The housing crash not yet realized its full impact on budgets in the most vulnerable states. It's the banking crisis all over again – and it's time to stop ignoring it.
Meredith Whitney, the superstar analyst who famously forecast disaster for America's big banks before the credit crisis struck, is now warning about another looming threat: The wreckage from over-stretched state budgets.
Today, Whitney is releasing a 600-page report, colorfully entitled "The Tragedy of the Commons," that rates the financial condition of America's 15 largest states, measured by their GDP. Whitney claims that the study is the most comprehensive, in-depth analysis of the states' murky patterns of spending, revenues and benefits programs ever assembled by the government, foundations, or another research firm.
What Whitney found reminds her of the poor disclosure and arcane accounting rules that hid the fragile condition of the banks and monoline insurers that she unmasked. "The states represent the new systemic risk to financial markets," says Whitney. "I see a lack of transparency and an abundance of complacency on the part of investors and politicians, just as we saw before the banks imploded."
The study represents a departure for Whitney, whose boutique research firm specializes in providing its clients, including hedge funds, big institutions and banks, with proprietary research on the financial condition of consumers, ranging from projections on credit card defaults to regional employment trends. So why the mega-work on the states? "It's not that my clients requested it," says Whitney. "I was just so shocked by what I was seeing that I couldn't stop. Any long-term strategic plan needs to take account of the dangerous, mostly overlooked problems in the state finances." Whitney describes the reports as "her favorite child."
The title, "The Tragedy of the Commons," comes from a parable about greedy farmers who let their sheep gobble up all the grass in a pasture, leaving the land barren and unfarmable––reflecting the spending frenzy that promises to decimate the prospects for many of America's largest, and formerly most prosperous, states.
Bigger economies, lower ratings
In the report, Whitney rates the fifteen states on four criteria, their economy, fiscal health, housing, and taxes. For each category, she assigns a rating of one, two or three for best, neutral or negative. Only two states get positive overall ratings: Texas and Virginia. Eight are either negative, or rated neutral, with a negative bias. The rub is that those are typically the states with the biggest economies: California, Ohio, New Jersey, Michigan, and Illinois (all negative) and Florida, Georgia, and New York (neutral, negative bias).
The full rankings:
Worst states
1. California
2. New Jersey, Illinois, Ohio (tie)
3. Michigan
4. Georgia
5. New York
6. Florida
Best states
1. Texas
2. Virginia
3. Washington
4. North Carolina
Neutral states: Pennsylvania, Maryland, Massachusetts
....
The problem is that the states that benefited disproportionately from housing are generally the biggest economies, so their woes have become a deadweight on overall economic growth. "Other states such as Nebraska, even with larger ones like Texas, aren't large enough in total to offset the weak growth in the states that depended on real estate," says Whitney.
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