The problem with behavioral law and economics (and its behavioral economics cousin) is not that it has nothing interesting to say, but rather that the interesting things it has to say do not mean what its proponents think they mean.  It is one thing to claim that people are less rational than we thought.  It even one thing to claim that people are systematically less rational than we thought, in predictable and important ways.  But it is entirely another to presume that the implication of this is a larger scope for government regulation to protect the market and market actors from the depredations of this irrationality.

Why?  Well, the market, of course.  Just because individuals may be less-rational than we thought does not mean that the complex and nuanced activities of markets can’t account for these deviations (particularly if they are predictable).  Add to this well-canvassed problems like government actors subject to the same biases, the problem of competing and conflicting biases, and the problem of unacknowledged, contrary implications, and the case for doing anything about behavioral quirks is extremely weak.

Thus, for example, let’s grant that, as many behavioralists aver, hyperbolic discounting exists.  Um, so, if that’s right, what should we do about it?  Force everyone to save more of their paychecks for retirement?  Insist on opt-out rather than opt-in retirement investing?  Ban cigarettes? Raise tax rates? (I don’t know if anyone has argued this one yet, but it seems like a plausible implication, and it’s only a matter of time)

Here’s the problem, as I see it:  Let’s say the behavioralists are right that, in the abstract, people save less money for future consumption than they would like.  Richard Thaler’s solution to this problem is the “Save More Tomorrow plan (pdf),” which takes advantage of people’s alleged current hyperbolic discounting to commit them to future savings that they actually want but can’t otherwise adhere to when the future actually arrives.  This is a “libertarian paternalist” (pdf) solution to the problem.

But there is a problem, even with a libertarian brand of paternalism here. Suppose I am a hyperbolic discounter.  I might very well plan on early retirement (discounting heavily any money I might otherwise be able to earn when I am old(er)) and plan on working very hard now, earning considerably in order to fund my early retirement (perhaps not enough, but even a hyperbolic discounter is not an infinite discounter and, remember, I plan to curtail a large chunk of my future earning—surely I will compensate).  As a hyperbolic discounter I spend far too much of my extravagant earnings, of course (but, again, not all of it because I do understand that I will need to live on something when I retire), but I certainly earn more than I would if I expected to work well into my 80s instead of retiring at 40.  So what happens when I reach retirement age?  Do I have less in savings than I might like or, because I earned so much more than some imaginary baseline, do I have more?  If I have less, I am also am earning more than I would otherwise, and have better future prospects than I would otherwise.  And when the future becomes the present at the time of retirement I will be readily able to “make up” for the lost savings because of my superior earning position.  Which effect predominates?  Who knows?—but certainly not proponents of government actions that would require us to act as though the cost of saving too little outweighs the benefit of being able to earn more.

But wait, you might say—your premise is faulty.  A true hyperbolic discounter would not plan on early retirement and earn more now.  Present leisure time is too valuable and he would discount the benefits of future leisure time too much to plan on early retirement.  But this is exactly my point.  The behavioralists impose imaginary baselines and then explore the implications of a deviation from that baseline in isolation.  If I hyperbolically discount future savings, I probably also hyperbolically discount future leisure, as well as future earnings and, well, everything else in the future.  That may cause me to actually put myself in a better position than I would have been (as in my example), or it might put me in a worse position, depending on a host of factors particular to me and not generalizable in any substantial way across a large population subject to undifferentiated government dictates.

It is interesting that the government action (and, for that matter, the “nudge”) prong of the behavioralist enterprise implicitly assumes that rationality exists on some sort of normative plain, inexorable and ideal—and off of which markets and market actors cease to function in ways that yield positive results.  It is a curious assumption for an inherently subjectivist enterprise, and it gets them into a lot of trouble where, as above, it is taken as given that an identified quirk causes a net deviation from perfectly rational outcomes, without also questioning whether the presumed rational outcome is itself affected by actor’s (or the market’s) compensating.  In other words, given a set level of earning, yes, people may save “too little.”  But if the same psychic effect that causes them to save too little also causes them to earn more in the first place, the net deviation from optimal may be zero, and the effect on savings may be irrelevant–and this effect may be transparent (which helps the behavioralists make their rhetorical case, but doesn’t help them be right).

But assume they do, and in so assuming behavioralists reveal a remarkable pessimism about markets that is seemingly unwarranted by the thousands of years of human history and progress that seems to have taken place before the creation of the Cornell coffee mug (pdf).

