Citizens United Decreases Governance Effectiveness in Both Government and Business

The challenge with Citizens United vs the Federal Election Commission (Library, 2010) is how to approach it. One can view it through the lens of ethics (Silver, 2014), through which it is a terrible decision. You could examine it from an empirical standpoint and, even given the limited time since it was decided, there’s already sufficient evidence to suggest it is (further) corrupting the electoral process in the United States (Spencer & Wood, 2014). One could also view it from a governance standpoint, examining whether it will increase or decrease the efficacy of boards over their corporations (Coates IV, 2012). Since the narrow definition of the role of the board it to increase corporate value, it is fairly straightforward to measure the effects of Citizen’s United and, according to Coates, it has been surprisingly negative.

The lens through which I want to address Citizens United is that of electoral and governance accountability: Does Citizens United increase or decrease the ability to hold our elected officials and our corporations accountable for their actions? I think, in spite of some commentators claims to the contrary (Bedford, 2010; Meyer, 2012), Citizens United exacerbated the already existing problem of what Monks calls “Drone Corporations,” (Monks, 2013) those in which ownership is too diffuse to apply any power over the Board and, consequently, instilling more power in the managerial class. By giving corporate executives even more unrestrained power to lobby, bribe, hire, and otherwise influence political decision-making, it allows them to continue to tip the scales away from workers and toward themselves, and takes away more of the influence of the electorate and puts it squarely in the hands of deep-pocketed business interests.

First, electoral accountability. Citizens United essentially takes the previous legal fiction of corporate personhood and makes it a both metaphysical and legal fact. The decision gives corporations the power to anonymously spend unlimited amounts of money influencing the electoral process based on the First Amendment’s free speech guarantees. The managerial class has done a very effective job of increasing the amount of money that goes into their pockets and decreasing worker pay over the last 30 years (McCall & Percheski, 2010). Through their destruction of/decrease in participation in unions and conducting race-to-the-bottom labor arbitrage, the rich have become richer and the poor, poorer. While money does not determine elections, in competitive, non-incumbency races, campaign contributions have a significant effect on a candidate’s chances of winning (Erikson & Palfrey, 1998) and it buys influence and access. Thus, with corporations having significantly more money than individuals, they will be able to significantly affect elections and elected representatives will feel most accountable to them for their continued support. Thus, Citizens United takes power away from actual people and decreases electoral accountability.

Nearly as concerning is the effect it has on accountability in corporate governance. While the problems of drone boards, interlocking directorates, powerful chairmen and passive/diffused investors, all of which serve to decrease the power of the shareholder and increase the power of the managerial class existed before Citizens United, the decision gives managers increased powers in the halls of government (Monks, 1913). An excellent example of the way this effects governance is through the activity of the Business Roundtable, an organization of CEOs of large (mostly drone) corporations in fighting all “say-on-pay” provisions of the Dodd-Frank act, as toothless and merely advisory as those provisions are. Thus, by giving managers even more power, effective governance becomes ever more difficult. The managerialism that has increased in the U.S. for the past three decades (Locke & Spender, 2011) seems likely to significantly increase as a result of Citizens United. Thus, both corporations and the government move further out of our democratic control.

References
Bedford, K. (2010). Citizens United v. FEC: The Constitutional Right That Big Corporations Should Have But Do Not Want. Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, 34(2), p639–661.
Coates IV, J. C. (2012). Corporate Politics, Governance, and Value Before and After Citizens United. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 9(4), 657–696. doi:10.1111/j.1740-1461.2012.01265.x
Erikson, R. S., & Palfrey, T. R. (1998). Campaign Spending and Incumbency: An Alternative Simultaneous Equations Approach. The Journal of Politics, 60(02), 355–373. doi:10.2307/2647913
Library, H. O. U. S. S. C. Citizens United v Federal Election Commission (2010).
Locke, R., & Spender, J.-C. (2011). Confronting Managerialism: How the Business Elite and Their Schools Threw Our Lives Out of Balance (Economic Controversies). London: Zed Books.
McCall, L., & Percheski, C. (2010). Income Inequality: New Trends and Research Directions. Annual Review of Sociology, 36(1), 329–347. doi:10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102541
Meyer, J. M. (2012). The Real Error in Citizens United. Washington and Lee Law Review, 69(4), 2171–2232.
Monks, R. A. G. (2013). Citizens DisUnited: Passive Investors, Drone CEOs, and the Corporate Capture of the American Dream. Miniver Press.
Silver, D. (2014). Business Ethics After Citizens United: A Contractualist Analysis. Journal of Business Ethics, 127(January 2014), 385–397. doi:10.1007/s10551-013-2046-y
Spencer, D., & Wood, A. (2014). Citizens United, States Divided: An Empirical Analysis of Independent Political Spending. Indiana Law Journal, 89(1), 315–372.

