How Governments Shape Markets

Chris Hughes is a co-founder of Facebook and an economist who specializes in the history of Fed policy. He is also the author of MarketCrafters: The 100-Year Struggle to Shape the American Economy.

In this podcast, Hughes joined Motley Fool host Ricky Mulvey to discuss:

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• Modern examples of American "market craft."
• How to fix the housing crisis.
• What we did and didn't get from $2 trillion in COVID aid.

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A full transcript is below.

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Chris Hughes: But the point is, there is a broad emergent view that the government can and should use its balance sheet to support and spur the industries that we need and want, either for national security reasons or for other reasons for the public good.

Mary Long: I'm Mary Long, and that's Chris Hughes. He's a co-founder of Facebook former Democratic strategist, and now an economic historian. Most recently, Chris has written the book Market Crafters, the 100 year struggle to shape the American economy. My colleague, Ricky Mulvey, caught up with Hughes for a conversation about how the US government has crafted markets throughout modern history and whether that interference looks a bit different today than it has in the past, how market craft could apply to sectors like housing and therefore improve the cost of living, plus what two trillion dollars in COVID aid did and didn't do for the American public.

Ricky Mulvey: I really enjoyed the book, and for me, it definitely affected the way I view things going on right now and historical events. I found myself disagreeing with parts, and you know what, Chris? That's the purpose of a book. It gets you.

Chris Hughes: That's a good thing. Exactly.

Ricky Mulvey: I'm glad I'm glad to have that experience. One of the themes that struck me from this is that, you know, people like to think, I'm a free markets person, or I want government involved with things. One of the things that ultimately happens is people who come into markets as staunch libertarians, let the markets regulate themselves, end up having this moment where they're like, no, we need some help to regulate markets, whether it's the Mexican Peso crisis, strategic reserves of oil, bank about bailouts in 2008. Did that trend, I guess, when you were researching this book surprise you a bit?

Chris Hughes: Well, it did. I mean, one of the biggest things when I started to peel back the layers of the history of market craft, which as you know, I use as a term to describe the efforts by government to harness or organize markets for political ends, is how often you found not just Republicans but libertarians who believed that it was important to do it. I look mid century treasury markets and a pretty conservative head of the Federal Reserve who use policy to make those markets orderly. You mentioned the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I mean, a libertarians libertarian Bill Simon, who is a Treasury secretary, use market craft to stabilize energy markets in a crisis, but then also create this institution. That stockpiles oil to create resiliency in the long term and also buffer prices. This just kept coming up again and again and it also for me scrambled that whole duality of free market folks are over here on the right, and social Democrats are over here on the left, because I think the real story, if you look at the broad consensus on big industries like healthcare, pharmaceuticals, banking and finance, even to some extent, big tech, is that you want government to shape these markets so that they work better, which doesn't mean replacing. The profit motive or private activity, it means using it for the public good.

Ricky Mulvey: I want to use strategic reserves as a way to introduce the concept of Market Craft more, as you've talked about in other interviews and in your book. Market Craft is not a good or bad thing. Inherently, it's neutral. It's a tool.

Chris Hughes: Exactly.

Ricky Mulvey:: Right now, the phrase strategic reserve is hot in the streets because the current Trump administration is talking about it with regard to Bitcoin. Reading your book, I don't even know I don't think that's the right term for a large hoard of Bitcoin. I don't know if that even counts as a strategic reserve. For our listeners, can you give us a primer on how the US has historically used strategic reserves, particularly in energy markets?

Chris Hughes: Strategic reserves are traditionally the term is traditionally used to describe efforts by government to stockpile to prevent emergency shortages and in some cases do price buffering. We can go back to the 1930s and the Depression when the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which was a national Investment Bank had an initiative that would buy low and sell high for corn, wheat, grapes, butter, all kinds of commodities that cotton. All kinds of commodities that Americans were using in order to spur investment by having this price floor and then help consumers by preventing spikes in crunches. There was a very foundational effort to do that then. It's really the same idea in treasury markets now. You can think of the Fed's balance sheet stockpiles treasuries and mortgage backed securities as a method to conduct its open market operations and manage the price of short term credit. Then, of course, you mentioned the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is something that some folks are familiar with coming out of the 1973 oil crisis, Bill Simon, who I mentioned earlier, who was a libertarian, teamed up with Alan Greenspan and other folks in the Ford administration.