What is so hard to understand is why—other than self aggrandizement or political agendas—the behavioralists think their results are so important.  As I said—interesting, most definitely; but with Earth-shattering ramifications? Hardly.  To take one delicious example, it is claimed by no less authority than Richard Thaler, that investors are systematically biased in their investments and thus that stock prices are systematically incorrect.  Or as his asset management company website puts it,

Investors make mental mistakes that can cause stocks to be mispriced. Fuller & Thaler’s objective is to use our understanding of human decision making to find these mispriced stocks and earn superior returns.

This sort of claim has been used to dismiss the Efficient Capital Market Hypothesis and justify a host of regulatory interventions into markets to insure against bubbles, protect investors, make markets more “fair,” etc.  But did you notice the delicious part?  Thaler—himself an advocate of, among other things, the CFPB—is running an asset management company to take advantage of these defects in reasoning!  And with what potential effect (if he is right, that is)?  More accurate capital markets as his investment decisions yield enormous returns (and an ever-increasing amount of money with which to influence markets, of course), affect stock prices, and generate a host of copy-cats eager to take advantage of his brilliant insights, as well.  Who needs government?

As far as I know (see for yourself; see also this (gated)), Thaler has not made scads of money and has not demonstrated that his investment theories are any better than average—suggesting that perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to enshrine them in perpetual federal bureaucracies managed by know-nothing true believers like Elizabeth Warren.

So perhaps the upshot of all of this behavioral stuff is that, if it’s right, it doesn’t matter because individuals and markets will act accordingly—even behavioralists themselves act as if this is true (all the while denying it in their advocacy and scholarship).  Of course, it is where the claims are incorrect that the real danger lies—both because the claims may nevertheless be believed and because proponents nevertheless want to insist on governments mandating all kinds of regulatory responses based on them.  But “interesting” doesn’t mean “policy-relevant.”

Two related items from ICLE:

As regular readers know, interchange fees are a frequent topic of conversation around the blog.  Taking the conversation from the ether to the real world, ICLE has funded a white paper and is putting on a conference next week on the topic.  The conference, in fact, grows out of the successful online symposium we held here at Truth on the Market a few months ago.  An e-book/pdf version of the posts and comments from that sympoisum can be downloaded here, by the way.  A few of the participants from the symposium will be participating in the conference, as well (more below).

The paper, by Todd Zywicki (ICLE Senior Fellow and Foundation Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law), is entitled, “The Economics of Payment Card Interchange Fees and the Limits of Regulation.”

The timing of the paper’s release couldn’t be more fortuitous, as Congress reconvenes next week and begins to confer over the language of the Durbin Amendment to the “Restoring American Financial Stability Act of 2010.”  The Durbin Amendment would impose price controls on debit card interchange fees and would restrict the use by credit and debit card networks of certain network rules.  As Todd described it recently in a Washington Times op-ed:

Late in the Senate’s proceedings on the financial regulatory reform bill, the Senate adopted – with no hearings and minimal debate – a controversial provision proposed by Sen. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrat, that imposes price controls on interchange fees for debit and prepaid cards. The amendment also allows merchants to override several rules of payment card networks that currently protect consumers from abusive practicesby merchants. While big-box merchants and convenience stores are declaring this a victory against the financial services industry, if the amendment survives in conference committee, consumers and small banks will be the real losers.

The paper, although focused most heavily on credit card interchange fees (and the attendant complexity of credit card markets more generally) has important implications for the debate over the Durbin Amendment.  As the paper’s abstract explains:

Fresh off of the most substantial national liquidity crisis of the last generation and the enactment of sweeping credit card regulation in the form of the Credit CARD Act, Congress continues to deliberate, with a continuing drumbeat of support from lobbyists, a set of new regulations for credit card companies. These proposals, offered in the name of consumer protection, seek to constrain the setting of “interchange fees”—transaction charges integral to payment card systems—through a range of proposed political interventions. This article identifies both the theoretical and actual failings of such regulation. Payment cards are a secure, inexpensive, welfare-increasing payment mechanism largely unlike any other in history. Rather than increasing consumer welfare in any meaningful sense, interchange fee legislation represents an attempt by some merchants to shift costs away from their businesses and onto card issuing banks and cardholders. In particular, bank-issued credit cards offer a dramatic improvement in the efficiency and availability of consumer credit by shifting credit risk from merchants onto banks in exchange for the cost of the interchange fee—currently averaging less than 2% of purchase value. Merchants’ efforts to cabin these fees would harm not only consumers but also the merchants themselves as commerce would depend more heavily on less-efficient paper-based payment systems. The consequence of interchange fee legislation, as Australia’s experiment with such regulation demonstrates, would be reduced access to credit, higher interest rates for consumers, and the return of the much-loathed annual fee for credit cards. Interchange fee regulation threatens to constrain credit for consumers and small businesses as the American economy begins to convalesce from a serious “credit crunch,” and should be accordingly rejected.

