 I'm Reed Kramer. I direct the asset building program here at the New America Foundation. And in our work, we recognize the importance of families having to manage their finances effectively and access a range of financial products, including savings products and credit products. And we're concerned at times when these products are debilitating. They don't always help. Sometimes they hinder. Many times they help. But we got to figure out the difference. And in that respect, we're very pleased to have you here today for this event with Lewis Hyman and his new book, Borrow, The American Way of Debt. Lewis is kind of a local boy. He was raised right down the road in Baltimore, Maryland. And he went on to become a historian looking at the history of consumer finance in America. With his Harvard PhD, he's gone off to Cornell University, where he is an assistant professor in the labor relations law and history department in the ILR school at Cornell. I used to be a very common term, right, industrial and labor relations. It's a little anachronistic now. But I think when I went on the website, it was rebranded as Workplace Studies. So maybe that's the modern updating. Anyway, his first book was called Dead or Nation, The History of America in Red Ink. And it looked at the political economy of debt. And Borrow is really a companion book, as I read it, looking a little bit more at the evolution of culture and how that has evolved when looking at how people are accessing credit and capital and then what they do with it. And so he really takes us on a tour of the last hundred years and finds that in many respects what's passed is prologue, which is a pretty good finding for a historian who wants to still participate in contemporary debates because these are really relevant issues for us today. He shows how some of the products that emerged and brought on the Great Depression disappeared but reemerged and played a role in the Great Recession. And what I like about the book is it's very relevant for a lot of our contemporary policy discussions. And so I think policymakers should read it. Perhaps we shouldn't call it history, though, because I don't think they like history. They don't, in D.C., anything that's just a couple weeks old is history and don't pay any attention to what brought on the Great Recession or even events of the recent past. And it's really a survey of the financial services marketplace and how it's evolved over time. And with it we learn the story of a bunch of entrepreneurs and firms that have really shaped American culture. Ford, GM, Macy's, Bloomingdale's, Fannie Mae, Kmart, Walmart, all of these different firms that are quite well-known. He takes us back to their origin and shows how they've evolved. So he's going to come up here and share the highlights of the book for about 20 minutes or so. And maybe he'll help us understand the age-old question of the distinction between good debt and bad debt and also what maybe government should be doing when it oversees this marketplace. Then afterwards, we're very fortunate that Janice Bowler is here to join us and comment on Lewis's remarks and book. She is the director of the Wealth Building Project at the National Council of La Raza. And she's been intimately involved in a lot of the policy responses to the recession, particularly about how people need to respond to the housing finance system and people trapped in foreclosure and debt. So she's going to offer her insights with the perspective of that work on Lewis's book. So she'll speak for about 5 to 10 minutes and then we'll open it up with a conversation here. So that's the game plan. And Lewis, why don't you come up to the podium and we'll bring down the screen magically for his PowerPoint. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for coming here today. I can't imagine coming here to talk on borrowing and debt during your lunch break, but I appreciate that you did come and it's great that the New America Foundation is here asking these kinds of questions, these kinds of questions that get us past the political divide that is so intense in this country, though I guess in D.C., you'd really like it. It's your business. But I'm a historian. I'm not a policymaker. So historians like to tell stories, right? And I want to start my talk today with a story because I think it's a story of the recent past, a story of financial crisis. It should be all too familiar to us now. And I, of course, change the names to Dick and Jane because nobody wants to be held accountable. So there's a lot of stories you can tell about financial crisis, about deception, about fraud. But I like stories that are about love and hope, right? That's what real good stories are all about. And that's what this story is about. It's about Dick and Jane. Dick and Jane meeting shortly after they moved to the big city. There were sparks. They declared their love for one another, rings, and then vows. And so it's a wonderful story that begins in the way that you hope all stories will end. But it didn't end there because, of course, Dick didn't have a college degree, but he did manage to find work in a hot new tech industry that was sweeping the country, these high tech products that everybody wanted. And that company's initial public offering a few years earlier had been one of the most successful in American history. And Dick and Jane were caught up in this new, glamorous world of technology with the newspapers called the New Era. Now, they had a lot of love, but they didn't have much cash. And so what do they want to do? They want to be part of this. So they go to their local bank and they see if they can get a mortgage for one of those nice new houses. And the mortgage officer says, well, you know, you could get a better house if you didn't worry so much about amortizing it, paying back that principle as well as the interest every month. Just go for it. The house will go up in value. You have nothing to worry about. Just go for those interest only payments that all the smart people are using these days. They were called balloon mortgages, he told them. It would allow you to buy the home of your dreams immediately, and sleep soundly with the knowledge that there's nowhere for house prices to go but up. And when the time for those bigger payments would come a few years down the road when you had to refinance, wouldn't be a problem. He would be there to help you refinance. And so Dick and Jane were reassured. After all, he was an expert. And so they moved into their new house. Dick went to work. Jane filled that house with brand new modern furniture on the installment plan. She bought sofas. But of course, Dick bought a new Chevy. Now his father had only ever paid cash for cars, but he got alone for it. And with all this credit, they got the house of their dreams. They got the car. They got the sofa. Everything was coming together. Everything was working out. And if their dreams could come true in 1928, well 1929 was going to be even better. Now the parallels between Dick's manufacturing job at General Motors in Flint, Michigan in 1928. And today's workers is all too clear. But the larger structural similarities between the economy of the late 1920s and that of the past decade, I think are truly terrifying. With credit, the Smiths and millions of other Americans of the 1920s borrowed their way into the American dream. And in both eras, a consumer credit boom made possible. The invention of new weight made possible by the invention of new ways to repackage and resell individuals' debts in the financial markets made possible all of this borrowing. And in both eras, the world made possible by credit came crashing down in a financial cataclysm. And so that's the end of love and hope for today's talk. I'd like to