Video Transcript: Is Capitalism the Cause or the Solution to the Financial Crisis? | Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
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Dennis McCuiston - Well, I'm Dennis McCuiston, and we're here in Las Vegas at Freedom Fest, July 2009. It's a conference getting together a lot of incredible people, including the two people that I have on the program today. We're going
to talk about the cause of the financial crisis. Is capitalism that cause, or is capitalism the solution to these problems? And joining me here, as he did last year, is Steve Forbes. Steve, welcome back to the program.
Steve Forbes - Good to be with you, Dennis. Thank you.
Dennis McCuiston - As most of you know, Steve Forbes is the editor in chief of Forbes magazine. He's also the CEO of Forbes, and he's got a new book out, which I haven't read yet, called "Power, Ambition, Glory: The Stunning Parallels Between Great Leaders of the Ancient World and Today and the Lessons You Can Learn. So, Steve, I'm looking forward to reading this book about leadership. Thank you. And then, also joining me is Tom Woods, and Tom Woods is the author of this book, which I have read, Tom. And I must say, it's called Meltdown: A Free Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse. Nothing controversial about this at all, Tom, and I'm sure you've been let's just say in great demand to talk about this subject.
Tom Woods - Well, simply because people, I think, are tired of the conventional wisdom, and I've got a little bit of an alternative.
Dennis McCuiston - It's certainly unconventional, and you make a great case for what you do in Europe, the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Yes, and so we appreciate your joining us here as well. My pleasure. Now, Steve, let me let me start with this. Now, we it's hard to turn on a television without somebody saying we have a whole breakdown here in free market capitalism, and that's what caused the problem. Is that true?
Steve Forbes - Well, it's like a guy shooting somebody and then blaming the victim for getting shot. Most of the great economic crises, including this one, are caused by huge government errors. In this case, the Federal Reserve printing
too much money, keeping money artificially cheap. If the Fed hadn't turned out so much liquidity, there's no way he could have had a bubble of this size. Add to that to the mix: Freddie and Fannie, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, underwriting hundreds of billions of dollars of junk mortgages. Then, when the crisis hit, things like market-to-market accounting, regulatory mistakes turned a flood into a tsunami. And then, of course, they blame the victim. In this case, it's amazing, as you know, Dennis, in the private sector. If you make a mistake, you fail. You pay a price for it. With government, when they make a mistake, they get bigger and more powerful. Absolutely perverse. Opposite of capitalism.
Dennis McCuiston - I see. Well, now look, Steve. I hear that, and I have some sympathy for it. But you're you're in New York all the time, and I've read in addition to this meltdown book, a little book called Chain of Blame, which is an interesting book, and it talks about all the mortgage companies, the subprime mortgage companies in Orange County, California, and they couldn't have done all the stuff without having Wall Street, Lehman, Bayer, Merrill, Morgan, who have I left out here, Goldman, underwriting all this stuff and then securitizing it worldwide. And what does that have to do with government?
Steve Forbes - Well, again, if the government didn't print the money, they couldn't have done what they did. If the bartender doesn't give you the booze, you can't get drunk. And in this case, they have a monopoly on the booze, and they just kept churning it out. So whether it went to Wall Street or somewhere else, when you print too much money, as we saw in the 1970s, bad things will happen. You may not know where it's going to happen, but you know strange things are going to happen, and they have nothing to do with the free market. They distort the free market. They distort prices. For example, what is the real price of energy? We don't know, so we can't make real decisions whether this is a real increase, real demand, or artificial. And so it just makes goes makes everything goes haywire.
Dennis McCuiston - Well, I would say that I don't remember you're quoting Steve a lot in this book, Tom, but you could have. He's making the case for you. You you wrote this book, as I recall, the foreword by Ron Paul, who who all of us know here. You wrote this book, I think you said in a pretty much of a hurry, not like you would write your normal book or you do a lot of research over time, but you rushed it to print for what reason?