The paper presents a detailed analysis of the economics of payment card networks and the implications for the various participants in those networks–from consumers to banks to merchants, among others–of political intervention into the setting of the interchange fee.

Please click on the link to download the paper:

Todd J. Zywicki, “The Economics of Payment Card Interchange Fees and the Limits of Regulation.”

Coinciding with the release of the paper, ICLE, in conjunction with George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, will be hosting a conference in Washington, DC, next week on the interchange fee debate.  For more information on the conference and to register, please click here.  The conference, to be held on June 9th from 8:30 am to 1:00 pm at the Willard InterContinental Hotel, will cover both the politics and regulation of interchange fees, as well as the underlying economics of card networks and the place of the interchange fee in those networks.

Conference Speakers include:

Thomas Brown, O’Melveny & Myers LLP

Sujit Chakravorti, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago

Thomas Durkin, Former Senior Economist, Federal Reserve Board

Mike Konczal, Roosevelt Institute

Geoffrey Manne, International Center for Law and Economics

Megan McArdle, Atlantic Monthly

Tim Muris, former Chairman, Federal Trade Commission

Felix Salmon, Reuters

Steven Semeraro, Thomas Jefferson University

Fred Smith, Competitive Enterprise Institute

Joshua Wright, George Mason University Law School and ICLE

Todd Zywicki, George Mason University Law School, Mercatus and ICLE

We hope to see you there

Cross-posted at Business in the Beltway (at Forbes.com) and The Volokh Conspiracy.

In a recent commentary at Forbes.com, former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro argues that some 250,000 jobs would be created, and consumers would save $27 billion annually, by reducing the interchange fee charged to merchants for transactions made by consumers using credit and debit cards.  If true, these are some incredible numbers.

But incredible is indeed the correct characterization for his calculations.  Shapiro’s claims, based on a recent study he co-authored, rest on tendentious accounting, questionable assumptions, and—most crucially—a misunderstanding of the economics of interchange fees.  Political price caps on interchange fees won’t help the economy or create jobs—but they will make consumers poorer.

First, Shapiro estimates the employment impact of a redistribution of fees using the same stimulus multiplier that the Obama administration uses to tout the effect of its stimulus package.  But it is completely inappropriate to simply “plug in” the multiplier for government stimulus to calculate the effect of a reduction of interchange fees —unless the interchange fees currently paid to banks somehow simply disappear from the economy, contributing nothing to job creation, lowering the cost of capital, or increasing access to credit.  Even assuming that some portion of the fees are pure profit for card issuers, those profits must be paid out to shareholders or employees, invested, or used to bolster bank balance sheets (which provides capital for lending).  So, unlike the stimulus, this is at best merely a politically-mandated wealth (and employment) redistribution from card issuers to merchants, and any calculation of apparent economic gain must be offset by a similar calculation of loss on the other side.  Having ignored this offset, Shapiro’s conclusions are completely untenable.

But Shapiro also misunderstands the economics of payment card networks and the role of the interchange fee within them.  For example, Shapiro estimates that 70% of merchant savings from reduced interchange fees would be passed on to consumers in the form of lower retail prices.  But that is pure speculation.  In Australia, where regulators imposed price controls on interchange in 2003, fees paid by merchants have fallen but consumers have seen no reduction in the prices that they pay.  And where merchants have been permitted to impose surcharges on credit users, the surcharge can, and often does, substantially exceed the interchange fee cost.  It is not for nothing that merchants have spent millions trying to push interchange fee regulation through Congress.

In addition, Shapiro suggests that interchange fees are excessive in light of the “transaction and processing costs of using credit and debit cards.”  But his estimation of these costs is dramatically off-base.  Not only does he appear to exclude the cost of the delay between the time merchants receive payment (almost immediately) and when consumers pay their bills (at the end of a billing cycle), he ignores what may be the most significant single cost of consumer credit operations (and corresponding benefit to merchants): the cost of credit loss.

