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Apr 28, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
XXX, April 28, 2017 at 06:29 PMSanjait,"Hillary Clinton, following a long tradition of mainstream Democrats, had a grab bag of proposals that, if enacted, would collectively make a huge difference in the lives of working people. "
I think you are wrong here.
Hillary was/is a neoliberal, and as such is hostile to the interests of working people and middle class in general. Like most neoliberals she is a Machiavellian elitist. Her election promises are pure demagogy, much like Trump or Obama election promised (immortalized in the slogan "change we can believe in" which now became the synonym of election fraud)
Also she was/is hell-bent of preserving/expanding the US neoliberal empire and the wars for neoliberal dominance (in ME mainly for the benefit of Israel and Saudis). War are pretty costly ventures and they are financed at the expense of working class and lower middle class, never at the expense of "fat cats" from Wall Street.
All-in-all I think the role of POTUS is greatly "misunderestimated" in your line of thinking. As we can see differences between Trump and Hillary in foreign policy are marginal. Why are you assuming that the differences in domestic economic policies would be greater ?
In reality there are other powerful factors in play that diminish the importance of POTUS:
- The US Presidential Elections are no longer an instrument for change. They are completely corrupted and are mostly of "bread and circuses" type of events, where two gladiators preselected by financial elite fight for the coveted position, using all kind of dirty tricks for US public entertainment.
- While the appearance of democracy remains, in reality the current system represents that rule of "deep state". In the classic form of "National security state". In the National Security State, the US people no longer have the any chances to change the policies.
- Political emasculation of US voters has led to frustration, depression and rage. It feeds radical right movement including neo-fascists, which embrace more extreme remedies to the current problems because they correctly feel that the traditional parties no longer represent the will of the people.
- Insulated and partially degenerated US elite have grown more obtuse and is essentially a hostage for neocons. They chose to ignore the seething anger that lies just below the surface of brainwashed Us electorate.
- The "American Dream" is officially dead. People at a and below lower middle class level see little hope for themselves, their children or the country. The chasm between top 1% (or let's say top 20%) and the rest continues to fuel populist anger.
- While Trump proved to be "yet another turncoat" like Barak Obama (who just got his first silver coin in the form of the $400K one hour speech) Trump's election signify a broad rejection of the country's neoliberal elite, including neoliberal MSM, neocon foreign policy as well as neoliberal economic system (and first of all neoliberal globalization).
- The country foreign policy remains hijacked by neocons (this time in the form of fiends of Paul Wolfowitz among the military brass appointed by Trump to top positions in his administration) and that might spell major conflict or even WWIII.
The level of subservience to neocon agenda in Trump administration might well be higher then in previous administration. And "make America first" was already transformed into "full spectrum dominance" == "America uber alles". http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/deutschland-uber-alles-and-america-first-in-song
8. We can now talk about the USA as "neocon occupied country" (NOC), because the neocons policies contradict the USA national interests and put heavy burden of taxpayers, especially in lower income categories. Due to neglect in maintaining infrastructure, in some areas the USA already looks like third word country. Still we finance Israel and several other countries to the tune of $40 billion dollars in military aid alone (that that's in case of Israel just the tip of the iceberg; real figure is probably double of that) https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33222.pdf
Since Bill Clinton POTUS is more or less a marionette of financial oligarchy (which Obama -- as a person without the past (or with a very fuzzy past) - symbolizes all too well).
Dec 13, 2017 | www.unz.com
Introduction
The American welfare state was created in 1935 and continued to develop through 1973. Since then, over a prolonged period, the capitalist class has been steadily dismantling the entire welfare state.
Between the mid 1970's to the present (2017) labor laws, welfare rights and benefits and the construction of and subsidies for affordable housing have been gutted. ' Workfare' (under President 'Bill' Clinton) ended welfare for the poor and displaced workers. Meanwhile the shift to regressive taxation and the steadily declining real wages have increased corporate profits to an astronomical degree.
What started as incremental reversals during the 1990's under Clinton has snowballed over the last two decades decimating welfare legislation and institutions.
The earlier welfare 'reforms' and the current anti-welfare legislation and austerity practices have been accompanied by a series of endless imperial wars, especially in the Middle East.
In the 1940's through the 1960's, world and regional wars (Korea and Indo-China) were combined with significant welfare program – a form of ' social imperialism' , which 'buy off' the working class while expanding the empire. However, recent decades are characterized by multiple regional wars and the reduction or elimination of welfare programs – and a massive growth in poverty, domestic insecurity and poor health.
New Deals and Big Wars
The 1930's witnessed the advent of social legislation and action, which laid the foundations of what is called the ' modern welfare state' .
Labor unions were organized as working class strikes and progressive legislation facilitated trade union organization, elections, collective bargaining rights and a steady increase in union membership. Improved work conditions, rising wages, pension plans and benefits, employer or union-provided health care and protective legislation improved the standard of living for the working class and provided for 2 generations of upward mobility.
Social Security legislation was approved along with workers' compensation and the forty-hour workweek. Jobs were created through federal programs (WPA, CCC, etc.). Protectionist legislation facilitated the growth of domestic markets for US manufacturers. Workplace shop steward councils organized 'on the spot' job action to protect safe working conditions.
World War II led to full employment and increases in union membership, as well as legislation restricting workers' collective bargaining rights and enforcing wage freezes. Hundreds of thousands of Americans found jobs in the war economy but a huge number were also killed or wounded in the war.
The post-war period witnessed a contradictory process: wages and salaries increased while legislation curtailed union rights via the Taft Hartley Act and the McCarthyist purge of leftwing trade union activists. So-called ' right to work' laws effectively outlawed unionization mostly in southern states, which drove industries to relocate to the anti-union states.
Welfare reforms, in the form of the GI bill, provided educational opportunities for working class and rural veterans, while federal-subsidized low interest mortgages encourage home-ownership, especially for veterans.
The New Deal created concrete improvements but did not consolidate labor influence at any level. Capitalists and management still retained control over capital, the workplace and plant location of production.
Trade union officials signed pacts with capital: higher pay for the workers and greater control of the workplace for the bosses. Trade union officials joined management in repressing rank and file movements seeking to control technological changes by reducing hours (" thirty hours work for forty hours pay "). Dissident local unions were seized and gutted by the trade union bosses – sometimes through violence.
Trade union activists, community organizers for rent control and other grassroots movements lost both the capacity and the will to advance toward large-scale structural changes of US capitalism. Living standards improved for a few decades but the capitalist class consolidated strategic control over labor relations. While unionized workers' incomes, increased, inequalities, especially in the non-union sectors began to grow. With the end of the GI bill, veterans' access to high-quality subsidized education declined.
While a new wave of social welfare legislation and programs began in the 1960's and early 1970's it was no longer a result of a mass trade union or workers' "class struggle". Moreover, trade union collaboration with the capitalist regional war policies led to the killing and maiming of hundreds of thousands of workers in two wars – the Korean and Vietnamese wars.
Much of social legislation resulted from the civil and welfare rights movements. While specific programs were helpful, none of them addressed structural racism and poverty.
The Last Wave of Social Welfarism
The 1960'a witnessed the greatest racial war in modern US history: Mass movements in the South and North rocked state and federal governments, while advancing the cause of civil, social and political rights. Millions of black citizens, joined by white activists and, in many cases, led by African American Viet Nam War veterans, confronted the state. At the same time, millions of students and young workers, threatened by military conscription, challenged the military and social order.
Energized by mass movements, a new wave of social welfare legislation was launched by the federal government to pacify mass opposition among blacks, students, community organizers and middle class Americans. Despite this mass popular movement, the union bosses at the AFL-CIO openly supported the war, police repression and the military, or at best, were passive impotent spectators of the drama unfolding in the nation's streets. Dissident union members and activists were the exception, as many had multiple identities to represent: African American, Hispanic, draft resisters, etc.
Under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, Medicare, Medicaid, OSHA, the EPA and multiple poverty programs were implemented. A national health program, expanding Medicare for all Americans, was introduced by President Nixon and sabotaged by the Kennedy Democrats and the AFL-CIO. Overall, social and economic inequalities diminished during this period.
The Vietnam War ended in defeat for the American militarist empire. This coincided with the beginning of the end of social welfare as we knew it – as the bill for militarism placed even greater demands on the public treasury.
With the election of President Carter, social welfare in the US began its long decline. The next series of regional wars were accompanied by even greater attacks on welfare via the " Volker Plan " – freezing workers' wages as a means to combat inflation.
Guns without butter' became the legislative policy of the Carter and Reagan Administrations. The welfare programs were based on politically fragile foundations.
The Debacle of Welfarism
Private sector trade union membership declined from a post-world war peak of 30% falling to 12% in the 1990's. Today it has sunk to 7%. Capitalists embarked on a massive program of closing thousands of factories in the unionized North which were then relocated to the non-unionized low wage southern states and then overseas to Mexico and Asia. Millions of stable jobs disappeared.
Following the election of 'Jimmy Carter', neither Democratic nor Republican Presidents felt any need to support labor organizations. On the contrary, they facilitated contracts dictated by management, which reduced wages, job security, benefits and social welfare.
The anti-labor offensive from the ' Oval Office' intensified under President Reagan with his direct intervention firing tens of thousands of striking air controllers and arresting union leaders. Under Presidents Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush and William Clinton cost of living adjustments failed to keep up with prices of vital goods and services. Health care inflation was astronomical. Financial deregulation led to the subordination of American industry to finance and the Wall Street banks. De-industrialization, capital flight and massive tax evasion reduced labor's share of national income.
The capitalist class followed a trajectory of decline, recovery and ascendance. Moreover, during the earlier world depression, at the height of labor mobilization and organization, the capitalist class never faced any significant political threat over its control of the commanding heights of the economy.
The ' New Deal' was, at best, a de facto ' historical compromise' between the capitalist class and the labor unions, mediated by the Democratic Party elite. It was a temporary pact in which the unions secured legal recognition while the capitalists retained their executive prerogatives.
The Second World War secured the economic recovery for capital and subordinated labor through a federally mandated no strike production agreement. There were a few notable exceptions: The coal miners' union organized strikes in strategic sectors and some leftist leaders and organizers encouraged slow-downs, work to rule and other in-plant actions when employers ran roughshod with special brutality over the workers. The recovery of capital was the prelude to a post-war offensive against independent labor-based political organizations. The quality of labor organization declined even as the quantity of trade union membership increased.
Labor union officials consolidated internal control in collaboration with the capitalist elite. Capitalist class-labor official collaboration was extended overseas with strategic consequences.
The post-war corporate alliance between the state and capital led to a global offensive – the replacement of European-Japanese colonial control and exploitation by US business and bankers. Imperialism was later 're-branded' as ' globalization' . It pried open markets, secured cheap docile labor and pillaged resources for US manufacturers and importers.
US labor unions played a major role by sabotaging militant unions abroad in cooperation with the US security apparatus: They worked to coopt and bribe nationalist and leftist labor leaders and supported police-state regime repression and assassination of recalcitrant militants.
' Hand in bloody glove' with the US Empire, the American trade unions planted the seeds of their own destruction at home. The local capitalists in newly emerging independent nations established industries and supply chains in cooperation with US manufacturers. Attracted to these sources of low-wage, violently repressed workers, US capitalists subsequently relocated their factories overseas and turned their backs on labor at home.
Labor union officials had laid the groundwork for the demise of stable jobs and social benefits for American workers. Their collaboration increased the rate of capitalist profit and overall power in the political system. Their complicity in the brutal purges of militants, activists and leftist union members and leaders at home and abroad put an end to labor's capacity to sustain and expand the welfare state.
Trade unions in the US did not use their collaboration with empire in its bloody regional wars to win social benefits for the rank and file workers. The time of social-imperialism, where workers within the empire benefited from imperialism's pillage, was over. Gains in social welfare henceforth could result only from mass struggles led by the urban poor, especially Afro-Americans, community-based working poor and militant youth organizers.
The last significant social welfare reforms were implemented in the early 1970's – coinciding with the end of the Vietnam War (and victory for the Vietnamese people) and ended with the absorption of the urban and anti-war movements into the Democratic Party.
Henceforward the US corporate state advanced through the overseas expansion of the multi-national corporations and via large-scale, non-unionized production at home.
The technological changes of this period did not benefit labor. The belief, common in the 1950's, that science and technology would increase leisure, decrease work and improve living standards for the working class, was shattered. Instead technological changes displaced well-paid industrial labor while increasing the number of mind-numbing, poorly paid, and politically impotent jobs in the so-called 'service sector' – a rapidly growing section of unorganized and vulnerable workers – especially including women and minorities.
Labor union membership declined precipitously. The demise of the USSR and China's turn to capitalism had a dual effect: It eliminated collectivist (socialist) pressure for social welfare and opened their labor markets with cheap, disciplined workers for foreign manufacturers. Labor as a political force disappeared on every count. The US Federal Reserve and President 'Bill' Clinton deregulated financial capital leading to a frenzy of speculation. Congress wrote laws, which permitted overseas tax evasion – especially in Caribbean tax havens. Regional free-trade agreements, like NAFTA, spurred the relocation of jobs abroad. De-industrialization accompanied the decline of wages, living standards and social benefits for millions of American workers.
The New Abolitionists: Trillionaires
The New Deal, the Great Society, trade unions, and the anti-war and urban movements were in retreat and primed for abolition.
Wars without welfare (or guns without butter) replaced earlier 'social imperialism' with a huge growth of poverty and homelessness. Domestic labor was now exploited to finance overseas wars not vice versa. The fruits of imperial plunder were not shared.
As the working and middle classes drifted downward, they were used up, abandoned and deceived on all sides – especially by the Democratic Party. They elected militarists and demagogues as their new presidents.
President 'Bill' Clinton ravaged Russia, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Somalia and liberated Wall Street. His regime gave birth to the prototype billionaire swindlers: Michael Milken and Bernard 'Bernie' Madoff.
Clinton converted welfare into cheap labor 'workfare', exploiting the poorest and most vulnerable and condemning the next generations to grinding poverty. Under Clinton the prison population of mostly African Americans expanded and the breakup of families ravaged the urban communities.
Provoked by an act of terrorism (9/11) President G.W. Bush Jr. launched the 'endless' wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and deepened the police state (Patriot Act). Wages for American workers and profits for American capitalist moved in opposite directions.
The Great Financial Crash of 2008-2011 shook the paper economy to its roots and led to the greatest shakedown of any national treasury in history directed by the First Black American President. Trillions of public wealth were funneled into the criminal banks on Wall Street – which were ' just too big to fail .' Millions of American workers and homeowners, however, were ' just too small to matter' .
The Age of Demagogues
President Obama transferred 2 trillion dollars to the ten biggest bankers and swindlers on Wall Street, and another trillion to the Pentagon to pursue the Democrats version of foreign policy: from Bush's two overseas wars to Obama's seven.
Obama's electoral 'donor-owners' stashed away two trillion dollars in overseas tax havens and looked forward to global free trade pacts – pushed by the eloquent African American President.
Obama was elected to two terms. His liberal Democratic Party supporters swooned over his peace and justice rhetoric while swallowing his militarist escalation into seven overseas wars as well as the foreclosure of two million American householders. Obama completely failed to honor his campaign promise to reduce wage inequality between black and white wage earners while he continued to moralize to black families about ' values' .
Obama's war against Libya led to the killing and displacement of millions of black Libyans and workers from Sub-Saharan Africa. The smiling Nobel Peace Prize President created more desperate refugees than any previous US head of state – including millions of Africans flooding Europe.
'Obamacare' , his imitation of an earlier Republican governor's health plan, was formulated by the private corporate health industry (private insurance, Big Pharma and the for-profit hospitals), to mandate enrollment and ensure triple digit profits with double digit increases in premiums. By the 2016 Presidential elections, ' Obama-care' was opposed by a 45%-43% margin of the American people. Obama's propagandists could not show any improvement of life expectancy or decrease in infant and maternal mortality as a result of his 'health care reform'. Indeed the opposite occurred among the marginalized working class in the old 'rust belt' and in the rural areas. This failure to show any significant health improvement for the masses of Americans is in stark contrast to LBJ's Medicare program of the 1960's, which continues to receive massive popular support.
Forty-years of anti welfare legislation and pro-business regimes paved the golden road for the election of Donald Trump
Trump and the Republicans are focusing on the tattered remnants of the social welfare system: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. The remains of FDR's New Deal and LBJ's Great Society -- are on the chopping block.
The moribund (but well-paid) labor leadership has been notable by its absence in the ensuing collapse of the social welfare state. The liberal left Democrats embraced the platitudinous Obama/Clinton team as the 'Great Society's' gravediggers, while wailing at Trump's allies for shoving the corpse of welfare state into its grave.
Conclusion
Over the past forty years the working class and the rump of what was once referred to as the ' labor movement' has contributed to the dismantling of the social welfare state, voting for ' strike-breaker' Reagan, ' workfare' Clinton, ' Wall Street crash' Bush, ' Wall Street savior' Obama and ' Trickle-down' Trump.
Gone are the days when social welfare and profitable wars raised US living standards and transformed American trade unions into an appendage of the Democratic Party and a handmaiden of Empire. The Democratic Party rescued capitalism from its collapse in the Great Depression, incorporated labor into the war economy and the post- colonial global empire, and resurrected Wall Street from the 'Great Financial Meltdown' of the 21 st century.
The war economy no longer fuels social welfare. The military-industrial complex has found new partners on Wall Street and among the globalized multi-national corporations. Profits rise while wages fall. Low paying compulsive labor (workfare) lopped off state transfers to the poor. Technology – IT, robotics, artificial intelligence and electronic gadgets – has created the most class polarized social system in history. The first trillionaire and multi-billionaire tax evaders rose on the backs of a miserable standing army of tens of millions of low-wage workers, stripped of rights and representation. State subsidies eliminate virtually all risk to capital. The end of social welfare coerced labor (including young mother with children) to seek insecure low-income employment while slashing education and health – cementing the feet of generations into poverty. Regional wars abroad have depleted the Treasury and robbed the country of productive investment. Economic imperialism exports profits, reversing the historic relation of the past.
Labor is left without compass or direction; it flails in all directions and falls deeper in the web of deception and demagogy. To escape from Reagan and the strike breakers, labor embraced the cheap-labor predator Clinton; black and white workers united to elect Obama who expelled millions of immigrant workers, pursued 7 wars, abandoned black workers and enriched the already filthy rich. Deception and demagogy of the labor-
Issac , December 11, 2017 at 11:01 pm GMT
"The military-industrial complex has found new partners on Wall Street and among the globalized multi-national corporations."whyamihere , December 12, 2017 at 4:24 am GMT"The collaboration of liberals and unions in promoting endless wars opened the door to Trump's mirage of a stateless, tax-less, ruling class."
A mirage so real, it even has you convinced.
If the welfare state in America was abolished, major American cities would burn to the ground. Anarchy would ensue, it would be magnitudes bigger than anything that happened in Ferguson or Baltimore. It would likely be simultaneous.Disordered , December 13, 2017 at 8:41 am GMTI think that's one of the only situations where preppers would actually live out what they've been prepping for (except for a natural disaster).
I've been thinking about this a little over the past few years after seeing the race riots. What exactly is the line between our society being civilized and breaking out into chaos. It's probably a lot thinner than most people think.
I don't know who said it but someone long ago said something along the lines of, "Democracy can only work until the people figure out they can vote for themselves generous benefits from the public treasury." We are definitely in this situation today. I wonder how long it can last.
While I agree with Petras's intent (notwithstanding several exaggerations and unnecessary conflations with, for example, racism), I don't agree so much with the method he proposes. I don't mind welfare and unions to a certain extent, but they are not going to save us unless there is full employment and large corporations that can afford to pay an all-union workforce. That happened during WW2, as only wartime demand and those pesky wage freezes solved the Depression, regardless of all the public works programs; while the postwar era benefited from the US becoming the world's creditor, meaning that capital could expand while labor participation did as well.Wally , Website December 13, 2017 at 8:57 am GMTFrom then on, it is quite hard to achieve the same success after outsourcing and mechanization have happened all over the world. Both of these phenomena not only create displaced workers, but also displaced industries, meaning that it makes more sense to develop individual workfare (and even then, do it well, not the shoddy way it is done now) rather than giving away checks that probably will not be cashed for entrepreneurial purposes, and rather than giving away money to corrupt unions who depend on trusts to be able to pay for their benefits, while raising the cost of hiring that only encourages more outsourcing.
The amount of welfare given is not necessarily the main problem, the problem is doing it right for the people who truly need it, and efficiently – that is, with the least amount of waste lost between the chain of distribution, which should reach intended targets and not moochers.
Which inevitably means a sound tax system that targets unearned wealth and (to a lesser degree) foreign competition instead of national production, coupled with strict, yet devolved and simple government processes that benefit both business and individuals tired of bureaucracy, while keeping budgets balanced. Best of both worlds, and no military-industrial complex needed to drive up demand.
