot of
effort--I am glad to see that it eventually resulted in
Congress enacting the strong regulator legislation. It would
have been better if it could have acted sooner.
Chairman Waxman. Ms. Watson.
Ms. Watson. Thank you so much. I would like to thank the
three gentlemen for their ability to withstand this current
barrage of questions and your responses.
Mr. Cox, I want to start with you. I would like the other
two gentlemen to respond, too.
Since the beginning of the economic crisis, you have come
up with a number of suggestions in order to properly oversee
America's financial markets.
Now, if you, with all clarity, can respond to this, and I
would like the other two gentlemen to follow, do you believe in
regulating the financial markets, and what role do you think
the Federal Government should play in the U.S. economy in light
of our current economic crisis?
Mr. Cox. Thank you, Congresswoman. First, the answer is
yes, and, strongly, I believe in regulation of financial
markets. That is why I serve as the chairman of the Securities
and Exchange Commission.
Embedded within the description of regulation of financial
markets are two things, regulation and markets, and both are
good, and both are important. Congressman Sarbanes just a
moment ago analogized to driving and the rules of the road.
It's vitally important for markets that there be rules of the
road.
It would be very, very difficult to get people in America
to part with their money, to have investors be confident that
they could put money into the system with rules. So I support--
--
Ms. Watson. Congressman Cox, who should be involved in
formulating those rules?
Mr. Cox. Pardon me?
Ms. Watson. Who should be involved in formulating those
rules?
Mr. Cox. Well, clearly the Congress, first and foremost,
needs to describe the architecture and rulemaking, as has been
devised by the Congress as a means of addressing things at a
level of granularity that legislation can't reach. I think
that's a sound system.
With respect to the second part of your question, the role
of the government in the economy, that's the market's part. I
think it's vitally important that we never fail to appreciate
how powerful a means of wisdom markets can be in allocating
scarce resources in a nation of 300 million people and a world
of 6 billion people. Markets are going to give us the wisdom of
crowds, the markets are going to make decisions that a central
government can't. We have seen the failure of central planning
before but not both. You have to have regulation and markets.
Ms. Watson. Let me just, because our time is going to run
out, what additional authority would you, as Secretary need, or
whoever follows you need, to do the job smartly?
Mr. Cox. First and foremost, close the regulatory gaps that
I have described with respect to investment bank holding
companies, with respect to municipal securities, with respect
to credit default swaps, harmonize the regulation of
economically competitive products that currently are regulated
by the CFTC and the SEC.
If we fill those regulatory gaps, then I think the SEC will
be able to do a far better job than what it already does.
Ms. Watson. All right. And would you then put in writing to
the committee those specific items that you just pointed out?
Mr. Cox. I would be very pleased to do that.
Ms. Watson. Thank you. Let me go to Mr. Snow.
Chairman Waxman. Microphone.
Mr. Snow. I keep forgetting it. I agree with the comments
and associate myself with the comments of Chairman Cox. It's
not a matter of no regulation or some regulation. We know we
have to regulate financial markets. It's the matter of getting,
I think as the chairman said, smart regulation, targeted,
effective regulation.
On the economy, I think the economy is in tough shape. I
think it's going down a bad, bad path. And I think that the
stimulus package that's being talked about, a targeted, well-
shaped, well-formed stimulus package would make good sense at
this time.
Ms. Watson. Mr. Greenspan, please.
Mr. Greenspan. We have to recognize that this is almost
surely a once-in-a-century phenomenon. In that regard, to
realize that the types of regulation that would prevent this
from happening in the future are so onerous as to basically
suppress the growth rate in the economy, and I think the
standards of living of the American people, this is the really
major tradeoff problem that governments have in the sense that
we do know, on the basis of history, that free markets grow far
faster, create greater wealth, than, say, centrally planned
economies.
Ms. Watson. We know that, and I am sure you are very
experienced in explaining that. But who should then formulate
the regulations? Where would that lie?