Tom Woods - Well, first of all, I'll point out that because even though I wrote it very quickly, it doesn't mean that it's a piece of garbage. I mean, it still has its merits, but but I did it quickly because I thought the country is about to get hit with an avalanche of books by predictable people saying utterly predictable
things that are all going to be disastrous. That are going to misdiagnose the problem and come up with solutions, cures that'll be worse than the disease. So I thought it's essential to get the free market perspective on this out there because you're certainly not getting it on television, present company excepted. So I thought it's essential to get out on this quickly because there'll be hundreds of books on the subject by the end of the year, and then forget it; you'll be totally lost. And I thought there is a persuasive free market account of what's happened. And so far, I've had a lot of people say they've read this. It doesn't sound like special pleading. It doesn't sound like I'm tripping over myself to find some kind of way to blame the government for this. The governments and the Federal Reserve System's fingerprints are all over the crisis, and you'd have to. You got to be kidding me if you're not going to.
Dennis McCuiston - All right, put the blame there in some way. Okay, now Tom, let me let me put it this way. Now we we did. Let's see. I came to Freedom Fest for the first time in 2007, July 2007, and I interviewed a guy that you guys know, Fred Folvery, who's here at this conference. And Fred Folvery told me on
camera in July 2007. He said this. He said we're going to have a depression in real estate starting in 2008. He'd written a paper about it in 1997. Okay, so based on that, we did a television program originating in Dallas in October of 2007. Now on that program, I had an economist from SMU. I had Bob McTeer, who you guys know, Bob, former head of the Dallas Fed. I had the general counsel, Texas Bankers Association, and I had a big-time money manager who's on the board of the Teachers Retirement Fund. And Bob McTeer, who's who's really a good guy now, a fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, which is a good group. I asked him, I said, "What culpability did the Fed have in this? And he basically denied any culpability in October of '07. Tom, what do you think about that?
Tom Woods - Well, that doesn't really surprise me. I mean, typically people associated with the Fed are inclined to place the blame elsewhere, but I don't find the special pleading persuasive. I mean, even Anna Schwartz, the Chicago economist who is typically pro-Fed, says that Alan Greenspan's attempts to shift the blame are utterly unpersuasive, and as Steve points out, had it not been for the Fed, it would have been impossible for there to be this sort of housing bubble. I mean, what would have happened if you had had a genuine free market? Is that if we had all become irrationally committed to the purchase of houses, what would have happened is the banks would have begun to draw down the the money they could lend, and so therefore interest rates would have shot up, and that would have put an end to speculation in real estate. But if you have a magical money creation machine that can keep pumping money into the system, that can keep pushing those interest rates back down and keep this, in
effect, this artificial stimulus to speculation going, this couldn't this couldn't have been done without Alan Greenspan.
Dennis McCuiston - Well, now Steve, I I've read what Alan Greenspan said in the Wall Street Journal. You know, John Taylor wrote a nice article with the Taylor Rule, which we don't get too technical for that person watching. But, and then Greenspan and Bernanke will say that it wasn't them turning on the money machine. They didn't not. They pushed these interest rates down the the short term rates down to 1% in 2003, 2004. That there was this. You talked about tsunami. There was this tsunami of liquidity coming from China and other places. How would you respond to that?
Steve Forbes - So Alan Greenspan's epitaph is going to be the Chinese made me do it. The fact of the matter is, there is no such thing as a savings glut. The whole point of a financial system is to take one person's savings and put a productive use. Be a middle person, put a productive use elsewhere. So, if the Chinese had savings, a normal financial system would take in those savings and direct it so it can be invested productively. And so the key thing here, Dennis, is when you look at commodity prices, it's a cash market. It's a global market. It's nominated in dollars. If they're all going in one direction, as they did in 2004, that's a sign something is going wrong. Usually they're all over the place. Some are up, some are down, some are treading water. But when they all shoot up, you know something is happening, and the thing is, it's unfashionable to say it, but you look at G O L D gold is the one thing that stays constant in value, and if that's starting to shoot up, you know something is wrong, or if it's plunging, you know something is wrong in terms of dollars. So in 2004, all the signals were there, and those of us looked at this stuff were saying, "We don't know how it's going to unfold, but something bad is going to happen if they keep this up.