go through and show you some of these images. I mean, this is, for me, what struck me about the 1920s was how similar, and this is now relatively familiar data, how similar inequality looked in the 1920s, how it went up to that peak of 1924, a peak of 24% of the share of income in 1928, and then it peaked again in 2007. I mean, this is prima facie evidence that there is perhaps some connection between inequality and borrowing. But how did it work on the ground? How did it work on the ground? It's all well and good to talk about numbers. I like numbers as much as the next guy, but I think there are other things we need to think about besides numbers. We need to think about practices. We need to think about institutions. We need to understand what actually was happening to make that 24 relevant to the life of Dick and Jane. And part of it is this culture. This is an advertisement from the 1920s, an advertisement for some of those new technological goods. In this case, a vacuum cleaner. We don't think of vacuum cleaners as particularly exciting ways to think about borrowing. But in the 1920s, they were. They were part of a broad class of new goods, new technological goods that required electricity. And electricity was the foundation of this new economy. Now it's hard, I at least find it's hard to convince people when I'm at barbecues that people borrowed in the past. You go and you talk to people and they say, well, I understand people today are totally degenerates. I mean, I know that's true. I see in the 60s, but my parents, they never barred for anything. And no matter what I say, talked to I'm red in the face. I could cite data. I could cite advertisements. The balance is equally easy to meet. They'll never believe you. But luckily, I'm in a room of people with open minds. And they understand that this actually was the foundation of the 1920s economy. But it wasn't just about the goods themselves. It was about the ways in which they were sold. And this is surprising, I think, to many of us that many of the financial practices that we take as recent actually had a longer history in the 1920s. Now, of course, I'm an academic historian. And the first time I heard of balloon mortgages was not in the pages of the New York Times, but from the dusty archives as I read about them in the 1920s. And when I found out that they were coming back again, I was shocked because the balloon mortgage made possible so many of the excesses in borrowing in the 1920s that banker that mortgage banker for Dick and Jane was comfortable lending so much money to a auto worker at GM, because he knew that he didn't have to risk the bank's own capital to make that loan because of things like this. This is seeming like a laser. Yes, a laser, the mortgage bond, the forerunner of today's mortgage backed security. This is one from Kentucky. So this isn't so it's not as if this is just happening in centers of financial excitement like New York City. This is a mortgage bond that allowed you to lend money for mortgage to a prospective home buyer, and then sell that sell a bond to finance it to an investor. And these were commonplace in the 1920s. There were also forms of finance like this, the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, GMAC, as we call it today, now the mortgage arm of our fabled auto company. But these kinds of products were all being sold in the same way that they are today. And the consequences were very similar to what they are today. This is an image from roughly 1930 talking about but it could be from a newspaper today talking about look, money, money, money. Bring your big sacks, get some money from this guy, the mortgage racketeer, because all this money from investors flowing through these mortgage bonds made its way to making these people's dreams come true, at least for a little while, and also to making this guy with his nice top hat, be able to fill his top hat with gold. Why should we care about history? Why should we care about it? Because it came back. It came back in a big way. That inequality of the 1920s came back with a vengeance. Now this is a graph of GDP and median male wages. So you can see this red is median male wages from the late from the early 1950s, the post war, when all those dirty hippies were growing up into the late 1960s. You can see that that's adjusted for inflation. You can see the rise in wages on this graph here. And then the stagnation or even the fall 4% by 2010. Meanwhile, that GDP just kept going up and up and up and up. Where did all that money go? If all that stayed the same, where did all that money go? And that is the source of all that inequality. It's shocking how different our economy has been for the last 40 years. We imagined that there would be that kind of growth into the future. And in this kind of economy, all that borrowing for houses, and for big fin cars to go to the mall to go shopping, maybe it's not so bad, because you're borrowing from future income. But in an economy like this, an economy of stagnation, you're just paying a fee for your own money from the future. This is a pretty simple projection. If you imagine what our economy would look like today, if our wages had kept growing at the rate they had throughout the entire post war. In reality, it's this red line from 33 to 32. But if it kept growing, that's where we'd be today, where the median male wage of $60,000. That gap is the consequence of the shift in the economy away from a strong manufacturing economy that provided good work for average folks to an economy of concentration that provided high wealth, high income for the very few. It's that gap right there that makes credit so dangerous today. Credit itself is rather immoral. Capital, of course, is completely immoral. But that right there, for me at least, is a moral question. But to understand this shift about what kinds of policies made that possible, what changes in businesses made that possible, we need to understand more than graphs. And for me, it's a picture. I mean, people hate math in America, and as well they should. It's deceptive. It's deceptive. Right? We trust math too much. Well, this picture never lies. I'm gonna show you a picture from a grocery store in the late 19th century. I love this picture. It's from a poster that you would hang on your wall in your in your shop, probably a grocery store, hardware store. And I like it because it's the opposite of everything we think about credit today. This guy here, the worried guy, he sells on credit, whereas this guy here sells for cash. Now, today we think this is a good way to make money to sell things on credit payday lenders still are very hard at work, pushing their products and everyone. Yet for this guy, his hair is all pulled out as if he didn't get tenure. Look how anxious he is. I mean, he kind of looks like me, right? So you can see the nervousness, the identification between me and this credit lender. There's rats, his pants are torn. He has no rug. The rats are eating the IOUs that spill out of his coffers, which are by the way empty. His wall is painted. His paint is peeling. He is not doing well. This is a warning to his customers. So if you're standing there, they say, I want to borrow some money from you. He says, I don't want to be like that guy. I want to be like this guy. Corpulent with nice chops that would be the envy of any hipster. He's got a cigar. His hair is nice. I'm envious of that too. Yeah, his nice wall decorations. He's got sushi in his coffers. Money. No rats. A rug exactly. Everyone likes a rug. The exact opposite of someone who sells for credit. The logic of this poster is the exact opposite of our entire economy today. And so in thinking about borrow, I wanted to think about how this economy got turned upside down. What made