Remarks of Under Secretary for Domestic Finance Mary Miller at the Office of Financial Research (OFR) and Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) Conference on “Assessing Financial Intermediation: Measurement and Analysis”

Remarks of Under Secretary for Domestic Finance Mary Miller at the Office of Financial Research (OFR) and Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC) Conference on "Assessing Financial Intermediation: Measurement and Analysis"
Dec 6, 2012
http://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/tg1789.aspx

As Prepared for Delivery
WASHINGTON – Good morning and thank you to the OFR and the Council for the opportunity to join you here today.

It is a pleasure for me to note that this is the second annual conference hosted by the OFR and the Council.  These two organizations have come a long way since their creation in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.

Conferences like this one are a key way that the OFR and the Council are leveraging their expertise by calling on experts from academia, industry, and elsewhere in government to bring diverse perspectives on questions related to system-wide financial stability.

The Dodd-Frank Act designed the OFR to act as a catalyst to foster a broad examination of questions related to financial stability.  One of the OFR’s goals involves cultivating a virtual network of academics, researchers, and others to enrich and expand the OFR’s reach in fulfilling its mission.

The Council and the OFR work together to produce important and timely research and analysis on a range of issues—for example, on the risks presented by money market funds.  In addition, the OFR plays a central role in the international initiative to implement a global data standard to identify uniquely the entities in financial transactions.  This legal entity identifier, or LEI, is essential for governments and the financial industry to assess exposures and interconnections within the vast network of financial market participants.  And both the Council and the OFR have published detailed annual reports to engage the public with their work.

Today’s conference provides an opportunity to build on those accomplishments and to continue a discussion on the best ways to promote financial stability. 

The financial services marketplace is constantly changing, as market participants seek new and better ways to do business, as technology and techniques evolve, and as government adjusts the regulatory and supervisory framework.

This process of evolution creates exciting opportunities, but it also represents a moving target of possible risks that can grow into potential threats to financial stability.  That is where the Council and the OFR come in and that is where this conference will turn its focus.

Before the Dodd-Frank Act, the United States did not have one single agency tasked with looking at systemic risk across the financial system and considering how to respond to it – what we call a macroprudential approach.  That shortcoming resulted in a critical blind spot to risks building in the financial system and, once the crisis began, blocked a clear view of what was happening as the nation plummeted into the financial crisis.

The Council and the OFR are designed to correct that lack of comprehensive vision – to provide visibility across the financial services marketplace and across the areas of the compartmentalized responsibility of federal and state financial regulators.  It also allows us to inspect the inner workings of the financial system for an understanding of the interconnections that can transmit and compound systemic risks.

As 2012 draws to a close and Dodd-Frank implementation continues, our resolve is stronger than ever to resist any attempt to roll back these reforms and return our country to the precarious environment of misplaced incentives and inadequate controls that got us into such serious trouble.

We must also be mindful that, as the economy continues to recover, we must remain vigilant about detecting emerging risks and taking appropriate action.

In my experience, you are never handed the same script for a financial crisis or shock.  The next financial crisis is unlikely to look like the last.  Innovative thinking is essential as we recognize that the past approaches for assessing and managing system-wide risks are inadequate for facing the challenges of today and tomorrow.  New ideas must be applied to these problems and government cannot generate all of the good new ideas on its own.  There must be a partnership with academics, industry, and others—and conferences like this one are incubators for new ideas to emerge and begin to develop.

I would like to thank all of the conference participants for contributing to this effort and for helping to expand our collective knowledge of financial stability.  Your time and energies are providing a valuable service to our country, its economy, and its citizens.

