Book Blog – The Great Deformation – Part I, The Blackberry Panic Of 2008

Book Blogs are notes about books I’m reading, as I read them. They may or may not be followed up by wholesale reviews in traditional format.

The Great Deformation, by David A. Stockman published 2013 (buy on Amazon.com)

I received a copy of David Stockman’s 2013 analysis of the mechanics of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath as a gift from a friend and sat down to read the first 50 pages, Part I.

I think Stockman attempts to make several key points as a set up to the remainder of this lengthy tome:
-the mainstream/regime narrative of an incipient economic crisis catalyzed by a financial collapse originating in Wall Street credit markets controlled by major Wall Street institutions (such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs) is one part baseless lie and one part clueless ignorance of facts on the ground at the time
-there was a crisis, for these particular institutions, which was a result of years of non-value adding financial and accounting chicanery enabled by Fed Chairman Greenspan’s infamous “put” and the crisis would’ve resulted in the liquidation of these firms assets (and the termination of their managers) into abler hands which would’ve been a good thing for competitive financial markets and the capitalist economy as a whole
-this crisis was not only averted by the frantic lobbying of connected officials in Congress, the Treasury and other regulatory agencies by crony executives in the affected firms, but these same executives and officials worked in concert to turn the bailout moment into a massive payday/profit opportunity; most of the people making decisions about this in the government, particularly in the Treasury and the Fed, were inexperienced, miseducated or otherwise rankish amateurs with little understanding of the context of their decisions or their consequences beyond the immediate moment
-the scale of the bailouts in terms of pure dollars was completely without precedent or connection to actual costs and risks present in the system at the time
-memoirs of officials and executives involves in the bailout discussions published extemporaneously do not make a substantial case for their decisions based off of data available about the period years later
-much of the decision-making at the time, by concerned executives as well as captured officials, seems to be dominated by the twin desire to avoid taking responsibility for mistakes made in the past (thereby looking foolish) and to continue the illusion of the viability of the system based on these mistakes going forward

“All the rest,” as it has been said, “is illustration.”

There were parts of the narrative I found confusing to follow at times. Its possible I didn’t read clearly, but in several instances it seemed like on one page or at the beginning of a chapter Stockman would be arguing that the potential capital losses of a particular company were small enough relative to their total balance sheet that they could easily sweat the loss from a survival standpoint and then on the next page or at the end of the chapter, he seemed to suggest the same loss was so sizeable that it would threaten the viability of the enterprise itself.

I think there was a lot of question-begging in the narrative as well. Stockman builds a decent logical case for why there was no “contagion” that could spread from Wall Street (the financial markets) to Main Street (the rest of the economy) that would result in a general economic depression. But his argument always rests on the costs being shifted to various government backstop agencies and funding sources which could make things like commercial lending and payroll finance markets “money good”. It isn’t explained where these institutions would come by the required funds necessary to remain in operation without a bout of money printing (bailouts) and how this is different than the bailouts Wall Street received.

That leads to another concern I have with the overall thesis, which is that somehow, what happens on Wall Street is arbitrary and doesn’t affect greater economic outcomes. While I agree with the notion that purging the financial system of bad debts and bad business models during periods of crisis is a process of economic health rather than economic illness, I so far fail to see how the repricing and reorganization of economic capital taking place in these markets would not result in similar repricings and reorganizations of capital investment throughout the economy as a whole. Stockman details several multi billion dollar examples of ” predatory financial practices” in which members of Main Street America were able to finance lifestyles they couldn’t prudently afford the costs of and it seems like these are prime (or subprime, as it were) examples of assets that would need to be repriced and reorganized into abler hands. The gutters of both Streets would be filled with the purged excess, and it would eventually drain.

Annoyingly, Stockman repeatedly exalts “our political democracy” and even conflates its goodness and functioning with free market capitalism. For me, this is a fundamental flaw in reasoning and defining terms that throws his entire analysis into suspicion, at least from the standpoint of his analytical framework operant and his own agenda in terms of desired social outcomes. I don’t think Stockman and I are on the same page, in other words.

So far, Stockman’s book expects a lot of prior knowledge on behalf of the reader. He doesn’t begin the book outlining his economic or financial theories, nor his concept of the purpose of government. We intuit bits and pieces of it as he proclaims this bad, that person good, this event horrid, etc. But he never really says “I’m from the School of X” or gives a summary of the key principles necessary to follow his analysis. Therefore, it comes off as strenuously assertive rather than rigorously logical. And I think part of Stockman’s goal is to spread blame in a bipartisan fashion, while building bridges and giving accolades in an “independent” manner. So far, though, it seems arbitrary due to this lack of explanation about his framework.