The Social Structure of Financial Crisis Governance, 1974 and 2008
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The Social Structure of Financial Crisis Governance, 1974 and 2008 Pierre-Christian Fink Columbia University Running head: Financial Crisis Governance Word count: 7,100 * Pierre-Christian Fink, Department of Sociology, Columbia University, 606 West 122nd Street, MC 9649, New York, NY 10027. E-mail: [email protected]. FINANCIAL CRISIS GOVERNANCE 2 The Social Structure of Financial Crisis Governance, 1974 and 2008 Abstract: Crises are moments of uncertainty in which existing routines no longer apply. Yet across some crises, patterns of governance repeat themselves. This article defines the conditions under which crisis governance is partially predictable, and identifies mechanisms operative in such cases. The argument is developed through a comparison of governance during the financial crises of 1974 and 2008, drawing on original archival research. In both cases, the institutional set-up led to the Federal Reserve becoming the leading institution in crisis governance. The Federal Reserve recombined forms of expertise from its two main departments (monetary policy and financial regulation) that are separate during normal times. As a consequence, it conceived of both crises as runs not on banks but on the money market, through which banks and other institutions increasingly fund themselves. Because the framing of the crisis as a money-market run implied even more risk—a disaster for the entire economy—than that of a bank run, the Federal Reserve hid its framing from Congress and the public. To solve the crisis, the Federal Reserve and its allies from banks and executive agencies sought to stabilize the money market by repurposing old tools to create so-called funding facilities. Only as a complement to this effort did bail-outs of banks take place. Key words: Disaster, Financial Sociology, Political Sociology, Archival Research FINANCIAL CRISIS GOVERNANCE 3 The Social Structure of Financial Crisis Governance, 1974 and 2008 In the wake of 2008, sociologists have increasingly sought to explain crisis governance. A line of research focused on the micro level identifies “unplanned, trial-and- error [action by] a policy apparatus reaching its limits” (Thiemann 2018:195). Existing regulations had failed to prevent the crisis and existing tools such as the Federal Reserve’s discount window proved insufficient to resolve the acute problems in the financial system. Confronted with uncertainty, actors were forced to improvise and wound up bailing out banks (Jacobs 2012; Swedberg 2010). Scholars working in this line of research stress that crisis governance happens “in the heat of the moment” (Lazar 2006:268) and strive to “recover a sense of the contingency that surrounds all decisions” during crises (Lamoreaux 2001:632). They claim that “[c]risis is resistant to epistemologies of causal uniform regularities” (Steinmetz 2018:n.p.; similarly Gibson 2011; Sewell 2005). Yet scholars taking a macro approach highlight that the outcome of crisis governance is remarkably consistent: the financial system is being rescued (Roitman 2014). These scholars argue that contingency is restricted to the surface, while further down there is “a determinate direction to history” (Konings 2018b:208). The details of bailouts differ (Culpepper and Reinke 2014; Woll 2014) but their existence is one of the “systematic features of [the contemporary] financial regime” (Konings 2018a:18). “Never do we have more certainty about the need to maintain capitalism’s key institutions than at times when the banks seem about to fail and we face genuine uncertainty” (Konings 2017:n.p.). However, this line of research is still grappling with “a residual teleology or functionalism” FINANCIAL CRISIS GOVERNANCE 4 (Konings 2018b:207). If uncertainty exists, i.e., if pre-crisis routines no longer work, how can actors accomplish a financial rescue again and again? This paper takes a comparative approach to answer this question. Original archival research into the crisis of 1974—at the time the most severe one since the Great Depression (Grossman 2010:266–69; Spero 1980)—is combined with a synthesis of revisionist scholarship on the crisis of 2008 (Judge 2017; Mehrling 2017; Ricks 2016; Tooze 2018). In both crises, the Federal Reserve communicated to the public that the crisis was one of banks but internally understood the crisis as one of the money market. The money market had emerged during the 1950s and 1960s as a major source of funding for financial and other corporations (Battilossi 2010; Stigum and Crescenzi 2007). In 1974 and 2008, the Federal Reserve was most concerned with the freezing of this market and tried to render it liquid through new tools, so-called funding facilities. Only as a complement to this strategy did it engage in bailouts of banks. Based on this empirical finding, it becomes possible to explain why crisis governance under certain conditions exhibits chaos on the surface and order below. Faced with uncertainty, actors at the core of crisis governance develop a new frame, but they strategically