The Ethics Of, and Response To, "Strategic Default" (part 3 of 3)

Part 3: How lenders should handle the situation

So, if strategic default is clearly unethical, financially irresponsible and certainly legally questionable, how are the banks to respond? In the days before the sub-prime meltdown, this would have been an easy question. Since banks were assumed to have the superior ethical standing, they could afford to take a hard-line approach to defaulters and quickly use whatever legal and financial means at their disposal. Now, however, the ethical presumption lies with the borrowers, so the lenders have to be very careful about how they respond.

We will need to approach this issue sensitively and creatively. I have to admit that my first reaction upon hearing about this trend was neither sensitive nor particularly creative. Given the ethical in-defensibility and dire consequences of strategic default, it’s an understandable reaction. Lenders are going to have to resist the urge to play hardball with these borrowers, however. For one thing, it probably won’t work. Since debtors prison hasn’t existed for two hundred years, the borrowers already know that the worst that can happen is that their credit will be ruined; they’ve already worked that into the cost benefit analysis.

The first step will be to draw a profile of who the strategic defaulters are. Since no one bank is likely to have enough data to draw solid conclusions from, there will need to be inter-bank or, preferably, industry-wide cooperation. I’m assuming, since I don’t have access to that sort of data, that a statistical picture of the strategic defaulter is possible and that a predictive model could be constructed. Again, this would have to be an industry effort to aggregate enough data to make meaningful predictions.

Once the picture of the likely defaulter is developed, banks would need to develop individual ways of dealing with them. The most effective way will be to proactively approach the borrowers that fit the profile and offer them some kind of pre-emptive workout plan. It will be harder for the borrowers to default if they feel they’ve been treated fairly by their banks. It would be a way of building brand loyalty and it would skew the cost benefit analysis toward keeping their homes. While it will cost the lenders in the short run, given the fall in value in some real estate markets, the cost of foreclosure and disposition of the defaulted properties will likely even out. Beyond that, should the effects of strategic default become systemic, the losses would be far greater. Dealing with this problem is going to require foresight and a long-term view of these assets and the market as a whole.

Once these proactive workout plans are offered, there will be several further practical steps required to adequately address this problem. First, so that strategic defaulters do not get lumped into the category of those who merely borrowed beyond their means or were victims of the economic downturn, additional means testing would have to be added to work-out planning by the banks. This adds a further burden to non-strategic defaulters, but this is one further consequence of the strategic defaulters’ actions (in other words, the banks can’t be blamed for this…blame the people walking away from their homes).

Second, government regulators and legislators should be brought into the conversation. This sort of activity by individuals borders on fraud and theft and while it may not be universally popular, the systemic danger of strategic default becoming widespread and having a serious impact on the functioning of the lending ecosystem transcends short-term popularity.

Finally, a coordinated publicity campaign about the dangers of strategic default to the society at large and its ethical indefensibility should be undertaken. If the presumption of ethical activity could be more neutral (i.e., neither with the banks nor with individuals), the peer pressure that used to exist that kept people from walking away from their homes could be revived. While it’d require careful execution, I think the intuitive reaction of most people to strategic default is negative, so merely pointing out the possible dire consequences of such defaults might be enough to turn public option strongly against it.

It goes without saying that all three responses would have to be cautious, careful, and sensitively planned and executed. Banks and other mortgage lenders have fallen into the same category as lawyers and politicians in terms of public esteem and ethical estimation. Because of the possibility of systemic consequences such as the possible disruption of the entire mortgage ecosystem (which would have ripple effects in real estate, building, tax revenues, and ever other system that depends on a functioning lending system), I don’t think it should be ignored. The challenge will be convincing the public, regulators, and government officials that the concern of the banks isn’t merely with coughing short-term gains out of already struggling homeowners. By offering proactive help to borrowers who could fall into strategic default, lenders could demonstrate that they are working in the best interest of not only their customers but the economic wellbeing of the entire home owning ecosystem.

