May 28, 2015
Last week I noted the gift from the gods that the re-authorization of the Export-Import Bank is coming up at the same time as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The great fun here is that the TPP proponents are running around being sanctimonious supporters of free trade. However the main purpose of the Export-Import Bank is to subsidize U.S. exports (mostly those of large corporations). Subsidizing exports is 180 degrees at odds with free trade, it’s sort of like having sex to promote virginity, but naturally many of our great leaders in Washington support both.
We got another treat this week along the same lines in a Politico piece by Michael Grunwald arguing against breaking up the too big to fail (TBTF) banks. There is much in the piece that is wrong (e.g. he asserts that the biggest banks were not at the center of the financial crisis) but the key section for these purposes is when he tells readers:
“There’s much to dislike about America’s financial sector, but it is America’s financial sector. It’s actually much smaller as a percentage of the economy than its counterparts in Asia and Europe, and it’s much less concentrated at the top . Unilaterally enforcing size limits on domestic banks would put the U.S. at a real competitive disadvantage in financial services.”
Almost all of Grunwald’s argument is completely wrong (breaking up J.P. Morgan doesn’t reduce its components and competitors to “community banks”). But the key point is that this is yet another example of an Obama-type (he collaborated in writing Timothy Geithner’s autobiography) arguing for a government subsidy to help a favored interest group. Allowing the implicit guarantee of TBTF insurance is a massive government subsidy that the I.M.F. recently estimated to have a value of up to $70 billion a year for the United States. So once again we have a free trader arguing for government subsidies when something really important to them is at stake, in this case the survival of the Wall Street banks.
Given all the money and power on the side of the proponents of TPP, they are likely to get their deal through Congress. At least the rest of us can enjoy the spectacle of all these elite types making incredibly silly arguments.
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