###

Tracking Global Demand for Advanced Economy Sovereign Debt

Tracking Global Demand for Advanced Economy Sovereign Debt. Prepared by Serkan Arslanalp and Takahiro Tsuda
IMF Working Paper No. 12/284
December 2012
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=40135.0

Recent events have shown that sovereign, just like banks, can be subject to runs, highlighting the importance of the investor base for their liabilities. This paper proposes a methodology for compiling internationally comparable estimates of investor holdings of sovereign debt. Based on this methodology, it introduces a dataset for 24 major advanced economies that can be used to track US$42 trillion of sovereign debt holdings on a quarterly basis over 2004-11. While recent outflows from euro periphery countries have received wide attention, most sovereign borrowers have continued to increase reliance on foreign investors. This may have helped reduce borrowing costs, but it can imply higher refinancing risks going forward. Meanwhile, advanced economy banks’ exposure to their own government debt has begun to increase across the board after the global financial crisis, strengthening sovereign-bank linkages. In light of these risks, the paper proposes a framework— sovereign funding shock scenarios (FSS)—to conduct forward-looking analysis to assess sovereigns’ vulnerability to sudden investor outflows, which can be used along with standard debt sustainability analyses (DSA). It also introduces two risk indices—investor base risk index (IRI) and foreign investor position index (FIPI)—to assess sovereigns’ vulnerability to shifts in investor behavior.

Operationalising the selection and application of macroprudential instruments

Operationalising the selection and application of macroprudential instruments
Committee on the Global Financial System
December 3, 2012
http://www.bis.org/press/p121203.htm

The recent financial crisis has accelerated efforts to develop macroprudential policy frameworks. As a result, new or strengthened mandates for macroprudential policies have been established in a growing range of jurisdictions. A report released today by the Committee on the Global Financial System (CGFS) provides practical guidance for policymakers on how macroprudential instruments should be chosen, combined and applied.

This report - prepared by a Working Group chaired by José-Manuel González-Páramo, formerly of the European Central Bank - aims to help policymakers in operationalising macroprudential policies.

Specifically, it identifies three high-level criteria that are key in determining the selection and application of macroprudential instruments:

1. the ability to determine the appropriate timing for the instrument's activation or deactivation;
2. the instrument's effectiveness in achieving the stated policy objective; and
3. the instrument's efficiency in terms of a cost-benefit assessment.

In trying to operationalise these criteria, the report proposes a number of practical tools that can help when choosing and implementing macroprudential instruments.

William C Dudley, CGFS Chairman and President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, says in the preface of the report: "We hope that the practical approaches described in this report will prove to be a relevant and timely input to the macroprudential policy frameworks that are currently being established in a large range of jurisdictions."

Human Nature: Jim Sinegal Dividend Tax Decision - Costco Will Borrow To Pay Dividends

Costco's Dividend Tax Epiphany. WSJ Editorial
Obama's fans in the 1% vote to beat Obama's tax increase.The Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2012, on page A14
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324705104578149012514177372.html

When President Obama needed a business executive to come to his campaign defense, Jim Sinegal was there. The Costco COST +2.07% co-founder, director and former CEO even made a prime-time speech at the Democratic Party convention in Charlotte. So what a surprise this week to see that Mr. Sinegal and the rest of the Costco board voted to give themselves a special dividend to avoid Mr. Obama's looming tax increase. Is this what the President means by "tax fairness"?

Specifically, the giant retailer announced Wednesday that the company will pay a special dividend of $7 a share this month. That's a $3 billion Christmas gift for shareholders that will let them be taxed at the current dividend rate of 15%, rather than next year's rate of up to 43.4%—an increase to 39.6% as the Bush-era rates expire plus another 3.8% from the new ObamaCare surcharge.

More striking is that Costco also announced that it will borrow $3.5 billion to finance the special payout. Dividends are typically paid out of earnings, either current or accumulated. But so eager are the Costco executives to get out ahead of the tax man that they're taking on debt to do so.

Shareholders were happy as they bid up shares by more than 5% in two days. But the rating agencies were less thrilled, as Fitch downgraded Costco's credit to A+ from AA-. Standard & Poor's had been watching the company for a potential upgrade but pulled the watch on the borrowing news.

We think companies can do what they want with their cash, but it's certainly rare to see a public corporation weaken its balance sheet not for investment in the future but to make a one-time equity payout. It's a good illustration of the way that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke's near-zero interest rates are combining with federal tax policy to distort business decisions.