Mr. Greenspan. I think it has to lie with the Congress.
Ms. Watson. All right, OK.
I have one question, I am going to run out of time, may I
just ask, and they can respond?
Chairman Waxman. Sure.
Ms. Watson. We have a personal problem in California and
Los Angeles, Mr. Cox, you might be aware of it. It's with the
Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority, MTA. The
Southlands commuter rail agency sold most of its train cars and
locomotives in four lease-back deals, three of which involved
AIG.
Metrolink and the MTA have to look for another firm to
replace AIG, which provided $1 billion in loans to finance the
lease-back transaction. This is a daunting task, considering
the Nation's current economic status. Outside of the financial
services industry, do you gentlemen foresee a wide variety of
bankruptcies that involve small businesses and other
corporations as a result of this financial crisis?
And thank you for allowing me to finish my questions.
Chairman Waxman. If you could answer very, very briefly. In
fact you can say, yes, no or maybe.
Mr. Snow. Unfortunately, yes.
Mr. Greenspan. I second that statement.
Mr. Cox. I have no reason to disagree with what has been
said thus far.
Chairman Waxman. Well, we are sorry to hear your answers,
but we appreciate that you gave us an answer.
Ms. McCollum.
Ms. McCollum. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
A free market isn't the same thing as an unregulated
market. The private sector and the government play two
different but very essential roles in our economy, and there's
a healthy tension between the private and the public interest,
and that's the balance you were referring to, Mr. Snow.
But when financial regulators decide to let the private
markets run free, the public interest is left defenseless to
the greed of Wall Street.
Mr. Snow, this morning you talked about the importance of
regulation, and you gave examples of regulatory matters you
wish Congress had acted on. But that seems to be a change of
heart from when you were Treasury Secretary.
I would like to show you a photograph taken in 2003 while
you were in charge of the Treasury Department. The picture
includes some of Treasury's top officials, including the
Director of the Office of Thrift Supervision, James Gilleran;
the Comptroller of the Currency, John Hawke. The picture also
includes representatives of the banking industry.
Now, this photo was taken at a press conference to announce
a new initiative to limit regulations on banks. There they are,
standing happily, destroying a tall stack of Federal rules.
I think it's telling that they are not using a scissor to
cut up the regulations, they are not even using an Enron paper
shredder. They are using a chain saw. So there's not much
nuance there, Mr. Snow.
The photo obviously is intended to send a clear,
unmistakable message to the market and to the public.
Mr. Snow, in your opinion, what message is this photograph
conveying about regulation in the Treasury Department when you
were the head of it, and how do you interpret this photo?
Mr. Snow. Sorry, Congresswoman, I don't see myself in that
photo. Maybe I am in there, maybe my eyesight has failed me.
Ms. McCollum. Mr. Snow, I did not say you were in the
photo. What I did say is you were head of the Treasury, and
these are people who are very highly placed Treasury officials.
Mr. Snow. Congresswoman, I have no knowledge of what that
photo is about or what those smiling people are celebrating.
Ms. McCollum. Well, Mr. Snow, at the time you were in
charge of the Treasury Department you were unaware of this
massive deregulation, cutting up of the banking industry?
Mr. Snow. Yes, I am unaware of any massive deregulation,
cutting the banking industry.
Ms. McCollum. Well, Mr. Snow, taking a chain saw to the
banking regulations was just the beginning. Two months after
this press conference, the Office of Comptroller of the
Currency issued a rule that prevented States from banning
predatory lending.
Your Treasury Department didn't act to prevent this crisis.
In fact, your Department blocked, your Department blocked the
States from protecting their citizens. Is that correct, yes or
no?
Mr. Snow. I think that's false.
Ms. McCollum. So your Department did absolutely no lobbying
to stop States from being able to regulate predatory lending?
Mr. Snow. I don't think the Treasury Department lobbied on
that matter. This was an action, as I recall it, taken by the
OCC, and under laws established by the Congress, the OCC on
regulatory matters is, enforcement matters, is entirely
independent of the Treasury Department.