"President Obama transferred 2 trillion dollars to the ten biggest bankers and swindlers on Wall Street " That's twice the amount that Bush gave them.jacques sheete , December 13, 2017 at 10:52 am GMTDen Lille Abe , December 13, 2017 at 11:09 am GMTThe American welfare state was created in 1935 and continued to develop through 1973. Since then, over a prolonged period, the capitalist class has been steadily dismantling the entire welfare state.
Wrong wrong wrong.
Corporations [now] are welfare recipients and the bigger they are, the more handouts they suck up, and welfare for them started before 1935. In fact, it started in America before there was a USA. I do not have time to elaborate, but what were the various companies such as the British East India Company and the Dutch West India Companies but state pampered, welfare based entities? ~200 years ago, Herbert Spencer, if memory serves, pointed out that the British East India Company couldn't make a profit even with all the special, government granted favors showered upon it.
Corporations not only continuously seek monopolies (with the aid and sanction of the state) but they steadily fine tune the welfare state for their benefit. In fact, in reality, welfare for prols and peasants wouldn't exist if it didn't act as a money conduit and ultimate profit center for the big money grubbers.
Well, the author kind of nails it. I remember from my childhood in the 50-60 ties in Scandinavia that the US was the ultimate goal in welfare. The country where you could make a good living with your two hands, get you kids to UNI, have a house, a telly ECT. It was not consumerism, it was the American dream, a chicken in every pot; we chewed imported American gum and dreamed.wayfarer , December 13, 2017 at 1:01 pm GMTIn the 70-80 ties Scandinavia had a tremendous social and economic growth, EQUALLY distributed, an immense leap forward. In the middle of the 80 ties we were equal to the US in standards of living.
Since we have not looked at the US, unless in pity, as we have seen the decline of the general income, social wealth fall way behind our own.
The average US workers income has not increased since 90 figures adjusted for inflation. The Scandinavian workers income in the same period has almost quadrupled. And so has our societies.The article is dismal reading, and evidence of the failings of the "unregulated" society, where the anything goes as long as you are wealthy.
Anonymous , Disclaimer December 13, 2017 at 1:40 pm GMTBetween the mid 1970's to the present (2017) labor laws, welfare rights and benefits and the construction of and subsidies for affordable housing have been gutted. 'Workfare' (under President 'Bill' Clinton) ended welfare for the poor and displaced workers. Meanwhile the shift to regressive taxation and the steadily declining real wages have increased corporate profits to an astronomical degree.
source: http://www.unz.com/jpetras/rise-and-decline-of-the-welfare-state/
What does Hollywood "elite" JAP and wannabe hack-stand-up-comic Sarah Silverman think about the class struggle and problems facing destitute Americans? "Qu'ils mangent de la bagels!", source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake
... ... ...
@Greg FraserAnonymous , Disclaimer December 13, 2017 at 2:43 pm GMTLike the Pentagon. Americans still don't readily call this welfare, but they will eventually. Defense profiteers are unions in a sense, you're either in their club Or you're in the service industry that surrounds it.
As other commenters have pointed out, it's Petras curious choice of words that sometimes don't make too much sense. We can probably blame the maleable English language for that, but here it's too obvious. If you don't define a union, people might assume you're only talking about a bunch of meat cutters at Safeway.animalogic , December 13, 2017 at 2:57 pm GMTThe welfare state is alive and well for corporate America. Unions are still here – but they are defined by access and secrecy, you're either in the club or not.
The war on unions was successful first by co-option but mostly by the media. But what kind of analysis leaves out the role of the media in the American transformation? The success is mind blowing.
America has barely literate (white) middle aged males trained to spout incoherent Calvinistic weirdness: unabased hatred for the poor (or whoever they're told to hate) and a glorification of hedge fund managers as they get laid off, fired and foreclosed on, with a side of opiates.
There is hardly anything more tragic then seeing a web filled with progressives (management consultants) dedicated to disempowering, disabling and deligitimizing victims by claiming they are victims of biology, disease or a lack of an education rather than a system that issues violence while portending (with the best media money can buy) that they claim the higher ground.
@WallyReg Cćsar , December 13, 2017 at 3:08 pm GMT""Democracy can only work until the people figure out they can vote for themselves generous benefits from the public treasury." We are definitely in this situation today."
Quite right: the 0.01% have worked it out & US democracy is a Theatre for the masses.
Reg Cćsar , December 13, 2017 at 3:20 pm GMTThey elected militarists and demagogues as their new presidents.
Wilson and FDR were much more militarist and demagogic than those that followed.
@whyamiherephil , December 13, 2017 at 4:48 pm GMTI don't know who said it but someone long ago said something along the lines of, "Democracy can only work until the people figure out they can vote for themselves generous benefits from the public treasury."
Some French aristocrat put it as, once the gates to the treasury have been breached, they can only be closed again with gunpowder. Anyone recognize the author?
The author doesn't get it. What we have now IS the welfare state in an intensely diverse society. We have more transfer spending than ever before and Obamacare represents another huge entitlement.HallParvey , December 13, 2017 at 4:57 pm GMTIntellectuals continue to fantasize about the US becoming a Big Sweden, but Sweden has only been successful insofar as it has been a modest nation-state populated by ethnic Swedes. Intense diversity in a huge country with only the remnants of federalism results in massive non-consensual decision-making, fragmentation, increased inequality, and corruption.
@AnonymousAnonymous , Disclaimer December 13, 2017 at 4:57 pm GMTThe welfare state is alive and well for corporate America. Unions are still here – but they are defined by access and secrecy, you're either in the club or not.
They are largely defined as Doctors, Lawyers, and University Professors who teach the first two. Of course they are not called unions. Access is via credentialing and licensing. Good Day
@Linda GreenAnonymous , Disclaimer December 13, 2017 at 5:54 pm GMTBernie Sanders, speaking on behalf of the MIC's welfare bird: "It is the airplane of the United States Air Force, Navy, and of NATO."
Elizabeth Warren, referring to Mossad's Estes Rockets: "The Israeli military has the right to attack Palestinian hospitals and schools in self defense"
Barack Obama, yukking it up with pop stars: "Two words for you: predator drones. You will never see it coming."
It's not the agitprop that confuses the sheep, it's whose blowhole it's coming out of (labled D or R for convenience) that gets them to bare their teeth and speak of poo.
@HallParveyLogan , December 13, 2017 at 9:10 pm GMTWhat came first, the credentialing or the idea that it is a necessary part of education? It certainly isn't an accurate indication of what people know or their general intelligence – although that myth has flourished. Good afternoon.
@RealistLogan , December 13, 2017 at 9:19 pm GMTFor an interesting projection of what might happen in total civilizational collapse, I recommend the Dies the Fire series of novels by SM Stirling.
It has a science-fictiony setup in that all high-energy system (gunpowder, electricity, explosives, internal combustion, even high-energy steam engines) suddenly stop working. But I think it does a good job of extrapolating what would happen if suddenly the cities did not have food, water, power, etc.
Spoiler alert: It ain't pretty. Those who dream of a world without guns have not really thought it through.
@philIt has been pointed out repeatedly that Sweden does very well relative to the USA. It has also been noted that people of Swedish ancestry in the USA do pretty well also. In fact considerably better than Swedes in Sweden
Dec 12, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
...Neoliberal epidemics are particular pathways of embodiment. From Ted Schrecker and Clare Bambra in The Conversation :
In our new book , we draw on an extensive body of scientific literature to assess the health effects of three decades of neoliberal policies. Focusing on the social determinants of health -- the conditions of life and work that make it relatively easy for some people to lead long and healthy lives, while it is all but impossible for others -- we show that there are four interconnected neoliberal epidemics: austerity, obesity, stress, and inequality. They are neoliberal because they are associated with or worsened by neoliberal policies. They are epidemics because they are observable on such an international scale and have been transmitted so quickly across time and space that if they were biological contagions they would be seen as of epidemic proportions.
(The Case-Deaton study provides an obvious fifth: Deaths of despair. There are doubtless others.) Case in point for one of the unluckier members of the 90%:
On the morning of 25 August 2014 a young New Jersey woman, Maria Fernandes, died from inhaling gasoline fumes as she slept in her 13-year-old car. She often slept in the car while shuttling between her three, low-wage jobs in food service; she kept a can of gasoline in the car because she often slept with the engine running, and was worried about running out of gasoline. Apparently, the can accidentally tipped over and the vapours from spilled gasoline cost her life. Ms Fernandes was one of the more obvious casualties of the zero-hours culture of stress and insecurity that pervades the contemporary labour market under neoliberalism.
And Schrecker and Bambra conclude:
Neoliberalism operates through labor markets to undermine health not only by way of the financial consequences of unemployment, inadequate employment, or low wages, as important as these are, but also through chronic exposure to stress that 'gets under your skin' by way of multiple mechanisms. Quite simply, the effects of chronic insecurity wear people out over the life course in biologically measurable ways .
... ... ...
Oh, and "beyond class" because for social beings embodiment involves "social production; social consumption; and social reproduction." In the most reductive definition of class -- the one I used in my crude 1% + 10% + 90% formulation -- class is determined by wage work (or not), hence is a part of production (of capital), not social consumption (eating, etc.) or social reproduction (children, families, household work ). So, even if class in our political economy is the driver, it's not everything.
nonclassical , December 11, 2017 at 8:30 pm
Amfortas the Hippie , December 11, 2017 at 4:20 pmL.S. reminiscent of Ernst Becker's, "The Structure of Evil" – "Escape from Evil"? (..not to indicate good vs. evil dichotomy) A great amount of perspective must be agreed upon to achieve "change" intoned. Divide and conquer are complicit, as noted .otherwise (and as indicated by U.S. economic history) change arrives only when all have lost all and can therefore agree begin again.
There is however, Naomi Klein perspective, "Shock Doctrine", whereby influence contributes to destabilization, plan in hand leading to agenda driven ("neoliberal"=market fundamentalism) outcome, not at all spontaneous in nature:
"Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that "the market" delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.
Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve."
Rosario , December 11, 2017 at 10:55 pmWell done, as usual.
On Case-Deason: Sounds like home. I keep the scanner on(local news) ems and fire only since 2006(sheriff got a homeland security grant). The incidence of suicide, overdose and "intoxication psychosis" are markedly increased in the last 10+ years out here in the wilderness(5K folks in whole county, last I looked). Our local economy went into near depression after the late 90's farm bill killed the peanut program then 911 meant no hunting season that year(and it's been noticeably less busy ever since) then drought and the real estate crash(we had 30 some realtors at peak..old family land being sold off, mostly). So the local Bourgeoisie have had less money to spend, which "trickles down" onto the rest of us.:less construction, less eating out even at the cheap places, less buying of gas, and on and on means fewer employees are needed, thus fewer jobs. To boot, there is a habit among many employers out here of not paying attention to labor laws(it is Texas ) the last minwage rise took 2 years to filter out here, and one must scrutinize one's pay stub to ensure that the boss isn't getting squirrelly with overtime and witholding.
Geography plays into all this, too 100 miles to any largish city.... ... ...
Lambert Strether Post author , December 11, 2017 at 11:20 pmI'm not well versed in Foucault or Lacan but I've read some of both and in reading between the lines of their writing (the phantom philosophy?) I saw a very different message than that often delivered by post-modern theorists.
As opposed to being champions of "self-actualization/identity" and "absolute relativism", I always got the impression that they were both offering stark warnings about diving too deeply into the self, vis-a-vis, identity. As if, they both understood the terrifying world that it could/would create, devoid of common cause, community, and ultimately empathy. A world where "we" are not possible because we have all become "I".
Considering what both their philosophies claimed, if identity is a lie, and the subject is always generated relative to the other, then how the hell can there be any security or well being in self-actualization? It is like trying to hit a target that does not exist.
All potentially oppressive cultural categorizations are examples of this (black, latino, gay, trans, etc.). If the identity is a moving target, both to the oppressor and the oppressed, then how can it ever be a singular source of political action? You can't hit what isn't there. This is not to say that these groups (in whatever determined category) are not oppressed, just that formulating political action based strictly on the identity (often as an essential category) is impossible because it does not actually exist materially. It is an amalgamation of subjects who's subjectivity is always relative to some other whether ally or oppressor. Only the manifestations of oppression on bodies (as brought up in Lambert's post) can be utilized as metrics for political action.
... ... ...
oaf , December 12, 2017 at 7:11 amI thought of a couple of other advantages of the "embodiment" paradigm:
Better Framing . Wonks like Yglesias love to mock working class concerns as "economic anxiety," which is at once belittling (it's all about f-e-e-e-lings *) and disempowering (solutions are individual, like therapy or drugs). Embodiment by contrast insists that neoliberalism (the neoliberal labor market (class warfare)) has real, material, physiological effects that can be measured and tracked, as with any epidemic.
... ... ...
"we have measurable health outcomes from political choices" So True!!!
Thank you for posting this.
Dec 14, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
December 14, 2017 by Yves Smith Yves here. Notice that Costa Rica is served up as an example in this article. Way back in 1997, American Express had designated Costa Rica as one of the countries it identified as sufficiently high income so as to be a target for a local currency card offered via a franchise agreement with a domestic institution (often but not always a bank). 20 years later, the Switzerland of Central America still has limited Internet connectivity, yet is precisely the sort of place that tech titans like Google would like to dominate.
The initiative described in this article reminds me of how the World Bank pushed hard for emerging economies to develop capital markets, for the greater good of America's investment bankers.
By Burcu Kilic, an expert on legal, economic and political issues. Originally published at openDemocracy
Today, the big tech race is for data extractivism from those yet to be 'connected' in the world – tech companies will use all their power to achieve a global regime in which small nations cannot regulate either data extraction or localisation.
n a few weeks' time, trade ministers from 164 countries will gather in Buenos Aires for the 11th World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference (MC11). US President Donald Trump in November issued fresh accusations of unfair treatment towards the US by WTO members , making it virtually impossible for trade ministers to leave the table with any agreement in substantial areas.
To avoid a 'failure ministerial," some countries see the solution as pushing governments to open a mandate to start conversations that might lead to a negotiation on binding rules for e-commerce and a declaration of the gathering as the "digital ministerial". Argentina's MC11 chair, Susana Malcorra, is actively pushing for member states to embrace e-commerce at the WTO, claiming that it is necessary to " bridge the gap between the haves and have-nots ".
It is not very clear what kind of gaps Malcorra is trying to bridge. It surely isn't the "connectivity gap" or "digital divide" that is growing between developed and developing countries, seriously impeding digital learning and knowledge in developing countries. In fact, half of humanity is not even connected to the internet, let alone positioned to develop competitive markets or bargain at a multilateral level. Negotiating binding e-commerce rules at the WTO would only widen that gap.
Dangerously, the "South Vision" of digital trade in the global trade arena is being shaped by a recent alliance of governments and well-known tech-sector lobbyists, in a group called 'Friends of E-Commerce for Development' (FED), including Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Uruguay, and, most recently, China. FED claims that e-commerce is a tool to drive growth, narrow the digital divide, and generate digital solutions for developing and least developed countries.
However, none of the countries in the group (apart from China) is leading or even remotely ready to be in a position to negotiate and push for binding rules on digital trade that will be favorable to them, as their economies are still far away from the technology revolution. For instance, it is perplexing that one of the most fervent defenders of FED's position is Costa Rica. The country's economy is based on the export of bananas, coffee, tropical fruits, and low-tech medical instruments, and almost half of its population is offline . Most of the countries in FED are far from being powerful enough to shift negotiations in favor of small players.
U.S.-based tech giants and Chinese Alibaba – so-called GAFA-A – dominate, by far, the future of the digital playing field, including issues such as identification and digital payments, connectivity, and the next generation of logistics solutions. In fact, there is a no-holds-barred ongoing race among these tech giants to consolidate their market share in developing economies, from the race to grow the advertising market to the race to increase online payments.
An e-commerce agenda that claims unprecedented development for the Global South is a Trojan horse move. Beginning negotiations on such topics at this stage – before governments are prepared to understand what is at stake – could lead to devastating results, accelerating liberalization and the consolidation of the power of tech giants to the detriment of local industries, consumers, and citizens. Aware of the increased disparities between North and South, and the data dominance of a tiny group of GAFA-A companies, a group of African nations issued a statement opposing the digital ambitions of the host for MC11. But the political landscape is more complex, with China, the EU, and Russia now supporting the idea of a "digital" mandate .
Repeating the Same Mistakes?
The relationships of most countries with tech companies are as imbalanced as their relationships with Big Pharma, and there are many parallels to note. Not so long ago, the countries of the Global South faced Big Pharma power in pharmaceutical markets in a similar way. Some developing countries had the same enthusiasm when they negotiated intellectual property rules for the protection of innovation and research and development costs. In reality, those countries were nothing more than users and consumers of that innovation, not the owners or creators. The lessons of negotiating trade issues that lie at the core of public interest issues – in that case, access to medicines – were costly. Human lives and fundamental rights of those who use online services should not be forgotten when addressing the increasingly worrying and unequal relationships with tech power.
The threat before our eyes is similarly complex and equally harmful to the way our societies will be shaped in the coming years. In the past, the Big Pharma race was for patent exclusivity, to eliminate local generic production and keep drug prices high. Today, the Big Tech race is for data extractivism from those who have yet to be connected in the world, and tech companies will use all the power they hold to achieve a global regime in which small nations cannot regulate either data extraction or data localization.
Big Tech is one of the most concentrated and resourceful industries of all time. The bargaining power of developing countries is minimal. Developing countries will basically be granting the right to cultivate small parcels of a land controlled by data lords -- under their rules, their mandate, and their will -- with practically no public oversight. The stakes are high. At the core of it is the race to conquer the markets of digital payments and the battle to become the platform where data flows, splitting the territory as old empires did in the past. As the Economist claimed on May 6, 2017: "Conflicts over control of oil have scarred the world for decades. No one yet worries that wars will be fought over data. But the data economy has the same potential for confrontation."
If countries from the Global South want to prepare for data wars, they should start thinking about how to reduce the control of Big Tech over -- how we communicate, shop, and learn the news -- , again, over our societies. The solution lies not in making rules for data liberalization, but in devising ways to use the law to reduce Big Tech's power and protect consumers and citizens. Finding the balance would take some time and we are going to take that time to find the right balance, we are not ready to lock the future yet.
Jef , December 14, 2017 at 11:32 am
Thuto , December 14, 2017 at 2:14 pmI thought thats what the WTO is for?
Mark P. , December 14, 2017 at 3:30 pmOne suspects big money will be thrown at this by the leading tech giants. To paraphrase from a comment I made recently regarding a similar topic : "with markets in the developed world pretty much sewn up by the tripartite tech overlords (google, fb and amazon), the next 3 billion users for their products/services are going to come from developing world". With this dynamic in mind, and the "constant growth" mantra humming incessantly in the background, it's easy to see how high stakes a game this is for the tech giants and how no resources will be spared to stymie any efforts at establishing a regulatory oversight framework that will protect the digital rights of citizens in the global south.
Multilateral fora like the WTO are de facto enablers for the marauding frontal attacks of transnational corporations, and it's disheartening to see that some developing nations have already nailed the digital futures of their citizens to the mast of the tech giants by joining this alliance. What's more, this signing away of their liberty will be sold to the citizenry as the best way to usher them into the brightest of all digital futures.
Thuto , December 14, 2017 at 4:58 pmOne suspects big money will be thrown at this by the leading tech giants.
Vast sums of money are already being thrown at bringing Africa online, for better or worse. Thus, the R&D aimed at providing wireless Internet via giant drones/balloons/satellites by Google, Facebook, etc.
You're African. Possibly South African by your user name, which may explain why you're a little behind the curve, because the action is already happening, but more to the north -- and particularly in East Africa.
The big corporations -- and the tech giants are competing with the banking/credit card giants -- have noted how mobile technology leapt over the dearth of last century's telephony tech, land lines, and in turn enabled the highest adoption rates of cellphone banking in the world. (Particularly in East Africa, as I say.) The payoffs for big corporations are massive -- de facto cashless societies where the corporations control the payment systems –and the politicians are mostly cheap.
In Nigeria, the government has launched a Mastercard-branded national ID card that's also a payment card, in one swoop handing Mastercard more than 170 million potential customers, and their personal and biometric data.
In Kenya, the sums transferred by mobile money operator M-Pesa are more than 25 percent of that country's GDP.
You can see that bringing Africa online is technically a big, decade-long project. But also that the potential payoffs are vast. Though I also suspect China may come out ahead -- they're investing far more in Africa and in some areas their technology -- drones, for instance -- is already superior to what the Europeans and the American companies have.
Mark P. , December 14, 2017 at 6:59 pmThank you Mark P.
