— Holman Jenkins, The Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2011

— Ben Bernanke, Feb. 24, 2009, finally, if tamely, acknowledging the crucial role of mark-to-market accounting in the financial death spiral.

(via Brian Wesbury)

Holman Jenkins today also picks up the theme of mark-to-market’s central role in the panic.

the CDS market offers a convenient way of shorting bonds, but the risk/reward asymmetry works in the opposite way. Going short on bonds by buying a CDS contract carries limited risk but almost unlimited profit potential. By contrast, selling CDS offers limited profits but practically unlimited risks. This asymmetry encourages speculating on the short side, which in turn exerts a downward pressure on the underlying bonds. The negative effect is reinforced by the fact that CDS are tradable and therefore tend to be priced as warrants, which can be sold at anytime, not as options, which would require an actual default to be cashed in. People buy them not because they expect an eventual default, but because they expect the CDS to appreciate in response to adverse developments. . . .

The third step is to recognize reflexivity, which means that the mispricing of financial instruments can affect the fundamentals that market prices are supposed to reflect. Nowhere is this phenomenon more pronounced than in the case of financial institutions, whose ability to do business is so dependent on trust. A decline in their share and bond prices can increase their financing costs. That means that bear raids on financial institutions can be self-validating.

The real credit, however, goes to Brian Wesbury, who’s been pounding away and comments on video here. To Steve Forbes, with his bold Wall Street Journal op-ed that opened the floodgates on the matter last week. And to David Malpass, who identified the mark-to-market problem over a year ago in early 2008.

The S&P 500 is up more than 10% since mark-to-market reform looked possible.

What is most astounding about President Barack Obama’s radical economic recovery program isn’t its breadth, but its continuation of the most destructive policies of the Bush administration. These Bush policies were in themselves repudiations of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Mr. Obama’s hero.

The most disastrous Bush policy that Mr. Obama is perpetuating is mark-to-market or “fair value” accounting for banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions. The idea seems harmless: Financial institutions should adjust their balance sheets and their capital accounts when the market value of the financial assets they hold goes up or down. [...]

Mark-to-market accounting is the principle reason why our financial system is in a meltdown. The destructiveness of mark-to-market — which was in force before the Great Depression — is why FDR suspended it in 1938. It was unnecessarily destroying banks.

The history seems clear. Mark-to-market accounting existed in the Great Depression, and according to Milton Friedman, who wrote about it just 30 years after the fact, it was responsible for the failure of many banks.

Franklin Roosevelt suspended it in 1938, and between then and 2007 there were no panics or depressions. But when FASB 157, a statement from the Federal Accounting Standards Board, went into effect in 2007, reintroducing mark-to-market accounting, look what happened.

Two things are absolutely essential when fixing financial market problems: time and growth. Time to work things out and growth to make working those things out easier. Mark-to-market accounting takes both of these away.

Then,

strip out all the toxic assets and put them into a holding tank inside the Treasury. . . .  inject $300 billion in fresh equity for both Citi and Bank of America. Create 10 billion new shares of each of the companies to replace the old ones. The book value of each share could be $30. Very quickly, a new board of directors should be created and a new management team hired. Here’s the tricky part: Who owns the shares? Politics will kill a nationalized bank. So spin them out immediately.

Some $6 trillion in income taxes were paid by individuals in 2006, 2007 and 2008. On a pro-forma basis, send out those 10 billion shares of each bank to taxpayers. They paid for the recapitalization.

Each taxpayer would get about $100 worth of stock for each $1,000 of taxes paid. Of course, each taxpayer has the ability to sell these shares on the open market, maybe at $40, maybe $20, maybe $80. It depends on management, their vision, how much additional capital they are willing to raise, the dividend they declare, etc. Meanwhile, the toxic assets sitting inside the Treasury will have residual value and the proceeds from their eventual sale, I believe, will more than offset the capital injected. That would benefit all citizens, not the managements and shareholders who blew up the banking system in the first place.

Is Kessler crazy? Well, maybe. In his own creative and boisterous way. But not nearly so crazy as Washington’s fumble-bumble these last few months. I’d much prefer Kessler’s out-of-the-box plan to D.C.’s muddle.

What becomes clearer every day is that all the government’s efforts, from the AIG “bailout” to TARP 1.0 and TARP 2.0 onward, have essentially been efforts to get around the terribly destructive interaction of “mark-to-market” accounting and regulatory capital requirements. A few keen observers — David Malpass (I), Brian Wesbury (I, II, III, IV), Steve Forbes (I, II) – have made this point from the start. But the government and most economists clung stubbornly to “fair value” in an apparent attempt not to “let the banks off the hook.” 

But what a time for an attack of conscience, a principled stand for supposed accounting purity! We’ll spend trillions and totally alter the nation’s financial landscape, but a minor (though powerful and free!) accounting change — relaxing mark-to-market — is a bridge too far? Explain that one.

Even those who don’t directly target the mark-to-market interplay as the culprit implicitly acknowledge it. As Kessler describes, 

The first iteration of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) last year was to buy these bad loans and derivatives. It didn’t work. Nothing was bought when it became clear that paying face value was a taxpayer giveaway to banks, but paying market prices for this stuff would cause huge equity write-downs, wiping out banks which would be left with negative equity and effective insolvency.