it possible for this to become the new logic, the new common sense of the 20th century, how an entire 19th century world that told consumers that they could not borrow became the new common sense of consumers need to borrow to make the economy work. And in understanding this shift, we can understand how the 1920s became the 1940s with its relative equality, and then became the 1970s and 80s and 90s. And today, how that economy came apart was put back together and came undone yet again. And to understand this, we need to understand fundamentally that the choice to lend money is an investment. Now this is a weird idea, I think for a lot of people, we think of investments as factories and investments as new business opportunities and things of that sort. And we should. We absolutely should because the choice of this man to lend his money was a business decision that he either made or did not make depending on what he thought the return would be. And in every case, this was a bad business decision. It was his money out there on the street. Those were his IOUs. He could not resell his debt to a finance company like GMAC. It was his capital at risk. No bank would lend him money. And he had to collect it himself. And so the inversion of this world into our contemporary world is the inversion of that business decision. When did it make more sense to lend money to consumers than to businesses? When did it make more sense? When did it make more sense? This is the question. Does it make sense to lend money to consumers rather than to businesses? In our econ 101 classes were always taught that government debt crowds out business investment through the interest rate mechanism. And that may be true. But on the ground, when you look at the actual portfolios of banks of companies, it's consumer debt that crowds out that business debt. The small banks that two generations ago would have lent money to that new company no longer do. They lend money to consumers. They lend money on mortgages and houses and cars. And all of that is because these kinds of debt became resellable, that he was able to move that consumer debt into the market, debt stopping something to be avoided, debt started to be something to be embraced, and eventually to be produced as a commodity itself. Barrow tells this story of how debt went from the world of backroom loan sharks to boardroom investment bankers. How all this investment in consumer debt enabled at first many Americans to have their American dreams, but always, always reminding us that those American dreams need to be founded on the ability to pay back those debts over time. Without the ability to pay back those debts. It's all a dream. It's a dream. It's a dream not just for the consumers, but for the business owners themselves. In the long run to make money for General Electric to make money off of the loans it makes through its GE capital, it has to have workers that can produce at a wage that should buy its products to pay back its debt. And that is a world that has gone away today. And the question, of course, for us is how do we turn our world back to something more like this? Now Barrow isn't all just a big bummer, a story about the sort of collapse of certain economy. It's also about the story of the invention of different parts of this economy in non-intuitive ways. How Henry Ford invented the modern car, but also resisted modern car finance. How Bloomingdale's brought us the first credit cards, and then why they succeeded in that while Citibank failed at first. How Target and Ann Taylor in turn used credit to destroy Bloomingdale's. And then of course at the end, getting back to this larger story, how securitization made it rebalance the scales so that it became so much easier to invest in consumer debt than in business debt that it sent us into the spiral that we're in today. Now of course I promise to be quick. I hope I've been relatively quick as academics go. I'm used to speaking for an hour and a half. So I'll end my comments there and look forward to your questions afterwards and the feedback from Janice. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. And, and I found your book very interesting. I will admit I I just came back from vacation. It was not my vacation reading, but I did. I did I did have a chance to to read through it. And there's a couple things that I found really interesting. First of all, I'm used to being on panels with economists. And I'm very excited to be on a panel with a historian because the take is completely different. And economists hate stories. They really hate stories. And I happen to love stories. And I think there's, you know, the numbers tell a story. They don't tell the whole story until you get to the ground and really talk to people about what their experiences are. We never really know exactly what happened. You said something in your presentation that I thought was really interesting, because it it harkens back to a debate, an ongoing debate I have with my colleague, who insists that markets are value neutral. Okay, and this is a debate I constantly have with economists, of course, who insists that markets are value neutral. I'm an advocate. So I have no reason to be beholden or restricted by strict economic theory and insist that, in fact, markets are not value neutral. And part of the reason why I insist that they are not is because you will never find a perfect market. Markets do not operate in perfection. And usually economic theory sort of has that assumption. Markets always find the weakest length that they can exploit and maximize for profit. And so one of the things that is in your book that I thought was this really great insight was the way that debt has become such a commodity, and it becomes disconnected then from the real economy and from actual consumer need. What do our families actually need to facilitate their lives? Therein lies the weak link that I insist, of course, is not value neutral and that our markets have exploited quite, quite handily. The issue then I think is, or one issue that we really have to pay attention to is that while this may be the case, that this is the way that markets generally operate, and there, as you point out in the book, there are ups and downs that are felt system-wide, the American experience with credit and credit markets has not been uniform. And depending on where you live or who you are or even how much money your parents had, your experience with those credit markets can be dramatically different. And that is also a story that I think we see repeating itself today. And you did a great job in your presentation pointing out income inequality generally. I don't think it will come as a surprise to anybody in this room that for people of color, that income and wage gap is even greater. For African American and whites, it's 40 percent. For Latinos and whites, it's 30 percent. That is significant. Our real assets have, the wealth gap has actually widened as well. In the current economic recession that we've had, wealth amongst Latino families has dropped by 66 percent. A couple of years ago, the most recent numbers we had as a couple of years ago, the wealth gap was about 12 to 1. New research shows that for African Americans and for Latinos, it is now 18 to 1. And one of the reasons why these gaps and that uneven experience is so significant is because our demographics are rapidly shifting. We have a browning of America. By 2050, if not before, we will be a majority, minority country, whatever that means. We're going to be truly multicultural whether we like it or not. And if we have a built in financial underclass because a certain segment of the population has had dramatically different opportunities or different experiences with credit, that is going to have