Hoisted from a comment I made here recently: "Here in South Africa and through its Free Basics programme, facebook is jumping into bed with unsuspecting ISPs (I say unsuspecting because fb will soon be muscling in on their territory and becoming an ISP itself by provisioning bandwidth directly from its floating satellites) and circumventing net neutrality "
I'm also keenly aware of the developments in Kenya re: safaricom and Mpesa and how that has led to traditional banking via bank accounts being largely leapfrogged for those moving from being unbanked to active economic citizens requiring money transfer facilities. Given the huge succes of Mpesa, I wouldn't be surprised if a multinational tech behemoth (chinese or american) were to make a play for acquiring safaricom and positioning it as a triple-play ISP, money transfer/banking services and digital content provider (harvesting data about users habits on an unprecedented scale across multiple areas of their lives), first in Kenya then expanded throughout east, central and west africa. I must add that your statement about Nigeria puts Mark Zuckerberg's visit there a few months back into context somewhat, perhaps a reconnaissance mission of sorts.
Out of idle curiosity, how could you accurately deduce my country of origin from my name?
Mark P. , December 14, 2017 at 3:34 pmOut of idle curiosity, how could you accurately deduce my country of origin from my name?
Though I've lived in California for decades, my mother was South African and I maintain a UK passport, having grown up in London.
Mattski , December 14, 2017 at 3:41 pmAs you also write: "with markets in the developed world pretty much sewn up by the tripartite tech overlords (google, fb and amazon), the next 3 billion users for their products/services are going to come from developing world."
Absolutely true. This cannot be stressed enough. The tech giants know this and the race is on.
Been happening with food for 50 years.
Jun 13, 2010 | www.nj.com
At 5:30 every morning, Tony Gwiazdowski rolls out of bed, brews a pot of coffee and carefully arranges his laptop, cell phone and notepad like silverware across the kitchen table.
And then he waits.
Gwiazdowski, 57, has been waiting for 16 months. Since losing his job as a transportation sales manager in February 2009, he wakes each morning to the sobering reminder that, yes, he is still unemployed. So he pushes aside the fatigue, throws on some clothes and sends out another flurry of resumes and cheery cover letters.
But most days go by without a single phone call. And around sundown, when he hears his neighbors returning home from work, Gwiazdowski -- the former mayor of Hillsborough -- can't help but allow himself one tiny sigh of resignation.
"You sit there and you wonder, 'What am I doing wrong?'" said Gwiazdowski, who finds companionship in his 2-year-old golden retriever, Charlie, until his wife returns from work.
"The worst moment is at the end of the day when it's 4:30 and you did everything you could, and the phone hasn't rung, the e-mails haven't come through."
Gwiazdowski is one of a growing number of chronically unemployed workers in New Jersey and across the country who are struggling to get through what is becoming one long, jobless nightmare -- even as the rest of the economy has begun to show signs of recovery.
Nationwide, 46 percent of the unemployed -- 6.7 million Americans -- have been without work for at least half a year, by far the highest percentage recorded since the U.S. Labor Department began tracking the data in 1948.
In New Jersey, nearly 40 percent of the 416,000 unemployed workers last year fit that profile, up from about 20 percent in previous years, according to the department, which provides only annual breakdowns for individual states. Most of them were unemployed for more than a year.
But the repercussions of chronic unemployment go beyond the loss of a paycheck or the realization that one might never find the same kind of job again. For many, the sinking feeling of joblessness -- with no end in sight -- can take a psychological toll, experts say.
Across the state, mental health crisis units saw a 20 percent increase in demand last year as more residents reported suffering from unemployment-related stress, according to the New Jersey Association of Mental Health Agencies.
"The longer the unemployment continues, the more impact it will have on their personal lives and mental health," said Shauna Moses, the association's associate executive director. "There's stress in the marriage, with the kids, other family members, with friends."
And while a few continue to cling to optimism, even the toughest admit there are moments of despair: Fear of never finding work, envy of employed friends and embarassment at having to tell acquaintances that, nope, still no luck.
"When they say, 'Hi Mayor,' I don't tell a lot of people I'm out of work -- I say I'm semi-retired," said Gwiazdowski, who maxed out on unemployment benefits several months ago.
"They might think, 'Gee, what's wrong with him? Why can't he get a job?' It's a long story and maybe people really don't care and now they want to get away from you."
SECOND TIME AROUNDLynn Kafalas has been there before, too. After losing her computer training job in 2000, the East Hanover resident took four agonizing years to find new work -- by then, she had refashioned herself into a web designer.
That not-too-distant experience is why Kafalas, 52, who was laid off again eight months ago, grows uneasier with each passing day. Already, some of her old demons have returned, like loneliness, self-doubt and, worst of all, insomnia. At night, her mind races to dissect the latest interview: What went wrong? What else should she be doing? And why won't even Barnes & Noble hire her?
"It's like putting a stopper on my life -- I can't move on," said Kafalas, who has given up karate lessons, vacations and regular outings with friends. "Everything is about the interviews."
And while most of her friends have been supportive, a few have hinted to her that she is doing something wrong, or not doing enough. The remarks always hit Kafalas with a pang.
In a recent study, researchers at Rutgers University found that the chronically unemployed are prone to high levels of stress, anxiety, depression, loneliness and even substance abuse, which take a toll on their self-esteem and personal relationships.
"They're the forgotten group," said Carl Van Horn, director of the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers, and a co-author of the report. "And the longer you are unemployed, the less likely you are to get a job."
Of the 900 unemployed workers first interviewed last August for the study, only one in 10 landed full-time work by March of this year, and only half of those lucky few expressed satisfaction with their new jobs. Another one in 10 simply gave up searching.
Among those who were still unemployed, many struggled to make ends meet by borrowing from friends or family, turning to government food stamps and forgoing health care, according to the study.
More than half said they avoided all social contact, while slightly less than half said they had lost touch with close friends. Six in 10 said they had problems sleeping.
Kafalas says she deals with her chronic insomnia by hitting the gym for two hours almost every evening, lifting weights and pounding the treadmill until she feels tired enough to fall asleep.
"Sometimes I forget what day it is. Is it Tuesday? And then I'll think of what TV show ran the night before," she said. "Waiting is the toughest part."
AGE A FACTORGenerally, the likelihood of long-term unemployment increases with age, experts say. A report by the National Employment Law Project this month found that nearly half of those who were unemployed for six months or longer were at least 45 years old. Those between 16 and 24 made up just 14 percent.
Tell that to Adam Blank, 24, who has been living with his girlfriend and her parents at their Martinsville home since losing his sales job at Best Buy a year and half ago.
Blank, who graduated from Rutgers with a major in communications, says he feels like a burden sometimes, especially since his girlfriend, Tracy Rosen, 24, works full-time at a local nonprofit. He shows her family gratitude with small chores, like taking out the garbage, washing dishes, sweeping floors and doing laundry.
Still, he often feels inadequate.
"All I'm doing on an almost daily basis is sitting around the house trying to keep myself from going stir-crazy," said Blank, who dreams of starting a social media company.
When he is feeling particularly low, Blank said he turns to a tactic employed by prisoners of war in Vietnam: "They used to build dream houses in their head to help keep their sanity. It's really just imagining a place I can call my own."
LESSONS LEARNEDMeanwhile, Gwiazdowski, ever the optimist, says unemployment has taught him a few things.
He has learned, for example, how to quickly assess an interviewer's age and play up or down his work experience accordingly -- he doesn't want to appear "threatening" to a potential employer who is younger. He has learned that by occasionally deleting and reuploading his resume to job sites, his entry appears fresh.
"It's almost like a game," he said, laughing. "You are desperate, but you can't show it."
But there are days when he just can't find any humor in his predicament -- like when he finishes a great interview but receives no offer, or when he hears a fellow job seeker finally found work and feels a slight twinge of jealousy.
"That's what I'm missing -- putting on that shirt and tie in the morning and going to work," he said.
The memory of getting dressed for work is still so vivid, Gwiazdowski says, that he has to believe another job is just around the corner.
"You always have to hope that that morning when you get up, it's going to be the day," he said.
"Today is going to be the day that something is going to happen."
Leslie Kwoh may be reached at [email protected] or (973) 392-4147.
DrBuzzard Jun 13, 2010I collect from the state of iowa, was on tier I and when the gov't recessed without passing extension, iowa stopped paying tier I claims that were already open, i was scheduled to be on tier I until july 15th, and its gone now, as a surprise, when i tried to claim my week this week i was notified. SURPRISE, talk about stress.
berganliz Jun 13, 2010
This is terrible....just wait until RIF'd teachers hit the unemployment offices....but then, this is what NJ wanted...fired teachers who are to blame for the worst recession our country has seen in 150 years...thanks GWB.....thanks Donald Rumsfeld......thanks Dick Cheney....thanks Karl "Miss Piggy" Rove...and thank you Mr. Big Boy himself...Gov Krispy Kreame!
rp121 Jun 13, 2010
For readers who care about this nation's unemployed- Call your Senators to pass HR 4213, the "Extenders" bill. Unfortunately, it does not add UI benefits weeks, however it DOES continue the emergency federal tiers of UI. If it does not pass this week many of us are cut off at 26 wks. No tier 1, 2 -nothing.
Dec 13, 2017 | www.cvtips.com
It's almost impossible to describe the various psychological impacts, because there are so many. There are sometimes serious consequences, including suicide, and, some would say worse, chronic depression.
There's not really a single cause and effect. It's a compound effect, and unemployment, by adding stress, affects people, often badly.
The world doesn't need any more untrained psychologists, and we're not pretending to give medical advice. That's for professionals. Everybody is different, and their problems are different. What we can do is give you an outline of the common problems, and what you can do about them.
The good news is that only a relatively small number of people are seriously affected by the stress of unemployment to the extent they need medical assistance. Most people don't get to the serious levels of stress, and much as they loathe being unemployed, they suffer few, and minor, ill effects.
For others, there are a series of issues, and the big three are:
- Stress
- Anger, and other negative emotions
- Depression
Stress
Stress is Stage One. It's a natural result of the situation. Worries about income, domestic problems, whatever, the list is as long as humanity. The result of stress is a strain on the nervous system, and these create the physical effects of the situation over time. The chemistry of stress is complex, but it can be rough on the hormonal system.
Over an extended period, the body's natural hormonal balances are affected, and this can lead to problems. These are actually physical issues, but the effects are mental, and the first obvious effects are, naturally, emotional.
Anger, and other negative emotions
Not at all surprisingly, people under stress experience strong emotions. It's a perfectly natural response to what can be quite intolerable emotional strains. It's fair to say that even normal situations are felt much more severely by people already under stress. Things that wouldn't normally even be issues become problems, and problems become serious problems. Relationships can suffer badly in these circumstances, and that, inevitably, produces further crises. Unfortunately for those affected, these are by now, at this stage, real crises.
If the actual situation was already bad, this mental state makes it a lot worse. Constant aggravation doesn't help people to keep a sense of perspective. Clear thinking isn't easy when under constant stress.
Some people are stubborn enough and tough enough mentally to control their emotions ruthlessly, and they do better under these conditions. Even that comes at a cost, and although under control, the stress remains a problem.
One of the reasons anger management is now a growth industry is because of the growing need for assistance with severe stress over the last decade. This is a common situation, and help is available.
If you have reservations about seeking help, bear in mind it can't possibly be any worse than the problem.
Depression
Depression is universally hated by anyone who's ever had it. This is the next stage, and it's caused by hormonal imbalances which affect serotonin. It's actually a physical problem, but it has mental effects which are sometimes devastating, and potentially life threatening.
The common symptoms are:
- Difficulty in focusing mentally, thoughts all over the place in no logical order
- Fits of crying for no known reason
- Illogical, or irrational patterns of thought and behavior
- Sadness
- Suicidal thinking
It's a disgusting experience. No level of obscenity could possibly describe it. Depression is misery on a level people wouldn't conceive in a nightmare. At this stage the patient needs help, and getting it is actually relatively easy. It's convincing the person they need to do something about it that's difficult. Again, the mental state is working against the person. Even admitting there's a problem is hard for many people in this condition.
Generally speaking, a person who is trusted is the best person to tell anyone experiencing the onset of depression to seek help. Important: If you're experiencing any of those symptoms:
- Get on the phone and make an appointment to see your doctor. It takes half an hour for a diagnosis, and you can be on your way home with a cure in an hour. You don't have to suffer. The sooner you start to get yourself out of depression, the better.
- Avoid any antidepressants with the so-called withdrawal side effects. They're not too popular with patients, and are under some scrutiny. The normal antidepressants work well enough for most people.
Very important: Do not, under any circumstances, try to use drugs or alcohol as a quick fix. They make it worse, over time, because they actually add stress. Some drugs can make things a lot worse, instantly, too, particularly the modern made-in-a-bathtub variety. They'll also destroy your liver, which doesn't help much, either.
Alcohol, in particular, makes depression much worse. Alcohol is a depressant, itself, and it's also a nasty chemical mix with all those stress hormones.
If you've ever had alcohol problems, or seen someone with alcohol wrecking their lives, depression makes things about a million times worse.
Just don't do it. Steer clear of any so-called stimulants, because they don't mix with antidepressants, either.
Unemployment and staying healthy
The above is what you need to know about the risks of unemployment to your health and mental well being.
These situations are avoidable.
Your best defense against the mental stresses and strains of unemployment, and their related problems is staying healthy.
We can promise you that is nothing less than the truth. The healthier you are, the better your defenses against stress, and the more strength you have to cope with situations.
Basic health is actually pretty easy to achieve:
Diet
Eat real food, not junk, and make sure you're getting enough food. Your body can't work with resources it doesn't have. Good food is a real asset, and you'll find you don't get tired as easily. You need the energy reserves.
Give yourself a good selection of food that you like, that's also worth eating.
The good news is that plain food is also reasonably cheap, and you can eat as much as you need. Basic meals are easy enough to prepare, and as long as you're getting all the protein veg and minerals you need, you're pretty much covered.
You can also use a multivitamin cap, or broad spectrum supplements, to make sure you're getting all your trace elements. Also make sure you're getting the benefits of your food by taking acidophilus or eating yogurt regularly.
Exercise
You don't have to live in a gym to get enough exercise for basic fitness. A few laps of the pool, a good walk, some basic aerobic exercises, you're talking about 30-45 minutes a day. It's not hard.
Don't just sit and suffer
If anything's wrong, check it out when it starts, not six months later. Most medical conditions become serious when they're allowed to get worse.
For unemployed people the added risk is also that they may prevent you getting that job, or going for interviews. If something's causing you problems, get rid of it.
Nobody who's been through the blender of unemployment thinks it's fun.
Anyone who's really done it tough will tell you one thing:
Don't be a victim. Beat the problem, and you'll really appreciate the feeling.
Dec 12, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Uber lost $2.5 billion in 2015, probably lost $4 billion in 2016, and is on track to lose $5 billion in 2017.
The top line on the table below shows is total passenger payments, which must be split between Uber corporate and its drivers. Driver gross earnings are substantially higher than actual take home pay, as gross earning must cover all the expenses drivers bear, including fuel, vehicle ownership, insurance and maintenance.
Most of the "profit" data released by Uber over time and discussed in the press is not true GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) profit comparable to the net income numbers public companies publish but is EBIDTAR contribution. Companies have significant leeway as to how they calculate EBIDTAR (although it would exclude interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization) and the percentage of total costs excluded from EBIDTAR can vary significantly from quarter to quarter, given the impact of one-time expenses such as legal settlements and stock compensation. We only have true GAAP net profit results for 2014, 2015 and the 2nd/3rd quarters of 2017, but have EBIDTAR contribution numbers for all other periods. [5]
Uber had GAAP net income of negative $2.6 billion in 2015, and a negative profit margin of 132%. This is consistent with the negative $2.0 billion loss and (143%) margin for the year ending September 2015 presented in part one of the NC Uber series over a year ago.
No GAAP profit results for 2016 have been disclosed, but actual losses likely exceed $4 billion given the EBIDTAR contribution of negative $3.2 billion. Uber's GAAP losses for the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2017 were over $2.5 billion, suggesting annual losses of roughly $5 billion.
While many Silicon Valley funded startups suffered large initial losses, none of them lost anything remotely close to $2.6 billion in their sixth year of operation and then doubled their losses to $5 billion in year eight. Reversing losses of this magnitude would require the greatest corporate financial turnaround in history.
No evidence of significant efficiency/scale gains; 2015 and 2016 margin improvements entirely explained by unilateral cuts in driver compensation, but losses soared when Uber had to reverse these cuts in 2017.
Total 2015 gross passenger payments were 200% higher than 2014, but Uber corporate revenue improved 300% because Uber cut the driver share of passenger revenue from 83% to 77%. This was an effective $500 million wealth transfer from drivers to Uber's investors. These driver compensation cuts improved Uber's EBIDTAR margin, but Uber's P&L gains were wiped out by higher non-EBIDTAR expense. Thus the 300% Uber revenue growth did not result in any improvement in Uber profit margins.
In 2016, Uber unilaterally imposed much larger cuts in driver compensation, costing drivers an additional $3 billion. [6] Prior to Uber's market entry, the take home pay of big-city cab drivers in the US was in the $12-17/hour range, and these earnings were possible only if drivers worked 65-75 hours a week.
An independent study of the net earnings of Uber drivers (after accounting for the costs of the vehicles they had to provide) in Denver, Houston and Detroit in late 2015 (prior to Uber's big 2016 cuts) found that driver earnings had fallen to the $10-13/hour range. [7] Multiple recent news reports have documented how Uber drivers are increasing unable to support themselves from their reduced share of passenger payments. [8]
A business model where profit improvement is hugely dependent on wage cuts is unsustainable, especially when take home wages fall to (or below) minimum wage levels. Uber's primary focus has always been the rate of growth in gross passenger revenue, as this has been a major justification for its $68 billion valuation. This growth rate came under enormous pressure in 2017 given Uber efforts to raise fares, major increases in driver turnover as wages fell, [9] and the avalanche of adverse publicity it was facing.
Since mass driver defections would cause passenger volume growth to collapse completely, Uber was forced to reverse these cuts in 2017 and increased the driver share from 68% to 80%. This meant that Uber's corporate revenue, which had grown over 300% in 2015 and over 200% in 2016 will probably only grow by about 15% in 2017.
MKS , December 12, 2017 at 6:19 am
JohnnySacks , December 12, 2017 at 7:34 am"Uber's business model can never produce sustainable profits"
Two words not in my vocabulary are "Never" and "Always", that is a pretty absolute statement in an non-absolute environment. The same environment that has produced the "Silicon Valley Growth Model", with 15x earnings companies like NVIDA, FB and Tesla (Average earnings/stock price ratio in dot com bubble was 10x) will people pay ridiculous amounts of money for a company with no underlying fundamentals you damn right they will! Please stop with the I know all no body knows anything, especially the psychology and irrationality of markets which are made up of irrational people/investors/traders.
SoCal Rhino , December 12, 2017 at 8:30 amMy thoughts exactly. Seems the only possible recovery for the investors is a perfectly engineered legendary pump and dump IPO scheme. Risky, but there's a lot of fools out there and many who would also like to get on board early in the ride in fear of missing out on all the money to be hoovered up from the greater fools. Count me out.
tegnost , December 12, 2017 at 9:52 amThe author clearly distinguishes between GAAP profitability and valuations, which is after all rather the point of the series. And he makes a more nuanced point than the half sentence you have quoted without context or with an indication that you omitted a portion. Did you miss the part about how Uber would have a strong incentive to share the evidence of a network effect or other financial story that pointed the way to eventual profit? Otherwise (my words) it is the classic sell at a loss, make it up with volume path to liquidation.
allan , December 12, 2017 at 6:52 amapples and oranges comparison, nvidia has lots and lots of patented tech that produces revenue, facebook has a kajillion admittedly irrational users, but those users drive massive ad sales (as just one example of how that company capitalizes itself) and tesla makes an actual car, using technology that inspires it's buyers (the put your money where your mouth is crowd and it can't be denied that tesla, whatever it's faults are, battery tech is not one of them and that intellectual property is worth a lot, and tesla's investors are in on that real business, profitable or otherwise)
Uber is an iphone app. They lose money and have no path to profitability (unless it's the theory you espouse that people are unintelligent so even unintelligent ideas work to fleece them). This article touches on one of the great things about the time we now inhabit, uber drivers could bail en masse, there are two sides to the low attachment employees who you can get rid of easily. The drivers can delete the uber app as soon as another iphone app comes along that gets them a better return
Thuto , December 12, 2017 at 6:55 amYet another source (unintended) of subsidies for Uber, Lyft, etc., which might or might not have been mentioned earlier in the series:
Airports Are Losing Money as Ride-Hailing Services Grow [NYT]
For many air travelers, getting to and from the airport has long been part of the whole miserable experience. Do they drive and park in some distant lot? Take mass transit or a taxi? Deal with a rental car?
Ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are quickly changing those calculations. That has meant a bit less angst for travelers.
But that's not the case for airports. Travelers' changing habits, in fact, have begun to shake the airports' financial underpinnings. The money they currently collect from ride-hailing services do not compensate for the lower revenues from the other sources.
At the same time, some airports have had to add staff to oversee the operations of the ride-hailing companies, the report said. And with more ride-hailing vehicles on the roads outside terminals,
there's more congestion.Socialize the losses, privatize the gains, VC-ize the subsidies.