The next round of TARP injected money onto bank balance sheets first, boosting their equity so they could absorb the write-downs to come when the toxic junk was bought later. It didn’t work. The $45 billion to Citi and Bank of America wasn’t nearly enough. Instead, $306 billion and $118 billion loan guarantees were extended to cover the bad debt, which unfortunately, the market believes still weighs down banks’ balance sheets.

Now with TARP 2.0, renamed a friendly Financial Stability Plan, the idea is to entice private capital to buy these bad loans and derivatives in an effort to set the “market price.” But Mr. Geithner hasn’t solved the dilemma of banks not wanting to sell and become insolvent. Moreover, no one is going to buy these securities ahead of Mr. Geithner’s action with the “full resources of the government” to bring down mortgage payments and reduce mortgage interest rates. Lower mortgage payments means mortgage-backed securities would be worth even less. Six months to a year from now, big banks may still be weak and the ugly “n” word of nationalization will be back.

Look at some very real examples of how mark-to-market sucks the whole banking system down a procyclical vortex.

the Bank of New York Mellon reported that in the fourth quarter, it wrote down its $5 billion investment portfolio of Alt-A residential MBS by $1.4 billion, or about 25%.  If the bank had accounted for the securities as loans, it estimates these same assets would have been impaired only $208 million, just 4% of the portfolio’s face value. The difference between the two accounting treatments: more than $1 billion.

One Alt-A MBS expert, Thomas Patrick, chairman of New Vernon Capital and a former Merrill Lynch vice chairman, calls mark-to-market accounting a “swamp” in this environment, an “accounting fiction” better reflecting the “financial desperation of sellers than the value of the securities sold.” 

In 3,700 mortgage securitizations he examined, Patrick found that of $1.4 trillion in Alt-A mortgages, $948 billion were current on interest and principal, while $452 billion were delinquent more than 30 days.   Further, banks carried the performingmortgages at an average 50% of par.  Patrick observes that if owned directly as loans, the banks would carry the mortgages closer to par.  He concludes that the mark-to-market fiction has created enormous financial difficulties.

Patrick proposes that these securities be dismantled.  Banks would be allowed to rebook performing mortgages as loans at par less appropriate reserves.  Accounting gains would absorb remaining losses in the non-performing mortgages. 

Similarly, Dutch banking authorities evaluated a $39 billion portfolio of Alt-A MBS owned by ING and marked-to-market at 65% of par.  They subjected the cash flows of the 600,000 loans comprising the securities to severe stresses (principal assumptions were another 10% decline in home prices, and a 50% decline from peak prices in Florida and California) and concluded that the bonds were likely to return 90% of their original value. 

Writing alongside Kessler, Holman Jenkins took mark-to-market head on: 

regulatory forbearance [to mitigate mark-to-market] is the most important item in the government toolkit, and the giant raspberry Mr. Geithner received from the market yesterday should be his signal that the market understands this and worries he doesn’t . . . .

Dropping mark-to-market is no miracle cure, but it would reduce the pressure on banks and regulators to make irrational choices about the disposition of questionable assets. Banking might even regain some of its appeal for equity investors, who might see an attractive bet that bank-held assets are oversold — that is, if they don’t have to worry about unpredictable regulatory actions. Real confidence is organic: not something that can be conjured from Mr. Geithner’s promise that Mighty Mouse is here to save the day.

The inflationary housing bubble-bust would have caused problems in any case. But the financial crisis that spilled over — crashed over — into the real economy did not have to happen. Rigid mark-to-market and capital enforcement was gasoline poured onto a mostly contained fire. It wouldn’t have cost a penny to alter these guidelines — and probably avoid today’s global inferno.

Suspending mark-to-market accounting will not keep institutions that took excessive risk from failing. Bad loans are still bad loans and there is no way to avoid the pain that they cause. It will, however, end the negative feedback loop, which drags everyone down. It allows time to see if the wind shifts and keeps the flames from spreading.

In the 1980s, loan problems took down thousands of banks, but because we did not force fair value accounting, the economy and stock market actually thrived. Every money center bank would have been insolvent in the early 1980s if they were forced to write down Latin American debt to 10 cents on the dollar. Add in bad oil loans which took down Pen Sqaure and Continental and bad S&L loans, and it is easy to see that the bank problems in the early 1980s were much more severe than those of the 2000s. But the rules were not as inflexible as their are today. Problems did not spread, many banks eventually recovered their principle on Latin American debt and the economy grew.

In contrast, today’s problems are expanding, and have now caused the government to put almost $4 trillion of taxpayer funds at risk to support the financial system. This is an amazing sum of money, equaling 28% of GDP, or 42% of total US stock market capitalization, or more than a quarter of all household debt outstanding, or nearly 40% of all private household mortgage debt, or three times the amount of subprime loans outstanding at their peak.

The government has tried multiple strategies. The only thing they have in common is that they are designed to offset or stop the damage caused by mark-to-market accounting.