economic ramifications for our entire country. So one of the things that I, after looking at the book and kind of mulling this over, as the advocate part of me is like, well, jeez, now what? Now what are we going to do? Because in fact, we find ourselves in pretty dire straits. In fact, people are subsisting on credit. We're expecting new research to come out from demos that is likely going to show that families are still financing their daily lives on credit. And that's a function of the income gap in parts. Again, these really great economic terms like income smoothing. No, what it means is people can't afford to buy diapers. And so you can say, you know, bad, bad consumer, you don't know how to live within your means. But on a day to day basis, when a family can't buy groceries and they can't buy diapers or they can't get to the doctor for an emergency, they turn somewhere. And it's usually to credit. And so one of the things that we're trying to really look at is, okay, it may not be value neutral. Credit may be a necessary evil that is here to stay. How do we make it work? And that's a conversation that I don't think that policymakers are having enough. It's, you know, how do we turn the dials? How how do we make it, you know, on one side it's like, how do we lessen the regulatory burden so that banks can open the floodgates again? On the other hand, you know, we talk about how do we make sure that there's even access and an inclusive financial economy? But we haven't had a really robust conversation about what does good lending look like? And in fact, we know what good lending looks like. The problem is that those models have not really gone to scale. And this brings me really full circle with my debate with my colleague. The reason why they don't get to scale is that they generally are not considered profitable enough. And so once again, markets in my humble advocacy opinion, not value neutral because they're, you know, they're never going to go this route because it's not going to make them enough money. A good example is that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had perfectly good prime products that required housing counseling that were safe. Those quickly became the not dominant products in the market 2004 to 2006 in favor of private label securities credit made available through private label on the secondary market, which you didn't have to go through housing counseling. You didn't have to document your income. I assume a lot of people in this room already know that story. It won't bore you with the details, but my point is that we have models that we know that work. The fact is that they are slow, steady sort of responsible products that when debt is a commodity that is being traded on the floor, slow and steady is not, it's not the hot ticket item. I wanted to pick up on just two other things really quickly. You know, you were mentioning in your presentation that at barbecues you have a hard time convincing people that this borrowing thing has been around for a long time. One of the other things that I hear that's similar to that in the policy debate is we have to get back to the good old days of mortgage lending. And I thought your book did a good job actually of kind of dismantling that myth as well that you know we've had good days, but again we're not having this conversation about how do we do this right? The conversation has been dominated for decades about how do I facilitate the selling of debt, which is a different question of how do I take a working family and facilitate their American dream. That is not really the conversation that we're having, but from a policy perspective that's exactly where conversation could be centered. I think we could go back to the 90s to the early 2000s and say we had some success with some good models, but again I would point to that access to those markets was not felt uniformly for people of color. And so the good old days of mortgage lending were the good old days for some people in some places, not even evenly available by geography. And then the other thing that I think we haven't talked about and this is the last point that I'll make is that this evolving role of what I would call financial czars in our life. So if you think about the bubble years and the role of Alan Greenspan of kind of, you know, really had this czar like persona for the American public blessing the use of the house as the piggy bank, as you point out in the book, you know, you have all of this equity and income just sitting in your house, how do you get to it? You know, our financial thought leaders, if you will, that are helping craft the way that people think about their money are endorsing this idea that you crack open that piggy bank and spend baby spend. And so it's hard for me to accept the argument then that any loan consumer was going to be the best place to regulate the market and that it was their soul responsibility to stand up to Alan Greenspan and Wall Street and the banks and say, you don't know what you're talking about. You're doing it wrong. Now, of course, that's not to say that borrowers have no responsibility. They do and and NCLR is heavily engaged in in that business through housing counseling. Our housing counselors were the ones who actually probably were disagreeing with Alan Greenspan who were forcing families to eat their veggies and face up to their finances. But as I think about the role of markets, I want to point out that consumers are the least well positioned to regulate the market. And there is a role for good policy to say here are some rules of the road. You can't lend to people without verifying their ability to pay and to create more evenness in the market so that it is a level playing field. So those experiences are more uniform. And so that we get back to a point where the financial services industry is help facilitating actual consumer needs, not commoditizing debt. Great. I'm very pleased to have Janice here. She articulately said a lot of things that were on my mind. And I didn't have to say them. Anyway, Lewis, a bunch of things to respond to there. Maybe you can give a shot at some of that before we open it up for questions. But what is good lending and what is the role of government and information in the marketplace? Well, I have to say, if this is my this is what policy makers usually do with these talks. It's wonderful. It's nice to be told that she liked the book. Academics never start off their talks that way. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. No, I think a lot of the issues that you talk about are core for me in my thinking. How do we structure policies that will enable broad based participation in the benefits of capitalism? You know, and I think that a lot of people are asking this question. How do we do it that creates profits on the one hand, which are necessary for growth, which are necessary for the growth of these institutions? And at the same time, provide services to average folks. And for me, one of the things I talk about the end of the book, when I venture off into policy is the question of, well, why do we securitize just consumer debt? Why don't we securitize other kinds of debt as well? Why don't we securitize small business debt? So it's just as easy for these banks to lend to new businesses, as it is to lend to people who just want to borrow money on their credit cards. We see this especially in communities of color, right? Places where the only way you can get a business loan is if you open a franchise, right? Something that where the risk is low, low, low. And we see the health consequences of that. We also see the expropriation of profit from those communities of color. So how do we get actual lending into those communities? But what was the rarity, I