There is nothing like the release of secret tape recordings to clarify an inconclusive debate. I recall that happening with Nixon back in the day. Even as a Washington apprentice I could see that he was a ruthless, power hungry abuser of his office, but much of official Washington just denied it. Then came the tapes. Soon there was no doubt. In short order Nixon was gone.
So now comes the Goldman tapes—-46 hours of recordings by an embedded New York Fed regulator at Goldman Sachs who got fired for attempting to, well, regulate. Would that the Carmen Segarra affair generates a Nixonian result—-that is, exposure that “regulatory capture†is an endemic, potent and inextricable evil that can’t be remediated in situ.
Never mind that what Ms. Segarra was attempting to regulate–whether Goldman had a conflict of interest policy with respect to its M&A clients—-was actually none of the state’s business in the first place. If in the instant case GS was giving squinty eyed advise to its client, El Paso Corporation, because it owned a $4 billion position in the other party to the transaction, Kinder Morgan, so be it. Either the conflict was harmless or eventually Goldman’s M&A business would have been punished by the marketplace—–even stupid executives and boards wouldn’t pay huge fees to be taken to the cleaners for long.
Actually, what the tapes really show is that the Fed’s latest policy contraption—-macro-prudential regulation through a financial stability committee—-is just a useless exercise in CYA. Apparently, even the colony of the bubble blind which inhabits the Eccles Building has started to get nervous about financial bubbles and instability in recent months. What with junk bond yields sporting a 5 handle, the Russell 2000 trading at 80X reported profits and the IPO market having gone full-tilt manic with last week’s pricing at 27X sales of a Chinese e-commerce mass merchant that is a pure proxy for the greatest credit fueled house of cards in human history—-it needed to show some gesture of concern.
Now, it might have gone straight to the horse’s mouth. It might have asked about 70 consecutive months of zero money market rates, for instance, and the manner in which that has enabled speculators to mount massive momentum trades everywhere in the financial markets by funding any “risk asset†that generates a yield or a short-run gain with nearly zero cost options or repo. Or it might have inquired about the destruction of the market’s natural internal mechanisms of stability and financial restraint—-that is, short sellers and two way trading—that has resulted from the Greenspan/Bernanke/Yellen Put; or it might have wondered whether its bald-faced doctrine of “wealth effects†and ever rising stock prices does not in itself create a massive bias toward speculative risking taking and a blind buy-the-dips herd mentality in the casino.