Louis Fyne , December 12, 2017 at 8:35 amThe cold hard truth is that Uber is backed into a corner with severely limited abilities to tweak the numbers on either the supply or the demand side: cut driver compensation and they trigger driver churn (as has already been demonstrated), increase fare prices for riders and riders defect to cheaper alternatives. The only question is how long can they keep the show going before the lights go out, slick marketing and propaganda can only take you so far, and one assumes the dumb money has a finite supply of patience and will at some point begin asking the tough questions.
Thuto , December 12, 2017 at 11:30 amThe irony is that Uber would have been a perfectly fine, very profitable mid-sized company if Uber stuck with its initial model -- sticking to dense cities with limited parking, limiting driver supply, and charging a premium price for door-to-door delivery, whether by livery or a regular sedan. And then perhaps branching into robo-cars.
But somehow Uber/board/Travis got suckered into the siren call of self-driving cars, triple-digit user growth, and being in the top 100 US cities and on every continent.
David Carl Grimes , December 12, 2017 at 6:57 amI've shared a similar sentiment in one of the previous posts about Uber. But operating profitably in decent sized niche doesn't fit well with ambitions of global domination. For Uber to be "right-sized", an admission of folly would have to be made, its managers and investors would have to transcend the sunk cost fallacy in their strategic decision making, and said investors would have to accept massive hits on their invested capital. The cold, hard reality of being blindsided and kicked to the curb in the smartphone business forced RIM/Blackberry to right-size, and they may yet have a profitable future as an enterprise facing software and services company. Uber would benefit from that form of sober mindedness, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Michael Fiorillo , December 12, 2017 at 9:33 amThe question is: Why did Softbank invest in Uber?
JimTan , December 12, 2017 at 10:50 amI know nothing about Softbank or its management, but I do know that the Japanese were the dumb money rubes in the late '80's, overpaying for trophy real estate they lost billions on.
Until informed otherwise, that's my default assumption
Yves Smith Post author , December 12, 2017 at 11:38 amSoftbank possibly looking to buy more Uber shares at a 30% discount is very odd. Uber had a Series G funding round in June 2016 where a $3.5 billion investment from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund resulted in its current $68 billion valuation. Now apparently Softbank wants to lead a new $6 billion funding round to buy the shares of Uber employees and early investors at a 30% discount from this last "valuation". It's odd because Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund has pledged $45 billion to SoftBank's Vision Fund , an amount which was supposed to come from the proceeds of its pending Aramco IPO. If the Uber bid is linked to SoftBank's Vision Fund, or KSA money, then its not clear why this investor might be looking to literally 'double down' from $3.5 billion o $6 billion on a declining investment.
Robert McGregor , December 12, 2017 at 7:04 amSoftBank has not yet invested. Its tender is still open. If it does not get enough shares at a price it likes, it won't invest.
As to why, I have no idea.
divadab , December 12, 2017 at 7:19 am"Growth and Efficiency" are the sine qua non of Neoliberalism. Kalanick's "hype brilliance" was to con the market with "revenue growth" and signs of efficiency, and hopes of greater efficiency, and make most people just overlook the essential fact that Uber is the most unprofitable company of all time!
Phil in Kansas City , December 12, 2017 at 7:55 amWhat comprises "Uber Expenses"? 2014 – $1.06 billion; 2015 $3.33 billion; 2016 $9.65 billion; forecast 2017 $11.418 billion!!!!!! To me this is the big question – what are they spending $10 billion per year on?
ALso – why did driver share go from 68% in 2016 to 80% in 2017? If you use 68% as in 2016, 2017 Uber revenue is $11.808 billion, which means a bit better than break-even EBITDA, assuming Uber expenses are as stated $11.428 billion.
Perhaps not so bleak as the article presents, although I would not invest in this thing.
lyman alpha blob , December 12, 2017 at 2:37 pmI have the same question: What comprises over 11 billion dollars in expenses in 2017? Could it be they are paying out dividends to the early investors? Which would mean they are cannibalizing their own company for the sake of the VC! How long can this go on before they'll need a new infusion of cash?
Vedant Desai , December 12, 2017 at 10:37 amThe Saudis have thrown a few billion Uber's way and they aren't necessarily known as the smart money.
Maybe the pole dancers have started chipping in too as they are for bitcoin .
Louis Fyne , December 12, 2017 at 8:44 amOh article does answer your 2nd question. Read this paragraph:-
Since mass driver defections would cause passenger volume growth to collapse completely , Uber was forced to reverse these cuts in 2017 and increased the driver share from 68% to 80%. This meant that Uber's corporate revenue, which had grown over 300% in 2015 and over 200% in 2016 will probably only grow by about 15% in 2017.
As for the 1st, read this line in the article:-
There are undoubtedly a number of things Uber could do to reduce losses at the margin, but it is difficult to imagine it could suddenly find the $4-5 billion in profit improvement needed merely to reach breakeven.
Alfred , December 12, 2017 at 9:49 amin addition to all the points listed in the article/comments, the absolute biggest flaw with Uber is that Uber HQ conditioned its customers on (a) cheap fares and (b) that a car is available within minutes (1-5 if in a big city).
Those two are not mutually compatible in the long-term.
Martin Finnucane , December 12, 2017 at 11:06 amThus (a) "We cost less" and (b) "We're more convenient" -- aren't those also the advantages that Walmart claims and feeds as a steady diet to its ever hungry consumers? Often if not always, disruption may repose upon delusion.
Altandmain , December 12, 2017 at 11:09 amUber's business model could never produce sustainable profits unless it was able to exploit significant anti-competitive market power.
Upon that dependent clause hangs the future of capitalism, and – dare I say it? – its inevitable demise.
Jim A. , December 12, 2017 at 12:21 pmWhen this Uber madness blows up, I wonder if people will finally begin to discuss the brutal reality of Silicon Valley's so called "disruption".
It is heavily built in around the idea of economic exploitation. Uber drivers are often, especially when the true costs to operate an Uber including the vehicle depreciation are factored in, making not very much per hour driven, especially if they don't get the surge money.
Instacart is another example. They are paying the deliver operators very little.
Altandmain , December 12, 2017 at 5:40 pmAt a fundamental level, I think that the Silicon Valley "disruption" model only works for markets (like software) where the marginal cost for production is de minimus and the products can be protected by IP laws. Volume and market power really work in those cases. But out here in meat-space, where actual material and labor are big inputs to each item sold, you can never just sit back on your laurels and rake in the money. Somebody else will always be able to come and and make an equivalent product. If they can do it more cheaply, you are in trouble.
Joe Bentzel , December 12, 2017 at 2:19 pmThere aren't that many areas in goods and services where the marginal costs are very low.
Software is actually quite unique in that regard, costing merely the bandwidth and permanent storage space to store.
Let's see:
1. From the article, they cannot go public and have limited ways to raise more money. An IPO with its more stringent disclosure requirements would expose them.
2. They tried lowering driver compensation and found that model unsustainable.
3. There are no benefits to expanding in terms of economies of scale.
From where I am standing, it looks like a lot of industries gave similar barriers. Silicon Valley is not going to be able to disrupt those.
Tesla, another Silicon Valley company seems to be struggling to mass produce its Model 3 and deliver an electric car that breaks even, is reliable, while disrupting the industry in the ways that Elon Musk attempted to hype up.
So that basically leaves services and manufacturing out for Silicon Valley disruption.
Phil in KC , December 12, 2017 at 3:20 pmUBER has become a "too big to fail" startup because of all the different tentacles of capital from various Tier 1 VCs and investment bankers.
VCs have admitted openly that UBER is a subsidized business, meaning it's product is sold below market value, and the losses reflect that subsidization. The whole "2 sided platform" argument is just marketecture to hustle more investors. It's a form of service "dumping" that puts legacy businesses into bankruptcy. Back during the dotcom bubble one popular investment banker (Paul Deninger) characterized this model as "Terrorist Competition", i.e. coffers full of invested cash to commoditize the market and drive out competition.
UBER is an absolute disaster that has forked the startup model in Silicon Valley in order to drive total dependence on venture capital by founders. And its current diversification into "autonomous vehicles", food delivery, et al are simply more evidence that the company will never be profitable due to its whacky "blitzscaling" approach of layering on new "businesses" prior to achieving "fit" in its current one.
It's economic model has also metastasized into a form of startup cancer that is killing Silicon Valley as a "technology" innovator. Now it's all cargo cult marketing BS tied to "strategic capital".
UBER is the victory of venture capital and user subsidized startups over creativity by real entrepreneurs.
It's shadow is long and that's why this company should be ..wait for it UNBUNDLED (the new silicon valley word attached to that other BS religion called "disruption"). Call it a great unbundling and you can break up this monster corp any way you want.
Naked Capitalism is a great website.
Phil in KC , December 12, 2017 at 3:10 pm1. I Agree with your last point.
2. The elevator pitch for Uber: subsidize rides to attract customers, put the competition out of business, and then enjoy an unregulated monopoly, all while exploiting economically ignorant drivers–ahem–"partners."
3. But more than one can play that game, and
4. Cab and livery companies are finding ways to survive!
Jan Stickle , December 12, 2017 at 5:00 pmIf subsidizing rides is counted as an expense, (not being an accountant, I would guess it so), then whether the subsidy goes to the driver or the passenger, that would account for the ballooning expenses, to answer my own question. Otherwise, the overhead for operating what Uber describes as a tech company should be minimal: A billion should fund a decent headquarters with staff, plus field offices in, say, 100 U.S. cities. However, their global pretensions are probably burning cash like crazy. On top of that, I wonder what the exec compensation is like?
After reading HH's initial series, I made a crude, back-of-the-envelope calculation that Uber would run out of money sometime in the third fiscal quarter of 2018, but that was based on assuming losses were stabilizing in the range of 3 billion a year. Not so, according to the article. I think crunch time is rapidly approaching. If so, then SoftBank's tender offer may look quite appetizing to VC firms and to any Uber employee able to cash in their options. I think there is a way to make a re-envisioned Uber profitable, and with a more independent board, they may be able to restructure the company to show a pathway to profitability before the IPO. But time is running out.
A not insignificant question is the recruitment and retention of the front line "partners." It would seem to me that at some point, Uber will run out of economically ignorant drivers with good manners and nice cars. I would be very interested to know how many drivers give up Uber and other ride-sharing gigs once the 1099's start flying at the beginning of the year. One of the harsh realities of owning a business or being an contractor is the humble fact that you get paid LAST!
We became instant Uber riders while spending holidays with relatives in San Diego. While their model is indeed unique from a rider perspective, it was the driver pool that fascinates me. These are not professional livery drivers, but rather freebooters of all stripes driving for various reasons. The remuneration they receive cannot possibly generate much income after expenses, never mind the problems associated with IRS filing as independent contractors.
One guy was just cruising listening to music; cooler to get paid for it than just sitting home! A young lady was babbling and gesticulating non stop about nothing coherent and appeared to be on some sort of stimulant. A foreign gentleman, very professional, drove for extra money when not at his regular job. He was the only one who had actually bought a new Prius for this gig, hoping to pay it off in two years.
This is indeed a brave new world. There was a period in Nicaragua just after the Contra war ended when citizens emerged from their homes and hit the streets in large numbers, desperately looking for income. Every car was a taxi and there was a bipedal mini Walmart at every city intersection as individuals sold everything and anything in a sort of euphoric optimism towards the future. Reality just hadn't caught up with them yet .
Dec 11, 2017 | en.wikipedia.org
Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World is a 1995 book by American political scientist Benjamin Barber , in which he puts forth a theory that describes the struggle between "McWorld" ( globalization and the corporate control of the political process) and " Jihad " (Arabic term for "struggle", here modified to mean tradition and traditional values , in the form of extreme nationalism or religious orthodoxy and theocracy ). Benjamin Barber similarly questions the impact of economic globalization as well as its problems for democracy.The book was based on a March 1992 article by Barber first published in The Atlantic Monthly . [1] The book employs the basic critique of neoliberalism seen in Barber's earlier, seminal work Strong Democracy . As neoliberal economic theory -- not to be confused with social liberalism -- is the force behind globalization, this critique is relevant on a much larger scale. Unregulated market forces encounter parochial (which he calls tribal ) forces.
These tribal forces come in many varieties: religious, cultural, ethnic, regional, local, etc. As globalization imposes a culture of its own on a population, the tribal forces feel threatened and react. More than just economic, the crises that arise from these confrontations often take on a sacred quality to the tribal elements; thus Barber's use of the term "Jihad" (although in the second edition, he expresses regret at having used that term). [ why? ]
Barber's prognosis in Jihad vs McWorld is generally negative -- he concludes that neither global corporations nor traditional cultures are supportive of democracy . He further posits that McWorld could ultimately win the "struggle". He also proposes a model for small, local democratic institutions and civic engagement as the hope for an alternative to these two forces.
Problems for democracy editBarber states that neither Jihad nor McWorld needs or promotes democracy. [2]
McWorld editBarber argues that there are several imperatives that make up the McWorld, or the globalization of politics : a market imperative, a resource imperative, an information-technology imperative, and an ecological imperative. Due to globalization, our market has expanded and is vulnerable to the transnational markets where free trade, easy access to banking and exchange of currency are available. With the emergence of our markets, we have come up with international laws and treaties in order to maintain stability and efficiency in the interconnected economy. Resources are also an imperative aspect in the McWorld, where autarky seems insufficient and inefficient in presence of globalization. The information-technology of globalization has opened up communications to people all over the world, allowing us to exchange information. Also, technology is now systematically integrated into everyone's lives to the point where it "gives every person on earth access to every other person". [3] Globalization of ecology may seem cliche; Barber argues that whatever a nation does to their own ecology, it affects everyone on earth. For instance, cutting down a jungle will upset the overall oxygen balance, which affects our "global lungs". McWorld may promote peace and prosperity, but Barber sees this as being done at the cost of independence and identity , and notes that no more social justice or equality than necessary are needed to promote efficient economic production and consumption.
Jihad editBarber sees Jihad as offering solidarity and protecting identities, but at the potential cost of tolerance and stability. Barber describes the solidarity needed within the concept of Jihad as being secured through exclusion and war against outsiders. As a result, he argues, different forms of anti-democratization can arise through anti-democratic one-party dictatorships, military juntas, or theocratic fundamentalism. Barber also describes through modern day examples what these 'players' are. "they are cultures, not countries; parts, not wholes; sects, not religions, rebellious factions and dissenting minorities at war not just with globalism but with the traditional nation-state. Kurds, Basques, Puerto Ricans, Ossetians, East Timoreans, Quebecois, the Catholics of Northern Ireland, Catalans, Tamils, and of course, Palestinians- people with countries, inhabiting nations not their own, seeking smaller worlds within borders that will seal them off from modernity." [4]
Confederal option editBarber writes democracy can be spread and secured through the world satisfying the needs of both the McWorld and Jihad. "With its concern for accountability, the protection of minorities, and the universal rule of law, a confederalized representative system would serve the political needs of McWorld as well as oligarchic bureaucratism or meritocratic elitism is currently doing." [4] Some can accept democracy faster than others. Every case is different, however "Democracy grows from the bottom up and cannot be imposed from the top down. Civil society has to be built from the inside out." [1] He goes on to further explain exactly what the confederal option means and how it will help. "It certainly seems possible that the most attractive democratic ideal in the face of the brutal realities of Jihad and the dull realities of McWorld will be a confederal union of semi autonomous communities smaller than nation-states, tied together into regional economic associations and markets larger than nation-states -- participatory and self-determining in local matters at the bottom, representative and accountable at the top. The nation-state would play a diminished role, and sovereignty would lose some of its political potency." [4]
Dec 11, 2017 | en.wikipedia.org
Jihad vs. McWorld From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation , search
Jihad vs. McWorld Cover to the paperback edition Author Benjamin Barber Country United States Language English Genre Political science Publisher Times Books Publication date 1995 Media type Print ( Hardcover ) Pages 381 ISBN 978-0-812-92350-6 OCLC 31969451 Dewey Decimal 909.82/9 21 LC Class HM201 .B37 1996 Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Reshaping the World is a 1995 book by American political scientist Benjamin Barber , in which he puts forth a theory that describes the struggle between "McWorld" ( globalization and the corporate control of the political process) and " Jihad " (Arabic term for "struggle", here modified to mean tradition and traditional values , in the form of extreme nationalism or religious orthodoxy and theocracy ). Benjamin Barber similarly questions the impact of economic globalization as well as its problems for democracy.
The book was based on a March 1992 article by Barber first published in The Atlantic Monthly . [1] The book employs the basic critique of neoliberalism seen in Barber's earlier, seminal work Strong Democracy . As neoliberal economic theory -- not to be confused with social liberalism -- is the force behind globalization, this critique is relevant on a much larger scale. Unregulated market forces encounter parochial (which he calls tribal ) forces.
These tribal forces come in many varieties: religious, cultural, ethnic, regional, local, etc. As globalization imposes a culture of its own on a population, the tribal forces feel threatened and react. More than just economic, the crises that arise from these confrontations often take on a sacred quality to the tribal elements; thus Barber's use of the term "Jihad" (although in the second edition, he expresses regret at having used that term). [ why? ]
Barber's prognosis in Jihad vs McWorld is generally negative -- he concludes that neither global corporations nor traditional cultures are supportive of democracy . He further posits that McWorld could ultimately win the "struggle". He also proposes a model for small, local democratic institutions and civic engagement as the hope for an alternative to these two forces.
Contents [ hide ] Problems for democracy editBarber states that neither Jihad nor McWorld needs or promotes democracy. [2]
McWorld editBarber argues that there are several imperatives that make up the McWorld, or the globalization of politics : a market imperative, a resource imperative, an information-technology imperative, and an ecological imperative. Due to globalization, our market has expanded and is vulnerable to the transnational markets where free trade, easy access to banking and exchange of currency are available. With the emergence of our markets, we have come up with international laws and treaties in order to maintain stability and efficiency in the interconnected economy. Resources are also an imperative aspect in the McWorld, where autarky seems insufficient and inefficient in presence of globalization. The information-technology of globalization has opened up communications to people all over the world, allowing us to exchange information. Also, technology is now systematically integrated into everyone's lives to the point where it "gives every person on earth access to every other person". [3] Globalization of ecology may seem cliche; Barber argues that whatever a nation does to their own ecology, it affects everyone on earth. For instance, cutting down a jungle will upset the overall oxygen balance, which affects our "global lungs". McWorld may promote peace and prosperity, but Barber sees this as being done at the cost of independence and identity , and notes that no more social justice or equality than necessary are needed to promote efficient economic production and consumption.
Jihad editBarber sees Jihad as offering solidarity and protecting identities, but at the potential cost of tolerance and stability. Barber describes the solidarity needed within the concept of Jihad as being secured through exclusion and war against outsiders. As a result, he argues, different forms of anti-democratization can arise through anti-democratic one-party dictatorships, military juntas, or theocratic fundamentalism. Barber also describes through modern day examples what these 'players' are. "they are cultures, not countries; parts, not wholes; sects, not religions, rebellious factions and dissenting minorities at war not just with globalism but with the traditional nation-state. Kurds, Basques, Puerto Ricans, Ossetians, East Timoreans, Quebecois, the Catholics of Northern Ireland, Catalans, Tamils, and of course, Palestinians- people with countries, inhabiting nations not their own, seeking smaller worlds within borders that will seal them off from modernity." [4]
Confederal option editBarber writes democracy can be spread and secured through the world satisfying the needs of both the McWorld and Jihad. "With its concern for accountability, the protection of minorities, and the universal rule of law, a confederalized representative system would serve the political needs of McWorld as well as oligarchic bureaucratism or meritocratic elitism is currently doing." [4] Some can accept democracy faster than others. Every case is different, however "Democracy grows from the bottom up and cannot be imposed from the top down. Civil society has to be built from the inside out." [1] He goes on to further explain exactly what the confederal option means and how it will help. "It certainly seems possible that the most attractive democratic ideal in the face of the brutal realities of Jihad and the dull realities of McWorld will be a confederal union of semi autonomous communities smaller than nation-states, tied together into regional economic associations and markets larger than nation-states -- participatory and self-determining in local matters at the bottom, representative and accountable at the top. The nation-state would play a diminished role, and sovereignty would lose some of its political potency." [4]
Dec 09, 2017 | www.unz.com
... ... ...
The chaotic free-for-all in the US political economy is manipulated by scandalmongers, conspirators and flight capitalists. Instead of preparing an economic plan to ' make America great again' , they have embraced the political blackmailers and intriguers of Saudi Arabia in a sui-generis global political alliance. Both countries feature purges, resignations and pugnacious politicos who have never been weaned from the destructive bosom of war.
As a point of history, the United States didn't start out as a bloated, speculative state of crony capitalists and parasitical allies: The US was once a powerful industrial country, harnessing finance and overseas investments to securing raw materials for domestic industries and directing profits back into industry for higher productivity.