think, in terms of a racist, a relatively, you know, racist post-war economy is now the norm. So that it's not just people of color who can't get access, it's everybody, though, of course, to a different degree. So how do we do this? One of the things I suggest is that we securitize these small business, I don't mean startup restaurants, but places with a track record of success that still can't get loans, places that employ fewer than 500 people, you know, places that are, of course, the backbone of the economy. And I think that would be something that we could do relatively easily because we have the structures in place. So it's not securitization that did this. It's what we securitized. It's that we securitized useless things. We securitized houses and cars and credit cards that produce nothing, whereas we could securitize businesses that produce jobs and growth. And perhaps I'm just very old school, I'm not a neoclassical economist, I'm a classical economist, you know, going back to this idea of what is productive, what is unproductive, how do we get money into the hands of the productive? And I think that's a really important question because we can't do this if we ignore profit. Good lending is something that creates benefits for both sides. And it's not just about saying, well, on the one hand we have consumer debt, on the other hand we have business debt, we need to think about it as a system of allocating our capital. Great, thank you. Let's see, there's going to be a mic that can move around the room so we can start going. Let's start with this gentleman and we'll come over here. And you can tell us who you are and ask a question, make a brief comment for Lewis or Janice. My name is Mark Naterno, I'm with the Interactivity Foundation and we just finished a project on money credit and debt, so I'm very interested. I wanted to ask, I wanted to make a comment and then ask a question. The comment was one of the things that it seems to me that from my lifetime, which I think is really quite different, is of course the credit card and the mass marketing of credit through, you know, you don't have to do the due diligence that people might have otherwise done. But I want to ask a question based on my story. My story is this, like about, you know, maybe 10, 12 years ago I moved back from Europe to and came to Washington. Had no money. I had some money in the bank but had no job. I didn't want to rent because I just thought if I don't get a job I'm going to just end up losing all my money in rent. At least if I bought a house I would be able to sell it if something, maybe have a chance to sell if something went rent. Anyway, to make a long story short, I was able to get a, you know, the worst kind of mortgage. It was a no down payment mortgage. Had a high interest rate to begin with. I had, as I said, I had no job. Wouldn't have been able to do it, you know, had they done regular mortgages. Now as things turn out a couple months later I got a job, everything went well, paid off the house, which as in Washington now tripled in value. So the question that I have, I can't believe that I'm the only one in this kind of category. Do we know, has anyone done any research whatsoever? How lucky do you get? In other words. Has anyone done any research about how many people made out really well as a result of those, those risky, I didn't take a risky mortgage. I didn't take the highest, you know, but I took something that I thought I could handle. I would imagine a lot of people might have done that too and maybe have benefited. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't have because I'm very risk averse. But yeah, well, congratulations. I'm glad that turned out well for you. And the truth of the matter is it turned out well for lots of people, right? So if you can imagine your case is everybody in the post war period, right? In the book, I talk about how people in the post war happen to look into right buying houses in the midst of prosperity could easily people were worried it could have gone the other way in the depression, right? Or after the war ended, the stimulus is gone, we could have gone back to the way it was. But it turned out it was great. If you were white. So white people got access to all this great property so that they were able to build sort of the one of the foundational aspects of this wealth and the quality we're talking about is this intergenerational transfer of wealth, particularly for white people. So there was a whole new credit system that was created based in the new deal that was for white people and gave them access to mortgages and credit and they were able to leverage that and take advantage of that whole system. This was largely not available for people of color, especially for African Americans. So I think that this is one of the things that is going on, right? So that it happened to be you were lucky in your particular case, you were very lucky you lived in DC. In the post war period, you'd been very lucky if you'd lived anywhere basically if you were a white person. And then what you see the reason why mortgage backed securities come back in the housing act of 1968. As I write about in both in the book is how why are people doing so well in the suburbs? You look at the suburbs and they're they're doing well. Well, it's one way you could have gone is well, they have good jobs. Another way you could have gone in an easier policy way is to say, well, they have good mortgages. Let's give those mortgages to people in the inner city that's given to people of color who are not doing as well. And so they bring back the mortgage backed security which has been dead for 35 years. And you see the rebirth of our contemporary financial system. But unfortunately, just as this is happening is exactly when wages stagnate, you see the people who are just getting access to these kinds of asset building instruments are doing it exactly the wrong time. And I think part of what is happening today, and you know more about today than I do, is that exactly the moment when people of color gained access to debt for houses, mortgages that have been redlined for 30 or 40 years is exactly when things started to fall apart. So they didn't have those kinds of wealth building effects, coupled with of course greater job volatility and employment, etc. etc. I'm curious what your thoughts are though. Just a couple quick comments. One is that I have not seen any data that suggests that the the negam products, the interest only products that were sort of those that they were in their hay say like, you know, 10 years ago, that those were major wealth generators. They may be for individuals who who got lucky who bought at the right time who managed to land a good job, maybe against the odds. But I think on the whole, from what we've seen from the economy, they, they were not a good bet for the national economy and for a lot of people. But you make a really important pointless that I want to pick up on, which is what we often hear about credit marketed to communities of color, and especially in the policy context is that this kind of that the subprime credit that's flowing into communities of color, that this is this is your access. This is the highway that is being built for you to get a piece of the American dream. And we need to reject that argument flat out because it's substandard credit. And in fact, we call that a two tiered system. And so I reject the idea that that our communities need to be satisfied with getting some substandard apple. No, we want to bite at the same apple that everybody else gets. So in some ways we talk about the democratization of credit. But it wasn't all the way there. We again, we we made it a commodity. But that's not quite the same thing as creating a