One of the biggest dividend winners will be none other than Mr. Sinegal, who owns about two million shares, while his wife owns another 84,669. At $7 a share, the former CEO will take home roughly $14 million. At a 15% tax rate he'll get to keep nearly $12 million of that windfall, while at next year's rate of 43.4% he'd take home only about $8 million. That's a lot of extra cannoli.

This isn't exactly the tone of, er, shared sacrifice that Mr. Sinegal struck on stage in Charlotte. He described Mr. Obama as "a President making an economy built to last," adding that "for companies like Costco to invest, grow, hire and flourish, the conditions have to be right. That requires something from all of us." But apparently $4 million less from Mr. Sinegal.

By the way, the Costco board also includes at least two other prominent tub-thumpers for higher taxes— William Gates Sr. and Charles Munger. Mr. Gates, the father of Microsoft's MSFT -1.22% Bill Gates, has campaigned against repealing the death tax and led the fight to impose an income tax via referendum in Washington state in 2010. It lost. Mr. Munger is Warren Buffett's longtime Sancho Panza at Berkshire Hathaway BRKB 0.00% and has spoken approvingly of a value-added tax that would stick it to the middle class.

Costco's chief financial officer, Richard Galanti, confirms that every member of the board is also a shareholder. Based on the most recent publicly available data, they own more than 4.1 million shares and more than 1.3 million options to purchase additional shares. At $7 a share, the dividend will distribute roughly $29 million to the board, including Mr. Sinegal's $14 million—at a collective tax saving of about $8 million. Even more cannoli.

We emailed Mr. Sinegal for comment but didn't hear back. Mr. Galanti explained that while looming tax hikes are a factor in the December borrowing and payout, so are current low interest rates. Mr. Galanti adds that the company will still have a strong balance sheet and is increasing its capital expenditures and store openings this year.

As it happens, one of those new stores opened Thursday in Washington, D.C., and no less a political star than Joe Biden stopped by to join Mr. Sinegal and pose for photos as he did some Christmas shopping. It's nice to have friends in high places. We don't know if Mr. Biden is a Costco shareholder, but if he wants to get in on the special dividend there's still time before his confiscatory tax policy hits. The dividend is payable on December 18 to holders of record on December 10.

To sum up: Here we have people at the very top of the top 1% who preach about tax fairness voting to write themselves a huge dividend check to avoid the Obama tax increase they claim it is a public service to impose on middle-class Americans who work for 30 years and finally make $250,000 for a brief window in time.

If they had any shame, they'd send their entire windfall to the Treasury.

How dare Fannie and Freddie try to charge for their risks?

Senators for Housing Busts. WSJ Editorial
How dare Fannie and Freddie try to charge for their risks.The Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2012, on page A14
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324352004578139543792750584.html

For proof that politicians have learned nothing from the Federal Housing Administration's insolvency, look no further than a November 19 Senate letter to Edward DeMarco of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees Fannie Mae FNMA 0.00% and Freddie Mac FMCC 0.00% . Mr. DeMarco wants to let the toxic mortgage twins charge higher fees to cover their risks. Oh, the horror.

At issue is a little-noticed September FHFA proposal to discriminate between states with efficient foreclosure practices and those where judicial and regulatory burdens prolong the process. Specifically in Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and New York, foreclosures can take years.

Starting next year, Fannie and Freddie would charge borrowers in those states a one-time upfront fee of between 0.15% and 0.30%, which on a 30-year, $200,000 fixed-rate mortgage equates roughly to "an increase of approximately $3.50 to $7.00" on a monthly mortgage payment, according to FHFA.

The agency explained that the fees Fan and Fred charged before the housing crisis "proved inadequate to compensate for the level of actual credit losses" the duo sustained, which "contributed directly to substantial financial support being provided to the two companies by taxpayers." Total taxpayer cost so far: $138 billion. The change would relieve borrowers in low-cost states from subsidizing those in high-cost states. FHFA would lower or eliminate the levy if states sped up their foreclosure processes, which would also speed up the housing recovery.