Fake, or semi-fake, political rivalries and electoral competition counted little as incumbents retained their positions most of the time, and bi-partisan agreements ensured stability through sharing the spoils of office.
Things have changed. Overseas neo-colonies started to offer more than just raw materials: They introduced low-tax manufacturing sites promising free access to cheap, healthy and educated workers. US manufacturers abandoned Old Glory, invested overseas, hoarded profits in tax havens and happily evaded paying taxes to fund a new economy for displaced US workers. Simultaneously, finance reversed its relation to industry: Industrial capital was now harnessed to finance, speculation, real estate, insurance sectors and electronic gadgets/play-by-yourself ' i-phones' promoting isolated ' selfies' and idle chatter.
Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood replaced Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Chicago. Stockbrokers proliferated, while master tool-and-die makers disappeared and workers' children overdosed on 'Oxy'.
In the transition, politicians, who had no connection to domestic industry, found a powerful niche promoting overseas wars for allies , like Saudi Arabia and Israel, and disseminating domestic spats, intrigues and conspiracies to the voters. Vietnam and Watergate, Afghanistan and Volker, Iran-Contra and Reaganomics , Yugoslavia and Iraq, daily drone strikes and bombings and Bill Clinton's White House sex scandals giving salacious birth to SpecialProsecutors . . .
In this historic transformation, American political culture put on a new face: perpetual wars, Wall Street swindles and Washington scandals. It culminated in the farcical Hillary Clinton – Donald Trump presidential election campaign: the war goddess-cuckquean of chaos versus the crotch-grabbing real-estate conman.
The public heard Secretary of State Clinton's maniacal laugh upon her viewing the 'snuff-film' torture and slaughter of the wounded Libya's President Gadhafi: She crowed: ' We came, we saw and he died' with a sword up his backside. This defined the Clinton doctrine in foreign affairs, while slaughter of the welfare state and the bloated prison industry would define her domestic agenda.
Trump's presidential election campaign went about the country pleasuring the business and finance elite (promises of tax cuts, deregulations, re-contamination and jacking up the earth's temperature with a handful of jobs), and successfully pushed aside the outrage over his crude rump grabbing boasts. Wars, Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood all gathered to set the parameters of the United States' political economy: The chase was on!
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Joe Levantine , December 5, 2017 at 9:13 am GMT
This great article is an elaborate intellectual expansion on what Mr. Gerald Celente of Trendsresearch.com has been proclaiming for years that" while the business of China is business, the business of America is war". Professor Petras is pointing to the moral decline that is behind the social and economic decline of the nation of America that was once a beacon of light to the world.Astuteobservor II , December 6, 2017 at 3:01 am GMT
This analysis leaves the reader with little doubt as to the direction in which the momentum of historic leadership is moving; it is to the East away from the West in a reversal of the dawn of the Renaissance era of Europe. The last hope for the west to stay at the helm of civilisation is to have a leader who can ignite a moral renaissance in the West short of which the 21st century will definitely be China's century. The impetus for such a revival is a shake up of the world of finance that will chase the money changers out of the altar of the Western economy and put he lying scribes of the Western media in labour camp where they will be re educated about the virtues of truth and reality.there are 2 types of elites.jacques sheete , December 9, 2017 at 11:53 am GMTelites who line their pockets and only their pockets.
elites who line their pockets and also makes sure the rest of the country gets a little too.
guess which one is the american and chinese?
the saudis aren't even in the same category. they are just pets on a leash.
jacques sheete , December 9, 2017 at 12:46 pm GMTOfficial truth has become a stinking mound of offal.
Has become?
A good thing about it is that we should know to laugh at it whenever we hear it, and accept the fact that "authority" is lying until proven otherwise.
Were I to indulge my own theory, I should wish [the states] to practise neither commerce nor navigation, but to stand with respect to Europe precisely on the footing of China. We should thus avoid wars
-Thomas Jefferson, letter To G. K. van Hogendorp , Paris, Oct. 13, 1785
Isn't Western "civilization" just peachy? Civilization?
@Joe LevantineJoe Hide , December 9, 2017 at 2:54 pm GMTmoral renaissance
One has to have had a "naissance" of morals to experience a "re" of them, but yes, chasing the money changers out of the temple and money worship out of our souls would have helped.
Would have.
Our great mass of workers have labored for the money changers too long.
-Jacob Thorkelson, Rescue the Republic, p 9. 1939
Few listened. We've had a moral abortion.
You're right about many things you presented, but you still don't understand the multi-layered gradually administered releases of mis-information, dis-information, and information, designed to awaken and transform our nation, planet, and human consciousness. Given that half the population has below average intelligence, new positive leadership does not merely announce that generations of psychopaths have manipulated them. As a personal example, half the people I communicate with are sub-average intelligence, and I've learned to very gradually wake them up, or they will, in their unreasonable thinking, try to make trouble for me. There's the saying, "Don't throw pearls before swine." I know this too harshly stated, and I should have gradually and gently presented it for half the reader's. Sorry.
P.S. . Unz.com and it's reader's are likely far above average.
Dec 05, 2017 | www.project-syndicate.org
Globalization, which was supposed to benefit developed and developing countries alike, is now reviled almost everywhere, as the political backlash in Europe and the US in recent years has shown. The challenge is to minimize the risk that the backlash will intensify, and that starts by understanding – and avoiding – past mistakes.
NEW YORK – Fifteen years ago, I published Globalization and Its Discontents, a book that sought to explain why there was so much dissatisfaction with globalization within the developing countries. Quite simply, many believed that the system was "rigged" against them, and global trade agreements were singled out for being particularly unfair.
The Year Ahead 2018The world's leading thinkers and policymakers examine what's come apart in the past year, and anticipate what will define the year ahead.Order now
Now discontent with globalization has fueled a wave of populism in the United States and other advanced economies, led by politicians who claim that the system is unfair to their countries. In the US, President Donald Trump insists that America's trade negotiators were snookered by those from Mexico and China.
So how could something that was supposed to benefit all, in developed and developing countries alike, now be reviled almost everywhere? How can a trade agreement be unfair to all parties?
To those in developing countries, Trump's claims – like Trump himself – are laughable. The US basically wrote the rules and created the institutions of globalization. In some of these institutions – for example, the International Monetary Fund – the US still has veto power, despite America's diminished role in the global economy (a role which Trump seems determined to diminish still further).
To someone like me, who has watched trade negotiations closely for more than a quarter-century, it is clear that US trade negotiators got most of what they wanted. The problem was with what they wanted. Their agenda was set, behind closed doors, by corporations. It was an agenda written by and for large multinational companies, at the expense of workers and ordinary citizens everywhere.
Indeed, it often seems that workers, who have seen their wages fall and jobs disappear, are just collateral damage – innocent but unavoidable victims in the inexorable march of economic progress. But there is another interpretation of what has happened: one of the objectives of globalization was to weaken workers' bargaining power. What corporations wanted was cheaper labor, however they could get it.
This interpretation helps explain some puzzling aspects of trade agreements. Why is it, for example, that advanced countries gave away one of their biggest advantages, the rule of law? Indeed, provisions embedded in most recent trade agreements give foreign investors more rights than are provided to investors in the US. They are compensated, for example, should the government adopt a regulation that hurts their bottom line, no matter how desirable the regulation or how great the harm caused by the corporation in its absence.
There are three responses to globalized discontent with globalization. The first – call it the Las Vegas strategy – is to double down on the bet on globalization as it has been managed for the past quarter-century . This bet, like all bets on proven policy failures (such as trickle-down economics) is based on the hope that somehow it will succeed in the future.
The second response is Trump_vs_deep_state: cut oneself off from globalization, in the hope that doing so will somehow bring back a bygone world. But protectionism won't work. Globally, manufacturing jobs are on the decline, simply because productivity growth has outpaced growth in demand.
Even if manufacturing were to come back, the jobs won't. Advanced manufacturing technology, including robots, means that the few jobs created will require higher skills and will be placed at different locations than the jobs that were lost. Like doubling down, this approach is doomed to fail, further increasing the discontent felt by those left behind.
Trump will fail even in his proclaimed goal of reducing the trade deficit, which is determined by the disparity between domestic savings and investment. Now that the Republicans have gotten their way and enacted a tax cut for billionaires, national savings will fall and the trade deficit will rise, owing to an increase in the value of the dollar. (Fiscal deficits and trade deficits normally move so closely together that they are called "twin" deficits.) Trump may not like it, but as he is slowly finding out, there are some things that even a person in the most powerful position in the world cannot control.
There is a third approach: social protection without protectionism, the kind of approach that the small Nordic countries took. They knew that as small countries they had to remain open. But they also knew that remaining open would expose workers to risk. Thus, they had to have a social contract that helped workers move from old jobs to new and provide some help in the interim.
The Nordic countries are deeply democratic societies, so they knew that unless most workers regarded globalization as benefiting them, it wouldn't be sustained. And the wealthy in these countries recognized that if globalization worked as it should, there would be enough benefits to go around.
American capitalism in recent years has been marked by unbridled greed – the 2008 financial crisis provides ample confirmation of that. But, as some countries have shown, a market economy can take forms that temper the excesses of both capitalism and globalization, and deliver more sustainable growth and higher standards of living for most citizens.
We can learn from such successes what to do, just as we can learn from past mistakes what not to do. As has become evident, if we do not manage globalization so that it benefits all, the backlash – from the New Discontents in the North and the Old Discontents in the South – is at risk of intensifying.
Dec 08, 2017 | www.moonofalabama.org
psychohistorian , Dec 8, 2017 6:22:05 PM | 18
@ Daniel ending with "This "Clash of Civilizations" type narrative is not encouraging." That is exactly what they want you to focus on as a narrative rather than the simple truth about the demise of private banking. On the previous thread about the Republican: Ryan deficit BS there was a commenter ex-SA with a John H. Hotson link that I want to see go viral because it simply explains the history of the Gordian Knot we face as a speciesThe link to a 1996 article: Understanding Money by John H. Hotson . The take away quote
"Banking came into existence as a fraud. The fraud was legalized and we've been living with the consequences, both good and bad, ever since. Even so it is also a great invention-right up there with fire, the wheel, and the steam engine."
Clash of Civilizations is as vapid a meme as the common understanding of the Capitalism myth as that article so clearly states. Spread his word far and wide to wake up the zombies. It is time!
Nov 09, 2002 | www.prospect-magazine.co.uk
Financial markets 101
Early history
The Bretton Woods system
The power of financial actors
Consequences of global financial flows
Policy options
Theological and ethical considerations
A new financial architecture
What Christians can do
Want to know more?
Questions For Discussion
"During my whole career at Goldman Sachs - 1967 to 1991 - I never owned a foreign stock or emerging market bonds. Now I have hundreds of millions of dollars in Russia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, and I worry constantly about the dollar-yen rate. Every night before I go to bed I call in for the dollar-yen quote, and to find out what the Nikkei is doing and what the Hang Seng Index is doing. We have bets in all these markets. Right now Paul [one of my traders] is long [on] the Canadian dollar. We have bets all over the place. I would not have worried about any of these twenty years ago. Now I have to worry about all of them."
Leon Coopermann, hedge fund manager1
Economic globalization is probably the most fundamental transformation of the world's political and economic arrangements since the Industrial Revolution. Decisions made in one part of the world more and more affect people and communities elsewhere in the world. Sometimes the consequences of globalization are positive, liberating inventive and entrepreneurial talents and accelerating the pace of sustainable development. But at other times they are negative, as when many people, especially in less-developed countries, are left behind without a social safety net. Globalization undermines the ability of the nation to tax and to regulate its own economy. This weakens the power of sovereign nations relative to that of large transnational corporations and distorts how social and economic priorities are chosen.
Economic globalization is most often associated with rapid growth in the flow of goods and services across international borders. Indeed, the economic "openness" of a nation is often measured by the value of its exports, imports, or their sum when compared to the size of its economy. Economic globalization also involves large investments from outside each nation, often by transnational corporations. These corporations often combine technology and know-how with their investments that enhance the productive capacity of a nation. Previous position papers of the Mobilization, contained in Speaking of Religion & Politics: The Progressive Church Tackles Hot Topics2, have dealt with globalization primarily in these terms.
But international trade and investment are only part of the openness that has come to be called globalization. Another part, and arguably the most important, is the quickening flow of financial assets internationally. While a small portion of this flow is directly associated with the "real" economy of production and exchange, its vast majority is composed of trades in the "paper" economy of short-term financial markets. This paper economy is enormous: The value of global financial securities greatly exceeds the value of annual world output of goods and services. Moreover, the paper economy often contributes to crises in the real economy. Thus it is important to the well being of humanity and the planet as a whole, yet it is little understood by most people. This essay undertakes to provide a basic understanding of this paper economy, especially as its more speculative features have multiplied during the last two or three decades, so that Christians and others concerned about what is happening in our world can join in an intelligent discussion of how the harmful consequences of financial markets can be controlled.
Financial markets 101
To better understand this paper economy, one first needs to know something about foreign exchange markets, international money markets, and "external" financial markets.
In an open economy, domestic residents often engage in international transactions. American car dealers, for example, buy Japanese Toyotas and Datsuns, while German computer companies sell electronic notebooks to Mexican businessmen. Similarly, Australian mutual funds invest in the shares of companies all over the world, while the treasurer of a Canadian transnational corporation parks idle cash in 90-day Bank of England notes. Most of these transactions require one or more participants to acquire a foreign currency. If an American buys a Toyota and pays the Japanese Toyota dealer in dollars, for example, the latter will have to exchange the dollars for yens in order to have the local currency with which to pay his workers and local suppliers.
The foreign exchange market is the market in which national currencies are traded. As in any market, a price must exist at which trade can occur. An exchange rate is the price of a unit of domestic currency in terms of a foreign currency. Thus, if the exchange rate of the dollar in terms of the Japanese yen increases, we say the dollar has depreciated and the yen has appreciated. Similarly, a decrease in the dollar/yen exchange rate would imply an appreciation of the dollar and a depreciation of the yen.
Foreign exchange markets can be classified as spot markets and forward markets. In spot markets currencies are bought and sold for immediate delivery and payment. In forward markets, currencies are bought or sold for future delivery and payment. A U.S. music company, say, enters into a contract to buy British records for delivery in 30 days. To guard against the possibility of the dollar/pound exchange rate increasing in the meantime, the company buys pounds forward, for delivery in 30 days, at the corresponding forward exchange rate quoted today. This is called hedging.
Of course, there has to be a counterpart to the music company's forward purchase of pounds. Who is the seller of those pounds? The immediate seller would be a commercial bank, as in the spot market. But the bank only acts as an intermediary. The ultimate seller of forward pounds may be another hedger, like the music company, but with a position just its opposite. Suppose, for example, that an American firm or individual has invested in 30-day British securities that it wants to convert back into dollars after the end of 30 days. The investor may decide to sell the pound proceeds forward in order to assure itself of the rate at which the pounds are to be converted back into dollars after 30 days.
Another type of investor may be providing the forward contract bought by the music company. This is the speculator, who attempts to profit from changes in exchange rates. Depending on their expectations, speculators may enter the forward market either as sellers or as buyers of forward exchange. In this particular case, the speculator may have reason to believe that the dollar/pound exchange rate will decrease in the next 30 days, permitting him to obtain the promised pounds at a lower price in the spot market 30 days hence.
The main instruments of foreign exchange transactions include electronic bank deposit transfers and bank drafts, bills of exchange, and a whole array of other short-term instruments expressed in terms of foreign currency. Thus, foreign exchange transactions do not generally involve a physical exchange of currencies across borders. They generally involve only changes in debits and credits at different banks in different countries. Very large banks in the main financial centers such as New York, London, Brussels and Zurich, account for most foreign exchange transactions. Local banks can provide foreign exchange by purchasing it in turn from major banks.
Although the foreign exchange market is dispersed in many cities and countries, it is unified by keen competition among the highly sophisticated market participants. A powerful force keeping exchange rate quotations in different places in line with each other is the search on the part of market participants for foreign exchange arbitrage opportunities. Arbitrage is the simultaneous purchase and sale of a commodity or financial asset in different markets with the purpose of obtaining a profit from the differential between the buying and selling price.
When foreign exchange is acquired in order to engage in international transactions involving the purchase or sale of goods and services, it is said that international trade has taken place in the real economy. When international transactions involve the purchase or sale of financial assets, they are referred to as international financial transactions. They constitute the paper economy.
Financial markets are commonly classified as capital markets or money markets. Capital markets deal in financial claims that reach more than one year into the future. Such claims include shares of stock, bonds, and long-term loans, among others. Money markets, on the other hand, deal in short-term claims, with maturities of less than one year. These include marketable government securities (like Treasury bills), large-denomination certificates of deposit issued by banks, commercial paper (representing short-term corporate debt), money market funds, and many other kinds of short-term, highly liquid (easily transferable) financial instruments. It is these short-term money market securities that account for most of the instability in the global paper economy.
Buying or selling a money market security internationally involves the same kind of foreign exchange risk that plagues buyers or sellers of merchandise internationally. If one wishes to guard against the possibility of an increase or decrease in the foreign exchange rate, one can insure against such fluctuations by "covering" in the forward market. By the same token, the decision about whether to own domestic or foreign money market securities is not simply a comparison of the rates of interest paid on otherwise comparable securities, because one must also take into account the gain (or loss) from purchasing foreign currency spot and selling it forward. Thus, choosing the security with the highest return does not necessarily imply the one with the highest interest rate.
People who trade in international money markets, moreover, need to take into account many other variables, including the costs of gathering and processing information, transaction costs, the possibility of government intervention and regulation, other forms of political risk, and the inability to make direct comparisons of alternative assets. Speculating in international money markets is a risky proposition.
International money markets involve assets denominated in different currencies. External financial markets involve assets denominated in the same currency but issued in different political jurisdictions. Eurodollars, for example, are dollar deposits held outside the United States (offshore), such as dollar deposits in London, Zurich, or even Singapore banks. The deposits may be in banks owned locally or in the offshore banking subsidiaries of U.S. banks. Deutsche mark deposits in London banks or pound sterling deposits in Amsterdam banks also are examples of external deposits. They are referred to as eurocurrency deposits. (The advent of a new common currency in the European Community - the Euro - will require the development of new nomenclature for external financial markets)
External banking activities are a segment of the wholesale international money market. The vast majority of eurocurrency transactions fall in the above $1 million value range, frequently reaching the hundreds of millions (or even billion) dollar value. Accordingly, the customers of eurobanks are almost exclusively large organizations, including multinational corporations, government entities, hedge funds, and international organizations, as well as eurobanks themselves. Like domestic banks, eurobanks that have excess reserves may make loans denominated in eurocurrencies, expanding the supply of eurocurrency deposits. The eurocurrency market funnels funds from lending countries to borrowing countries. Thus, it performs an important function as global financial intermediator.
Early history
The origins of what Karl Polanyi3 called haute finance can be traced to Renaissance Italy, where as early as 1422 there were seventy-two bankers or bill-brokers in or near the Mecato Vecchio of Florence.4 Many combined trade with purely financial business. By the middle of the fifteenth century, the Medici of Florence had opened branches in Bruges, London and Avignon, both as a means of financing international trade and as a way of marketing new kinds of financial assets. Many banking terms and practices still in use today originated in the burgeoning financial centers of Renaissance Europe.
By the early seventeenth century, the Dutch and East India Companies began issuing shares to the public in order to fund imperial enterprises closely linked to Holland and Britain. Their shares were made freely transferable, permitting development of a secondary financial market for claims to future income. Amsterdam opened a stock exchange in 1611, and shortly thereafter, the British government began issuing lottery tickets, an early form of government bonds, to finance colonial expansion, wars and other major areas of state expenditure. A lively secondary market in these financial instruments also emerged.5
Throughout these early years, financial markets were anything but riskless and stable. Consider the famous Dutch tulip mania of 1630, for example. This speculative bubble saw prices of tulip bulbs reach what seemed like absurd levels, yet "the rage among the Dutch to possess them [tulips] was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected." Some investors in Britain and France shared this "irrational exuberance," though it was centered mostly in Holland. Then, not unlike speculative bubbles of more recent vintage, prices crashed6, pushing the economy into a depression and leaving many investors angry and confused.
Paris developed into an early financial center in the eighteenth century, but the Revolution of 1789 dissipated its power. The New York Stock Exchange was formally organized in 1792 and the official London Stock Exchange opened in 1802. The expansion westward of the railroads in the U.S. offered the financial community opportunity to sell railway shares and bonds that quickly became dominant in the financial markets. Indeed, the bond markets of London, Paris, Berlin, and Amsterdam were vehicles for collecting massive amounts of European savings and transferring it at higher returns to the emerging markets of the U.S., Canada, Australia, Latin America and Russia in the century preceding World War I.
