Financial crisis and the real economy

Corporate DealMaker, March 19, 2008:
At times of financial turmoil there's something reassuring about the term "the real economy." It would be even more reassuring if it didn't usually denote a realm threatened by forces emanating from a scary parallel universe. But when the headlines describe large, familiar financial institutions gravely damaged by securities so complex that nobody can put a price on them, it's nice to recall that there's a world out there where people are still making tractors. Let's just hope it can be kept safe from the reckless and greedy denizens of Wall Street.Lots of us think this way. Isn't the ongoing surge in commodity prices partly a revolt against weird abstractions? Forget those freaky collateralized loan obligations and, while you're at it, the U.S. dollar they rode in on. Give us some gold and oil and steel and coffee. In fact, I would be betting really big on commodities right now, except for one thing. I'm actually a little worried that commodities are forming a bubble of their own. You see, the wizards down the hall from the ones who designed those CLOs have continued to improve on the futures and options originally created so producers and users of commodities could manage price volatility. Now exchange-traded notes and other nifty new instruments may be facilitating investment flows way out of proportion to the actual demand for commodities. Well. As the great soul singer Tyrone Davis said of a situation like the one poor Mrs. Spitzer recently faced, there it is. The tensions in the often stormy, centuries-old marriage between finance and industry, between Wall Street and Main Street, have flared up once again, and there seems little doubt about who deserves the blame. Until we start the couples therapy.That's when things get messy. The conversation can't ignore people who are needlessly losing their homes and good businesses that can't get capital. Our patchwork system of regulating financial institutions obviously needs updating, and it's not just securities but also reputations that are being marked to market. It's already happening to former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, and also to Robert Rubin. The former Clinton treasury secretary received more than $100 million as chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup over the last eight years, even as the nation's biggest financial institution helped to dig the hole we're now in. But we will do well to remember there's a relationship worth salvaging here. On one hand, Rubin arrived at Citigroup after he and Greenspan helped to remove the regulatory barriers to the merger that created it. Now it's falling to their successors to improvise some new guardrails. Another hallmark of the Greenspan-Rubin 1990s, though, was the financial diplomacy that helped turn developing economies into emerging markets for tractor-makers and then, when that project devolved into another great financial crisis, got it back on track. If either of these men wish, like Tyrone Davis, that they could turn back the hands of time on a few decisions, they haven't said so. Certainly other people in the financial world would like to. But they can't, and neither can those of us who identify more closely with the so-called real economy. We'll just have to try and make sure we get more of what we need out of the relationship in the future.--Kenneth Klee

Link to Professor's Klee's Biography: http://www.law.ucla.edu/home/index.asp?page=564