The Ethics Of, and Response To, "Strategic Default" (part 2)

Part 2: The Ethical and Systemic Consequences of Strategic Default

For this reason, mortgage lenders should be very cautious in their approach to dealing with this trend. Additionally, there is reason to think that there could be systemic effects should this trend become widespread. If strategic default were to go to 2 million, the risk profile of mortgage lending in the US would change so significantly that it could result in much higher interest rates for all borrowers or, in an extreme case, could see lenders exiting the business for lower-risk places for their capital.

To see why I think there could be systemic effects from strategic default, it’s necessary to understand the risk sharing profile of home lending. There are several kinds of risk involved in making a loan, market, default, and financial. Market risk is the possibility that the property being bought by the homeowner will decrease, rather than increase in value (or, perhaps, even just fall short of the cost of capital, in this case the interest rate of the home loan). Default risk is possibility that the borrower might not repay the loan. Finally, financial risk is the possibility that money the bank uses to lend to the homeowner will become more expensive than loan itself (i.e. the bank’s cost of capital exceeds the interest rate on the loan.)

As in most financial transactions, the holder of the risk gets the rewards for that risk. In the case of mortgage lending, if the house goes up in value, the homeowner gets to keep difference (minus taxes, etc.). If the loan gets repaid, the bank (or holder of the loan in the secondary market) gets compensated for the default risk by interest payments. The same goes for financial risk. If the opportunity cost of the loan was lower than that of other investments, it’s a good investment.

The major problem with strategic defaults, from both ethical and financial perspectives, is that they transfer the market risk from the party who gets the benefit if the risk comes good (the homeowner) to a party who gets gets no benefit and in fact sees nothing but downside risk (the lender). Since the lender isn’t expecting the downside market risk when making the loan, that risk isn’t priced into the loan. The lenders would want either to share in the upside risk (by sharing in the profits of a sale if the market went up) or price the market risk into the into the interest rate (by raising it considerably). But since neither of these scenarios was taken into account went the loans were made, I’d argue that transferring risk to a party that isn’t compensated for it is unethical.

Even more concerning than the losses to banks is the possibility of strategic defaults becoming widespread. While I’m not one to prophesy doom for the worlds most resilient financial system, strategic defaults could have a severely destabilizing effect on the mortgage lending market if their prevalence rises. Without structural changes in the way home loans apportion risk and reward, mortgage lending would become a very unattractive business indeed.

This could play out in a number of ways. Risk-averse investors/lenders could leave the market. The process and qualifications for the getting a home loan could be much more stringent, pushing housing prices down. The most likely scenario would be a wholesale rise in interest rates to account for increased default risk. Here’s where the strategic defaulters would be forcing us into a “tragedy of the common” situation, thereby doubling their ethical . The short-term individual gains of the defaulters would cause a structural change in the way interest rates are calculated. This would result in everyone paying higher interest rates for their loans.

In short, from an ethical perspective, the strategic defaulter is a triple loser. First, they break a contract made in good faith. Second, they cause others to become unable to get home loans as banks tighten their lending standards. Third, as the price of strategic defaults gets priced into the interest rates charged on home loans, they cause many people who are ethically untainted pay the price of their default.

This raises the question, of course, if there are ethically defensible reasons for breaking a contract like a home loan. While this may controversial in some cases, it’s pretty clear that there are situations when a borrower shouldn’t be held ethically (or financially, for that matter) liable for walking away from a loan. If the loan was made under fradulent pretenses (by the lender, that is), for example, a borrower shouldn’t be held to the contract. Similalry, if undue or inappropriate pressure or misinformation was used to get a borrower to take out the loan, I think we’d say they should be released from responsibility. Also, the ethical approbrium we would level at someone who has lost a job or has seen their ability to pay a loan decreased through either macro- or micro-economic circumstances would be diminished. Thus, there are clearly cases when it’s not ethically questionable to default on a home loan and banks should be clear about dilineating the different classes of borrowers when dealing with the default.

That said, under no traditional ethical framework would strategic default be approved of. Clearly, all foundational ethical systems have “no stealing” and “no lying” dicta which preclude strategic default. Virtue ethics, in which one asks if this is something a virtuous person would do, is (as always) a little less definite on this question, but it’s hard to imagine a person walking away from a contract for purely economic gain being considered a paragon of virtue. A deontological approach, especisally that of Kant’s Categorical Imperitive, would clearly make strategic default unethical. In Kant’s approach, we try to imagine a world in which everyone acted in the way we are examining. If it becomes impossible, than Kant would say it’s unethical. Obviously, if everyone defaulted on a loan that lost value, no one would make loans any more, which would make taking out loans impossible. Finally, under a pragmatic/utilitarian ethical framework, which looks at the action in terms of how well it works out for the everyone, strategic default would be considered unethical because, due to the “tragedy of the commons” effect, far more finanical pain is caused by the defaulters than is gained by them.