Forward markets soon developed, especially in the U.S., in order to counter the impact of long distances and unpredictable weather. As capital and money markets expanded, other new financial instruments came into use. Joint stock companies were formed, enabled by legislation that clarified the distinction between the owners and managers of corporations. This, in turn, helped stimulate the growth of the American stock market in the late nineteenth century. To be sure, financial markets did not grow continuously in the nineteenth century. Lending to the emerging markets was interrupted by defaults in the 1820s, 1850s, 1870s and 1890s, but each wave of default was confined to a relatively small number of countries, permitting growth of financial flows to resume.7
In the four decades leading up to World War I, a truly worldwide economy was forged for the first time, extending from the core of Western Europe and the U.S. to latecomers in Eastern Europe and Latin America and even to the countries supplying raw materials on the periphery. Central to this expansion of trade and investment was an expanding system of finance that girded the globe. The amount was enormous: between 1870 and 1914 something like $30 billion,8 the equivalent in 2002 dollars of $550 billion, was transferred to recipient countries, in a world economy perhaps one-twelfth as large as today's.
During this "Gilded Age" of haute finance, the risks of participating in international trade and investment were generously shared with governments and the banking system. The reason is that foreign exchange rates were kept reasonably stable by the commitment of most governments to the "high" gold standard. In this way, businesses and individuals engaging in international transactions were reasonably certain that the value of their contracts was not going to change before they matured. Their exchange risk was shared with government by its willingness to buy or sell gold in order to keep the exchange rate constant. Because of this assurance, financial flows were reasonably free of regulation.
They were not immune from crises, however. When the sources of financial capital temporarily dried up, capital-importing countries occasionally found they could not expand export earnings sufficiently to avoid suspending interest payments on their debts or abandoning gold parity. On two occasions, the United States faced this possibility. The first was in 1893, when it switched in a sharp economic downturn to bimetallism (which caused William Jennings Bryan to denounce the "cross of gold"), and the second was in 1907, which led to the creation of the Federal Reserve System, handing to the government the function of lender of last resort previously carried out by Wall Street banks under the tutelage of J. Pierpont Morgan.
In his magisterial book The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi reflected on the pervasive influence of haute finance on the policies of nations even in this "Gilded Age." The globalising financial markets and the gold standard, according to Polanyi, left very little room for states, especially smaller ones, to adopt monetary and fiscal policies independent of the new international order. "Loans, and the renewal of loans, hinged upon credit, and credit upon good behavior. Since, under constitutional government ..., behavior is reflected in the budget and the external value of the currency cannot be detached from the appreciation of the budget, debtor governments were well advised to watch their exchanges carefully and to avoid policies which might reflect upon the soundness of budget positions." Thus, even one hundred years ago the then-dominant world power, Great Britain, speaking as it did so often through the voice of the City of London, "prevailed by the timely pull of a thread in the international monetary network.9
Following World War I, the United States emerged not merely as a creditor country but as the primary source of new international financial flows. At first, the principal borrowers were the national governments of the stronger countries, but as the boom in security underwriting developed in the U.S, numerous obscure provinces, departments and municipalities found it possible to sell their bonds to American investors.10 Just as domestic construction, land, and equity markets went through speculative rises in the 1920s, so too did the U.S. experience a speculative surge in foreign investment. In the aftermath of successive defaults by foreign debtors in 1932, the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency concluded:
The record of the activities of investment bankers in the flotation of foreign securities is one of the most scandalous chapters in the history of American investment banking. The sale of these foreign issues was characterized by practices and abuses that violated the most elementary principles of business ethics.11
Speculation in the stock markets leading up to 1929 offers still another window on the instability of short-term financial flows. A speculative market can be defined as one in which prices move in response to the balance of opinion regarding the future movement of prices rather than responding normally to changes in the demand for and supply of whatever is priced. Helped by the willingness of Wall Street to allow people to buy stocks on margin, people were only too ready to bet prices would rise as long as others thought so too. Day after day and month after month the price of stocks went up in 1927. The gains by later standards were not large, but they had an aspect of great reliability. Then in 1928, the nature of the boom changed. "The mass escape into make-believe, so much a part of the true speculative orgy, started in earnest.12
Following World War I, the gold standard itself took on new form. Nations were allowed to hold their international reserves in either gold or foreign exchange. This worked for a while in the 1920s, but as speculation mounted and balances of payments disequilibria grew, fears of devaluation led central banks to try to replace their foreign-exchange holdings with specie in a "scramble for gold." The worldwide result of these shifts in central bank portfolios was an overall contraction of the supply of money and credit that sapped aggregate demand and forced prices to fall and output levels to shrink. Thus, it can be argued - persuasively in our view - that the Great Depression of the 1930s was as much, if not more, the result of mismanagement of money and credit as it was the result of protectionist policies. Protectionist policies were more likely the result of slowed growth and stalled trade. Countries that broke with the gold-exchange standard early, such as Britain in 1931, and pursued more expansionary monetary policies fared somewhat better.
The Bretton Woods system
During the darkest days of World War II, a radically new economic architecture was designed for the postwar world at a New Hampshire ski resort called Bretton Woods. With the competitive devaluation and protectionist policies of the 1930s still fresh in their minds, the mostly British and American delegates to the conference wanted most of all to design a system with fixed exchange rates that did not rely on national gold hoards to keep exchange rates stable. They decided to depend instead on strict controls of international financial movements. In this way, they hoped to allow countries to pursue full-employment policies through appropriate monetary (money and credit) and fiscal (tax and spending) policies without some of the anxieties associated with open financial markets. The role of monetary and financial stabilizer was given to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was provided with modest funds to assist nations to adjust imbalances in their external payments obligations. The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, later the World Bank) assumed the task of helping to finance post-war reconstruction.13
The IMF as it emerged from Bretton Woods had inadequate reserves to advance money for the long periods that many countries require for "soft-landings" from big current-account deficits. It would make only short-term loans. To make sure that borrowing nations were constrained, "conditionality" attached to IMF loans became standard practice, even in the early years of the Fund's operation. Policy limitations and "performance targets" tied to credit lines advanced under "standby agreements" began in the middle 1950s and were universal by the 1960s, long before the notions of "stabilization" and "structural adjustment" came into common parlance.
The Bretton Woods agreement also imposed a foreign exchange standard by which exchange rates between major currencies were fixed in terms of the dollar, and the value of the dollar was tied to gold at a U.S. guaranteed price of thirty-five dollars per ounce. By devising a system that controlled financial movements and assisted with the adjustment of countries' balances of payments, the new system succeeded in keeping exchange rates remarkably stable. They were changed only very occasionally, e.g., as when the value of sterling relative to the dollar was reduced in 1949 and again in 1966. This meant that companies doing business abroad did not need to worry constantly about the risk of exchanging one currency for another.
Among the reasons for this remarkable stability was the willingness of the central banks of other countries to hold an increasing proportion of their official reserves in the form of U.S. dollars. It was an essential part of the system that the dollars held by other countries would be seen as IOUs backed by the U.S. offer to exchange them for gold at a fixed pre-war price. But as the balance-of-payments of the U.S. moved more deeply into deficits in the 1960s, there were more and more U.S. dollars held by other countries, and this so-called "dollar overhang" became disturbingly large.15 General de Gaulle called it "the exorbitant privilege," meaning that the Americans were paying their bills - for defense spending to fight the Vietnam War among other things - with IOUs instead of real resources in the form of exports of goods and services.
Strict control over financial movements began to weaken as early as the 1950s, when the first eurodollar (later eurocurrency) deposits were made in London. At first a trickle, limited originally to Europe, these offshore banking operations soon expanded worldwide. The American "Interest Equalization Tax" (IET) instituted in 1963 raised the costs to banks of lending offshore from their domestic branches.16 The higher external rates led dollar depositors such as foreign corporations to switch their funds from onshore U.S. institutions to eurobanks. Thus, the real effect of the IET was to encourage the dollar to follow the foreigners abroad, rather than the other way around. Eurobanks paid higher interest rates on deposits and loaned eurocurrencies at lower rates than U.S. banks could at home. Still another large inflow of eurodeposits occurred in 1973-74 as the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began "recycling" their surplus dollar earnings through eurobanks. Because of their existence, a country such as Brazil could arrange within a reasonably regulation-free environment to obtain multimillion-dollar loans from a consortium of offshore American, German and Japanese banks and thereby finance its oil imports. Net eurocurrency deposit liabilities that amounted to around $10 billion in the mid-1960s, grew to $500 billion by 1980.
These eurocurrency transactions taught the players in financial markets how to shift their deposits, loans, and investments from one currency to another whenever exchange rates or interest rates were thought to be ready to change. Even the ability of central banks to regulate the supply of money and credit was undermined by the readiness of commercial banks to borrow and lend offshore. Hence, the effectiveness of regulatory mechanisms that had been put in place to implement the Bretton Woods agreement - interest rate ceilings, lending limits, portfolio restrictions, reserve and liquidity requirements - gradually eroded as offshore transactions started to balloon.
The world economy developed at unprecedented rates during the roughly twenty-five years immediately following World War II. Growth and employment rates during these years were at historic highs in most countries. Productivity also advanced rapidly in most developing countries as well as in the technological leaders. These facts suggest that the system devised at Bretton Woods worked reasonably well, despite occasional adjustments. To be sure, it helped to sow the seeds of its own destruction by failing to retain operational control of international financial flows. But the twenty-five years of its survival leading up to August 15, 1971, when President Nixon closed the gold window, have nonetheless come to be called by some economic historians the "Golden Years."
Controlling private risk
Fixed exchange rates did not last long after the U.S. stopped exchanging gold for claims on the dollar held by foreign central banks. The pound sterling was allowed to float against the dollar in July, 1972. Japan set the yen free to float in February, 1973, and most European currencies followed suit shortly thereafter. The Bretton Woods gold-dollar system was doomed.
The fact that exchange rates no longer were fixed meant that companies doing business in different countries had to cope with the day-to-day shifts in the dollar's rate of exchange with other currencies. The risks of unexpected changes in the value of international contracts suddenly had shifted from the public to the private sector. Corporate finance officers now had to hedge against possible exchange losses by buying a currency forward and investing the equivalent in the short-term money market, or by investing in the eurocurrency market. The corporations' banks, in turn, tried to match each foreign currency transaction with another contrary transaction in order not to leave each of the banks exposed to foreign exchange risk overnight. Since no single bank was likely to balance its foreign exchange positions exactly, the need arose to swap deposits in different currencies in order to match corporate hedging transactions and to square the bank's books.
The price of this forward cover on inter-bank transactions - that is to say, the premium or discount on a currency's spot value - has tended to accord with the differences between interest-rates offered for eurocurrency deposits in different currencies. This is the connection between the foreign exchange market and the short-term credit markets, between exchange rates and interest rates. Whenever exchange rates move up or down, therefore, their influence is immediately transmitted through the eurocurrency markets to the credit markets.
It is this scramble to avoid private risk that accounted for the dramatic rise in international financial movements following the demise of the Bretton Woods system. By 1973, daily foreign exchange trading around the world varied between $10 and $20 billion per day. This amount was approximately twice the value of world trade at the time. Bank of International Settlements data suggests that the daily average of foreign exchange trading had climbed by 1980 to about $80 billion, and that the ratio between foreign exchange trading and international trade was more nearly ten to one. The data for 1992 was $880 billion and fifty to one, respectively; for 1995, $l,260 billion and seventy to one; and for 2000, almost $1,800 and ninety to one.
There is very little doubt, therefore, that the lion's share of international financial flows is relatively short-run. Indeed, about eighty percent of foreign exchange transactions are reversed in less than seven business days. Only a very small proportion is used to finance international trade and direct foreign investment. The vast majority must be used with the expectation of gain or to avoid losses that may result from changes in the value of financial assets. In general terms, they are speculative, made in hope of capital gain or to hedge against potential capital loss, or to seek the gains of arbitrage based on slight differences in rates of return in different financial centers.
The power of financial actors17
Foreign exchange markets and markets for money and credit seem remote and abstract to most people. This section introduces the real institutions that operate these markets and assesses the nature of their power.
- Commercial banks They take deposits, lend money, and create credit to the extent their capitalization allows. In Europe, they tend to combine commercial and investment banking services, but in the U.S. and Japan they are still kept at least partially separate by regulation. The foreign exchange trading facilities of the largest commercial banks, e.g. Citibank and J.P.Morgan/Chase in the U.S., tend to dominate the market. The banking industry as a whole represents the largest pool of world financial capital.
- Investment banks They facilitate international payments, manage new issues of stocks and bonds, advise on mergers and acquisitions in all industries, and engage in securities and foreign exchange trading as allowed by law. Investment banks (previously called merchant banks in the U.K.) have specialized in particular kinds of derivative products. Derivatives are financial contracts whose value is based upon the value of other underlying financial assets such as stocks, bonds, mortgages or foreign exchange.
- Brokerage houses They handle the bulk of stock exchange transactions and a major part of foreign exchange transactions. Investment banks recently have acquired several of the main brokerage houses in the U.S. The development of investor-friendly methods of buying and selling securities, e.g., over-the-counter markets and electronic brokerage, also have diminished the role of independent brokerage houses.
- Mutual funds They are pools of funds provided by clients that are run by professional investment managers. These collective investments are held in portfolios with various mixes of money-market instruments, bonds and equities. Mutual funds account for the second largest pool of global financial capital.
- Hedge funds They resemble mutual funds, but they are much less restricted in investment activities and techniques. Their customers are high net-worth individuals and large institutional investors. They specialize in complex financial instruments and tend to take significant speculative positions, especially on expected future changes in macroeconomic conditions. They exploit arbitrage opportunities embedded in the relative prices of related securities. They frequent offshore centers and tax havens.
- Tax havens Offshore centers and tax havens shelter perhaps $10 trillion of wealth from capital and income taxation. The British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Dublin and Luxembourg are among the most important. Many hedge funds are registered there.
- Wealthy individuals They are an important source of funds, as many of them invest their liquid funds in financial markets. They account for about eighty percent of hedge fund investors.
- Private pension funds They function like annuities, receiving funds today in return for a promise to pay future benefits. With large pools of funds to invest, they tend to depend on investment banks, mutual funds or hedge funds to supervise placement of their assets in global financial markets.
- Insurance companies They pool risks by selling protection against the loss of property, income, or life. Since the risks they insure have various durations, they call for varied investment strategies. A portion of their funds is invested in short-term financial instruments, often through mutual and hedge funds.
- Transnational corporations They produce and sell goods and services in a number of countries. Their finance departments seek the best ways to raise and transfer funds across borders, and administer the transfer prices18 of international trade conducted within the corporation. Some even have in-house corporate banks.
According to recent work by political scientists, the power of these financial actors is based in part on a complicated "process of multiplication" of loans, assets and transactions. Many investors in financial markets buy financial instruments on very thin margins, based on loans obtained by pledging the assets as collateral. This is called "leverage" in the jargon of financial markets. In turn, the borrowed funds are invested in other financial assets, multiplying the demand for credit and financial assets. As demand rises, more sophisticated financial assets are invented, including many forms of financial derivatives. A major portion of the accumulated debt remains serviceable only as long as the prices of most assets will rise or at least remain relatively stable. If prices turn down, they easily can lead to a chain-reaction. If investors respond instinctively like a herd, they will bring a far-reaching collapse that constitutes a crisis.
As the flow of financial assets climbs, some bankers, brokers, and managers of financial institutions become prominent players in the competition for investor dollars. Some become known for picking profitable places to invest and for promoting their selections successfully. This can influence markets if people have confidence in their advice. A notorious example of the influence of prominent players was the attack on British sterling in 1992 by George Soros' Quantum Fund. Believing that sterling was overvalued, the Fund quietly established credit lines that allowed it to borrow $15 billion worth of sterling and sell it for dollars at the then "overvalued" price. Its purpose, of course, was to pay back the loan with cheaper pounds after they had depreciated. Having gone long on dollars and short on sterling, Soros decided to speak up noisily. He publicized his short-selling and made statements in newspapers that the pound would soon be devalued. It wasn't long before sterling was devalued; he made $1 billion in profit.
The point can be made more generally: financial markets are subject to manipulation because they have become socially structured. Market leaders and financial gurus are admired and followed (at least until very recently). The heavyweights thus dominate the business. An obvious consequence of this is that there is a strong tendency in financial markets for further concentration of resources.
Another source of the power of financial actors is their obvious affinity for the rampant free-market philosophy of neo-liberalism. The freedom with which they move financial capital around depends, of course, on the market-friendly policies of the so-called Washington Consensus.19 As long as they are seen as part of the governing coalition, they derive special powers to regulate themselves rather than be controlled by an independent government agency or civil society. Their power also is reinforced by the activities of several collective associations of financial actors,20 which lobby on their behalf.
One more source of power for the financial actors is their knowledge that if they are big enough and sufficiently interlaced with other financial actors, then the "system" will keep them from failing. Consider the case of Long-term Capital Management, a hedge fund partnership started in 1994. It was able to borrow from various banks the equivalent of forty times its capitalization in order to make bets on changes in the relative prices of bonds in the U.S. and abroad. When the Russian government announced a devaluation and debt moratorium in August, 1998, it produced losses that the fund could not sustain. Nor could some of the banks that had loaned large amounts to the fund. Accordingly, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, fearful that the risk to the entire system was too high, orchestrated a private rescue operation by fourteen banks and other financial institutions, which re-capitalized the company for $3.5 billion.
Financial actors also have the power indirectly to influence non-financial actors such as firms or states. By providing economic incentives to gamble and speculate on financial instruments, global financial markets divert funds from long-term productive investments. In all probability, they also encourage banks and financial institutions to maintain a regime of higher real interest rates that reduce the ability of productive enterprises to obtain credit. The volatility of global financial markets, moreover, brings uncertainty and volatility in interest rates and exchange rates that are harmful to various sectors of the real economy, particularly international trade.
The above stories about George Soros and Long-term Capital Management are good illustrations of the consequences for non-financial actors of actions by financial actors. Both episodes are examples of games that are basically zero-sum, at least in the short-run. Nothing new was produced; no new values were created. In the 1992 case about speculating against sterling, the Quantum Fund's profits were at the expense of the British government, especially the Bank of England, and British taxpayers. In 1998, the losses suffered by Long-term Capital Management came out of the pockets of the stockholders of the banks that bailed it out, as the stock-market value of their shares depreciated. Hence, the financial system tends to feed itself by drawing more resources from other sectors of the economy, undermining the vitality of the real economy.
Consequences of global financial flows
The dominant economic ideology of the last twenty-five years has been embodied in the so-called Washington Consensus. It is a "market-friendly" ideology that traces its roots to longstanding policies of the IMF that encourage macroeconomic "stabilization;" to adoption by the World Bank of ideas in vogue in Washington early in the Reagan period concerning deregulation and supply-side economics; to the zeal of the Thatcher government in England for privatizing public enterprises; and perhaps most of all to the neo-liberal tendencies of the business community and the economics profession in the U.S. The implementation of these policies of economic "reform," by first "stabilizing" the macro-economy and then "adjusting" the market so that it can perform more efficiently, are supposed to pay off in the form of faster output growth and rising real incomes
Among these policy prescriptions is financial liberalization in both the developed and the developing countries. Domestically it is achieved by weakening or removing controls on interest and credit and by diluting the differences between banks, insurance and finance companies. International financial liberation, on the other hand, demands removal of controls and regulations on both the inflows and outflows of financial instruments that move through foreign exchange markets. It is the implementation of these reforms that is perhaps the single most important cause of the surge in global financial flows. To be sure, the influence of technological advances has broken the natural barriers of space and time for financial markets as twenty-four hour electronic trading has grown. The fact that throughout most of the 1980s and 1990s the developed countries suffered from over-capacity and overproduction in manufacturing may also have led the owners of financial capital to look for alternative profit opportunities.
It now is time to ask whether the implementation of all these reforms, on balance, has produced good or bad results. The focus of this section will be mostly on the consequences of large and expanding international financial flows. After all, they are the main concern of this essay. But first, we should ask whether or not the policies of growth and rising real incomes promoted by the Washington Consensus have borne fruit.
Growth and income
There is little doubt that the introduction of the Washington Consensus' policy mix expanded the volume of international trade. As a result, trade in goods and services has grown at more than twice the rate of global gross domestic product (GDP), and developing countries' share of trade has risen from 23 to 29 percent. Increasing numbers of firms from developing countries, like their industrial-country counterparts, engage in transnational production and adopt a global perspective in structuring their operations. The flow of foreign direct investments and foreign portfolio investments has multiplied even more rapidly than trade, despite the financial instability experienced in Asia, Brazil, Russia, and elsewhere in recent years.
The effects of liberalization have not been uniformly favorable, however. After at least ten full years of experience with the Washington Consensus, several recent studies have begun to assess the consequences for developing countries of this experiment in more open markets.21 Except for the years of crisis in a number of the countries studied, most developing countries achieved moderate growth rates of gross domestic product in the 1990s - considerably higher than in the l980s in Africa and Latin America during the debt crisis, but remarkably unchanged in most other regions. Moreover, average annual growth in the 1990s was slightly lower than in the twenty-five years preceding the debt crisis when a strategy of substituting domestic production for imports was in fullest use. When population growth rates are taken into consideration, the growth rate of per capita income in the developing countries studied during the 1990s also was somewhat lower than in the 1960s and 1970s. Toward the end of the 1990s, growth tapered off in many countries due to emerging domestic financial crises or external events. There is little evidence in these figures, therefore, to suggest the strategy of liberalization boosted growth rates appreciably.