conceal the new frame from the periphery. This pattern is predictable because it is shaped during normal times. First, whether the core of crisis governance is one government institution or a government-wide initiative depends on the institutional set-up for dealing with a conventional problem below the threshold of crisis. In the case of financial regulation, that set-up isolates institutions, blocks cooperation, and makes the Federal Reserve the first mover. Second, a new framing of a crisis does not arise de novo FINANCIAL CRISIS GOVERNANCE 5 but as a recombination of existing concepts and data sources. The Federal Reserve, which is not only a financial regulator but also implements monetary policy, is uniquely well- positioned to develop a framing of financial stability that is centered on the money market. The concealment of a frame is particularly likely in the governance of financial crises because they are endogenous (Block 1977; Merton 1948; Swedberg 2012). In other crises, such as a drug scandal, regulatory action cannot worsen the problem. A drug does not become more dangerous because the Food and Drug Administration shares information about its toxicity. In finance, however, regulators may deepen the crisis if they disseminate an understanding of the problem that is more pessimistic than that of the audience. This paper makes the double talk of central actors visible by drawing on data that was confidential during the crises. For the events of 1974, the papers of Federal Reserve governor Andrew F. Brimmer contain important information not found in other government archives. The postwar archive of the New York Clearing House provides the first inside perspective on private actions during the crisis. After 2008, the size and shape of the Fed’s funding facilities was disclosed as the result of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act over the protest of the Federal Reserve and the New York Clearing House. The paper is organized as follows. The next section discusses existing sociological approaches to crises and develops a framework that can account for predictability in crisis governance. The discussion of the cases then begins with a section that provides empirical background on bank runs and money market runs. The following four sections trace crisis FINANCIAL CRISIS GOVERNANCE 6 governance in 1974 from the center (the Federal Reserve) to the periphery (Congress and the public). The discussion brings in the 2008 case for comparison. CRISIS GOVERNANCE Sociologists studying crises typically posit a discontinuity from normalcy. Crises are painted as periods of uncertainty in which the usual routines no longer apply. This paper argues that such contingency exists only in some crisis. In other crises, routines from normalcy are recombined in predictable ways. Whether crisis governance will be predictable and if so, which shape it will take, depends on decisions taken before the crisis. Knowledge In a crisis, reality overflows existing frames in such a way that action is no longer effective. Actors may or may not become aware of this discrepancy. If they do, they may or may not succeed in developing a new frame. A new frame does not arise de novo but as a recombination of existing types of expertise (Padgett and Powell 2012). This recombination may take the form of the adoption of a different conceptual framework at the highest level of an organization (Fligstein, Stuart Brundage, and Schultz 2017). But it may also entail the re-arrangement of data by “research assistants, junior economists, midlevel officials, and also mainframe computers with their glitches and bugs” (Elyachar 2013:147). As regulatory institutions generate much of their data through the implementation of administrative programs, a promising way for such re- FINANCIAL CRISIS GOVERNANCE 7 arrangement is to exploit linkages between parts of the institution that implement different programs and are separate from one another during normal times (Carrigan 2014). Among financial regulators, the Fed is uniquely well-positioned to create such linkages during crises. It not only regulates banks but implements monetary policy and hence continuously acts in the money market, collecting information that the other regulators do not have access to. Institutions This erasure of institutional barriers during crises needs to be institutionally prepared during normal times. In his study of the Cuban missile crisis, Gibson paints a picture of crisis governance by the U.S. government as “fluid and contingent processes at the very bottom of the (sociological) micro-macro continuum” (Gibson 2011:408). High- ranking officials deliberated as a group in which “protocol, status differences, and bureaucratic loyalties were suspended” (2012:7). But this form of decision-making did not arise spontaneously. The group, known as ExComm, had been set up as a new bureaucratic entity after the Bay of Pigs invasion. It was designed for situations in which “incomplete information […] and bureaucratic interests threatened to lead [the President] astray” (Gibson 2012:51). For a financial crisis, the famously disjointed U.S.