Visionnaire, Ron Paul ? En tout cas, voici un discours qu'il a prononcé à la chambre des représentants en juillet 2002, alors que tout Wall Street baignait dans l'euphorie du début de la bulle immobilière (En gras: souligné par moi) :
Mr. Speaker, I rise to introduce the Free Housing Market Enhancement Act. This legislation restores a free market in housing by repealing special privileges for housing-related government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). These entities are the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie), the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie), and the National Home Loan Bank Board (HLBB). According to the Congressional Budget Office, the housing-related GSEs received $13.6 billion worth of indirect federal subsidies in fiscal year 2000 alone.
One of the major government privileges granted these GSEs is a line of credit to the United States Treasury. According to some estimates, the line of credit may be worth over $2 billion. This explicit promise by the Treasury to bail out these GSEs in times of economic difficulty helps them attract investors who are willing to settle for lower yields than they would demand in the absence of the subsidy. Thus, the line of credit distorts the allocation of capital. More importantly, the line of credit is a promise on behalf of the government to engage in a massive unconstitutional and immoral income transfer from working Americans to holders of GSE debt.
The Free Housing Market Enhancement Act also repeals the explicit grant of legal authority given to the Federal Reserve to purchase the debt of housing-related GSEs. GSEs are the only institutions besides the United States Treasury granted explicit statutory authority to monetize their debt through the Federal Reserve. This provision gives the GSEs a source of liquidity unavailable to their competitors.
Ironically, by transferring the risk of a widespread mortgage default, the government increases the likelihood of a painful crash in the housing market. This is because the special privileges of Fannie, Freddie, and HLBB have distorted the housing market by allowing them to attract capital they could not attract under pure market conditions. As a result, capital is diverted from its most productive use into housing. This reduces the efficacy of the entire market and thus reduces the standard of living of all Americans.
However, despite the long-term damage to the economy inflicted by the government’s interference in the housing market, the government’s policies of diverting capital to other uses creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have otherwise been had government policy not actively encouraged over-investment in housing.
Perhaps the Federal Reserve can stave off the day of reckoning by purchasing GSE debt and pumping liquidity into the housing market, but this cannot hold off the inevitable drop in the housing market forever. In fact, postponing the necessary but painful market corrections will only deepen the inevitable fall. The more people invested in the market, the greater the effects across the economy when the bubble bursts.
No less an authority than Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has expressed concern that government subsidies provided to the GSEs make investors underestimate the risk of investing in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Mr. Speaker, it is time for Congress to act to remove taxpayer support from the housing GSEs before the bubble bursts and taxpayers are once again forced to bail out investors misled by foolish government interference in the market. I therefore hope my colleagues will stand up for American taxpayers and investors by cosponsoring the Free Housing Market Enhancement Act.
Inutile de dire que le Free Housing Market Enhancement Act, introduit par Ron Paul à l'agenda parlementaire du congrès en 2002 et 2003, n'a finalement pas été voté, comme toutes les autres tentatives de réforme du marché hypothécaire américain, bloquées par les démocrates...
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Une des principales arguties des pro-renforcement de la régulation bancaire est que l'abrogation du Glass Steagall Act de 1999 aurait constitué une véritable "dérégulation" de la finance qui aurait conduit au désastre actuel. Mes lecteurs réguliers savent déjà tout le mal que je pense de cette affirmation, mais il est bon de la corroborer par d'autres points de vue.
Sur Bloomberg, Peter Wallison, du competitive enterprise institute, enfonce le clou:
The repeal of portions of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 -- often cited by people who know nothing about that law -- has no relevance whatsoever to the financial crisis, with one major exception: it permitted banks to be affiliated with firms that underwrite securities, and thus allowed Bank of America Corp. to acquire Merrill Lynch & Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to buy Bear Stearns Cos. Both transactions saved the government the costs of a rescue and spared the market substantial additional turmoil.
None of the investment banks that got into financial trouble, specifically Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., were affiliated with commercial banks, and none were affected in any way by the repeal of Glass-Steagall.
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Erick Hurst, un macro-économiste de l'université de Chicago, encore un, rappelle sur Freakonomics les bienfaits de la suppression de certaines régulations :
The usual story begins with the deregulation of U.S. banking that occurred in the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s. But it is worth going back to the regulations that Congress enacted subsequent to the Great Depression.
Congress was concerned with limiting speculation by commercial banks in order to prevent bank collapses. Consequently, Regulation Q was passed, capping the interest rate that banks were allowed to charge borrowers or pay depositors. The argument was made that this would limit speculation by commercial banks, as only speculators could afford to pay high interest rates on their bank deposits.