Tomorrow, part 3: Playing Heavy and/or Creative Solutions: What Should the Banks Do?

The Ethics Of, and Response To, "Strategic Default" (part I)

My reflections on this topic ended up being far too long for a single blog post, so I’ve divided it into three for easier reading. I’ll post them over the next three days).

Part I: Strategic Default: What is it, and why would anyone consider doing it?

Banks, once the paradigm case of fiduciary responsibility, have taken quite a reputational hit in the past half-decade. Where once the banker was the very stereotype of responsible, conservative financial management, whom you’d trust with your money more than you’d trust yourself, many people now see banks as just one more institution interested in nothing more than taking your money from you. While this is a broad generalization, it’s not without some basis in fact. Mortgage lenders and mortgage brokers, particularly, played a substantial role in the current financial crisis. However, an emerging trend called “strategic default,” where homeowners who are capable of repaying loans walk away from their homes because of a drop in investment value, takes unfair advantage of this perception and could possibly endanger the entire home loan ecosystem. Because of the recent reputation of dirty-dealing in lending, though, banks need to very careful in how they analyze and respond to this trend.

Strategic default, as it has come to be known, is when a homeowner who has the means to pay his or her mortgage stops paying their mortgage and allows the bank to foreclose. For example, let’s say a family took out a $400,000 loan in 2005 to buy a house at the peak of the market. They were able to pay the loan at the time and it is still within their means to do so. But let’s further assume that the value of the house, should they sell it today, would be $250,000 (a drop that would be entirely likely in some parts of California). The “strategic” defaulter, seeing that they have $-150,000 in equity, decides that letting the bank have the house and taking the 7 to 10 year hit on his or her credit is worth the $150,000. They know it would probably be 7 to 10 years before they recover the original value of the house, to say nothing of the thousands payed in interest.

Looked at from a purely financial point of view, it’s easy to see their point. Let’s look at the math. In May 2005, the average interest rate for a 30 year fixed rate mortgage was 5.75. Let’s use the following assumptions:

House price: $420,000

Down payment (5%): $20,000

PMI: .5%

Taxes: 1.25%

Current value: $250,000

Rate of return for the next 10 years: 4%

A homeowner would be likely to analyse his or her cost benefit analysis as follows:

The value of the house at the end of the period: $370,000

Total payments: $418,000

Investment value $-48,000

It should be pointed out that this isn’t a very sophisticated way of doing a cost benefit analysis, but I think it is pretty close to the intuitive way people think about their housing investment. A good CBA would consider the pre-2010 payments sunk costs, take into consideration the value of housing for that period, and would include transaction and opportunity costs, etc. But still, I suspect it’s this sort of analysis that leads people to walk away from their homes. They think that for the $418,000 of payments they will have made, a $48,000 loss is a pretty bad return. And who could blame them for thinking that? But a mortgage is not just a financial, but a legal and ethical transaction, as well.

While there has likely always been a small percentage of homeowners who default on their loans for investment reasons, this number has remained small for few reasons. First, since the early 90s, the real estate market has almost always been a good investment. Over that period, there was never a period where the overall market dropped ( see graph for illustration of this phenomenon). Second, homeownership has traditionally held an exalted place in the American psyche and there has always been a good deal of social pressure to own a home among the middle and upper classes. Finally, in a another manifestation of social pressure, anyone who walked away from a home for purely financial reasons would be ostracized as a thief or, at the very least, a deadbeat.

The 20-40% market drop, in some places more, removed the investment incentive. While this has happened before, however, and there was not a wholesale abandonment of homes. The primary difference is that the fallen reputation of banks has provided a sort of excuse for people who would otherwise have been ashamed to walk away from their homes. The assumption of superior ethical standing has moved from the lenders to the borrowers. Now a person who is foreclosed upon is seen as a victim rather than a perpetrator, regardless of the actual circumstances of th default.