Cue the outrage from Capitol Hill. "As you know, certain state and local governments have put in place increased regulatory and judicial scrutiny of foreclosures to protect consumers from mortgage loan servicing and foreclosure abuses," Democratic Senators from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Florida, plus Independent Joe Lieberman, declared. They want the higher fees withdrawn.

Translation: The Senators are embarrassed that FHFA is exposing the cost of their antiforeclosure crusade and are trying to pin the blame on bankers. Recall that the "robo-signing" scandal never unearthed a wave of current borrowers wrongly ejected from their homes. The politicians want Fan and Fred to keep churning out below-market-rate mortgage insurance, regardless of the eventual cost to taxpayers.

This is the kind of thinking that led Fan and Fred to supercharge the subprime lending boom and pushed the FHA into its money-losing expansion. As long as politicians run the housing markets, they will continue promoting such behavior. Kudos to Mr. DeMarco, a career civil servant, for trying to impose a more rational policy, but don't be surprised if the Obama Administration tries to replace him in a second term.

Debate: Progressives & Conservatives on Entitlements

Progressives

Sorry, Erskine, America Rejected Simpson-Bowles. By John Nichols
The Nation, November 29, 2012 - 8:46 AM ET
http://www.thenation.com/blog/171513/sorry-erskine-america-rejected-simpson-bowles

 

Erskine Bowles, who is sort of a Democrat, met Wednesday with House Speaker John Boehner to help Republicans promote proposals to cut entitlements, as part of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations.

This is the right place for Bowles, who has long maintained a mutual-admiration society with House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin. The former Clinton White House chief of staff has always been in the corporate conservative camp when it comes to debates about preserving Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

It’s good that he and Boehner have found one another. Let the Republicans advocate for the cuts proposed by Bowles and his former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, his Republican co-conductor on the train wreck that produced the so-called “Simpson-Bowles” deficit reduction plan.

After all, despite the media hype, Simpson-Bowles has always been a non-starter with the American people.

Last summer, at the Democratic and Republican national conventions, so many nice things were said about the recommendations of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that had been chaired by former Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, a Republican, and Bowles that it was hard to understand why they were implemented. Paul Ryan went so far as to condemn President Obama for “doing nothing” to implement the Simpson-Bowles plan—only to have it noted that Ryan rejected the recommendations of the commission.

But, while a lot of politicians in both parties say a lot of nice things about the austerity program proposed by Simpson-Bowles, there is a reason why there was no rush before the election to embrace the blueprint for cutting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid while imposing substantial new tax burdens on the middle class.

It’s a loser.

Before the November 6 election, Simpson and Bowles went out of their way to highlight the candidacies of politicians who supported their approach—New Hampshire Republican Congressman Charlie Bass, Rhode Island Republican US House candidate Brendan Doherty, Nebraska Democratic US Senate candidate Bob Kerrey. Bipartisan endorsements were made, statements were issued, headlines were grabbed and…

The Simpson-Bowles candidates all lost.

Americans are smart enough to recognize that Simpson-Bowles would stall growth. And they share the entirely rational view of economists like Paul Krugman.

“Simpson-Bowles is terrible,” argues Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner for his economic scholarship. “It mucks around with taxes, but is obsessed with lowering marginal rates despite a complete absence of evidence that this is important. It offers nothing on Medicare that isn’t already in the Affordable Care Act. And it raises the Social Security retirement age because life expectancy has risen—completely ignoring the fact that life expectancy has only gone up for the well-off and well-educated, while stagnating or even declining among the people who need the program most.”

On election night, Peter D. Hart Research Associates surveyed Americans with regard to key proposals from the commission. The reaction was uniformly negative.

By a 73-18 margin, those polled said that protecting Medicare and Social Security from benefit cuts is more important than bringing down the deficit.
By a 62-33 margin, the voters who were surveyed said that making the wealthy start paying their fair share of taxes is more important than reducing tax rates across the board (62 percent to 33 percent).