Ms. McCollum. Mr. Snow, do you think that a law should have
been put in place that would have allowed States who wanted to
protect their citizens from predatory lending? Do you think
that law should have been allowed to move forward for States to
have control over that?
Mr. Snow. Well, I think an awful lot depends on the
circumstances and particulars of the law in question.
Ms. McCollum. Well, I am a former State representative, yes
or no. I mean, it's pretty clear to me, States rights or not.
Mr. Snow. Well, I would have to see the law. I am not going
to give a blanket answer to something unless I know what the
proposal is.
Ms. McCollum. Thank you.
Well, Chairman Cox, I have to agree with your statement at
CQ Weekly this month. You said the last 6 months has made it
abundantly clear that voluntary regulation does not work. I
have heard Dr. Greenspan refer to the fact that what he thought
the market would regulate to protect its investors it did not
regulate. I am paraphrasing from your earlier statement.
One of the lessons from this financial crisis is that over
the long term voluntary regulation is really no regulation at
all. We saw that at Lehman Brothers, AIG, and the credit rating
agencies that testified yesterday. Unregulated markets and
voluntary regulation, was a failed experiment. It's an
ideological approach to government that is erasing hard-earned
retirement and savings of millions of Americans, including my
constituents.
If we need an ideology, if we need a philosophy to govern,
as Mr. Greenspan suggested, I would suggest we give pragmatism
a try, we give common sense a try.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you, Ms. McCollum. We have two
Members who have not asked questions, Mr. Shays and Mr. Lynch,
and I think that will close out the hearing.
Mr. Shays.
Mr. Shays. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you for holding
these hearings. They have really been amazing, and I have
learned a lot, and I have met the enemy, and it's all of us.
I do want to say that I think Ms. McCollum's questions were
misinterpreting what was happening, where banks were being told
that they needed to lend to people who didn't have the income
and had bad credit, and we were forcing banks to move in that
direction.
I am struck by the fact that we have Freedom of Information
for the executive branch, but we don't have it for us, thank
God, huh?
But the Freedom of Information, when we had the hearing on
the regulators, excuse me, those who appraised the value of
companies and transactions, one of them said we just lost a
huge Mitsu RMBS deal to Moody's due to a huge difference in the
required credit support.
Then they said I think the only way to compete is to have a
paradigm shift in thinking, especially with the interest rate
risks; because they were rating them higher, they had to have a
greater set-aside.
Another memo we had was we don't have sufficient staff,
with the appropriate expertise, to research and establish
criteria to engage in dialog with our clients and to be
responsive. There were all these instruments, and we think the
rating agencies didn't understand them.
This is the one that really gets me. They said rating
agencies continue to create an even bigger monster, the CDO
market. Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time
this house of cards falters. I mean, that's the kind of
testimony we get, or the kind of testimony where we learn that
after we bail out AIG, just days afterwards, they went to a
swanky St. Regis resort in Monarch Beach for a week of wining
and dining of top salespeople.
As it happens, congressional investigators release that
they paid more than $440,000 for the event, including $200,000
for rooms, $150,000 for meals, $23,000 in spa charges. This is
after the $85 billion bailout.
But what I want to do is have you comment on this. We had a
savings and loan bust in the 1980's, and then we had the
commercial banks in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Then we
had the dot-com bubble bust, and now we have this subprime
meltdown.
My sense is, first off, somewhere between there was Enron
and Sarbanes-Oxley, and a bill I voted for. Was Sarbanes-Oxley
intended to prevent any of what we have seen here, and, if so,
did it?
I am not looking for a long answer. I will start with you,
Mr. Greenspan.
Mr. Greenspan. Well, it did one thing that I thought was
important; namely, to put the responsibility for the accounting
system on the--make it responsible for the chief executive
officer, because, as we have all learned in recent years----
Mr. Shays. OK, that's the first one. Any other benefit?
Mr. Greenspan. I am hard pressed to find any of them.