Nor did the distribution of income improve in most developing countries in the 1990s. On the contrary, virtually without exception the wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers rose with liberalization. The reasons for this varied widely among countries, but one of the most important reasons was the fact that the number of relatively well-paid jobs in sectors of the economy involved with international trade, though growing, was insufficient to absorb available workers, forcing many workers into more precarious and poorly paid employment in the non-traded, informal trade, and service sectors or where traditional agriculture served as a sponge for the labor market. Between the mid-1960s and the late-1990s, the poorest 20 percent of the world population saw its share of income fall from 2.3 to 1.4 percent. Meanwhile, the share of the wealthiest quintile increased from 70 to 85 percent.22
Risk and reward
While all markets are imperfect and subject to failure, financial markets are more prone than others to fail because they are plagued with three particular shortcomings: asymmetric information, herd behavior and self-fulfilling panics. Asymmetric information is a problem whenever one party to an economic transaction has insufficient information to make rational and consistent decisions. In most financial markets where borrowing and lending take place, borrowers usually have better information about the potential returns and risks associated with the investments to be financed by the loans than do the lenders. This becomes especially true as financial transactions disperse across the globe, often between borrowers and lenders of widely different cultures.
Asymmetric information leads to adverse selection and moral hazard. Adverse selection occurs when, say, lenders have too little information to choose from among potential borrowers those who are most likely to use the loans wisely. The lenders' gullibility, therefore, attracts more unworthy borrowers. Moral hazard occurs when borrowers engage in excessively risky activities that were unanticipated by lenders and lead to significant losses for the lender. Yet another form of moral hazard occurs when lenders indulge in lending indiscriminately because they assume that the government or an international institution will bail them out if the loans go awry.
A good illustration of asymmetric information is the story of bank lending following OPEC's large increase in oil prices following 1973. Awash in cash, the oil exporters deposited large amounts in commercial banks that then perfected the Euro-currency loan for developing countries. Eager to put excess reserves to use, the banks spent little time discriminating among potential borrowers, in part because they believed host governments or international agencies would guarantee the loans. At the same time, developing countries found they could readily borrow not only to import oil, but also to increase other kinds of expenditures. This meant they could use borrowed funds to maintain domestic spending rather than be forced to adjust to the new realities of higher prices for necessary imports. There is considerable evidence that moral hazard also was present in the Mexican crises in 1982 and 1994, and in the Southeast Asian crises in 1997-8.
Yet another illustration of asymmetric information is the tendency of financial firms, especially on Wall Street and in the City of London, to invent ever more complex derivatives to shift risk around the financial system. The market for these products is growing rapidly, both on futures and options exchanges (two of the several places where derivatives are traded). A financial engineer, for example, can take the risk in, say, a bond and break it down into a series of smaller risks, such as that inflation will reduce its real value or that the borrower will default. These smaller risks can then be priced and sold, using derivatives, so that the bondholder keeps only those risks he wishes to bear. But this is not a simple task, particularly when it involves assets with risk exposures far into the future and which are traded so rarely that there is no good market benchmark for setting the price. Enron, for instance, sold a lot of these sorts of derivatives, booking profits on them immediately even though there was a serious doubt about their long-term profitability. Stories of huge losses incurred in derivative trading are legion. The real challenge before central banks and regulatory bodies is to curb speculative behavior and bring discipline in derivative markets.
A second source of risk in financial markets is the tendency of borrowers and lenders alike to engage in herd behavior. John Maynard Keynes, writing in the 1930s, suggested that financial markets are like "beauty contests." His analogy was to a game in the British Sunday newspapers that asked readers to rank pictures of women according to their guess about the average choice by other respondents. The winner, therefore, does not express his own preferences, but rather anticipates "what average opinion expects average opinion to be." Accordingly, Keynes thought that anyone who obtained information or signals that pointed to swings in average opinion and to how it would react to changing events had the basis for substantial gain. Objective information about economic data was not enough. Rather, simple slogans "like public expenditure is bad," "lower unemployment leads to inflation," "larger deficits lead to higher interest rates," were then the more likely sources of changes in public opinion. What mattered was that average opinion believed them to be true, and that advance knowledge of, say, more public spending, lower unemployment, or larger deficits, respectively, offered the speculator a special advantage.
A financial market that operates as a beauty contest is likely to be highly unstable and prone to severe changes. One reason for this is that people trading in financial assets, even today, know very little about them. People who hold stock know little about the companies that issued them. Investors in mutual funds know little about the stocks their funds are invested in. Bondholders know little about the companies or governments that issued the bonds. Even knowledgeable professionals are often more concerned with judging how swings in conventional opinion might change market values rather than with the long-term returns on investments. Indeed, since careful analysis of risks and rewards is costly and time consuming, it often makes sense for fund managers and traders to follow the herd. If they decide rationally not to follow the herd, their competence may be seriously questioned. On the other hand, if fund managers follow the herd and the herd suffers losses, few will question their competence because others too suffered losses. When financial markets are operated like a beauty contest, everyone wants to sell at the same time and nobody wants to buy.
The financial markets behaved as predicted shortly after several industrial countries, including the U.S. and Germany, abolished all restrictions on international capital movements in 1973. The new system proved to be highly volatile, with exchange rates, interest rates, and financial asset-prices subject to large short-term fluctuations. The markets also were susceptible to contagion when financial tremors spread from their epicenter to other countries and markets that seemingly had little connection with the initial problem. In less than five years, it already was clear that both the surpluses and the deficits on the major countries' balance of payments were getting larger, not smaller, despite significant changes in the exchange rates.
In some cases, a financial crisis can be self-fulfilling. A rumor can trigger a self-fulfilling speculative attack, e.g. on a currency, that may be baseless and far removed from the economic fundamentals (unlike the Soros story above). This can cause a sudden shift in the herd's intentions and lead to unanticipated market movements that create severe financial crises. Consider, for example, the succession of major financial crises that have pock-marked the recent history of international financial markets, including Latin America's Southern Cone crisis of 1979-81, the developing-country debt crisis of 1982, the Mexican crisis of 1994-95, the Asian crisis of 1997-98, the Russian crisis of 1998, the Brazilian crisis of 1999, and the Argentine crisis of 2001-02.
Perhaps the Asian crisis of 1997-98 is the most interesting in this regard, for there were relatively few signals beforehand of impending crisis. All the main East Asian economies displayed in 1994-96 low inflation, fiscal surpluses or balanced budgets, limited public debt, high savings and investment rates, substantial foreign exchange reserves and no signs of deterioration before the crisis. This background has led many analysts to suppose that the crisis was a mere product of the global financial system. But what could have triggered the herd to stampede out of Asian currencies? No doubt several factors were at work. Before the crisis that started in the summer of 1997, there was a rise in short-term lending to Asians by Western and Japanese banks with little or no premiums, a fact that the Bank for International Settlement raised questions about. Alert investors, especially hedge funds, also noticed that substantial portions of East and Southeast Asian borrowings were going into non-productive assets and real estate that often were linked to political connections. In fact, some of the funds pouring into non-productive assets were coming out of the productive sector, mortgaging the longer-term viability of some real economies. Information about the structure and policies of financial sectors was opaque. Thus, opinions began to change among key lenders about the regulation of financial sectors in several Asian countries and their destabilizing lack of transparency. Suddenly, several important hedge funds reduced their exposure by shorting currency futures, followed quickly by Western mutual funds. The calling of loans led quickly to deep depression in several Asian countries. It has been estimated that the Asian crisis and its global repercussions cut global output by $2 trillion in 1998-2000.
Loss of government autonomy
Both economic theory and the experience of managing the external financial affairs of nations tell us that it is virtually impossible to maintain (1) full financial mobility, (2) a fixed exchange rate, and (3) freedom to seek macro-economic balance (full employment with little inflation) with appropriate monetary and fiscal policies. Only two of these policy objectives can be consistently maintained. If the authorities try to pursue all three, they will sooner or later be punished by destabilizing financial flows, as in the run up to the Great Depression around 1930 and in the months before sterling's collapse 1992. If a government tries to stimulate its economy with lax monetary policy, for example, and players with significant market power like George Soros sense that at a fixed exchange rate, foreigners will be unwilling to lend enough to finance the country's current account deficit, they will begin to flee the home currency in order to avoid the capital losses they will suffer if and when there is a devaluation. If reserve losses accelerate and more players follow suit, crisis ensues. The authorities are forced to devalue, interest rates soar, and the successful attackers sit back to count their profits.
For nations wishing to retain reasonably independent monetary and fiscal authority in order to cater to domestic needs, the solution is to allow the exchange rate to move up or down as conditions in the foreign exchange markets dictate, or to establish some sort of control over the movement of financial instruments in and out of the country, or to devise some combination of these two adjustment mechanisms. The debate over whether fixed or flexible exchange rates is the wiser policy continues to rage in academic quarters and in finance ministries all over the world. For the most part, the international business community prefers reasonably fixed exchange rates in order to minimize their costs of hedging foreign currency positions. Thus instituting some form of control over speculative financial movements may be an appropriate solution to the "trilemma."
The capacity of a nation to levy enough taxes to finance needed public expenditures is another important reason to retain independent authority. A central function of government has been to insulate domestic groups from excessive market risks, particularly those originating in international transactions. This is the way governments have maintained domestic political support for liberalizing trade and finance throughout the postwar period. Yet many governments are less able today to help citizens that are injured by freer markets with unemployment compensation, severance payments, and adjustment assistance because the slightest hint of raising taxes to pay for these vital public services leads to capital flight in a world of heightened financial mobility.
This is a dilemma. Increased integration into the world economy has raised the need of governments to redistribute tax revenues or implement generous social programs in order to protect the vast majority of the population that remains internationally immobile. At the same time, governments find themselves less able to maintain the safety nets needed to preserve social stability. It seems reasonable to suppose, therefore, that doing things that will bolster the ability of governments to levy sufficient taxes - curbing tax avoidance by transnational corporations, controlling offshore tax havens, regulating capital flight - would help make globalization slightly more democratic.
Winners and losers
The people who benefit from speculative financial movements are, for the most part, better educated and wealthier than the vast majority of fellow citizens. They are the elites, whatever the country. As noted above, they have fewer connections to the real economy of production and exchange than most people. And their purpose in trading financial assets, again for the most part, is to make a profit quickly rather than wait for an investment project to mature.
People who do not participate directly in the buying and selling of short-term financial instruments are nonetheless influenced indirectly by the macroeconomic instability and contagion that often accompany interruptions in financial market flows. This is true for people both in developed and developing countries. In developed countries, the voracious appetite of financial markets for more and more resources saps the vitality of the real economy - the economy that most people depend upon for their livelihood. It has been shown that real interest rates rise as a result of the expansion of speculative financial markets. This rise in real interest rates, in turn, dampens real investment and economic growth while serving to concentrate wealth and political power within a growing worldwide rentier class (people who depend for their income on interest, dividends, and rents).23 Rather, the long-term health of the economy depends upon directing investable funds into productive investments rather than into speculation.
In developing countries, attracting global investors' attention is a mixed blessing. Capital market inflows provide important support for building infrastructure and harnessing natural and human resources. At the same time, surges in money market inflows may distort relative prices, exacerbate weakness in a nation's financial sector, and feed bubbles. As the 1997 Asian crisis attests, financial capital may just as easily flow out of as into a country. Unstable financial flows often lead to one of three kinds of crises:
- Fiscal crises. The government abruptly loses the ability to roll over foreign debts and attract new foreign loans, possibly forcing the government into rescheduling or default of its obligations.
- Exchange crises. Market participants abruptly shift their demands from domestic currency assets to foreign currency assets, depleting the foreign exchange reserves of the central bank in the context of a pegged exchange rate system.
- Banking crises. Commercial banks abruptly lose the ability to roll over market instruments (i.e., certificates-of-deposit) or meet a sudden withdrawal of funds from sight deposits, thereby making the banks illiquid and possibly insolvent.
Although these three types of crises sometimes appear singly, they more often arrive in combination because external shocks or changed market expectations are likely to occur simultaneously in the market for government bonds, the foreign exchange market, and the markets for bank assets. Approximately sixty developing countries have experienced extreme financial crises in the past decade.24
The vast majority of people in the developing world suffer from these convulsive changes. They are tired of adjusting to changes over which they exercise absolutely no control. Most people in these countries view Western capitalism as a private club, a discriminatory system that benefits only the West and the elites who live inside "the bell jars" of poor countries. Even as they consume the consumer goods of the West, they are quite aware that they still linger at the periphery of the capitalist game. They have no stake in it, and they believe that they suffer its consequences. As Hernando deSoto puts it, "Globalization should not be just about interconnecting the bell jars of the privileged few."25
Social solidarity
Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation sought to explain how the "liberal creed" contributed to the catastrophes of war and depression associated with the first half of the twentieth century. Polanyi's central argument, which in fact can be traced back to Adam Smith, is that markets do indeed promote efficiency and change, but that they achieve this through undermining social coherence and solidarity. Markets must therefore be embedded within social institutions that mitigate their negative consequences.
The evidence of more recent times suggests that the global spread of free-market policies has been accompanied by the decline of countervailing institutions of social solidarity. Indeed, a main feature of the introduction of market-friendly policies has been to weaken local institutions of social solidarity. Consider, for example, the top-down policy prescriptions of the IMF and World Bank during the developing world's debt crisis in the 1980s. These policies evolved into an intricate web of expected behaviors by developing countries. In order for developing countries to expect private businesses and financial interests to invest funds within their borders and to boost the growth potential of domestic economies, they needed to drop the "outdated and inefficient" policies that dominated development strategies for most of the postwar period and adopt in their place policies that are designed to encourage foreign trade and freer financial markets. Without significant adjustments in the ways economies were managed, it was suggested, nations soon would be left behind.
The list of Washington Consensus requirements was long and daunting:
- Make the private sector the primary engine of economic growth
- Maintain a low rate of inflation and price stability
- Shrink the size of the state bureaucracy
- Maintain as close to a balanced budget as possible, if not a surplus
- Eliminate or lower tariffs on imported goods
- Remove restrictions on foreign investment
- Get rid of quotas and domestic monopolies
- Increase exports
- Privatize state-owned industries and utilities
- Deregulate capital markets
- Make currency convertible
- Open industries, stock, and bond markets to direct foreign ownership
- Deregulate the economy to promote domestic competition
- Eliminate government corruption, subsidies and kickbacks
- Open the banking and telecommunications systems to private ownership and competition
- Allow citizens to choose from an array of competing pension options and foreign-run pension and mutual funds.
In a provocative article, Ute Pieper and Lance Taylor point out that market outcomes often conflict with other valuable social institutions. In addition, they emphasize that markets function effectively only when they are "embedded" in society. The authors then look carefully at the experience of a number of developing countries as they struggled to comply with the policy prescriptions of the IMF and the Fund. In almost every case, they demonstrate conclusively that the impact of these efforts was to make society an "adjunct to the market."26
An appropriate balance is not being struck between the economic and non-economic aspirations of human beings and their communities. Indeed, the evidence is mounting that globalization's trajectory can easily lead to social disintegration - to the splitting apart of nations along lines of economic status, mobility, region, or social norms. Globalization not only highlights and exacerbates tensions among groups; it also reduces the willingness of internationally mobile groups to cooperate with others in resolving disagreements and conflicts.
Policy options
History confirms that free-markets are inherently volatile institutions, prone to speculative booms and busts. Overshooting, especially in financial markets, is their normal condition. To work well, free markets need not only regulation, but active management. During the first half of the post-war era, world markets were kept reasonably stable by national governments and by a regime of international cooperation. Only lately has a much earlier idea been revived and made an orthodoxy - the idea adopted by the Washington Consensus that, provided there are clear and well-enforced rules-of-the-game, free markets can be self-regulating because they embody the rational expectations that participants form about the future.
On the contrary, since markets are themselves shaped by human expectations, their behavior cannot be rationally predicted. The forces that drive markets are not mechanical processes of cause and effect, as assumed in most of economic theory. They are what George Soros has termed "reflexive interactions."27 Because markets are governed by highly combustible interactions among beliefs, they cannot be self-regulating.
The question before us then, is what could be done to better regulate financial markets and to bring active management back into the task of "embedding" markets in society, rather than the other way around? Monetary authorities such as the Federal Reserve System in the U.S. and the central banks of other countries were formed long ago in order to dampen the inherent instabilities of financial market in their home countries. But the evolution of an international regulatory framework has not kept pace with the globalization of financial markets. The International Monetary Fund was not designed to cope with the volume and instability of recent financial trends.
Capital controls
Given the problems outlined above about short-term speculative financial transactions, one might wonder why national policy-makers have not insulated their financial markets by imposing some sort of control over financial capital. The answer, of course, is that some have continued trying to do so despite discouragement from the IMF. For example, some have put limitations on the quantity, conditions, or destinations of financial flows. Others have tried to impose a tax on short-term borrowing by national firms from foreign banks. This is said to be "market-based" because it operates by altering the cost of foreign funds. If such transactions were absolutely prohibited, they would be called "non-market" interventions.
A more extreme form of financial capital controls, one that controls movement of foreign exchange across international borders, also has been tried in a number of countries. This form of control requires that some if not all foreign currency inflows be surrendered to the central bank or a government agency, often at a fixed price that differs from that which would be set in free market. The receiving agency then determines the uses of foreign exchange. The absence of exchange controls means that currencies are "convertible."
The neo-liberal argument opposing financial capital controls asserts that their removal will enhance economic efficiency and reduce corruption. It is based on two basic propositions in economic theory that depend for their proof on perfectly competitive markets in the real economy and perfectly efficient gatherers and transmitters of information in financial markets. Neither assumption is realistic in today's world. Indeed, a number of empirical studies have reported the effectiveness of capital controls in controlling capital flight, curbing volatile capital flows and protecting the domestic economy from negative external developments.
Developing countries have only recently abandoned, or still maintain, a variety of control regimes. Latin American countries traditionally have used market-based controls, putting taxes and surcharges on selected financial capital movements or tying them up in escrow accounts. Non-market based restrictions were more common in Asia until the early 1990s. Many commentators believe that their sudden removal in the early 1990s was a contributing cause to the Asian financial crises in 1997-8. The experience of two countries, Malaysia and Chile, with capital controls is especially instructive.
Malaysia, unlike its Asian neighbors, was reluctant to remove its restrictions on external borrowing by national firms unless they could show how they could earn enough foreign exchange to service their debts. Then when the Asian crises hit, its government imposed exchange controls, in effect making its local currency that was held outside the country inconvertible into foreign exchange. After the ringget was devalued, exporters were required to surrender foreign currency earnings to the central bank in exchange for local currency at the new pegged rate. The government also limited the amount of cash nationals could take abroad, and it prohibited the repatriation of earnings on foreign investments that had been held for less than one year. Thus, Malaysia's capital controls were focused mostly on controlling the outflow of short-term financial transactions. Happily, the authorities were able to stabilize the currency and reduce interest rates, leading to a degree of domestic recovery.28
Chile, on the other hand, tried to limit the inflow of short-term financial transactions. It did so by imposing a costly reserve requirement on foreign-owned capital held in the country for less than one year. Despite attempts to stimulate foreign direct investment of the funds, most of the reserve deposits were absorbed in the form of increased reserves at the central bank. In turn, this created a potential for expanding the money supply, which the government feared would lead to inflation. Rather than allow this to happen, the government "sterilized" the inflows by selling government bonds from its portfolio. But this pushed down the prices of bonds and pushed up the interest rates on them, discouraging business investment. Finally, when prices of copper (Chile's primary export) fell sharply in 1998, the control regime was scrapped.29
The tobin tax
A global tax on international currency movements was first proposed by James Tobin, a Yale University economist, in 1972.30 He suggested that a tax of one-quarter to one percent be levied on the value of all currency transactions that cross national borders. He reasoned that such a tax on all spot transactions would fall most heavily on transactions that involve very short round-trips across borders. In other words, it would be speculators with very short time-horizons that the tax would deter, rather than longer-term investors who can amortize the costs of the tax over many years. For example, the yearly cost of a 0.2 percent round trip tax would amount to 48 percent of the value of the traded amount if the round trip were daily, 10 percent if weekly and 2.4 percent if monthly. Since at least eighty percent of spot transactions in the foreign exchange markets are reversed in seven business days or less, the tax could have a profound effect on the costs of short-term speculators.
Of course, for those who believe in the efficiency of markets and the rationality of expectations, a transactions tax would only hinder market efficiency. They argue that speculative sales and purchases of foreign exchange are mostly the result of "wrong" national monetary and fiscal policies. While we readily admit that national policies sometimes do not accord with desired objectives, they nonetheless have little relevance for speculators focused on the next few seconds, minutes or hours.