To say, hey, wait a second, we cannot afford to be caught like we were with the oil embargo and have these incredible shortages and the risks that people wouldn't be able to heat their homes in the depths of winter. We need to create these enormous salt caverns which continue to exist today and hold hundreds of millions of barrels of oil. These strategic reserves can be used to enhance resiliency and guarantee price stability in a way that can be really powerful. There are a technique to do that that doesn't just rely on monetary policy, which I think is usually the the solution here. The crypto reserve, which you mentioned, I wouldn't call a strategic reserve in that at least so far, it does not seem to have a mandate to manage the price of crypto, but it is a market craft. There is a mission that this administration wants to stabilize, if not expand the crypto market. In order to do that, it's using the power of government to say, hey, this is a legitimate asset that we want to hold, and depending on how aggressively they invest in it, it could really bring significant legitimacy to that market when combined with regulatory changes. That is, I wouldn't call it exactly a strategic reserve, but it is mark graft for sure.

Ricky Mulvey: A lot of people think back on the oil shock and I wasn't around for this as a form of policy disaster. But your book offers some revisionist histories, looking back on past crises, particularly with Paul Vocker and the Fed, and we'll stay on strategic reserves for now. But what do you think people misunderstand about the oil crisis and the way America responded to those embargoes back in the 70s?

Chris Hughes: The first is we got to separated into two. There were two oil crises in the 70s, '73 and '79. '79 was a disaster. Prices were totally decontrolled, t here were long lines across the country. There were shortages. The best that the president President Carter could do was to tell you to turn down the temperature so you use less energy. He literally turned down the temperature in the White House and told everybody to put on an extra sweater. It was not a high point, let's say, for public policy management of a crisis. Now, that stands in stark contrast to the first oil crisis in 1973, which, my politics are generally left of center, but I think it's important to name was better managed by a Republican administration. In that case, what happened is, as the price of oil was going up, Congress chartered an institution called the Federal Energy Office that had this mandate to keep prices as stable as they could and prevent shortages.

The government moved in quickly to manage so that the prices when they went up, they happened gradually to do allocation on a regional basis to ensure that, for instance, home heating oil in New England wouldn't be the first market to be hit so that people wouldn't literally freeze to death in the winter. Then, also ensure that the military and hospitals had enough oil supply. You look on the other side of that particular crisis, and even though the oil embargo was incredibly disruptive to global energy markets, prices in the United States went up by 20%, which was a lot less than they went up in Europe and other places that took different approaches. No one actually died. With the exception of a couple of weeks in February, there were not meaningful shortages. What I'm trying to make the case for is less like a revisious history, government did it all right. Let's be precise. There was a much better way to respond to a crisis that then learned that lesson, built on it toward a market craft for the long term with a strategic petroleum reserve that stands in stark contrast to just throwing up your hands and saying, Well, we're just going to let the market adjust, which is what happened later in the decade.

Ricky Mulvey: There can be hopeful visions of market craft, and one topic I know you're particularly interested in is modular housing. This is an industry where you could see the government help with things. Bluntly, it's one where I'm puzzled by, we spent what was it four trillion dollars on a lot of the COVID bail out. Didn't make the cost of living that much cheaper for folks, but there is a version of Market Craft where maybe the government could intervene and help people live more affordably with more home construction, getting rid of some zoning policies, intervening there. Maybe even tax incentives for building materials. I don't know. You've thought about this topic a lot more than me. How could the concept of Market Craft apply for housing and maybe make the cost of living cheaper?

