Banking on Bankruptcy
Thoughts on Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, Commodity Spikes, and the "New Stagflation"
By Larry Peterson
This is a web-only article from the website of Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice available at
Banking on Bankruptcy | Dollars & Sense
After the stabilization provoked by the government-supported rescue of one of the financial sector's main players, Bear Stearns, in March, the economic focus of most people, including policy makers, immediately turned to the remarkable rise in prices that had been spreading through a worrying extent of the economy for somewhat longer.
This trend had been led, of course, by surges in prices of key inputs such as oil and agricultural commodities (and also by gold: though of relatively little industrial use, it retains its traditional popularity as a hedge against inflation—or at least it did until very recently—for many investors). But, despite the clear upward trend, some of these commodities, especially oil, were subject on several occasions during this particular period to huge and rapid—sometimes unprecedentedly so—swings in both directions.
And then there was the dollar, which was engaged in a similarly bumpy ride, mainly downwards. But on Friday, July the 11th, the stock of the two major government-sponsored mortgage companies (or Government Sponsored Entities, or GSEs), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, fell by more than 50% in the opening minutes of trading in New York; and the focus shifted right back to the specific woes of the financial sector in a twinkling of an eye.
This was ironic in a sense, for it was exactly a year before that interest rate rises, justified at the time by stubbornly increasing prices—especially again, that of oil, but also by rising wages and falling unit labor costs (which corresponds to labor productivity)—precipitated the financial catastrophe that has come to be known as the "subprime crisis."
(A quick aside here: just in May, Challenge published the results of a shocking study by Andrew Sum and Paolo Tobar, which indicates that "$32-$37 billion in major Wall Street firms' bonuses in 2006 and 2007 were greater than the annual increases in the wages of 109 million American front-line workers between 2002 and 2007."
This suggests that of the feared earnings inflation the Fed is so zealous to combat, the lion's share between 2005-2007 consisted of outsized payouts to movers and shakers on Wall Street— ..... con't
Banking on Bankruptcy | Dollars & Sense