Mr. Shays. When we passed Sarbanes-Oxley, we learned that
the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, these huge giants, were not
under it. They weren't under it because they are not under the
1933 act and they are not under the 1934 act. That's the SEC.
They were not you, Mr. Cox, were they?
Mr. Cox. No. They had their own regulator, OFHEO.
Mr. Shays. They weren't under the regulator. They weren't
under the SEC. We forced them, by introducing legislation in
2002 and 2003 to put them under both. They voluntarily, kind of
arrogantly, voluntarily agreed to be under the 1934 act. That
just made us understand their macro numbers. The 1933 act would
have been all these different instruments. Why in the world is
not Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the 1933 act?
Mr. Cox. There is no good reason for that.
Mr. Shays. Thank you.
Mr. Cox. I have consistently urged, and I think we missed a
big opportunity in the emergency economic----
Mr. Shays. And the reason why it's not happening is
Congress doesn't want to put them under it, and that's the
challenge that we have.
We also, Mr. Snow, you advocated that they be, have a
stronger regulator. We have finally done it, but you went after
it day in and day out. Mr. Cox, you did as well. Mr. Greenspan,
you advocated that they have a better regulator.
So, my understanding is that the housing market, the drop,
the subprime, that has us into this meltdown.
Now, the criticism of you, Mr. Greenspan, and I would love
to hear your comment, is that when we had the dot-com crash,
you felt we needed easy money to get out, and then you kept
easy money after we were out of it. And some of my constituents
said that led to dumb lending and dumb borrowing.
They said it was not just dumb lending to individuals
buying homes, people buying homes they couldn't afford, but it
was the big financial houses, Lehman, Bear Stearns, Morgan
Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, all making these big
deals with huge leveraging, getting people to buy businesses
that they, frankly, were having extraordinary debt.
I am just wondering with hindsight if you would have maybe
pushed the rates up a little higher a little sooner?
Mr. Greenspan. It's very evident, from all of the data,
that what we began to confront in the last 10 years is a major
change in the global structure of the world, basically the
result of huge increases in markets developed in China and
elsewhere.
Without getting into the details, this created a major
decline in real long-term interest rates globally. It started
to fall in early 2000, and it shows up by the year 2006 where,
for the first time in history we had not only inflation rates,
but long-term interest rates in single digits around the world.
What that meant was for any central bank which tried to
raise interest rates for mortgages, or anything with maturities
more than, say, 5 or 6 years, and found itself running into
trouble--we, for example, every time we raised rates in the
post-World War II period, and what we would raise, of course,
is the short-term rate, long-term rates would go up as well.
In 2004, however, when we started to embark upon a major
increase in rates, we found that long-term rates did not move
at all, that we had lost control of the markets in the longer
end of the market, as we like to say. That is true of the
European Central Bank, the Bank of England, all central banks
are being driven to the point where for longer-term issues they
basically are confronted with this global situation.
Mr. Davis of Virginia. Mr. Chairman, I would ask to yield 1
additional minute to Mr. Shays.
Chairman Waxman. I recognize Mr. Shays for 1 additional
minute.
Mr. Shays. Mr. Cox, I would like you to have the
opportunity to respond to criticism that said in 2004 the SEC
allowed Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Morgan brothers, Merrill
Lynch, Goldman Sachs, to leverage at 30-1, in some cases even
higher, from their practice of doing 12-1 or 15-1. That has
been a severe criticism against you. I would love to hear your
answer.
Mr. Cox. Well, first, that 2004 rule change occurred while
I was a Member of Congress. But what the SEC did in 2004 was
not to lift leverage requirements on investment bank holding
companies or to repeal a 12-1 leverage rule. First, there was
no 12-1 leverage rule; and, second, there was no rule
whatsoever for investment bank holding companies.
The SEC never purported to regulate them, had no statutory
authority to do so. So, until 2004, there were simply no rules
at all.