Chris Hughes: I think it's one of the most ripe areas for leadership because of the urgency of the problem, a third of American's budget goes to housing and housing prices remain significantly elevated. Then secondly, because there are clear ideas of how government can structure these markets to make it cheaper. I'd say three things. The first is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and a lot of the abundance folks rightly talk about streamlining, zoning and local regulations to make it easier to build. I think they're absolutely right. That is critical.. It's not enough. California updated many of its own building requirements five years ago and housing starts are still low. It's not enough to just make it easier through zoning. Government has to prioritize the construction of housing. There are two ways I would think about doing that. The first you mentioned is modular. Modular for folks who are not experts in it is where you build the components of housing offsite, literally the walls, the lights, all of the things, and then you bring it in and you place it.

It reminds me of these magnetiles that my 7-year-old son plays with where the buildings just go up as if pieces. Half of homes in the Nordic countries are created in this fashion, and it has gained some steam here in the United States. Now, we need an industrial policy for modular. What that would mean is first off making it a lot cheaper to build by investing in the modular companies that already have these factories and making it possible for them to expand. It would require making the financing much easier. Right now, half of the people who try to get a mortgage for a modular home get turned down. Congress can change that by directing Fannie and Freddie to change their standards around this. Then, also creating a singular set of standards so that there's interoperability for the kinds of construction that we need. Right now, a lot of local standards make it very difficult for these folks to scale. That also could be changed. Modular is one set of things. Then finally, in a third bucket, I would think about a housing construction fund. We need to make it consistently cheap to build multifamily housing in the United States. For those of your listeners who follow monetary policy, closely know that when the Fed raises rates, the first markets that are really affected are housing finance. It makes it more expensive for people to borrow, to build home and so it quickly decreases demand. If you're building a big apartment building, your math doesn't work as the rates go up. If we had a housing construction fund that was capitalized, it could be inside Fannie and Freddie and was able to assure the developers of dense housing that is relatively cheap, that it would be consistently affordable to build, it would spur significantly more development. There are some estimates that as little as $50 billion could lead to the creation of well over one million homes, which, with our national shortage estimated to be around four million, that would take us along the way there. There are ways to craft these markets to make housing cheaper if we have the political will to do.

Ricky Mulvey: A lot of that has to do with starting new industries or you're interacting to your credit with publicly traded, big multifamily REITs, real estate investment trusts. But a lot of the ideas that I hear from you and from the abundance folks often involve the starting up new industries. The abundance folks like vertical farming and grocery delivery. You never hear the abundance folks talking about Costco, the stuff that's already here where Americans are like, this is where I get my abundance. In the case of housing, we have some big homebuilders. We think about Dreamfinders homes, DR Horton. When you're thinking about, you know, trying to make housing more affordable and how government should impact that, how do you see Market Craft interacting with the big companies that are already doing it?

Chris Hughes: Well, I think that at least what I'm seeing in much of the reporting is that the uncertainty from Trump economic policies, particularly around the tariffs, it's creating a meaningful pause in investment. How can you make an agreement to build a new house if you don't know how expensive your [inaudible] is going to be or any of the other components that go into it? I think that maybe it's an obvious point, but I think foundationally, you need certainty from government for a price structure that is going to work. Then, you need to think, I think the key thing is to listen to a lot of these builders and sort through what's going to make it cheaper and easier for them to build. I am struck by how the puzzle of different regulatory requirements make it difficult to make a plan for a house and then build it in multiple different cities and in multiple different counties.

I am aligned with the Abundance folks and making sure that that's part of the plan. Then finally, I think that, ensuring that demand is stabilized through affordable interest rates so that there are people who actually want to buy those houses and build those houses is critical. Again, the tariff policies are estimated to be inflationary. We'll see what comes through on the other side of them. But consumers inflation expectations as you know are going up, and it's going to be very hard for the Fed to bring interest rates back down to make it more affordable for people to buy. What I'm trying to say is that these economic policies, some of which don't on the face have to do with housing, very much actually have to do with housing.