According to the industry standard Nilson Report, in 2009 issuers of Visa and MasterCard credit cards simply wrote off—never received payment for—about 5% of the total value of credit card purchases, a cost of about $65 billion.  Why a cost?  Because although cardholders failed to make good on $65 billion in commitments to pay for charges they incurred, issuing banks nevertheless transferred these funds to merchants as if they were paid.  In exchange for no more than $26 billion in interchange fees for these credit cards in 2009, therefore, merchants received a benefit—revenue they would otherwise simply not have received—worth $65 billion.  But this never shows up in Shapiro’s analysis—nor does it ever seem to factor into merchant claims that interchange fees are “too high.”

Interchange fees are the primary mechanism credit card issuers use to generate revenues from transactional users who don’t revolve balances.  If interchange fee revenue is arbitrarily reduced, issuers will be forced to increase prices on cardholders through annual fees, interest rates or other fees.  At the same time, issuers will need to reduce their risk of credit loss through shorter grace periods, lower credit limits, or tougher credit standards.  A reduction in interchange fee revenue would fall especially hard on community banks and credit unions that rely heavily on interchange fees because their customer base tends to revolve less and pay less in penalty fees than the big issuers.  Artificially reducing interchange fees would likely drive many of these issuers out of the market, reducing competition and consumer choice.

While the assertion of “pass-through” savings to consumers by merchants is speculative, what is not speculative is that card-using consumers will pay more and get less access to credit if interchange fees are set by politics rather than markets.  Again, the outcome of the Australian experiment with interchange price controls demonstrates this trade-off .  There, following the price controls, annual fees increased by 22% on standard cards and by as much as 77% on rewards cards.  The overall effect is to make it more expensive for consumers to even hold, let alone use, cards, stifling competition and innovation in the credit card industry.  And higher annual fees mean less money to spend at the local hardware store, a tradeoff that Shapiro nowhere acknowledges.  Moreover, because the fees don’t vary based on charge volume (which tends to vary with income), they are somewhat regressive in their impact.  Finally, it is worth noting that while merchants share the burden of interchange fees, they do not directly bear any of the cost of interest payments or annual fees, leaving consumers to bear the brunt of the “benefit” from capping interchange fees.

A reliable cost-benefit analysis of interchange regulation must consider all of these tradeoffs, along with many others; Shapiro’s analysis considers none of them.

Following Shapiro’s lead would invariably lead to higher prices for consumers and less innovation and competition in the credit network.  If successful, his efforts would dampen the move to a cashless society, and would politicize the business relationships between merchants, consumers and credit cards issuers.  None of this will create jobs or help consumers in the long run—although it might help merchants in the short run.  Congress should ignore fuzzy, “costless” accounting that perversely cloaks a redistribution of consumer wealth to retailers as a consumer protection initiative.

This post was co-authored with Todd Zywicki (former Director, Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission; Foundation Professor at George Mason University School of Law; and Senior Scholar at the International Center for Law & Economics).

A recent opinion from Judge Posner cites our very own Josh Wright (Joshua D. Wright & Todd J. Zywicki, “Three Problematic Truths About the Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009,” Lombard Street, Sept. 14, 2009, available here) (by the way, the essay has drawn a few comments, my favorite of which is definitely the one titled, “are you stupid or scumbags[?]“).

The opinion is vaguely interesting touching as it does on the propriety of short-term, high-interest loans, but the holding rests on an analysis of the commerce clause so is pretty well beyond my ken.

At issue is an Indiana statute that purports to apply Indiana’s restrictive usury laws to consumer contracts executed outside the state, but with creditors that have advertised or solicited sales within Indiana.  The Indiana usury statute at issue constrains consumer loan interest to terms under which “the ceiling is the lower of 21 percent of the entire unpaid balance, or 36 percent on the first $300 of unpaid principal, 21 percent on the next $700, and 15 percent on the remainder,” with an exception for payday loans.  Such terms would preclude payday loans if they weren’t excepted under the statute and does preclude car title loans of the sort at issue in the case.  The court rules that the restriction on out-of-state transactions is impermissible under the constitution and strikes down the Indiana law.

The interesting part (to me) of the case, and the part where Josh (and Todd) are cited, is where Posner discusses the law and economics and related scholarship of car title and payday loans.  He doesn’t really come down on one side or another in this debate except to aver that Indiana has a colorable interest in protecting its citizens from “predatory lending,” if it so chooses.  It seems to me that he gives too much credit to the behavioral-economics-based arguments on the “predatory lending is, well, predatory” side of the debate, but he really doesn’t wade into the debate.  Nevertheless, Josh and Todd get their mention (Todd actually gets a couple of mentions) in this section, and kudos to them (and to FinReg21, where their essay appears) for drawing Posner’s attention.