Dennis McCuiston - Now it's going to be a pretty picture. Yeah, and Dennis,
Tom Woods - let me add to what I agree completely with everything Steve said. But on top of that, we can point out that Asian saving remained pretty high throughout the housing boom and bust. So the, its explanatory power is it seems to me rather limited. Whereas if you look at the interest rate picture, that tracks what we actually observed in the real world much more closely. So the prima facie evidence, I think, is pretty compelling. All
Dennis McCuiston - right, Tom. Steve mentioned Fannie and Freddie, and most people who watch our program have heard of Fannie and Freddie. For sure, but give us some sense of not just Fannie and Freddie, but how the federal government, in all its agencies, and from Congress to the president, to Fannie
and Freddie, were actually pushing for more and more loans and affordable housing to be made for the last roughly 15, 20 years.
Tom Woods - Right. Well, this is we have to realize a bipartisan phenomenon. I mean, George W. Bush talked about helping people to make down payments, and these, and there was this sense that these old standards of creditworthiness-the ability to make a down payment, to prove you have a job these were just viewed as kind of old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy obstacles to people becoming homeowners. So we've had not only Fannie and Freddie, but the federal housing, various federal housing agencies, HUD, almost anything you think of. The Fed pushing so-called private lenders to make loans they wouldn't otherwise make to to suppress lending standards, and this was to create a so-called ownership society. But obviously, if you're in a house you can't otherwise afford, in what sense do you really own it? And it would obviously have been much better for many of these people to continue renting, which is not a waste of your money, contrary to popular belief, or simply to get a smaller house. I mean, it's like putting some kid, sending him to Harvard when he's really only you know suited for the you know the University of Mississippi. Well, you're not helping him by sending him to Harvard. You're just setting him up for failure. So so that's in a sense. And then we should also remember the Fed plays a role here too, because again, suppose the the Fed floods the credit markets with money. Well, where are the banks going to lend this money? Logically speaking, they've got to lend it out to borrowers they would otherwise have rejected because how at any given time they're already lent up to the ability they can let's stop there for a second they've got to lower the lending standard basically because
Dennis McCuiston - as that viewer knows I'm a recovering banker so let's say that I was a banker and and as we all know bankers have kept their we call it a loan to deposit ratio up very high in order to try to make money in the last few years, which they have made a lot of money, and so you're saying that they probably met all the loan demand that met their credit standards. Exactly. And then more money comes in. Then what? Then
Tom Woods - it's like if you have a basketball team, and suddenly you're told, by the way, you get to pick two extra players. Well, logically speaking, where am I going to get those players from? From the pool of players I would otherwise have rejected. So likewise, if I'm going to lend this additional money, I either have to lower my lending standards or lower interest rates, or something's got to give here in order to bring more people in. So the whole combination of all these factors, where you've got all the credit being poured in by the Fed, and then all these regulatory bodies, in effect, helping to channel that money into the
mortgage market, and the result is this catastrophe we see here. And meanwhile, we've got all the usual suspects scratching their head. Gee, where did this housing bubble come from? I have no idea.
Dennis McCuiston - Well, the way he talked about regulatory bodies. Now, look, Steve. Here's one of the complaints that these these greedy capitalist pigs in New York made sure all the regulations went away. Did regulations go away during all this crisis?
Steve Forbes - The banking industry is probably the most regulated industry in the United States. Hedge funds and equity funds are the least regulated. Where do the biggest disasters take place? Where supposedly they are being overseen
by the regulators. They were drinking their own Kool-Aid, they really believed this was a new era that secure that securitization and other measures had taken away risk. Now, in any of these disasters, instruments that are normally good, like securitization, spreading risk, lowers interest rates, good thing, misused becomes a disaster, like an automobile. You misuse that, it can become a lethal vehicle, and so in this case, these things were misused, and they and you got things like a new mortgage. Why have an income? Why make a down payment? Why why why because housing's going up? It's written in the Constitution, and therefore there's no risk because the asset's going up. So even if the borrower defaults, what's the problem? Exactly.