platform on which everybody has access to the same kind of products. And not that you just got lucky or that you happened to get a transfer of wealth from your parents. And it's also the case that a lot of the assumptions that go into the housing market for these kinds of transaction and financial products for the middle class don't exist for the poor and working class, whether you're a person of color or not that you just there aren't the same kind of fluidity of markets. The pricing is way off. And I write about it historically. I'm sure you find it today as well. That's right. Oh, do we want to take another quick point? I mean, I I think that's right. And I saw some of this in your book as well about, you know, there's there's challenges to owning a home, especially when it comes to mobility for low and moderate income families who need to travel to to find jobs, they might need to be more mobile if they they can't sell that non liquid asset. So definitely this is an critically important decision for for any family. But I want to underscore the importance of the maybe the one bright silver lining that not the one but a a bright point of the mortgage, which is this is the only leveraged asset that most low mod or even middle income families will get access to. So even if that that house just keeps pace with inflation and doesn't, you know, dramatically spike like in the case of DC, you still have an essence of force savings account that you wouldn't have otherwise. So it continues to be an asset building potential and a critical one for our families. I think the the thing that has gotten seriously confused in policy conversations as of late. And I found my own title as director of the wealth building policy project inspires this confusion is that I'm not talking about flipping, you know, or these get rich quick schemes. I'm talking about families who stay in their houses for decades, and they build wealth over time. And then they pass that wealth to their kids. That is the only way that we're going to create stable upward mobility for our for our families. So knowing that that's the kind of long view that we we take on housing, you know, it I think that it only makes sense and should be obvious that when we're talking about families of modest means, we're talking about putting them in houses at a time and place that it makes sense for them. I agree. A lot more to say about housing. Maybe we can get a few questions in the front here. Graduate school, I've been thinking about this issue the first time they came out with these mortgages, which I thought were nuts. Because when you have people who have no income and have no prospect for income, it's clearly going to be a disaster. So I have a number of questions. Seems to me this is a process and a system. We don't teach anybody to think that way. Secondly, I kept thinking as you were describing it, maybe all of the lenders should have a list of questions that the lenders have to give to the people who want to borrow money so that they can ask these various questions about what are the consequences if I do this and if these circumstances occur, where am I going to be a year from now? I mean, I think that and at a time when we have an enormous percentage of our population with no prospects for jobs, you just look at all these bright kids that have gotten out of college that can't find jobs. And the financial consequences of that is that they're then not buying things to even fill up apartments. I mean, the whole thing ripples through. So it's not just getting a house, but you have to have the resources to do it. And how do you deal with getting jobs? So she does raise the issue of financial knowledge and the role that that's played over time, obviously it varies quite a bit. And then a lot of confusion about terms and products. And of course, you raise in your book, almost the evolution of the culture where the sales person was this trusted figure at times and they could sell you anything. But then when you went back, maybe they wouldn't be there be someone else behind the counter. Well, I think I think that just briefly, I think the question of instability is key here from what I'm hearing from what you're saying that, you know, it's easy to make these decisions when you're able to plan. And fundamentally, people can't plan anymore, at least people of my generation that jobs come and go, you know, people are now it's very different than the world of the post war when corporations could plan, people could plan everything could plan. There was a lockstep trajectory to the economy. But today, those the future is very uncertain. And of course, while people on Wall Street can hedge and do all kinds of complex things, individuals can't. And on some level, I don't think they should have to. I don't feel like we should have to spend our times operating as hedge funds of one. Right? I mean, I don't feel like that is a good social use to make to force everyone to be as educated as a hedge fund manager is a really bad idea just the way we don't grow our own food. You know, I think that it's it's that kind of level of thing. And so I agree that we need to be more sophisticated. But on some level, I also think we need to stop becoming more sophisticated. People make horrible decisions when they think they're clever. So reduce the cleverness, make it a little safer. Let's go here. Thanks, Jeremy Smith, Pew Charitable Trust. And just a comment on what you just said, I think, you know, it's ironic, right? Because I think what you're saying, which I couldn't agree with more, is that in essence, we're at this place where we're we're becoming Adam Smith society of pin makers. Again, the expectation is that we grow our that financial we grow our own food that we make our own pins and how ironic that is. But the question is about your your notion, the possible solution that we you know, basically, we funnel securitization and secondary markets towards subsidizing small business lending. The question on that for me would be, you know, it's always been the intersection, right? Between both the presence of securitized funds as a huge funnel and then creating a whole incentive for new lending that comes out of consumer products. But there's also the cost of making the loans, right? The technology associated with making mortgages and in credit card lending, as someone has already said, made those loans incredibly profitable. It's hard to see that small business lending as a what by inherently a one off product, generate would generate the kind of profits that would make it attractive for a but there's two rules there. One is the assessment of the actual loan, you know, the underwriting. And, you know, that can be done well, or it can be done poorly, you can do it well, or you can give it away to people without income or assets. Then the different than the next step would be to possibly to make the loan and securitize and generate the flow of resources. So the underwriting is an essential part of that process. I mean, I think I think the question of how do you do this at a volume? And I think your point about I'm Smith is dead on by the way. And I like it when anyone reference as a historian, as a teacher, there are people remember the wealth of nations makes me happy. Thank you. But I think the question is a good one, you know, how do we how do we do this at volume? Right? This is the crux of what made consumer lending possible at volume. Now, the tricky thing is I actually think and maybe I'm wrong about this, but I actually think it'd be easier because we have a language to describe businesses. It's called accounting. You may have not have heard of it. But it's a way in which we sort of we have all these bright young things running around valuing companies all