In  January  I mentioned the law that pushed US banks into lending to uncreditworthy borrowers.

Since then received wisdom in US liberal circles has held it that free market greed is the culprit for their woes.

So an Op Ed piece in the New York Times on 11 December, by a Manhattan Institute researcher (Howard Husock) is a welcome sign of balance intruding.

"There’s little doubt that the rating agencies helped inflate the housing bubble. But when we round up all the culprits, we shouldn’t ignore the regulators and affordable-housing advocates who pushed lenders to make loans in low-income neighborhoods for reasons other than the only one that makes sense: likely repayment."

The details are compelling:

"…under the past two administrations the Department of Housing and Urban Development pushed the secondary mortgage market to buy loans based on criteria other than the creditworthiness of borrowers. These affordable-housing goals became more demanding over time. By 2005, HUD required that 45 percent of all the loans bought by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac be loans to borrowers with low and moderate incomes. HUD required further that Fannie and Freddie buy 32 percent of the loans in their portfolios from people in central cities and other underserved areas and that 22 percent of the loans they buy be to “very low income families or families living in low-income neighborhoods.”

And the conclusion:

"One cannot say with any certainty whether the more important cause of the current housing crisis was affordable-housing mandates or the actions of investment banks and ratings agencies. There can be no doubt, however, that both contributed"

Yes, it’s the real thing.  The Rugby League World Cup, brought to Wellington last night by the Chairman of the NZRL, Ray Haffenden, for the Wellington Rugby League Prizegiving.  I think everyone at the function had their photo taken with it so Cathy and I weren’t going to miss out.

It was a great evening at the Petone Workingmen’s Club, the first WRL prize-giving for six years.   The coach of the Melbourne Storm, Craig Bellamy, saluted grassroots clubs, their volunteers, coaches, managers and players.  He’s here to run some clinics this weekend, casting his eyes over our players too.

WRL Patron, the Hon. Winnie Laban, was very keen on ceremonies to honour volunteers when she agreed to become our patron.  Last night’s prizegiving celebrated volunteers and winners.  Kiwi Fern, Karen Taingahue, from Wainouiomata is the 2008 WRL Sportperson of the Year.

As WRL Chairman, I’m sorry to be losing our excellent CEO, Mark O’Connor, and his offsider, Marge Hocken, to Swimming New Zealand at the end of the year, but grateful for what they’ve helped to achieve – resurrecting Wellington governance of the sport here. 

Our Parliament’s new committee members could warm up with study of The Economist’s online debate. 

Knowing more may not help to decide whether to have an emissions trading scheme as opposed to a carbon tax, but it might improve our law’s vulnerability to cheating, and to misuse of powers by government for political patronage or even corrupt purposes.

 Another campaign has started to make us all worry about a minority addiction, whether we can do anything about it or not.

The Ministry of Health campaign against problem gambling aims "to strengthen society’s response to gambling, and prevent gambling-related harm. 

Challenging TV ads "will extend the message about how problem gambling affects people, and what can be done about it".

All very worthy I’m sure, but I’m waiting for the Treasury/MED’s challenging ads to combat problem non-gambling.

To retain or regain our place among the world’s winners we’ll need to recapture our forebears’ willingness to take risks, to back ourselves to win more than we lose in business.

My work is among ever-increasing rules and legal penalties for taking risk. I see some of the best brains in the country spending their lives crawling through the past to find people to pillory for failure. In RMA and other work they fight over changes to the status quo, with the "precautionary principle". These brains magnify the costs and possibilities of failure instead of taking part in our civilisation’s glorious tradition of improving on the past and working out how to turn the unexpected to advantage.

Often we work for people who are reneging on their bargains (to get a return for taking risks) looking for the deep pockets still standing who can be forced to compensate those whose risks went wrong.

Let’s see "challenging TV ads" celebrating the lives and exploits of our big commercial gamblers – the ones who took risks and succeeded. 

"You got to know when to hold em, know when to fold em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when youre sittin at the table.
Therell be time enough for countin when the dealins done."

Mai Chen’s  Business Herald profile pieces (here and here) must be the highwater mark for enviable business exposure, but where they got the picture of me appearing to do the envying I do not know. 

Spectacular work Mai.

Last week I proposed a firm programme for cleaning useless cronies out of public office.

The writer of Friday’s Herald editorial is concerned about cronyism, but got so far down the wrong end of the stick that the Herald lost sight of who could be holding the other end.

The editorial alleged:

"The [Coalition] agreements contain provisions that confirm the "scratch my back" spirit remains alive and well in politics.

Probably the most blatant example is the presence of an Act representative on the Cabinet committee on honours and appointments. Previously, Act has been quick to criticise any hint of honours being awarded for deeds that had more to do with contribution to a political party than services to the community.

 Dead wrong, I suspect.

The provision may reflect an ambition to put Sir Roger Douglas back where he can perform the same service he and Richard Prebble performed 20 years ago.

Their SOE appointments drew astonishment. They looked solely for merit. Many apointees were known to have little sympathy for them or for Labour. That Labour government established a pattern that served well for a decade, giving SOE’s boards that transformed many state-owned businesses so effectively New Zealanders rapidly forgot what dogs they’d been.