Dennis McCuiston - So we had this situation where prices of real estate were going up, and I think you would doubt that because money here is in terms
Steve Forbes - of greed, as somebody said, blaming this on greed is like saying gravity causes airplane crashes. No, it was contributing factor, but not the key factor. And again, if you the government floods the economy with money, bad things will happen, and people will do things they normally would not have done. Doesn't excuse what they did, but bad things are going to happen. All right,
Dennis McCuiston - let me tell you some bad things that happened from right here in Las Vegas, just to give you an example, Tom, and you're a visitor here to Las Vegas, as am I. But a lady signed up for a $300,000 mortgage through a local mortgage company. Now there was a bank in Texas that bought this mortgage. Now we have to ask ourselves why banks in Texas were buying this mortgage, but that's another issue. This woman was approached by the mortgage broker. I'm talking here about fraud, and said, "If you will let us use your credit, we will pay you a $42,000 fee." And you'll sign these $300,000 mortgages on. We'll sell the the property to somebody else here pretty quickly because things are going up all the time. She agreed to do that. Well, she
defaulted a few months later. The bank actually had a bunch of defaults. They came out here. The mortgage company went broke. They came out here to Clark County, Nevada, and they were looking through the records and they found that this woman, trying to find this woman among others, and this woman had sued the mortgage company because they stiffed her for the $42,000 fee. So they defrauded her. But it was a fraudulent fee that they, and she had sued them, and that's how they found her. So we had this kind of fraud going on here in Vegas and in all over the country as well. Is that a big problem or not?
Tom Woods - Well, I mean, obviously, any fraud should be prosecuted. Nobody disputes that. But the but to me the key point is that when you look at how gigantic the problem is, I mean obviously there will be when you've got so many people thinking they're going to make fortunes as mortgage brokers and fortunes as real estate speculators, inevitably there'll be bizarre turns of events such as you've described, but to me it seems that we have plenty to focus on when we look at the legitimate deals that that go through. I mean that's the thing: the the loans that were approved, the loans that by any conceivable standard no no rational person would have gone gone along with. That that's the the key problem, or to to me is not not the not the corruption or the fraud, but the vast bulk of legitimate loans that were made, all of the vast bulk of certain classes of which were utterly absurd.
Dennis McCuiston - Well, and also they made these loans, Steve, as you know, thinking that with very little down payment. A guy in Dallas at the University of Texas at Dallas, Dan Liebowitz, written a paper called "Anatomy of a Trainwreck, which you probably read, and he talks about no down payment, which is one of the things that again politically wanted loans to everybody. No down payment, and then an option arm loan. Steve, what what is it? What kind of a product is this? For heaven's sake, do you do you understand what what goes on when you can just say whatever you want to pay, and then later on you'll try to catch up? This
Steve Forbes - is how you persuade yourself this thing can go on forever. They have a low rate. The Federal Reserve's keeping rates down one or 2% which means you can do a very low mortgage rate for a year or two, and then they tell you, in effect, well, when the thing comes due and normally it goes shooting up, we just rewrite the mortgage because, after all, the house is going to go up in value. Blah blah blah, and that's what happens. So, so the mortgage, instead of being a 10-year, 20-year, 30-year instrument, becomes a 12-month, 24-month instrument that is always going to be constantly renewed at these low, artificially low rates. And so, this gets whole undermines the whole ethos of a free market system. That is, if you let the thing function, it'll meet all the needs of the
marketplace and do so in a sound way. Look at telephones. Look at cell phones. 4 billion in the world. We didn't need a Fannie and Freddie to get everyone to have a cell phone.
Dennis McCuiston - All right. In the 10 minutes that we have left, if capitalism wasn't the cause of the problem, even though you would admit that there were some capitalists who were greedy, and some who did stupid things, and some who reformed. Well, human nature does. My
Steve Forbes - book points out: human nature does not change. That's been with us for 1000s of years. 1000s of years. Okay.
Dennis McCuiston - All right. If capitalism isn't the cause of the problem, how is capitalism going to help? Because it seems to me that every time we turn around, we have this big stimulus package, almost 800 billion in stimulus. We've had the Fed running up its balance sheet. We've had the nationalization of General Motors and Chrysler and that sort of thing. So, Tom, how do you expect capitalism to help us out of this deal? Looks like to me, government's got to be the answer.