It happened that post those rules, leverage increased, but
it did not increase because of the rules. And the rules at
least gave an opportunity to see at the holding company level
what was going on and to manage better than the SEC otherwise
could have.
Nonetheless, as I have pointed out several times, that was
a fundamentally flawed system of voluntary regulation with
metrics that did not work any better in the investment banks
than they did for WaMu or for IndyMac or for commercial banks
in this country and around the world that were using the Basel
standards.
Mr. Shays. Thank you.
Chairman Waxman. Thank you, Mr. Shays.
Mr. Lynch.
Mr. Lynch. Mr. Chairman, in the interest of time, I would
ask unanimous consent that I submit for the record, this is a
speech, actually an article by Harvey Pitt, former SEC
chairman, in Compliance Week from June 24, 2008. And also
there's another article, actually a piece here, a report by
Mark Jickling for Congress, entitled Averting Financial Crisis,
dated October 8, 2008.
Chairman Waxman. Without objection.
[The information referred to follows:]
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Mr. Lynch. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I too want to thank the
panelists for their willingness to come forward and help this
committee with its work. This Congress and the next Congress
will be charged with the responsibility of trying to
reconfigure our regulatory framework to deal with the problems
that now have become evident.
While each of you have said during today's testimony that
there's probably not one cause of this, I think there is one
way to describe the current problem we have now, which is
valuation risk, and the inability of market participants to
really, you know, value products and to ascertain where they
stand and where some of their counterparties stand.
Accurate information for the markets is really its life's
blood. If we don't have that, we will never gain back the trust
that we need in these markets.
We had a couple of glaring examples. We had a financial
report by Bear Stearns on the way down, just as they were about
to be forced into a sale, where in their report they said, I
had a quote here, they were talking about their balance sheet,
and they said we currently have $19 billion in complex
derivatives on our books, the value of which is not readily
observable.
The instruments they had are just too complex, and the
market had basically gone away for those instruments.
As well, you had E. Stanley O'Neill, the CEO of Merrill,
came out in early October 2007, said we had losses of $4
billion. Came out a week later, said we have losses of $7
billion. Came out 3 weeks later and said we have losses of $11
billion.
Clearly, you know, these folks had no idea of what was
really going on, and it's a function of the complexity of some
of these instruments.
I think the complexity amplified some of the problems that
we had.
Dr. Greenspan, I was--and this happens in a number of ways.
It's not only the complexity of the instruments, but also some
of them are off book, off the balance sheets, so we don't know
about them.
As you mentioned before, these credit default swaps are
completely unregulated, so we don't get to see those. But the
lack of transparency is what I am getting and I was a little
surprised, Dr. Greenspan, at your comments earlier today,
although you may have started to clarify them a little bit,
that there's nothing wrong or that most of the derivatives are
working properly, because the complexity of some of those--now,
if you are talking about the standard, very common derivatives
that are used in interest rate calculation and the early
payments of mortgages, prepayment penalties, that type thing,
those are very common. But we also have some very complex
derivatives that are really gumming up the system, and it has
caused distrust between lenders, because one party doesn't want
to lend to the other because of the opaqueness or the opacity,
I guess, of what their derivatives are and some of their
holdings.
So is what you are saying that most of these derivatives
are working, is that an implication that we shouldn't do
something in terms of regulatory action with respect to some of
these complex derivatives, is that what you are saying?
Mr. Greenspan. Well, I think you are going to find,
Congressman, that many of those complex derivatives are gone,
never to be seen again.
Mr. Lynch. Well, I wish I could--I wish I could believe
that, but we have short memories around here, and as soon as
the urgency and this crisis is over, folks, you know, there's
good money being made on those and so there's an incentive
there to push them out into the market. So I wish I could
believe you that these things won't come back, but I want to
make sure.
Because it will be to the Congress' detriment, as well as
to the financial industry, if these things do come back or if
we have another failure like we are having right now.
Mr. Greenspan. Well, I certainly have no objection to
regulating those instruments. I mean, structured investment
vehicles, for example, my puzzlement is who is buying those
things? And if you are going to tell me that there are a lot of
instruments out there which make no sense, I agree with you.