But that’s just the beginning of an outline of opposition to the Simpson-Bowles approach.

To wit:
* 84 percent of those surveyed oppose reducing Social Security benefits;
* 68 percent oppose raising the Medicare eligibility age;
* 69 percent oppose reductions in Medicaid benefits;
* 64 percent support addressing the deficit by increasing taxes on the rich—with more than half of those surveyed favoring the end of the Bush tax cuts for those making more than $250,000.

Americans want a strong government that responds to human needs:
• 88 percent support allowing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies to lower costs;
• 70 percent favor continuing extended federal unemployment insurance;
• 64 percent support providing federal government funding to local governments;
• 72 percent say that corporations and wealthy individuals have too much influence on the political system.

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka is right. On November 6, “The American people sent a clear message.”

With their votes, with their responses to exit polls, with every signal they could send, the voters refused to buy the “fix” that Erskine Bowles is selling.

---
Conservatives

The Crisis of American Self-Government. By Sohrab Ahmari
Harvey Mansfield, Harvard's 'pet dissenter,' on the 2012 election, the real cost of entitlements, and why he sees reason for hope.
The Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2012, on page A13
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323751104578149292503121124.html

Cambridge, Mass.

'We have now an American political party and a European one. Not all Americans who vote for the European party want to become Europeans. But it doesn't matter because that's what they're voting for. They're voting for dependency, for lack of ambition, and for insolvency."

Few have thought as hard, or as much, about how democracies can preserve individual liberty and national virtue as the eminent political scientist Harvey Mansfield. When it comes to assessing the state of the American experiment in self-government today, his diagnosis is grim, and he has never been one to mince words.

Mr. Mansfield sat for an interview on Thursday at the Harvard Faculty Club. This year marks his 50th as a teacher at the university. It isn't easy being the most visible conservative intellectual at an institution that has drifted ever further to the left for a half-century. "I live in a one-party state and very much more so a one-party university," says the 80-year-old professor with a sigh. "It's disgusting. I get along very well because everybody thinks the fact that I'm here means the things I say about Harvard can't be true. I am a kind of pet—a pet dissenter."

Partly his isolation on campus has to do with the nature of Mr. Mansfield's scholarship. At a time when his colleagues are obsessed with trendy quantitative methods and even trendier "identity studies," Mr. Mansfield holds steadfast to an older tradition that looks to the Western canon as the best guide to human affairs. For him, Greek philosophy and the works of thinkers such as Machiavelli and Tocqueville aren't historical curiosities; Mr. Mansfield sees writers grappling heroically with political and moral problems that are timeless and universally relevant.

"All modern social science deals with perceptions," he says, "but that is a misnomer because it neglects to distinguish between perceptions and misperceptions."

Consider voting. "You can count voters and votes," Mr. Mansfield says. "And political science does that a lot, and that's very useful because votes are in fact countable. One counts for one. But if we get serious about what it means to vote, we immediately go to the notion of an informed voter. And if you get serious about that, you go all the way to voting as a wise choice. That would be a true voter. The others are all lesser voters, or even not voting at all. They're just indicating a belief, or a whim, but not making a wise choice. That's probably because they're not wise."

By that measure, the electorate that granted Barack Obama a second term was unwise—the president achieved "a sneaky victory," Mr. Mansfield says. "The Democrats said nothing about their plans for the future. All they did was attack the other side. Obama's campaign consisted entirely of saying 'I'm on your side' to the American people, to those in the middle. No matter what comes next, this silence about the future is ominous."

At one level Mr. Obama's silence reveals the exhaustion of the progressive agenda, of which his presidency is the spiritual culmination, Mr. Mansfield says. That movement "depends on the idea that things will get better and better and progress will be made in the actualization of equality." It is telling, then, that during the 2012 campaign progressives were "confined to defending what they've already achieved or making small improvements—student loans, free condoms. The Democrats are the party of free condoms. That's typical for them."