Tom Woods - Well, Steve and I were talking on the way over about a totally neglected historical episode that I talk about in meltdown, which is the the depression of 1920 to 21, which is a depression basically everyone's forgotten about, and the reason they've forgotten about it is that it was so short, and the federal government pretty much did the exact opposite, and I mean the exact opposite of what they're doing today. They basically cut the government budget in two years by about a half. The Federal Reserve System didn't actually begin open market operations until 1922, when the recovery was already underway anyway, and so you had a very swift, robust recovery by the late summer of 1921, and so you had the opposite of a fiscal stimulus. You had no so-called monetary stimulus. You didn't have these big bailouts. You simply allowed the market to reprice things that had been blown up into bubbles, to shift resources out of areas where they had been misplaced and into areas where they could add value. This can be done only through the price system and only through the free interactions of individuals. There's no way some central planner can substitute for these decisions, and the result was an immediate turnaround. So you'd think when we always hear about the need to learn from history, we would learn from this episode. Instead, what learning from history always means is, let's look back to some previous catastrophe the government caused, and let's learn the exact opposite lesson from
Dennis McCuiston - it. Well, you do talk about the the blip in 2021, but Steve, the one that gets talked. Most and you wrote about that in here too, is obviously the Great Depression in which and and you know I I found it interesting that Bernanke was the keynote speaker at Milton Friedman's 90th birthday party, and what he said to Milton Friedman, which you clearly
Steve Forbes - Friedman believes in diversity tolerance exactly, but he said he said to
Dennis McCuiston - Friedman he said first of all he said I want to confess even though he was not the chairman of the Fed at the time but he was with the Fed he said I want to confess that we caused the problem in the Great Depression that is we didn't pump the money supply up we let it shrink by 25 percent or whatever and he said I promise you Professor Friedman we will never let that happen again. It sounds like he believed what he said.
Steve Forbes - Well, this this gets. Why did the money supply decline during the depression? Because the government was deepening the depression. So what they call velocity, money, people clutch the cash like food in a famine. And so in this case, it's not printing the money that gets us out of this thing, it's allowing people to do positive things again. If you have a stable dollar, you can trust the thing and make investments, lowering tax rates as we did in the 1920s. Great key to prosperity. We've seen that in the 60s. We've seen that in the 80s. Even in 2003, when we reduced tax rates, it has a positive effect. There are positive things that you can do, but the thing you don't do is think that the government turns on the printing press yet again. The government takes over more of the economy. Dennis, if the if the government could cure make economies move, the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War. It didn't. The last I looked,
Dennis McCuiston - it certainly didn't. Now, in terms of capitalism, Tom, that person watching this program, who has his or her own business, as an example, or works for a small business, etc. I mean, they're having problems borrowing money now. They're having problems collecting their receivables, as an example. They're having problems making more sales because the economy has gone down. Surely, this stimulus must have some positive effect.
Tom Woods - Well, all it's doing is, I think, intensifying the problem. It's it's it's sucking more resources out of the productive private sector and and allocating them to who knows what use. But ultimately, what's what's I think also what's spooking investors right now is the is the atmosphere of uncertainty that's hanging over the market, because who knows? It's just like in the 1930s. Who knows what the regime is going to do next week? Who knows what crazy idea
they're going to come up with? They they nationalize this. They're taking over that. They're taxing this. It is unbelievable, and and it's interesting to note that Bob Higgs of the Independent Institute did an interesting study, and he looked in the 1930s to see, you know, why was the recovery so long in coming? And one of the factors he said was what he called regime uncertainty. That if you look at polling data among business executives, they were holding back from engaging in investment because they didn't know what this regime was going to do. They're being attacked in the press every day as being the great robber barons. They brought on the crisis. Well, you know what? That's not an environment that's that's really going to encourage a lot of investment. So we've, if if the regime would simply just give us a one and a half year breather, just shut up, stop doing anything, stop pouring fuel onto the fire, let the market sort this out, you would see credit being extended again. You would see the restoration of prosperity. But right now, who wants to lend? Who in the world wants to lend in this environment when you know there's very little chance you get paid back?