Ricky Mulvey: There's some immigration questions there as well. There's a lot of people who work in new home construction or immigrants. Hey, fools, we're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsor for today's episode. Real estate. It has been the cornerstone of wealth building for generations, but it's also often been a major headache for investors with 3:00 AM maintenance calls, tenant disputes, and property taxes. Fund rises Flagship fund, but $1.1 billion real estate portfolio with more than 4,000 single family homes in the Sunbelt communities, 3.3 million square feet of in-demand industrial facilities all professionally managed by an experienced team. The flagship fund taps into some of real estate's most attractive qualities, long term appreciation potential, a hedge against inflation, and diversification beyond the stock market. Check and check. All without the complex paperwork, massive down payments, and soul sucking landlord duties. Visit funrise.com/fool to explore the portfolio, check out historical returns, and see just how much easier investing in real estate can be.

As someone who closely pays attention to macroeconomic policy, where we're at now is interesting. We're in a negotiating place with a lot of countries. We put a tariff on them. Now we said, hey, we want you to join us because remember, we're allies, and now we're going to try to really have this trade war going with China. There's a lot of uncertainty going on, and I saw, especially in a lot of liberal media on Liberation Day, rightly so, the market's tanked on that. But they've recovered a lot. There's still a lot of questions. We might be going at it with a real trade war with China. Was it this week or last week, 35% decline in ships going to the port of Los Angeles. There's going to be some supply shortages that hit shelves soon. Market seems to be shaking this off like a little jab, not a left hook, knocking it down. I know you're on the liberal side. You worked on the Obama campaign. You look closely at macroeconomic policy. Has the response from markets to this trade dispute, has that surprised you at all?

Chris Hughes: I think they are way optimistic right now. The initial fall in the markets did not surprise me. This recovery does somewhat. It's hard for me, at least, to understand what is the root of the optimism. I guess this idea that there's going to be enough one-off trade agreements that'll help us get through. When I look at the macroeconomic indicators with consumer sentiment, just falling off the cliff. Investor uncertainty up significantly. GDP obviously contracting in the first quarter, it's a complicated stat because of the tariffs. Labour markets so far seem to be resilient, but given the reliance on consumer spending and the bearishness, as we already talked about the expectations around inflation going up, which puts the Fed in a very tight spot, making it more unlikely for them to loosen. I'm not optimistic. I think we will in the year if we don't end it in a recession, it'll be close to beginning one. I think it'll be very difficult for the Fed to lower. I don't know, I'm much more pessimistic that there's real dialogue that's going to lead to breakthrough trade agreements than others might seem. I mean, 145% on China is effectively an embargo on American-Chinese trade, and you hear more and more of these small and medium sized business voices cropping up and it seems like the ones who had some production lines in Vietnam are going to be able to maybe make it through, and a lot of other folks aren't. I'm much more pessimistic than markets are right now.

Ricky Mulvey: Has this pessimism, you've studied the history of markets, you've studied the history of economic policy. I know you've said you have a soft spot for Fed policy. Not a lot of people have a soft spot for the history of the Federal Reserve.

Chris Hughes: I'm still writing a dissertation to finish a PhD it's on Fed history. It's a particular thing I love.

Ricky Mulvey: You're deep in this and you're pessimistic. Has that affected the way that you personally invested at all?

Chris Hughes: I don't make active investing decisions. I have so many things going on in my life writing this book, doing my research, I got two young kids, and I have great investment advisors, so I give them a general direction and meet with them every now and then. But I'm not making active investment decisions. I definitely don't try to time the market. I think the people who do that and do that well are very good at what they do. I'm a little bit more of the Warren Buffett school park it in an index fund and see how it goes. Now, I've got access to things, so I'm not just hitting those investments, but dispositionally, that's how I approach it.

Ricky Mulvey: One of the things that would be an active investment that you've advocated for is a sovereign wealth fund. There's a lot of debate on that in the United States about whether or not we should do it. We've had it in the past with Jessie Jones and the RFC from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and that helped spur the housing boom that came after. I think there's a disconnect here that I want to talk to you about, which is when you see this getting set up, you say, basically, it should extend credit, make equity investments to private sector actors in pursuit of goals of basically making life better and building up industries that could help America. But you want to do that without the expectation of profit for government.