But Democrats' refusal to address the future in positive terms, he adds, also reveals the party's intent to create "an entitlement or welfare state that takes issues off the bargaining table and renders them above politics." The end goal, Mr. Mansfield worries, is to sideline the American constitutional tradition in favor of "a practical constitution consisting of progressive measures the left has passed that cannot be revoked. And that is what would be fixed in our political system—not the Constitution."

It is a project begun at the turn of the previous century by "an alliance of experts and victims," Mr. Mansfield says. "Social scientists and political scientists were very much involved in the foundation of the progressive movement. What those experts did was find ways to improve the well-being of the poor, the incompetent, all those who have the right to vote but can't quite govern their own lives. And still to this day we see in the Democratic Party the alliance between Ph.D.s and victims."

The Obama campaign's dissection of the public into subsets of race, sex and class resentments is a case in point. "Victims come in different kinds," says Mr. Mansfield, "so they're treated differently. You push different buttons to get them to react."

The threat to self-government is clear. "The American founders wanted people to live under the Constitution," Mr. Mansfield says. "But the progressives want the Constitution to live under the American people."

Harvey Mansfield Jr. was born in 1932 in New Haven, Conn. His parents were staunch New Dealers, and while an undergraduate at Harvard Mr. Mansfield counted himself a liberal Democrat.

Next came a Fulbright year in London and a two-year stint in the Army. "I was never in combat," he says. "In fact I ended up in France for a year, pulling what in the Army they call 'good duty' at Orléans, which is in easy reach of Paris. So even though I was an enlisted man I lived the life of Riley."

A return to the academy and a Harvard doctorate were perhaps inevitable but Mr. Mansfield also underwent a decisive political transformation. "I broke with the liberals over the communist issue," he says. "My initiating forces were anticommunism and my perception that Democrats were soft on communism, to use a rather unpleasant phrase from the time—unpleasant but true." He also began to question the progressive project at home: "I saw the frailties of big government exposed, one after another. Everything they tried didn't work and in fact made us worse off by making us dependent on an engine that was getting weaker and weaker."

His first teaching post came in 1960 at the University of California, Berkeley. In California, he came to know the German-American philosopher Leo Strauss, who at the time was working at Stanford University. "Strauss was a factor in my becoming conservative," he says. "That was a whole change of outlook rather than a mere question of party allegiance."

Strauss had studied ancient Greek texts, which emphasized among other things that "within democracy there is good and bad, free and slave," and that "democracy can produce a slavish mind and a slavish country." The political task before every generation, Mr. Mansfield understood, is to "defend the good kind of democracy. And to do that you have to be aware of human differences and inequalities, especially intellectual inequalities."

American elites today prefer to dismiss the "unchangeable, undemocratic facts" about human inequality, he says. Progressives go further: "They think that the main use of liberty is to create more equality. They don't see that there is such a thing as too much equality. They don't see limits to democratic equalizing"—how, say, wealth redistribution can not only bankrupt the public fisc but corrupt the national soul.

"Americans take inequality for granted," Mr. Mansfield says. The American people frequently "protect inequalities by voting not to destroy or deprive the rich of their riches. They don't vote for all measures of equalization, for which they get condemned as suffering from false consciousness. But that's true consciousness because the American people want to make democracy work, and so do conservatives. Liberals on the other hand just want to make democracy more democratic."

Equality untempered by liberty invites disaster, he says. "There is a difference between making a form of government more like itself," Mr. Mansfield says, "and making it viable." Pushed to its extremes, democracy can lead to "mass rule by an ignorant, or uncaring, government."

Consider the entitlements crisis. "Entitlements are an attack on the common good," Mr. Mansfield says. "Entitlements say that 'I get mine no matter what the state of the country is when I get it.' So it's like a bond or an annuity. What the entitlement does is give the government version of a private security, which is better because the government provides a better guarantee than a private company can."

That is, until the government goes broke, as has occurred across Europe.

