To: Freshman Senator/Member of Congress

Re: Making your mark

¡Felicidades! Maybe, like Robert Redford at the end of The Candidate, you find yourself asking “Now what?” How will you make your mark in the 112th Congress? Senior legislators are likely to give you some sage advice: focus on one or two important issues and become the master of those topics. It will show the seniors in the class that you are serious, deferential, and a resource for the party, rather than a dilettante and an egotist (you don’t want to be the first one of those on Capitol Hill). The more technical the issue, the less competition you’ll have and the less of a threat you’ll be to the old barons and baronesses.

Although technical (some would use the perjorative “boring”) issues may be a hit with the party bosses, you may be concerned that they won’t win you points with your public. But that depends on which issue you pick. One strategy – that also meshes well with your deeply ingrained sense of public service – is to find policy issues where the public is seriously underestimating the risk of problems and start raising the alarm. Do so in a sober way, of course, or risk becoming chicken little. (Just between the two of us, for all your jeremiads against the “elite”, I know you are secretly a wonkish egghead like me. Accordingly, you’ll be interested in some rich scholarship on the political opportunities that come from the gap between objective risk and public perceptions of risk. See Amitai Aviram).

Bearing this general strategy in mind, if you want to focus on financial regulation, there are three routes you can take: First, you can reach into the grab bag that was the Dodd-Frank Act and take an active role overseeing one of the major regulatory projects under that act.

As noted many times before, the last Congress delegated to federal agencies the task of putting the meat on that statute’s skeleton. There are lots of high profile rulemakings to choose from including the Volcker rule and the authority of the SEC to impose fiduciary duties on broker-dealers. But those two fields are likely to be crowded, so consider the host of other issues that are harder to understand, but no less important. Derivatives present a motherlode of important, but complex issues. For example, the “swaps pushout” requirements under the Act, which create push banks and other regulated entities that receive “federal assistance” to move their derivatives trading operations to affiliates that don’t receive that assistance. The politics of this regime can be clarified – should federal taxpayer dollars subsidize risk-taking on derivatives that might require a federal bailout? But the economics of this issue – measuring cross subsidization from one affiliate to another, determining when entities with an obscured subsidy compete unfairly with those that don’t – are hard. As are the legal issues of an agency writing rules to make sure that any subsidies from deposit insurance don’t leak even to “pushed out” affiliates. Bottom line: hire some experiences regulatory and transactional lawyers on your staff and reach out to economists.

You can go even deeper and ask about the unintended consequences of Dodd-Frank rules. For example, Dodd-Frank has numerous provisions designed to push over-the-counter derivatives to trade on exchanges and to be cleared through clearing companies. The intentions behind these provisions are good – to move derivatives to institutions where pricing is transparent and where counterparty risk (the risk that one party to a derivative contract will default, increasing the risk of a domino effect of defaults (the reason given for the bailout of AIG)) can be centralized, measured, and mitigated. But the risk of centralizing counterparty risk in clearing organizations is that we may be creating the mother-of-all-counterparty risks. This means that close attention will have to be paid to the rules for derivatives clearing organizations, including things like position limits and margin rules. Of course there will be plenty of experts in the agencies and in the private sector weighing in on these boring topics. However, one lesson from the financial crisis that should linger is the dangers of excessive reliance on technocratic experts to handle the boring stuff. Even technocrats are flawed and selfish, Principe/principessa.

A second approach is to focus less on the roadmap in Dodd-Frank and more on those factors in the global financial crisis that Dodd-Frank largely fails to address. I can think of many, but here are two starters.

One: the repurchase markets in which banks and other financial institutions borrow vast sums – often overnight. When lending in these “repo” markets (no – Emilio Estevez was not involved in this disaster) dried up, the credit system froze. Some economists liken the effect to a modern-day bank run. Dodd-Frank does too little to address repos.

Two: much of the complex financial transactions were a rhyme (not a repeat) of the type of off-balance sheet games we saw in the Enron era. Perhaps not the same shenanigans nor the same intent, but the effects were worse – assets were often moved off bank balance sheets even though the risk remained with the banks. Leverage was hidden.  Bank regulators will tell you that they carefully look at off-balance sheet liabilities when examining financial institutions. Bologna! We’ve seen what a great job they’ve done with that. So let’s add an accountant to your list of committee staffers or outside advisors.

A third and final approach is to forget fighting the last war and focus on fighting the next one (nota bene: military and sports metaphors will get you far in your line of work). As I’ve written before, beware of a crisis in municipal finance. If underfunded government insurance programs are your thing, move past social security and consider the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation – a government corporation that assumes responsibility for certain private sector pension plans when the sponsoring companies are in financial “distress.”

Hope this is helpful. Mucha suerte con todo! Oh, and about those personal e-mails imploring me to donate to your campaign -- I think you mean the Erik Gerding who used to work at Cleary Gottlieb.

Accounting, Finance, Financial Crisis, Masters: Agenda, Securities, Wisdom and Virtue | Bookmark

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