Mr. Lynch. Interestingly enough, 72 percent of them were
held by hedge funds, the smartest people in the room, we are
told.
Mr. Greenspan. That is what I find most disturbing. We are
not dealing with people who are dumb. We are dealing with, by
far, the most sophisticated, thoughtful people about the way
markets work who created the major problems.
Mr. Lynch. Mr. Chairman, could I give the other two
witnesses a crack at that?
Chairman Waxman. Yes, certainly, if they wish to engage.
Mr. Lynch. Please.
Mr. Cox. First, an observation about what we can do in real
time--an observation about what we can do in real time to
address some of the problems that you have just described. With
respect to credit default swaps, the creation of a central
counterparty and exchange trading for these can start to bring
them into the sunlight. Beyond that, if we had regulation of
them, so we can have a disclosure, that will help.
Beyond that, a more general point, the financial system
that's administered by Wall Street institutions exists for a
purpose. It exists to raise money for productive enterprise. It
supports a lot of jobs, it's what the real economy needs to
operate on. It should not be an end in itself. It should not
become a baroque cathedral of complexity that pays itself
richly in the short run while exposing all the rest of us to
extraordinary risk that can threaten the Nation itself.
I think we need to understand that complexity in and of
itself can frustrate investors' understanding of what is in the
market, can make it difficult for markets to work. An all-out
war on complexity is absolutely important. It's needed in
accounting. We have been doing it with the Financial Accounting
Standards Board to make sure that we simplify GAAP, but all the
complexity and the instruments and the disclosures where we
have been working to simplify it so investors can understand
it, and the lack of transparency in the markets, all of that, I
think you are absolutely right, conspires to let risk grow in
the darkness.
Mr. Lynch. Thank you.
Chairman Waxman. Mr. Snow.
Mr. Snow. I will just say I thought your statement,
Congressman, was a very coherent and lucid description of the
problem in the banking system today. It's gummed up, I think
that was your word, with all of this paper that is hard to get
price discovery on. They can't find out what the darn stuff is
worth because it's so opaque, and the banks don't trust each
other's balance sheets.
You can put liquidity in, as is being done by the Fed and
Treasury, and you can put capital in which is being done
through the TARP program you approved, but unless you clear up
this complexity, unless people trust each other's balance
sheets and the paper on the balance sheets, they are pretty
darn disinclined. It's called risk aversion. You are really
risk averse with your counterparty.
I think as long as this continues, until we get the price
discovery, overcome the risk aversion, we are going to have the
frozen credit markets, which is why I have been arguing we take
a page from the book of the Brits, who have not only done
liquidity and done capital, but they have put in place
guarantees, interbank lending guarantees so the banks will
start lending to each other, and do it for some period of time.
But we have to unfreeze this frozen mass of bad paper in
the system and get it disgorged, get it out of the system. But
in the interim while the disgorging and price discovery goes
on, it would seem to me it would make sense for us to move
toward interbank guarantees so that banks will start lending
again and overcome the risk aversion that they see in all their
counterparts.
Mr. Lynch. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Chairman Waxman. The gentleman's time has expired. When I
talked to Dr. Greenspan about coming to testify, he told me
that hearing could last 4 hours. You were absolutely on the
mark. This hearing has lasted 4 hours.
It has been a very helpful 4-hour period for us to have the
three of you here to give us your views on these issues of
where we have been and where we can go and what reforms we
ought to look to for the future. I want to thank you on behalf
of the committee for your generosity of your time and your
willingness to answer our questions for such a lengthy period
of time.
We stand adjourned in terms of the hearing. Those who are
here for the hearing certainly could leave. I thank you for
that.
We are adjourned for the hearing.
[Whereupon, at 1:55 p.m., the committee was adjourned.]
[The prepared statements of Hon. Edolphus Towns and Hon.
Bill Sali follow:]
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