"The Republicans should want to recover the notion of the common good," Mr. Mansfield says. "One way to do that is to show that we can't afford the entitlements as they are—that we've always underestimated the cost. 'Cost' is just an economic word for the common good. And if Republicans can get entitlements to be understood no longer as irrevocable but as open to negotiation and to political dispute and to reform, then I think they can accomplish something."

The welfare state's size isn't what makes it so stifling, Mr. Mansfield says. "What makes government dangerous to the common good is guaranteed entitlements, so that you can never question what expenses have been or will be incurred." Less important at this moment are spending and tax rates. "I don't think you can detect the presence or absence of good government," he says, "simply by looking at the percentage of GDP that government uses up. That's not an irrelevant figure but it's not decisive. The decisive thing is whether it's possible to reform, whether reform is a political possibility."

Then there is the matter of conservative political practice. "Conservatives should be the party of judgment, not just of principles," he says. "Of course there are conservative principles—free markets, family values, a strong national defense—but those principles must be defended with the use of good judgment. Conservatives need to be intelligent, and they shouldn't use their principles as substitutes for intelligence. Principles need to be there so judgment can be distinguished from opportunism. But just because you give ground on principle doesn't mean you're an opportunist."

Nor should flexibility mean abandoning major components of the conservative agenda—including cultural values—in response to a momentary electoral defeat. "Democrats have their cultural argument, which is the attack on the rich and the uncaring," Mr. Mansfield says. "So Republicans need their cultural arguments to oppose the Democrats', to say that goodness or justice in our country is not merely the transfer of resources to the poor and vulnerable. We have to take measures to teach the poor and vulnerable to become a little more independent and to prize independence, and not just live for a government check. That means self-government within each self, and where are you going to get that except with morality, responsibility and religion?"

So is it still possible to pull back from the brink of America's Europeanization? Mr. Mansfield is optimistic. "The material for recovery is there," he says. "Ambition, for one thing. I teach at a university where all the students are ambitious. They all want to do something with their lives." That is in contrast to students he has met in Europe, where "it was depressing to see young people with small ambitions, very cultivated and intelligent people so stunted." He adds with a smile: "Our other main resource is the Constitution."

Mr. Ahmari is an assistant books editor at the Journal.

Systemic Risk from Global Financial Derivatives: A Network Analysis of Contagion and Its Mitigation with Super-Spreader Tax

Systemic Risk from Global Financial Derivatives: A Network Analysis of Contagion and Its Mitigation with Super-Spreader Tax. By Sheri M. Markose
IMF Working Paper No. 12/282
November 30, 2012
http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=40130.0

Summary: Financial network analysis is used to provide firm level bottom-up holistic visualizations of interconnections of financial obligations in global OTC derivatives markets. This helps to identify Systemically Important Financial Intermediaries (SIFIs), analyse the nature of contagion propagation, and also monitor and design ways of increasing robustness in the network. Based on 2009 FDIC and individually collected firm level data covering gross notional, gross positive (negative) fair value and the netted derivatives assets and liabilities for 202 financial firms which includes 20 SIFIs, the bilateral flows are empirically calibrated to reflect data-based constraints. This produces a tiered network with a distinct highly clustered central core of 12 SIFIs that account for 78 percent of all bilateral exposures and a large number of  financial intermediaries (FIs) on the periphery. The topology of the network results in the “Too- Interconnected-To-Fail” (TITF) phenomenon in that the failure of any member of the central tier will bring down other members with the contagion coming to an abrupt end when the ‘super-spreaders’ have demised. As these SIFIs account for the bulk of capital in the system, ipso facto no bank among the top tier can be allowed to fail, highlighting the untenable implicit socialized guarantees needed for these markets to operate at their current levels. Systemic risk costs of highly connected SIFIs nodes are not priced into their holding of capital or collateral. An eigenvector centrality based ‘super-spreader’ tax has been designed and tested for its capacity to reduce the potential socialized losses from failure of SIFIs.