What would a day without payment cards be like? I had a glimpse into that just this morning, when my usual Bay Area morning routine of using my prepaid card to get a cup of Peet’s coffee and then check email and news was changed up by the coffee shop’s downed Internet connection. I was the store’s first customer for their 5:30 am opening, and the two young clerks were visibly nervous because they couldn’t take my merchant’s prepaid card and credit cards had to be processed with an old-school “knuckle-buster” device. From my usual seat in the corner I watched as the barista duo struggled to keep up with even the slightest trickle of customers, and the line of customers quickly backed up until the work crew doubled to four as sleepy-eyed and bed-headed backup workers arrived on the scene following emergency calls for their help. If we eliminated prepaid and credit cards, everything would change for merchants and retail customers. I’ve all but eliminated checks from my daily existence, but until I heard the now-unfamiliar sound of change jingling in my pocket I hadn’t realized how infrequently I use cash.

Now, there may be valid, empirical arguments that for some transactions cash is more efficient (see this post and comments for a brief discussion and for the key academic references).  And, of course, in the situation Jim describes, with time and regularity the burden of cash transactions would surely be reduced (the Second Law of Demand).  But the merchant-driven campaign against payment cards, in full recognition of the reality that making payment cards more expensive for consumers will lead to an increase in the use of cash and checks, is problematic.  For many, in fact, the move to cash is a feature, not a bug.  Suze Orman is (indignantly) leading a “Back to Cash Movement.”  Merchant advocacy groups tout cash and checks as a cheaper choice–for consumers–than credit cards.

But costs like the ones described by Jim in his post are not well-accounted for, as Todd Zywicki discussed in detail in his second interchange symposium post here.  Presumably the merchants who are advocating for greater use of cash in an effort to avoid interchange fees believe that the costs of cash born by merchants are less than interchange fees.  I’m not sure they are right given the costs to retailers of dealing with cash (from theft to accounting to transportation to security to employee time, etc., etc.), but let’s grant that revealed preference carries the debate (assuming the “back to cash” advocates really speak for all retailers . . . which is doubtful).  But what about the costs to consumers and taxpayers?  What about the costs of going to the ATM, maintaining precautionary checking account balances, budgeting without monthly statements, not having a float or access to consumer credit?  What about the huge and growing cost of not being able to engage in online commerce?  And what about the costs of increased tax evasion and enforcement, printing cash, protecting it, and transporting it?  Merchants are extremely critical of the cross-subsidy from cash customers to credit card customers they purport to see in the imposition of credit card interchange fees that raise retail prices for all consumers.  But what about the subsidy ofrom people with high time costs to those with low time costs when the costs of processing cash are imposed on all customers who have to wait in longer lines?

These costs may not be dispositive, but merchants and their advocates pretend like they don’t exist, and without knowing anything systematic about the magnitude or incidence of these (and many other) costs blithely advocate yet another round of government micromanagement of important parts of the economy.

Meanwhile, in the UK, banks are actually moving to eradicate paper checks completely:

There are many more efficient ways of making payments than by paper in the 21st century, and the time is ripe for the economy as a whole to reap the benefits of its replacement.

There is no annual fee for shopping at Wal-Mart, but there is an annual fee for shopping at Sam’s Club. Is there a consumer protection problem here?

Some people think that credit card issuers are acting badly by not charging annual fees, thus luring consumers into services that involve back end costs. By this logic, should retail stores like Wal-Mart be condemned for NOT charging annual membership fees, luring customers in, and making profit at check out lines? In fact, some stores probably charge a “negative” fee.  High-end retailers (Whole Foods, Neiman Marcus) provide a pleasant shopping experience and free samples. Low-end retailers distribute discount cards. They all charge these negative “membership fees” because they surely make up for it at the cashier. Should these retail techniques be regulated to protect consumers?

I find it puzzling why some retailers and service providers charge annual membership fees and others don’t. Why, for example, do wholesale clubs like Costco and Sam’s Club charge memberships while retail department stores do not? I am sure there is much to be learned from finding the answer to this puzzle, but I don’t think it has anything to do with consumer protection. Consumers are doing quite well in either format, and if there are problems of deception they are independent of the annual fee dimension.