day long. They have a way to do that, whereas houses are actually unique. They're not interchangeable. They're fundamentally unique kinds of things. We decide what are the key aspects of it to create of to decide on its value that that is what turns it into a commodity, just like corn. Corn can be grown on Bob's farm or Jane's farm. What enables corn to become a commodity, what enables anything to become a commodity is the standardization of a few key qualities so that you can have grade A corn, grade B corn, grade C corn. You can have certain kinds of mortgages. You can have certain kinds of businesses. And I don't think everybody should get a business. But personally, I would feel better about giving money, wasting, losing money on businesses than I would on consumer debt. Because at least with that there's a possibility of growth. At least there there is that possibility of growth. And I think Americans are worth it. Right here. Hi, Krista Watson, a triple AS science and technology policy fellow at the National Science Foundation and a physics professor at Manchester College. So you raised some interesting parallels in the 1920s and currently between mortgage debt, private debt. But I didn't hear anything about student loans that are of course getting a lot of attention today. Is there anything from the 1920s or 30s that you think would provide a good guide for how to deal with the student loan crisis? In your next book? Well, hopefully we'll figure it out by then. I think student debt is fundamentally different. And here's let me tell you why student debt's fundamentally different. I think it's something that lenders don't want to invest in or historically if not want to. So you needed special kinds of guarantees to make it so that you can't go into bankruptcy. So when I graduated college, I graduated about $22,000 in debt. And I thought I am going to go bankrupt. This is going to be awesome. By the time I get a grad school, I'll be set then looked up and I found out, oh, I can't. And I think that's one of the reasons that we have it that a lot of people would just go bankrupt when they're 22. I think also that it's different because what a lot of whereas a lot of these sort of policy wonks that the New York Times are writing about the sale went to Vassar and, you know, Amherst and Harvard, most people don't go to places like that. Most people who go to the University of Phoenix, or they go to Penn State, or they go to the Burke, the Cal system, right? So put normal places. And these normal places outside of University of Phoenix, which is a for profit kind of institution, what you're seeing is the taking money away from universities and putting it into prisons. And it's part of this longer, larger conversation we have as a society, why we want to invest in prisons and not in universities. I don't think prisons are a good long term source of economic growth. That's just my precision. So I think I think that we need to have that conversation. And so fundamentally, I think this is different than the other kinds of conversations about debt. It's an investment in human capital. Yeah, which I think is great. You can still have a bad student loan, bad terms, but expensive or a route that doesn't lead to earnings down the road. But often it is leading to an investment. But there are some there are some interesting parallels that I do think that we should talk about. Maybe a whole separate panel on the school to prison versus prison's issue. That is also very interesting. But what we have seen that I think is similar in the student loan context as in other consumer debt is that we've seen the commoditization of student loan debt so that it is now profitable. And it's a little industry of itself to go out and make loans and you can make money on bad loans. And the situation we have, especially among students of color is that they're graduating or that they're they're racking up tons of debt and then not graduating. So they neither have they don't have the degree. They've got tons of debt. And the situation that our kids are facing at this point is, do I get a college education or do I get a house? And the generation that's graduating now might have to choose between those two things because the debt levels can be nearly identical. And the situation is such that you'll be so deep in debt from one or the other that you can't have both. That that is a fundamental problem, especially I'm not sorry to bring it back to housing. But when I hear economists talk about the solution to the to the housing issue and the wealth gap issue surrounding housing. And by that, I mean the fact that people of color don't have the same access to wealth to to create the down payments, high down payments is education. So what I hear is go to school, get a better job, get more income, save up the money, maybe give it to your kids and maybe that kid and the next generation will then be able to buy a house that even I have problems with that scenario in the first place. But even if I didn't that scenario is not going to work either because that kid is so far in debt that they're they're going to take that good job and finance the education they got 20 years ago. If I could just quickly build on that, I think it's also important to not think in and as a professor you will also be heard to hear what I'm about to say. College isn't for everybody. We can't have an economy that only works for the people who graduate from college and everybody else just is left by the wayside. Part of what was great about this post war period is that people didn't go to college and they still were able to pay there for their house and their car and in their spouse didn't even have to work sometimes. So I think this is something that we need to think about as a society. School, college, that can't be the answer and if the Hail Mary pass is to send everybody to college then we're making a huge mistake. Right here. Gordon Johnson, I'm a retired businessman and I go back to the days when we banks really only loaned to small businesses. For new things, assets they could see that they could get paid back on. They never loaned money for operating expenses just to keep me alive. The job of the banker as we saw it in those days was he was the one who went around the battlefield after the battle and bayonetted the wounded. And that is a function that's a very important one and they didn't like to do that so they didn't loan money that required them to do that. I think your point of the securitization of taking the lender away from that responsibility is a huge problem. And as a businessman looking at what it was like for me now I look at the government and you haven't mentioned the problems of a government that is borrowing money worse than your chart. Your chart of the wages going suddenly becoming level the government wages are suddenly getting less but the debt is continuing to escalate. Do you have any advice for politicians on that? By bayonets. I think I mean I think part of it I mean from my understanding is that we've reduced the taxes too much that we need that we try to pay for two wars out of borrowed money from China and that doesn't seem like sounds policy to me and you know places where we spend money don't produce growth. So the other 1% that no one talks about is the 1% of the budget that is spent on science research in America. Only 1% actually a little under is about 0.8% and that's crazy to me. I mean I love science. Science is the foundation of all technologies the foundation of all economic growth it's a foundation most importantly of new industries to invest in to make money and without that scientific research the economy is not going to grow and so yeah I think there's a lot of questions about why the government is running up