The Coming World Disorder - The Decline of American Power and the Westphalian World Order

World Order in the Age of Obama. By Charles Hill
November 30, 2012 | 2:30 am
http://www.advancingafreesociety.org/the-caravan/world-order-in-the-age-of-obama

Excerpts:

[...]

What ominous factors caused Kepler to shiver? Disturbances, uphealvals and conflicts. Merchants moaned about untrustworthy bankers. Diplomats strutted even as they wavered. The masses sullenly made deals they needed to survive when the gathering storm broke. Varieties of religious fervor caused many to prepare to be slain rather than submit to rule by others.

The 1648 settlement at Westphalia, though setbacks were many and vicious, enabled procedures fostering what eventually would be called “the international community,” a term that curled many a lip in the midst of twentieth-century world wars. Those wars were attempts to overthrow the established world order. Those wars failed, but in recent decades have become seemingly interminable, and have required the stewards of world order to confront what George Shultz labels “asymmetrical” warfare in which professional standards have been turned into self-imposed liabilities by enemies who reject civilized international conduct.


No international order has proved immortal. Kepler today might note that the world order shaped by the war he predicted, might now fail to survive to celebrate its 375^th anniversary. As President Obama ponders his Second Inaugural Address, what Keplerian factors are now “prepared” for war?
The causes of war as discerned ever since Thucydides’ time are three: wars of ideology, of fear, and of gain.

The ideology of Islamism has been on the rise for generations and now aims to expropriate the Arab Spring. The ambitions of the1979 Iranian Revolution and Sunni fanaticism are transmogrifying into the kind of major religious war that the Treaty of Westphalia sought to forestall.

Thucydides traced the war that ruined ancient Greece to Sparta’s fear that Athens’ growing power was crossing the line where it would be impossible to contain. Israel faces that threat from Iran, as today’s international structures for the maintenance of international security have failed to halt Iran’s drive, propelled by religious ideology, to possess nuclear weapons. Israel, bereft of its traditional sense of American support, is making ready to act against Iran’s menace to its existence. President Obama’s priority must repair relations with Israel by visiting the Jewish state and convincing its leaders that the U.S. understands Israel’s uniquely dangerous position.

And there now grows a deepening appetite for gain. America, perceived as eager to shed the burdens of world order in order to be “fundamentally transformed” through European-style social commitments, talks of engagement even when Iran’s “diplomacy” is a form of protracted warfare. The enemies of world order translate the American election results into the lexicon of abdication, telling themselves that their time has come: there is a world to be gained.

Only America’s return to world leadership can halt this deterioration. “Sequestration” will relegate the U.S. to a second rate power and must be reversed to enable American strength and diplomacy to be employed in tandem. Without this the prediction of a Kepler for today must be grim. As the biographer of Augustus Caesar wrote in the years just before the Second World War, “Once again the crust of civilization has worn thin, and beneath can be heard the muttering of primeval fires. Once again many accepted principles of government have been overthrown, and the world has become a laboratory where immature and feverish minds experiment with unknown forces. Once again problems cannot be comfortably limited, for science has brought the nations into an uneasy bondage to each other.”

In this maelstrom lie opportunities not for idealism but for the cold, austere use of power, soft and hard, in order to, as Augustus was advised, teach the arts of peace to all. The old platforms for the region, including the “peace process,” are gone. New structures must be built and only the US can lead the construction job. Peace is not at hand, but statesmen can see the possibility of laying foundations for a new Middle East in Syria-Lebanon, Egypt-Gaza, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and even, should we finally get serious, in Iran.

Charles Hill is the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy at Yale University and co chair of the Herb and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order, Hoover Institution.

These excerpts are from a post that is part of The Caravan, a periodic discussion on the contemporary dilemmas of the Greater Middle East. Other commentary in this symposium on Obama’s Second Term – Middle Eastern Memos is provided by Russell Berman, Itamar Rabinovich, Robert Satloff, Asli Aydintasbas, Habib Malik, Reuel Gerecht, Leon Wieseltier, Tammy Frisby, Abbas Milani, and Fouad Ajami.