I think one of the key things when Jessie Jones was doing the RFC, even you admit, he had a sixth sense for markets. The RFC did, in fact, making a profit. I think when you set up a sovereign wealth fund, you could quickly get into trouble if there is no expectation for profit. If there is no end goal of how it's supposed to serve the American people. Like, a lot of funds, 529 that's supposed to pay for college, a 401K is supposed to pay for retirement. Even private equity investing funds have specific end dates. That was more of an AM radio call or take on that, but I can let you span for that. What is your vision of a sovereign wealth fund? Where's that money going?

Chris Hughes: Well, now, I like it. You said in the opening that there were pieces of the book that you were skeptical of, and so the more that we can talk about that, the better. A few things. First off, I think we have to separate out a sovereign wealth fund from a national investment bank. I'm very much supportive of the latter. I won't say skeptical, but less invested in there first. What's the difference? Well, I guess before I go into the difference, the Trump administration is very excited about the idea of a sovereign wealth fund. There'll be a report from the Commerce Secretary and the Treasury Secretary that's coming out in the next few weeks evaluating it as an idea, and it crops up in other contexts. One is in the very red state of Alaska where they have a sovereign wealth fund in the form of the Alaska Permanent Fund. This is an idea that spans political parties. A national investment bank, is a financial vehicle that makes investments in certain industries for the public good. That is in contrast to a sovereign wealth fund, which is an investment fund organized to make a profit. A sovereign wealth fund could look like the Alaska Permanent Fund. It could look like a pension fund. It could look like the big thing that Norway has, its own sovereign wealth fund, and those are just about using government dollars to make profits. A national investment bank, by contrast, is about saying, hey, we believe that housing markets are important and so we're going to invest in multifamily developer housing, understanding it'll be at a below-market rate. We're going to get our money back, but we're not optimizing for profit.

Again, this set of ideas is often popular with Republicans. George W Bush's administration and started the loan program office in the Energy Department to spur investment in energy innovation, the Obama administration expanded it, and then of course, the Biden administration did the same. But in this case, that's also more akin to a national investment bank, specifically with this mission of investing in energy innovation in the future. I do think a national Investment Bank would be a powerful idea. The vice president and others agree right before JD Vance was named as the vice presidential nominee last summer, he was on the cusp of introducing a bill for a national investment bank that would I think likely have focused on things like critical mineral production, national security, drones, etc. I as a left of center person would like to see also mandate for climate and other clean energies. But the point is there is a broad emergent view that the government can and should use its balance sheet to support and spur the industries that we need and want either for national security reasons or for other reasons for the public good.

Ricky Mulvey: We'll do a hypothetical. I'm going to sell my shares in Meta, and I'm going to give you that money for your national investment bank because I believe in you to allocate this, Chris. How are you allocating those dollars just as a rough draft for a national investment bank to maybe do the most good? How do you see that going?

Chris Hughes: I would focus on housing and climate, the two things that we've touched on a couple of places here. On housing, I think we've talked about it. I would do a housing construction fund specifically for the multifamily development and for modular. On climate, I think a lot of the structure of the Inflation Reduction Act, a lot of the investments were pointed in the right direction, but because there was no bank coordinating it, it was just all administered through the tax code can have a lot of money going into industries that might need it less than others. I would focus on those two industries and say the mandate is stabilize the cost of housing in the United States, if not to bring it down and spur clean energy production to combat climate change.

Ricky Mulvey: Let's get to the biggest market craft that I have lived through, and that was the public spending that came during COVID, $4 trillion. You mentioned that this was four times the size of Obama's stimulus. "Roughly half the funds were earmarked for relief, direct cash payments, support for small businesses and schools to navigate the pandemic, and the other half for public investment in infrastructure and climate." I think this will be one of the most controversial forms of market craft that's ever come. For a lot of this, especially for the other two trillion, it's tough for at least me to see how my life has gotten better from that. My energy bills have not gone down from the $2 trillion in public infrastructure and climate spending, at least here in Colorado. From a historian's lens, how do you think future historians of market crafters will look back on the effectiveness of all of that spending during COVID time?