(Tomorrow: Risk and Consequences)

The Malia/Racist Situation: The basic questions

When a friend sent me the link to the story (http://www.mediaite.com/online/conservative-blog-commenters-target-malia-obama-with-racial-slurs/), I asked her at first if she’d be offended if I didn’t read it. I could see from the title that it wasn’t going to improve my day or my feeling of solidarity with the human race. A day later, in a “car-crash-you-can’t-avert-your-gaze-from” sort of way, I read the story and followed up on some of the surrounding context. While it didn’t improve my attitude any, it did get me thinking. How can people, who live around me and probably seem like decent people most of the time, think that it is OK to write hateful, racist things about an eleven year-old girl? How can anyone ever think that’s an ethically acceptable thing to do? There are (at least) two answers to that question, one contextual and the other a matter of reflection (or lack thereof).

The contextual answer has always been both the explanation and the excuse for racism and hate that have their roots in social and economic alienation. People who are economically and socially alienated, especially those who have not always been thus, particularly those without fairly sophisticated critical thinking skills, tend toward extreme small-c conservatism. This is to say that change, since it brings us farther away from a situation that was perceived to be better for the group or class that the perceiver belongs to, is by nature bad.

In this case, white working-class men (and increasingly some women) look back to a period when it was possible for a working class man to support his family and have a comfortable lifestyle whilst working a blue-collar job. As was the experience in my own family, a sheet-metal worker in the fifties through early nineties could support a family, send his kids to college, and retire at 60 to a comfortable lifestyle. The combination of global socioeconomic shifts (outsourcing, labour arbitrage, industrial base being exported to the Far East/Pacific Rim) and current deep recession have made that all but impossible. While to some degree the conservative worship of the 50s as the golden moment of US history is the result of some retrospective rose-coloured glasses, it is certainly true that there are far fewer opportunities for those without advanced education and that the world of Ward and June is gone, not to return.

When this sort of alienation occurs, those so alienated frequently view any change at all as a cause of their alienation. I think much of the outright hate of Barack Obama has its genesis in exactly this dynamic. On any objective measure, President Obama would be a hard man to hate. You could hate his politics, for sure, but he seems like an awfully nice person. And an eleven year-old girl? Who could possibly have hateful things to say about her (except her parents…I have an eleven year old myself). What these people hate is not really President Obama or Malia. What they hate is the fact that the world is changing and it has eliminated the privilege white working- and middle-class men have had (or felt they have had) for some time. Even though President Obama is only a symptom of that change, their animus falls on him and now, reprehensibly, his daughter.

I don’t think my analysis so far is new or particularly novel. It’s only a slightly updated version of the traditional sociological understanding of racism among poor whites. What is new is the way the hatred has been generalized in one sense and made more specific in another. The important thing to realize here is that while this explains what’s behind the actions of people who call an 11 year-old girl who goes to one of the best schools in the country “ghetto[sic] trash”, it does not excuse it. Additionally, I think it is incomplete because there is something missing from the personal decision-making process of someone who could write something like that.

I remember once whilst in high school driving around with a bunch of friends. Putting aside the fact that four seventeen year-old boys are the dimmest creatures on the planet (when young men travel together their IQs are divisional rather than average, i.e. 5 boys with an average IQ of 125 actually act like they have an IQ of 25), I remember that we did something like steal a mailbox or something like that (I don’t remember exactly these decades later) but I remember thinking to myself “I just acted like an idiot. I was just playing the part of stupid frat guy in a John Hughes movie”. It was years later, in a philosophy class, that I found out that this is an essential reflection that can lead people to act as their best selves.

This reflection is central to what is called “virtue ethics”. It’s one of the primary ethical traditions in the west, one that was first explained by Aristotle. Rather than ask “is what I’m about to do right” (deontological ethics), or “does the society in which I live think this is the right thing to do” (social ethics), the virtue ethicist asks “would a virtuous person do this?”. My “16 Candles” moment was of just this variety and I think it is one of the main things missing from people who can despicable things around an 11 year-old girl that they don’t know. I’m pretty sure that people who do such things haven’t stopped to asked themselves “would a person who I consider virtuous call the President’s daughter ‘ghetto trash’”. It’s a version of “What Would Jesus Do?”. I think it’s safe to say that almost no one would think that Jesus or any other virtuous person would do these things. Further, anyone who reflects on this would see this too.

This is why I suspect that, along with sociological and economic alienations, there’s not a lot of ethical reflection happening as some of these people are writing their blog comments. It’s probably something we could all use with a little more of.