Todd is right that consumers are happy to see annual fees go away, but the disappearance of annual fees wasn’t a freebie for consumers.  It came about as part of a shift in the credit card business model whereby upfront fees were replaced with backend fees that have lesser salience to consumers when the consumers decide which cards to carry and use.  This was a move that was made to increase revenue for card issuers (or put another way, to siphon off more consumer surplus); it was not a charitable act.  The disappearance of annual fees is an important innovation, but I think it is a stretch to call it a pro-consumer innovation, when it is viewed contextually.

The disappearance of annual fees was a step in the democratization of credit (or put another way, the decline in underwriting standards).  Whether this was a good thing is unclear.  It certainly increased consumer’s borrowing ability and choices, and might have led to a substitution from secured installment credit to unsecured revolving credit.  But greater ability to borrow and more borrowing choices are not necessarily good.  They are only good to the extent that a consumer is capable of repaying the increased credit line and making informed choices among credit options.  Both of those are questionable for many consumers.

Adam’s incessant claims that consumers are idiots, fooled time and again by rapacious capitalists, is tiresome.  The behavioral econ/behavioral law and econ literature just doesn’t support these strong claims.  Yes, there are some interesting theories.  No, there is no empirical proof, and there are plenty of counter-explanations.  There are some experiments that support these claims.  And they have been called in to question (sorry I can’t take the time to link right now, but we’ve discussed the behavioral literature quite a bit on this blog).  Todd’s competition story is the Occam’s Razor argument here and unsupported claims to the contrary should be scoffed at.

The “contextual” reality is that the “backend” fees that have replaced annual fees are born by a small fraction of cardholders and are avoidable, as opposed to unavoidable annual fees born by all cardholders.  These backend fees have likewise been falling in magnitude and incidence over recent years.  And meanwhile, they act to make borrowing more expensive for the helpless people Adam and other self-appointed consumer advocates claim to want to protect from themselves and less expensive for those who don’t “need” Adam’s protection (scare quotes because I’d say no one “needs” Adam’s help).  On Adam’s own terms this should be a feature, not a bug, and it is arguably more efficient, lowering consumer credit costs for everyone.

Adam’s view that these backend fees make credit seem cheap to profligate spenders in a way that annual fees do not is absurd.  Maybe the first time, but I’d have to say that fees imposed directly when repayment is not forthcoming, for example, and showing up on a statement at the very moment they are incurred should have much more “salience” than annual fees imposed once a year with no relationship in time or magnitude to any behavior on the part of consumers.  Meanwhile, there is a whole industry of protectors warning consumers of the dangers of over-extending, and very few daytime talk shows warning of the perils of annual fees.  I’d wager the behavioral fee is much more “salient” than the annual fee.

This is the problem with the behavioral literature on which Adam relies: It is a set of non-rigorous, just-so stories that can be tortured to support any a priori policy view. The bottom line is that credit card markets have seen falling fees, increasing benefits (rental car insurance, airline miles, purchase protection, etc., etc.) and structural changes that respond to consumer preferences.  The just-so story that would turn this into a story of corporations preying on ignorant consumers is insulting and unsupported.

I am bewildered. But, more than that, I am angry. I can’t count how many news accounts I’ve seen about the poor, struggling homeowners who can’t make the monthly mortgage payment, are about to be foreclosed, and risk losing the family home, yard, white picket fence, and piece of the American Dream. But I haven’t heard one word about the poor, struggling renters, the ones who scrimped and saved and put money away each month towards a down payment, who kept the credit cards paid off, stayed out of trouble, and lived modestly, and thought that maybe, just maybe, the fall in housing prices meant that they, finally, could afford a house — maybe one of those foreclosed units down the street. These people are Bastiat’s unseen. For them, Obama’s housing plan is a giant slap in the face. To hell with the prudent. Party on, profligate! Now that’s what I call moral hazard.

Here’s Tyler Cowen (with lots of other links to other economists’ reactions — some much more favorable):

We should not be helping people stay in their homes if their mortgage payments are at 43 percent of their income.  (The bill requires banks, in such cases, to lower interest rates until monthly payments are at 38 percent of income.  The government then steps in to lower payments to 31 percent of income.)  I don’t feel moral outrage (although it is morally outrageous), I just don’t think it is a good use of money.  I also wonder how it works when your income is quite variable year to year.  Are they sure there is no way to game this?  It will in the short run prevent some (enough to matter?) foreclosures.  But it won’t keep up the long-term price of homes or prevent eventual foreclosures when the home has negative equity.  It adjusts interest rates on the payments, not principal on the loans (thank goodness).  Most of all it is a bad precedent which we will live to regret.  It is a significant move away from the idea of commercial decisions based on contract.