Chris Hughes: Well, the COVID payments, I think there's a lot that adds up to that four trillion. The COVID payments that were the direct payments, I wouldn't call a market craft. That was more fiscal stimulus to prevent a recession. It's easy to forget the depth of the concern in the spring of 2020 when COVID was hitting. The Trump administration was very concerned about potential of a meaningful economic recession so were congressional Democrats so they teamed up to send out checks to help families who were in a very unstable place and also have the macroeconomic effects. I think that was the right thing. Of course, Trump did a second round later in the year, and then the Biden administration did a third round. Personally, I think that the third round was larger than it needed to be. I also think that when we all collectively hear, policymakers of both parties had a choice. Clearly, people tilted toward being more generous rather than less out of fear of not just a recession, but perhaps a long-expanded one similar to what we had after the great financial crisis. The economic data is really clear.

That recession was extremely short, jobs bounce back and then we moved into a period of meaningful growth. Of course, that later period overlapped with inflation which the best estimates suggest that about 2% of the 9% inflation was caused by excessive government spending and demand stimulus, and the bulk of that inflation was caused by supply chain bottlenecks and a shift in consumer preferences. What I'm trying to say here is that I think that those stimulus policies, while they were a bit too large, it was better to err on that side, and we would all be feeling it differently if that hadn't happened. Now, the market craft, however, that was the most important, I think was around semiconductors and around climate. Since we talked about climate, why don't we just take semiconductors as a moment. I think the Trump administration wanted to accelerate semiconductor manufacturing in the United States and at the end of Trump's first term, the undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs at State Department, Keith Krak was working with a lot of Republicans in Congress to figure out how we could craft the American semiconductor market, so it was much bigger, much more reliable and that built momentum. Biden and other folks increased the size, and then we had the Chips Bill and we have five of the world's advanced semiconductor manufacturers making those chips in the United States now, including the TSMC is making the cutting edge chips for the iPhone now in the United States, and it seems like it's even more efficient than it is in Taiwan. That was a broadly effective market craft, clear vision. We have a national security concern. We need to make semiconductors here at home. They appropriated $50 billion to an institution at the Commerce Department to get it done, and in a relatively short time, we're accomplishing that. I think there's a lot to learn from that as a success.

Ricky Mulvey: I should have separated out the question more. I think I was talking $2 trillion. The good result of that seems to be onshoring of semiconductor manufacturing, but there's still a lot of chata cheese in there where it's tough to see the results of in an average American.

Chris Hughes: The chips is 50 billion. The two trillion of fiscal stimulus in response to the recession was a separate number than the 50 billion that came years later for the Chips Act.

Ricky Mulvey: As an observer of tariffs and news right now, it's also difficult for me to see when I'm seeing these large companies making moves to build chip plants in the United States, it's difficult to tell how much of that is a response to tariffs or the Chips Act because they're like, you know what? These tariffs have led us to onshore the manufacturing of semiconductors. Chris, if I were the CEO of a semiconductor company, and thank goodness I'm not, I would be saying the exact same thing, even if the plans were in the works for years. Is that something you're observing as well?

Chris Hughes: Well, I think the third ingredient that you don't mention is geopolitical instability. There were dozens of warships circling Taiwan just weeks ago. Given how reliant the world has been on production on a single island off the coast of China, it is in your business interest putting tariffs and the Chips Act for that matter aside, to diversify your sources of production. Now, the Chips Act in particular, has made it more cost-efficient for these pretty large capital investments to happen. The general concern about decoupling has, I think, made this whole set of questions more urgent, and they're all contributing to the reshoring or onshoring of its production now.

Ricky Mulvey: We'll leave it there. Chris Hughes, appreciate your time and your insight. Happy to recommend the book Market Crafters to listeners of Motley Fool Money. If you've made it this far in the conversation, I think you'll like the book, as well. There's a lot there to dig into. Thanks for being here.

Chris Hughes: I appreciate it. Thank you.

Mary Long: As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. The Motley Fool only picks products that it would personally recommend to friends like you. For the Motley Fool Money team, I'm Mary Long. Thanks for listening. We'll see on Monday.

Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Mary Long has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Ricky Mulvey has positions in Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Adobe, Bitcoin, Costco Wholesale, D.R. Horton, and Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.