A Financial Times columnist points out that Obama’s Transition Economic Advisory Board is mostly lawyers.. Willem Buiters fires a familiar broadside at lawyers 

"… in the US, the legal profession … has become a veritable succubus preying on the body politic and on the economic resource base of the country – the ultimate rent-seeking, wealth destroying profession. According to Legal Reform Now! there are 1,143,358 lawyers in the US, one for every 200 adults. The main problem is not that there are over a million socially unproductive lawyers in the US. The problem is that these lawyers are an essential component of a dysfunctional legal framework that has created the most litigious society in the world. The damage this dysfunctional legal framework causes must be measured not primarily by the direct cost of litigation, astounding though it is, but through the actions not undertaken and the creative and productive deeds not done because of fear of litigation."

That last sentence is the key. I see it in people I work with, in my children, in timid public officials, in service providers every day. They become uncertain, anxious about doing things out of the ordinary, taking any kind of risk that is not in familiar channels. Getting drunk is a familiar risk. Building your own building, learning to drive a bulldozer by doing, is not.

A young guy I know has become an expert truck driver without ever getting a licence, because the normal process now involves formal training and courses and tests that would cost around $3000.

Buiters goes on:

"Except for a depressingly small minority among them, lawyers know nothing. They are incapable of logic. They don’t know the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions or between type I and type II errors. Indeed, any concept of probability is alien to them. They don’t understand the concepts of opportunity cost and trade off. They cannot distinguish between normative and positive statements. They are so focused on winning an argument through technicalities, that they no longer would recognise the truth if it bit them in the butt. If you are very lucky, a lawyer will give you nothing but the truth. You will never get the truth, let alone the whole truth. Things have degenerated to the point that lawyers and the legal profession not only routinely undermine justice, but even the law.

Some exaggeration but depressingly defensible. The lawyer establishment has such a hold now that it is not feasible to challenge a lawyer consensus with simple common sense. You’ll need your own lawyer.

The Spectator summarizes a debate on that proposition. It sounds challenging.

Last evening members of VUW’s champion DebSoc entertained Cathy and me among former Weir House residents attending Weir’s 75th anniversary reunion . The moot was something like "I gained my real education at Weir House".

The debate was not intended to be challenging (and succeeded) but parts of it were very funny.

Myriad references to drunkenness were less entertaining than the two serious debates the Society offered during the election campaign, when the student debaters generally outshone the candidates (me included).

The Spectator has a good line from newspaper executive Jeremy O’Grady

"…a man taking a woman out to dinner is paying to facilitate her desire for him. When he hires a prostitute he’s paying for the absence of her desire for him. "  

and characteristic lines from Germaine Greer:

"There are worse things to sell, she said, than your body. ‘Your child, your kidney, your soul.’ In comparison with ‘the whole panoply of exploitation that is the consumer society, prostitution is honest and innocent’"

The feature that most interested me was the audience adjudication.

"Votes

Before the debate
For 134
Against 341
Don’t Know 221

After the debate
For 203
Against 449
Don’t Know 45"

I"d like to see more debates that change opinions. US presidential TV debates do not insult intelligence but our leaders’ TV debates are shame-inducing.

The National Business Review seemed to get bored with its Crony Watch last year, just as Labour’s crony programme went into overdrive. Unsuitable people were appointed to countless bodies across the country. Murray McCully kept an eye on it, but his back newsletters seem not to be searchable.

The new government should reinstate and reinforce a convention that appointments are patently on merit. Connections will always be material, because attested knowledge reassures appointors. They know that all appointments are a gamble on the unknown, and previous experience reduces the gamble. But crony appointments should meet a higher standard of objective suitability than others, just to underscore the basic principle of merit selection through out New Zealand life.

"Who you know – not what you know" is corrosive of our egalitarianism, and is a soft form of corruption.

The new government could start with SOEs. A substantial spill now, with a commitment not to stack boards in 2011, would signal that the recent abuse will not be worthwhile for a future regime.

It may also be a quick start on upgrading our woeful productivity performance. Boards matter. A friend on an SOE board, sick of having to carry the passengers with which his board is now lumbered, has urged me to push some recommendations:

a) A letter to all SOE directors suggesting they offer their resignations, because unqualified or overtly political appointments will be asked to go. A director whose resignation is accepted would get 1 months severance fees for each year of his or her term to go.

b) If the shareholding Ministers have to remove them with shareholders resolutions they’ll get no severance compensation, plus more public attention.

So the US rescue fund will now buy equity in the shaky banks instead of their toxic mortgages.

Gordon Brown’s UK bank rescue package also gives the taxpayer substantial equity upside for the risk taken on by the taxpayer. Some banks are saying "no thanks – we’ll look after ourselves if those are the terms".

I suspect that most of our banks would find the means to say the same. We should know which of ours could not.

We New Zealand taxpayers should be told in simple terms why we are giving to our banks’ creditors the liquidity (and credit?) assurance that  shareholders’ funds are supposed to provide, but not taking the upside from our rescue. 

The shareholders of other companies in strife hand over their ownership to the people who are filling owners’ shoes when they can’t survive without help. 

It is not enough to say we are not adopting the US and UK approach  because we fear banks will tighten a credit squeeze if they are not helped.

If the government is propping up the banks it can surely influence matters like that, or funnel liquidity through the banks that do not squeeze customers. They might include the two strongest Aussie banks, and locally funded TSB, SBS and Kiwibank.