While it may be true that Regulation Q limited banking volatility, it only did so by limiting banking activity. But as Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed Chairman Bernanke remind us, an active banking system transforms savings into capital, and so a reduction in banking activity likely led to less economic activity.
It is worth thinking through how these regulations stifled economic activity. Suppose that there are two types of banks: good banks and bad banks. Suppose the good banks are very good at identifying profitable investment projects, but the bad banks are less discerning. An efficient banking sector needs to funnel finance through the good banks.
How would these good banks attract the necessary capital? They need to be able to offer higher interest rates on deposits to attract the necessary funds. By capping interest rates, Congress artificially made it easier for the bad banks to compete with the good banks, leading many good projects to go unfunded.
Up through the early 1980’s, most U.S. states had restrictions in place that limited the extent to which their banks could establish branches, and they prevented local banks from being acquired by out-of-state banks. These branch banking laws severely limited banking competition; they prevented the good banks from growing while they allowed inefficient banks to prosper. Unfortunately, the good banks were prevented from driving the bad banks out of the market.
Relaxing these regulations led to massive gains in the efficiency of the U.S. banking system. These aren’t just abstract changes in efficiency; they have touched all of our lives.
Here’s a quick reading list of research showing that this deregulation yielded greater income growth; less volatile business cycles; better access to housing credit; offset racial discrimination in the labor market; and reduced crime.
The common theme of this research is that financial deregulation reduced interest rates and increased efficient lending and borrowing. In turn, people who were constrained from accessing a mortgage were now able to do so more easily, and firms found it easier to borrow, which led them to hire more workers.
(...)
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La faillite de Bradford et Bingley, 8ème prêteur immobilier en Grande Bretagne, n'est que le début d'une vague résultant d'une très forte correction à la baisse des valeurs immobilière anglaises. J'ai déjà eu l'occasion de montrer, sur crise publique, que le marché foncier anglais était un des plus réglementé qui soit, par le Town and Country Planning act de 1947 renforcé en 1965, ce qui faisait du marché du logement britannique l'un des plus "bullaire" du monde. Wendell Cox, souvent évoqué ici, ajoute que l'une des décisions funestes du gouvernement Blair fut de renforcer la proportion de nouvelles constructions devant, de par la loi, être édifiées sur des friches urbaines existantes ("brownfields") au détriment des terres agricoles converties en terrains.
En outre, les conseils locaux ont toujours cédé aux revendications NIMBYistes des propriétaires en place pour limiter le droit à construire des nouveaux entrants sur le marché du logement. Ce phénomène existe aussi en France et est documenté dans mon livre, "logement, crise publique, remèdes privés".
De fait, les niveaux de construction en Grande Bretagne sont clairement insuffisants, et surtout, la valeur "aux prix du marché" du parc immobilier anglais au sommet de la bulle était de 3500 milliards de livres, soit environ 5000 milliards d'Euros, alors qu'une simple prolongation de tendances historiques aurait du contenir la valeur de ce parc à moins de la moitié. Extrait du Blog de Wendell:
By requiring an untenably high share of new housing to be built in brownfield sites, the government has raised the price of housing and discouraged its development. It is not as if housing has not attracted the attention of the government. Indeed, it seems as if the more it has talked, the less has been built.
But there is much more than national policy. Local authorities have long since caved to property owners who think that their rights to property they can see is no less than their rights to property they own. The result is a nation that is saying no to the next generation. Never mind that the UK is among the most poorly housed nations in the developed world.
It is not, therefore surprising, that housing prices have risen with a vengeance. Owner occupied housing costs have doubled in the last decade relative to incomes. This means that the value of the owner occupied housing stock stands at nearly £3.5 trillion, when historic norms would place it at £1.7 trillion. The £150 billion (£0.150 trillion) may just be the beginning.
J'expliquais il y a quelques jours comment la réglementation des sols américains avait fait monter les prix de certaines grandes métropoles hors de toute raison outre Atlantique. Du fait que la réglementation anglaise des sols, centralisée, touche tout le pays, son impact sur la surévaluation des valeurs des biens servant de collatéral aux prêts hypothécaires pourrait être encore plus grand. Ce qui n'annonce rien de bon pour le système bancaire d'Outre Manche. Espérons que la France ne soit pas trop contaminée...
Encore une illustration de la loi des conséquences inattendues de textes votés par le législateur sans considération pour leurs effets économiques pourtant largement anticipables avec un minimum de connaissances théoriques ou historiques.
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Jeu de briques
Snake
Pacman
Bubble