No one seems to know where the $700 billion financial bailout went, what’s being done with it, and how much is still in the bank’s coffers to be used for who know’s what. Read about this below:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081222/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/meltdown_secrets
Now I can understand how normally, banks wouldn’t track dollars that came from one source versus dollars from another. However, in THIS case, the government fronted billions in taxpayer money (not private investment.) Therefore, I can’t imagine congress requiring anything less than full disclosure of how the money was going to be allocated and spent.
It appears that the rush to get money to the banks has succeeded in giving banks no incentives whatsoever to transparently disclose what’s being done with the money, or ‘where’ it’s at within each bank. If one made the assumption that these banks were all going to use this money for the best possible long-term usages for their firms, this lack of disclose might be okay. BUT, the fact that banks are in this mess due to poor financial decisions (and NOT “bad luck” due to the economic downturn, despite the fact that it exacerbated the situation), destroys that assumption.
While I do strongly believe that private firms generally perform better than government-owned ones (been to your local post office lately?), one thing that political trumpeters of the “free market” like to neglect are the conflicts of interest between firms and their management teams. Unfortunately, CEOs are often rewarded with compensation that focuses on the short term stock price (stock options and bonuses dependant on share price) rather than being aligned with the company’s long term future.
Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and arguably the greatest investor of all time, is a notable exception. His substantial net worth of many billions is almost completely investing in the company he leads. This long term ownership, combined with the fact that Buffett’s salary is a meager (for CEOs) $100,000 per year, with no fancy options deals, means that Buffett’s incentives are aligned with those of his long term shareholders.
Also, CEOs are generally paid more relative to the size of the company they control***. This creates the incentives to make fiscally irresponsible mergers just to “grow the empire.” And now, with the precedent being set of companies designated “too big to fail,” managements have even more incentives to grow the size of their firms. These incentives by themselves do not encourage firms to pursue social gains (either for consumers or shareholders) and therefore are undesireable.
Coming back to the financial bailout, it is very troubling that in an effort to quickly sustain failing companies within the financial services industry (without discussing whether that was the right thing to do or not), congress and the administration may have not addressed the threat of those firms failing in the future, throught poor use of the bailout money in the present. This lack of oversight may result in these same companies returning years later in similar predicaments. (Of course, that may have resulted anyway, even with oversight, calling into question the wisdom of the bailout, of which I’m not knowledeable enough to discuss.)
Hopefully failure of many of these companies down the road does not turn out to be the case. But, when one has no idea of what’s happening with the bailout money those firms received, how can we know one way or the other?
*** From nobel prize-winning economist Gary Becker (on the Becker-Posner-Blog.com): “For every 10 per cent increase in firm size, measured by the market value of assets, by sales, or by related variables, compensation increases by about 3 per cent. This “30 per cent” law held during the 1930’s, and has held for every succeeding decade, including right up to the present.”
