The Ponzi Economy
By Michael Kinsley
They keep telling us that this is the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. But there is at least one difference: in the Great Depression, nobody needed to be told they were in a depression. Today, except for relatively few investment bankers and somewhat more middle-class homeowners, who would guess that things are so dire? Life goes on, reasonably normally. Maybe it's easier to get a cab in New York City--a reliable real-life indication of an economic downturn--but then maybe the effect of the financial crisis is canceled out by the effect of that other crisis, the one about energy. Now, there is a crisis you can sink your teeth into. But this? It's like some terrible, ominous dream where you're being pursued by this huge, ugly, horrible ... what, exactly?
And this $700 billion that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson wants--it sounds like a lot. But then so does the $400 billion annual deficit that the Federal Government was already heading for before this new thing came along. And yet that didn't seem to have any real-life effect either. Nor have any of the other gargantuan numbers that have floated past us in the generation since Ronald Reagan declared in his first Inaugural Address that society is like a family and has to live within its means. We took this as an invitation for our families to start borrowing like the Federal Government. So now we have the national debt, credit-card debt, student-loan debt, plus Social Security and other government promises that amount to more debt (although they aren't on the official books).
Then there is the debt that set off this crisis: mortgage debt. Overly easy mortgage borrowing financed the house-price bubble. The bursting of that bubble set off the chain reaction of financial implosions that we are experiencing at the moment. Yet you rarely hear politicians calling it a bubble. In fact, constantly rising real estate prices seems to be regarded as some kind of natural right, or at least a natural state to which we must return as soon as possible. Getting prices "moving again"--which means moving higher--is one all-but-explicit goal of the Paulson bailout. If house prices head back up, fewer mortgages will exceed the value of the asset that backs them up, foreclosures will drop, and bankers will be willing to lend again. More generally, in a nation of homeowners, people will get back that cozy feeling that they are getting richer without lifting a finger. "Confidence"--today's great missing ingredient--will be restored. The crisis will end. The dreamer awakes and takes out a second mortgage, and we all live happily ever after.
But building restored confidence on real estate would be foolish. How is the country any richer if the exact same stock of existing housing is suddenly worth, say, 20% more? Other markets produce things. They sell what they produce. When prices go up, they produce more. Not so with real estate, for the most part. This market consists primarily of trading the same thing again and again. And you know the old saw about land: They're not making any more of it. Real estate is the only major consumer market in which how much you'll pay someone depends on your belief about how much someone else will pay you. In this market, prices go up when people believe they will continue to go up. To restore confidence would mean restoring belief in the greater fool. That shouldn't be hard. It's built into human nature. This is why another term for a Ponzi or pyramid scheme is a confidence trick.
It's been obvious for years that real estate was a bubble ready to burst. Politicians and government officials deserve the pounding they are getting for failure to take action sooner. Of course, there weren't a lot of warnings that houses were becoming too valuable (or calls for greater regulation of anything) from the politicians and commentators who are now so indignant. What was not so obvious was the ability of real estate, which has always had a slightly rakish air, to drag even the most respectable and conservative parts of the economy down with it. Other problem areas, like Social Security, also have a Ponzi-scheme flavor: the claims on some pile of money exceed the size of the pile. In many of these schemes, the average American plays both the victim and Ponzi himself.
Cassandra has had a tough assignment during the past three decades. She keeps warning of catastrophe, yet things have kept getting better and better. But maybe this is her moment. Maybe this is when the economy stops being something you watch on television and starts being something you live with.