Steve Forbes - Some sort of sort of capital goes on strike, and so what you want an environment is where people are willing to take risks again. But look what happened to General Motors: secured creditors got shafted, to use a French word, so what's that mean in the future? You lend somebody money, you think you've got collateral for it? Who's to say the government can't come in and say we're going to change the rules of the game and give it to a union? And so, in that kind of, we see that what that did to Argentina, Dennis.
Dennis McCuiston - Well, we did. Now, in just in the short time we have left, let me share a little story with you. I ran into the former President Bush 90 days ago in Dallas in an office building, and he was there talking to some good Catholic friends. You're a big Catholic writer, among other things, Tom, and they were telling him how much they liked his stem cell approach and how much they liked his abortion approach and that sort of thing. And he was signing some autographs. He asked me. He said, "Dennis, what do you think about things? And I said, "Well, Mr. President, with all due respect, I was not too happy about your bailout plans. And he said, "Well, let me ask you this, Dennis. He said, 'What would you have done? So I'm going to ask you this, Steve. He said, 'Dennis, what would you have done? He said, 'My top three financial guys, Cox, Paulson, Bernanke, come into my office in September last year and said, 'We don't bail out AIG and these banks. We're going to have a major financial meltdown. What would you have done? So I ask you, Steve, what would you have done?
Steve Forbes - First, fire them. Number for getting in the crisis. Number two, if you have to do something short term, do it and get it over with. But then they
should have gotten rid of things like market-to-market accounting, which has deepened the crisis. And Bush should have announced then, from henceforth, we're going to. Get rid of this weak dollar policy. His administration, they will never admit it, had a weak dollar policy because they thought crazily that it would improve our trade balance. So if he'd announced in September no more market-to-market and the big thing, we're going to have a strong and stable dollar. This crisis would have quickly been resolved.
Dennis McCuiston - Let me tell you what I told him. I'm going to get you to tell that viewer who Ludwig von Mises was, I said. Well, Mr. President, what I would have done was what von Mises would have done when he was teaching at NYU in the early 1940s. I don't know that he knew who von Mises was, by the way. I can't say that for sure. And and he said, well, what's that? I said, the student asked him. He said, Professor, had had you been in the government in the early 30s, and you saw people's houses being foreclosed, and you saw banks closing. You tell me you would have done nothing, and he said yes, but I would have started doing nothing much sooner. So give us give us just a 30 seconds of who von Mises was and why you have this institute in in Auburn.
Tom Woods - Well, Mises was one of the great economists of the 20th century and perhaps of all time. He was a Jew living in Nazi-controlled Europe who eventually had to flee that continent. The Nazis hated him and his teaching because he taught about international cooperation as being what the market was all about, and that's not what National Socialism is about. He has to flee Europe. They destroy his papers and library. He comes to the U.S. almost empty-handed, speaking not a word of English, and yet he becomes-he has the most productive period of his whole career. And long after people who were honored when he was ignored in the United States have been forgotten, Mises has the Ludwig von Mises Institute, M-I-S-E-S.org, named after him. He still learned from and studied, and he has the best approach to help us understand what just happened to him.
Dennis McCuiston - Thank you, Steve. We have about 30 seconds left. I'm going to give them to you to tell us why capitalism is going to save us.
Steve Forbes - Capitalism will save us because it allows we, the free people, to get us out of this mess. And if we lower the burden on people, we'll do it. We've been doing it for 230 years. We should have learned the lesson by now. Our founders understood it. We can relearn from them.
Dennis McCuiston - Well, I appreciate both of you joining us here. I know that Mark Skousen and the folks who put on Freedom Fest are glad to have you
here. They worked you to death, but 1,500 people talking about free markets and all that's been great. So thank you for being here, and thank you for joining us too. Because as you can tell, this is an extremely serious issue that, unfortunately, is not going away. We've been talking about things that matter with people who care.
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