those debts and also where they're spending their money to produce growth in the long run. Of course with the cost of funds being so low it might be a good time to borrow and deficit spend get the economy going. Okay last two comments over here. Yeah. My name is Kunio Kikuchi and I'm with Washington Research and Analysis. It seems to me that I'd like to get back to the housing issue because the biggest debt crisis is from the housing market and perhaps you may want to shine some light on the one factor that promotes bad loans, bad mortgages namely the people who would always profit regardless of what happens to the loan namely the real estate agents who take every housing transaction three to six percent and they get their rewards up front by pushing that house promoting the biggest amount of the loan and they keep and pocket six percent and they're never punished for what happens to the loan afterwards. It's not that the poor people are foolish it's that the siren song of the real estate agent is too sweet and until you cut that line off how can you stop bad loans, bad mortgages? I've never thought of it that way. I mean I don't usually assign blame to them although I sometimes think they're overpaid. Yeah. All right well two more comments back there and then we'll... I've been in a lot of businesses and one of them after my business I was the director of innovations at the office of naval research and one of the things I used to tell people when they came in because I was supposed to help remake the way that it is don't tell me the problems even don't tell me the solutions unless you can accomplish the solutions because I didn't want to have spent 55 minutes of every hour hearing problems. Today my wife's a political junkie if President Obama wins Virginia he'll get 50.1 or Romney he'll get 50.2 the same thing with the senators the same thing on almost everything so when you use the word policy or they ought to you remember they are 50-50 unless you can come up with a way of accomplishing some good answers, some bad answers whatever it is it's all doing is academic discussions all the time. A voice of frustration from the back of the room. I'm not frustrated I'm one and a half so I'm not complaining about me but tomorrow my children and their children are gonna have the problems. How do we remove the energy here in the last comment right in the front here thank you. My name is Lisa Menoff I'm a history guide student I went to Harvard, I go to Harvard but my question was that I guess back to the beginning of your talk Lewis because you mentioned the tantalizing correlation between rising inequality and growing debt and I was wondering what you thought the actual relationship between those two points were? Well I guess there's a lot of comments there I think that one of the things I think that a lot of people are working towards is trying to figure out getting to the gentleman in the back you know what kinds of policies help everybody you know what kinds of policies and those are hard to find right it's easy to say bayonet the bankers bayonet the people bayonet the poor it's hard to say well this policy will will help poor people and help bankers right I think right now there's a lot of anger in America and so if I say things like well you know let's do this kind of securitization policy people say I don't want to punish people I want to punish the bankers for what they did I'm like all right let's just get past it let's try to figure out ways to help people who are in a lot of in difficult situations so that that's my position in terms of the history which I think it's for me I think it's about the sort of way in which inequality produced money at the top in like the last 40 years produced money at the top concentrated it which then had to be invested somewhere right so that people produced all these kinds of financial instruments that appeared very safe to draw that 1% capital into the market and the old econ adage of savings equals investment isn't really true I mean it's true that the money has to be invested somewhere but it's not always invested in real investments that produce growth and I think that's part of what I'm trying to get at I'm just curious what your thoughts were yeah I mean I would I think that's right I would piggyback and come back to a point that I made in my opening remarks which is the changing demographics are such that if we don't think about these common platforms that are going to break down the income wage inequality and the wealth inequality we're gonna suffer as a nation we're not gonna be able to fuel our entire economy based on the earnings of the 1% we're just not gonna be able to do it so if we look at the state of the economy for Hispanic and African American families and that's where all of our population growth is coming from our next 25 years look pretty dismal because again we just had that little bump in assets that we got that's gone if you were relying on that to pay for your kid's education that's gone now your kid's in debt the situation looks pretty dismal but to the frustrated comment in the back there I find myself equally frustrated by the tone here because these problems are common and don't have to be ideologically driven and yet we find ourselves in an increasingly ideological space and that is not necessarily helpful there are ideas and solutions and if we had another hour we would get into some of them but things that I think can be bipartisan and ways that we can move forward on some of these issues especially when we're making a strong business case for them that there are ways to do good lending that is profitable and there are conversations going on now a lot of partnerships that are forming that are kind of leaving policy makers on the sidelines because they're such a disaster and those advocates and the businesses getting together and say let's figure this out and then we're gonna go take the plan to them because it's a little bit of a mess over there right now and just to sort of build on that and to pitch my book and both this book and the previous book I write a lot about the way in which we've misunderstood the new deal so the new deal is the foundation of the post war economy and the way in which we understand it is that it was government directly spending money taxpayer money to build trails and bridges and stuff like that, that's not right that was part of the new deal but the most important parts of the new deal were the policies that channeled private capital investment the FHA which built suburbia which we may have problems with today houses a lot, most Americans the rural electrification administration which brought electricity to everybody the not just people in the extreme rural areas and of course the most important one that no one's ever heard of the defense plant corporation which through a system of insurance channeling private capital bootstrapped our economy into the aerospace industry aluminum industry, electronics everything that was the foundation of the last 60 years of our economy and yet that's not part of the new deal that's just what business did this was all made possible by a collaboration between business people state policy makers and the American people but these are the kinds of things that we've forgotten in our scurry to either celebrate certain direct spending aspects of the new deal or to critique it as two left-wing shenanigans and I think it's important to realize no, there actually is practical policymaking that has worked in the past and can work again. That's an excellent last word it's an excellent book highly recommend it and like a good session we've actually identified a couple of other events and then discussions to have so I thank you both for helping us do that Thank you Thank you