Tobin did not intend for his proposal to involve a supranational taxation authority. Rather, governments would levy the tax nationally. In order to make the tax rate uniform across countries, however, an international agreement would have to be entered into by at least the principal financial centers. The revenue obtained from the tax could be designated for each country's foreign exchange reserve for use during periods of instability, or it could be directed into a common global fund for uses like aid to the poorest nations. In the latter case, the feasibility of the tax also would depend on an international political agreement. The revenue potential is sizeable, and could run as high as $500 billion annually.
There are two other advantages often cited by proponents of the Tobin tax. Tobin's original rationale for a foreign exchange transactions tax was to enhance policy autonomy in a world of high financial capital mobility. He argued that currency fluctuations often have very significant economic and political costs, especially for producers and consumers of traded goods. A Tobin tax, by breaking the condition that domestic interest rates may differ from foreign interest rates only to the extent that the exchange rate is expected to change (see p. 10), would allow authorities to pursue different policies than those prevailing abroad without exposing them to large exchange rate movements. More recent research suggests that this is only a very modest advantage.31
An additional advantage of the tax is that it could facilitate the monitoring of international financial flows. The world needs a centralized data-base on all kinds of financial flows. Neither the Bank for International Settlements nor the IMF has succeeded in providing enough information to monitor them all. This information should be regularly shared among countries and international institutions in order to collectively respond to emerging issues.
The feasibility issues raised by the Tobin tax are more political than technical. One of the issues is about the likelihood of evasion. All taxes suffer some evasion, but that has rarely been a reason for avoiding them. Ideally all jurisdictions should be a party to any agreement about a common transactions tax, since the temptation to trade through non-participating jurisdictions would be high. Failing that, one could levy a penalty on transactions with "Tobin tax havens" of, say, double the normal tax rate. Moreover, one could limit the problem of substituting untaxed assets for taxed assets by applying the tax to forwards, swaps and possibly other contracts.
Tobin and many others have assumed that the task of managing the tax should be assigned to the IMF. Others argue that the design of the tax is incompatible with the structure of the IMF and that the tax should be managed by a new supranational body. Which view will prevail depends upon the resolution of other outstanding issues. The Tobin tax is an idea that deserves careful consideration. It should not be dismissed as too idealistic or too impractical. It addresses with precision the problems of excessive instability in the foreign exchange markets, and it yields the additional advantage of providing a means to assist those in greater need.
Reforming the IMF
The IMF was established in 1944 to provide temporary financing for member governments to help them maintain pegged exchange rates during a period of internal adjustment. With the collapse of the pegged exchange rate regime in 1971, that responsibility has been eclipsed by its role as central arbiter of financial crises in developing countries. As noted above (p. 20), these crises may be of three different kinds: fiscal crises, foreign exchange crises, and banking crises.
Under current institutional arrangements, a nation suffering a serious fiscal crisis that could easily lead to default must seek temporary relief from its debts from three different (but interrelated) institutions: the IMF, which is sometimes willing to renegotiate loans in return for promises to adopt more stringent policies (see above); the so-called Paris Club that sometimes grants relief on bilateral (country to country) credits; and the London Club that sometimes gives relief on bank credits. This is an extremely cumbersome process that fails to provide debtor countries with standstill protection from creditors, with adequate working capital while debts are being renegotiated, or with ways to ensure an expeditious overall settlement. The existing process often takes several years to complete.
There is a growing consensus that this problem is best resolved with creation of a new international legal framework that provides for de facto sovereign bankruptcy. This could take the form of an International Bankruptcy Code with an international bankruptcy court, or it could involve a less formal functional equivalent to its mechanisms: automatic standstills, priority lending, and comprehensive reorganization plans supported by rules that do not require unanimous consent. Jeffrey Sachs recommends, for example, that the IMF issue a clear statement of operating principles covering all stages of a debtor's progression through "bankruptcy" to solvency. A new system of emergency priority lending from private capital markets could be developed, he suggests, under IMF supervision. He also feels that the IMF and member governments should develop model covenants for inclusion in future sovereign lending instruments that allow for priority lending and speedy renegotiation of debt claims.32
At the Joint Meeting of the IMF and the World Bank in September, 2002, the policy committee directed the IMF staff to develop by April, 2003, a "concrete proposal" for establishing an internationally recognized legal process for restructuring the debts of governments in default. It also endorsed efforts to include "collective action" clauses in future government bond issues to prevent one or two holdout creditors from blocking a debt-restructuring plan approved by a majority of creditors. The objective of both proposals is to resolve future debt crises quickly and before they threaten to destabilize large regions, as happened in Southeast Asia in 1997-98.
Member countries rarely receive support from the IMF any longer to maintain a particular nominal exchange rate. Because financial capital is so mobile now, pegged exchange rates probably are unsupportable. But there are special times when the IMF still might give such support during a foreign exchange crisis. International lending to support a given exchange rate is legitimate if the government is trying to establish confidence in a new national currency, or if its currency is recovering from a severe bout of hyperinflation. Ordinarily the foreign exchange should be provided from an international stabilization fund supervised by the IMF.
National central banks usually supervise and regulate the domestic banking sector. Thus, banking crises normally are handled by domestic institutions. This may not be possible, however, if the nation's banks hold large short-term liabilities denominated in foreign currencies. If the nation's central bank has insufficient reserves of foreign currencies to fund a large outflow of foreign currencies, there may be circumstances when the IMF or other lenders may wish to act as lenders-of-last-resort to a central bank under siege. Nations like Argentina that have engaged in "dollarization" are learning about the downside risks of holding large liabilities denominated in foreign currencies. The best way to avoid this problem is for governments and central banks to restrict the use of foreign currency deposits or other kinds of short-term foreign liabilities at domestic banks.
Overall, what is most needed is the availability of more capital in developing countries and much quicker responses, amply funded, to emerging financial crises.. George Soros has argued powerfully that the IMF needs to establish a better balance between crisis prevention and intervention.33 The IMF has made some progress in prevention by introducing Contingency Credit Lines (CCLs). The CCL rewards countries that follow sound policies by giving them access to IMF credit lines before rather than after a crisis erupts. But CCL terms were set too high and there have been no takers. Soros also has recommended the issuance of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) that developed-countries would donate for the purpose of providing international assistance. Its proceeds would be used to finance "the provision of public goods on a global scale as well as to foster economic, social, and political progress in individual countries."34
A growing number of civil society institutions, however, oppose giving more money to the IMF unless it is basically reformed. They point out that it is a committed part of the Washington Consensus, the application of whose policies have made societies adjuncts of the market. They see the IMF as an instrument of the U.S. government and its corporate allies. The conditions it attaches to loans for troubled countries often do more to protect the interests of first world investors than to promote the long-term health of the developing countries. The needed chastening of speculative investors does not occur under these circumstances. There is evidence that in several major crises, IMF requirements for assisting nations have in fact worsened the situation and protracted the crises. The IMF opposed the policies that enabled Malaysia to weather the crisis in Southeast Asia, for example, while it urged the failed policies of other Southeast Asian nations. The vast literature cited by Pieper and Taylor (p. 22) is a convincing chronicle of earlier missteps. For such reasons as these, some civil society institutions argue that, unless IMF policies are changed, giving the institution more money will do more harm than good.
Fortunately, the IMF's policies are beginning to change, partly as a result of criticisms by civil society institutions, but more through recognition of the seriousness of the problems with the present system. In the wake of recent financial crises, leaders in the IMF as well as the World Bank are looking for ways to reform the international financial architecture. Arguably, their emphasis is shifting away from slavish devotion to the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus and toward more state intervention in financial markets. Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Laureate who has been particularly critical of the IMF, nonetheless acknowledges that its policy stances are improving.35
The IMF has begun to recognize the importance of at least functional public interventions in markets and the need to provide more supporting revenues. It has realized that controls on external financial movements and prudent regulation can help contain financial crises. It has abandoned the doctrine, long the backbone of structural adjustment policies, that raising the local interest rate will stimulate saving and thereby growth. Both the IMF and the World Bank have rolled over or forgiven the bulk of official debt owed by the poorest economies.
Whether these and other promising changes in IMF thinking and policy formation are sufficient to assure that its future responses to crises will be benign still is not clear. While celebrating what they view as belated improvements, many critics of the IMF among civil society institutions are not convinced that they are sufficiently basic. Even if the IMF avoids repeating some of its more egregious mistakes, some believe that it is likely to continue to function chiefly for the benefit of the international financial community rather than the masses of people. Rather, they believe that, at least in the long term, it would be much better for control over international finance to reside in new institutions under a restructured United Nations. They favor the U.N. because it has a broader mandate, is more open and democratic, and, in its practice, has given much greater weight to human, social, and environmental priorities.
Many civil society institutions want the primary focus of reform to be on taming speculation, restoring the control of their economies to nations, and embedding economies in the wider society. They believe that if these policies are adopted there will be less need for large funding to deal with financial crises. There remains, however, the fact that such crises are occurring and will continue to occur for some time. The IMF is the only institution positioned to respond to these crises. Hence, even for those who sympathize with the goals of the civil society institutions, there is a strong argument for more financing for the IMF.
A world financial authority
A variety of public and private citizens and institutions have recently proposed the establishment of a World Financial Authority (WFA) to perform in the domain of world financial markets what national regulators do in domestic markets. Some believe it should be built upon the foundation of global financial surveillance and regulation that have already been laid by the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland. Others regard it as a natural extension of the activities of the IMF. Still others are less interested in the precise institutional form it would take than in the clear delineation of the tasks that need to be done by someone.
Its first task probably should be to provide sufficient and timely financial assistance during crises to avert contagion and defaults. This requires a lender-of-last-resort with sufficient resources and authority to disperse rescue money quickly. Perhaps the best example to date is the bailout loan to Mexico by the U.S. Treasury and the IMF at the end of 1994. It supplied sufficient liquidity for Mexico to make the transition back to stability and to pay back the loans ahead of time. The management of the Asian crises in 1997-8, on the other hand, was badly handled. The bailout packages offered by the IMF were not only significantly smaller than in the Mexico case; they also were constrained with so many conditions that a year later only twenty percent of the funds had been disbursed. This slow response to the crisis probably worsened the contagion. Surprisingly, the error was repeated in the Russian crisis in 1998 and the Brazilian crisis in 1999.
A World Financial Authority also should provide the necessary regulatory framework within which the IMF or a successor institution can develop as a lender-of-last-resort. As long as domestic regulatory procedures function properly, there will be no need for a world authority to be involved, any more than to certify that domestic regulatory procedures are effective. In countries where domestic financial regulation is unsatisfactory, the WFA would assist with regulatory reform. In this way, the WFA could aid financial reconstruction, reduce the likelihood of moral hazard, and give confidence to backers of the operation.
There is little appetite today, especially in Washington, to create a new international bureaucracy. This fact gives support to the idea of building the WFA from the existing infrastructure of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The BIS is a meeting place for national central bankers who have constructed an increasingly complicated set of norms, rules and decision-making procedures for handling and preventing future crises. Its committees and cooperative cross-border regulatory framework enjoy the confidence of governments and of the financial community. It may well be the best place to govern an international regulatory authority at the present time.
Theological and ethical considerations
While Christian theology cannot provide us with detailed recommendations on how to correct the adverse consequences of speculative financial movements, it can provide us with an empowering perspective or worldview. Our theological expressions of the faith describe the source of our spiritual energy and hope. They betray our ultimate values and the source of our ethical norms. They shape how we perceive and judge the "signs of the times."
God's world and human responsibilities
Nothing in creation is independent of God. "The earth is the Lord's and all that is in it, the world, and all those who live in it." (Ps. 24:1 NRSV) Thus, no part of the creation - whether human beings, other species, the elements of soil and water, even human-made things - is our property to use as we wish. All is to be treated in accord with the values and ground rules of a loving God, their ultimate owner, who is concerned for the good of the whole creation. All of God's creation therefore deserves to be treated with appropriate care and concern, no matter how remote from one's daily consciousness or existence.
The doctrine of creation reminds us that our ultimate allegiance is not to the nationalistic and human-centered values of our culture, but rather to the values of the loving Maker of heaven and earth. When we seek plenty obsessively, consume goods excessively, compete against others compulsively, or commit ourselves to Economic Fate, we are worshiping false gods. Modern idolatries are often encountered in economic forms, just as in the New Testament's warnings about the spiritual perils of prosperity in the parables of the rich, hoarding fool (Luke 12:15-21) and the rich youth (Matt. 19:16-24 and Luke 18:18-25).
The fact that so much of financial speculation is divorced from the real economy of production and exchange suggests that its paper transactions are more like bets in a casino than an essential component of God's real economy, which seeks the good of all creation. It is wrong to subject people to the effects of wholesale gambling. The fact that the practice of financial speculation is secretive, compulsively competitive, and frequented by lone rangers, moreover, hints at a cult of false idols. Its practitioners, including especially day-traders, seem interested only in exceedingly short-term personal financial advantage, unconcerned about the long-term consequences of their actions or their impact on others. This also indicates a degree of idolatry that contradicts the doctrine of creation.
Image of God
The conviction that human beings have a God-given dignity and worth (Gen. 1:26-28) unites humanity in a universal covenant of rights and responsibilities - the family of God. All humans are entitled to the essential conditions for expressing their human dignity and for participation in defining and shaping the common good. These rights include satisfaction of basic biophysical needs, environmental safety, full participation in political and economic life, and the assurance of fair treatment and equal protection of the laws. These rights define our responsibilities in justice to one another, locally, nationally and - because they are human rights - internationally.
Financial speculation often leads to unmanageable floods of funds into and out of host societies, creating unwanted bubbles and panics. Financial speculators normally ignore the human consequences of their activities on the rights of people in host societies, where economic adjustments are shared widely and painfully. Their primary interest is short-term personal financial gain. The absence of a sense of covenantal unity with their brothers and sisters of the developing world is a sad commentary on the governing ethic of speculators in the capital markets. Their arrogance calls for some form of control over foreign exchange and financial capital markets.
Justice in covenant
The rights and responsibilities associated with the image of God are inextricably tied to the stress on justice in Scripture and tradition. We render to others their due because of our loving respect for their God-given dignity and value. The God portrayed in Scripture is the "lover of justice" (Ps. 99:4, 33:5, 37:28, 11:7; Isa. 30:18, 61:8; Jer. 9:24). Justice is at the ethical core of the biblical message. Faithfulness to covenant relationships, moreover, demands a justice that recognizes special obligations, "a preferential option" to widows, orphans, the poor, and aliens, which is to say the economically vulnerable and politically oppressed. Hence, the idea of the Jubilee Year (Lev. 25) was meant to prevent unjust concentrations of power and poverty. Jesus' ministry embodies concern for the rights and needs of the poor; He befriended and defended the dispossessed and the outcasts.
The fact that the liberalization of trade and finance has failed to improve the distribution of incomes, indeed, that it has widened the gap between rich and poor in virtually every country, is not a sign of distributive justice but of its opposite. The standard of living for the least skilled, least mobile, and poorest citizens of many developing countries has declined absolutely. This, too, is an unjust result of a broken system. The fact that governments that wish to assist the vulnerable and weak of their societies are less able to do so, in part because they no longer can levy sufficient taxes on foreign interests, is a violation of justice in community.
Sin and judgment
Sin is a declaration of autonomy from God, a rebellion against the sovereign source of our being. It makes the self and its values the center of one's existence, in defiance of God's care for all. Sin tempts us to value things over people, measuring our worth by the size of our wealth and the quantity of goods we consume, rather than by the quality of our relationships with God and with others. Sin involves injustice because its self-centeredness defies God's covenant of justice, grasping more than one's due and depriving others of their due.
Sin is manifested not only in individuals, but also in social institutions and cultural patterns. These structural injustices are culturally acceptable ways of giving some individuals and groups of people advantage over others. Because they are pervasive and generally invisible, they compel our participation. They benefit some and harm many others. Whether or not we deserve blame as individuals and churches for these social sins depends in part on whether we defend or resist them, tolerate or reject them.
The fact that the freeing of financial markets has permitted financial speculators to engage in high-risk gambles without regard to the consequences for others is abundant evidence of both individual and institutional sin. The policies of the Washington Consensus frequently lead to adverse consequences for the poor and the environment, even as its proponents gain advantages from the implementation of such policies. They are another serious expression of social sin in our time. These policies inevitably increase the concentration of economic power in fewer hands. The fact that the global spread of free-market policies has led to the decline of countervailing institutions of
social solidarity means that it is easier for the centers of economic power to corrupt governments, control markets, alienate neighbors, manipulate public opinion, and contribute to a sense of political impotency in the public.
The Church's mission and hope
The church is called to be an effective expression of the Reign of God, which Jesus embodied and proclaimed. This ultimate hope is a judgment on our deficiencies
and a challenge to faithful service. God's goal of a just and reconciled world is not simply our final destiny but an agenda for our earthly responsibilities. We are called to be a sign of the Reign of God, on earth as it is in heaven, to reflect the coming consummation of God's new covenant of shalom to the fullest extent possible.
A new financial architecture
In her path-breaking book, Casino Capitalism,36 Susan Strange likens the Western financial system to a vast casino. As in a casino,
"the world of high finance today offers the players a choice of games. Instead of roulette, blackjack, or poker, there is dealing to be done - the foreign-exchange market and all its variations; or in bonds, government securities or shares. In all these markets you may place bets on the future by dealing forward and by buying or selling options and all sorts of other recondite financial inventions. Some of the players - banks especially - play with very large stakes. There are also many quite small operators. There are tipsters, too, selling advice, and peddlers of systems to the gullible. And the croupiers in this global finance casino are the big bankers and brokers. They play, as it were, "for the house.' It is they, in the long run, who make the best living."
She goes on to observe that the big difference between ordinary kinds of gambling and speculation in financial markets is that one can choose not to gamble at roulette or poker, whereas everyone is affected by "casino capitalism." What goes on in the back offices of banks and hedge funds "is apt to have sudden, unpredictable and unavoidable consequences for individual lives."
It is this volatility, this instability in financial markets that has given rise to recurring financial crises. They must be tamed. In the wake of recent financial crises, people are beginning to look for ways to reform the international financial architecture. Although it is difficult to move from general theological convictions to specific proposals, we offer the following suggestions for consideration by Christians and other persons of good will.
- Capital controls should be an integral part of national strategies to tame the financial system. They can be made an effective and meaningful tool to protect and insulate the domestic economy from volatile capital flows and other negative external developments.
- Regulatory and supervisory measures should supplement capital controls when appropriate. They should include regulation of financial derivatives and hedge funds. Regulation is a necessary complement to domestic capital controls. Nations influenced by hedge funds and their complex financial instruments should seek international cooperation, including the governments of host countries, to regulate their practices.
- A new international legal framework should be created, which provides for de facto sovereign bankruptcy. The existing international system for dealing with insolvent governments is woefully inadequate. Provision must be made for automatic standstills, priority lending, and planned reorganizations.
- An international transactions tax (like the Tobin tax) should be designed and implemented to discourage short-term speculative capital movements. It is neither "too idealistic" nor "too impractical." It would reduce short-term trading and strengthen the defensibility of the exchange rate regime.
- International cooperation should be sought to curb dubious activities of offshore financial centers. Strict international regulation and supervision of offshore centers is essential to curb tax and regulatory evasions. They also are a primary conduit for money laundering and various criminal activities.
- The IMF's responsibilities as a lender-of-last-resort should be enhanced, expanding its authority and resources to make possible quick action to avert financial crises. The IMF must have effective and swift mechanisms to increase the Fund's access to official monies in times of crisis, including authority to borrow directly from financial markets under those circumstances.
- A World Financial Authority based on the cross-border regulatory framework of the Bank for International Settlements should be developed. It should provide the necessary regulatory framework within which the IMF or a successor organization can develop as a lender-of-last-resort.
Of these recommendations, perhaps the most controversial is that more funds be given to the IMF. We noted above that much of the criticism of the IMF is justified. We also acknowledged that the IMF is improving its policies. We hope that these improvements will continue. Meanwhile, there is no other viable candidate to serve as lender-of-last-resort - an absolutely essential feature of any new financial architecture.
The major reason some civil society institutions resist funding the IMF further is its history of misguided structural adjustment policies, policies that are now widely recognized to have caused widespread suffering. We hope that recent changes will improve this situation as well and enable the IMF to perform the important role we recommend for it.
Along with the World Bank, it is beginning to contextualize its performance criteria and conditionalities, taking much more seriously the unique circumstances of particular economies. It is listening more and nitpicking less. To be sure, the IMF is not likely to abandon its policy of making its loans conditional on the adoption by borrowing countries of mutually agreed economic policies. Even so, there is considerable evidence that when it has had more resources on hand, conditionality has been correspondingly wiser and less draconian.
The IMF now recognizes that it can leave more decisions to developing countries partly because these have better informed and more sophisticated employees than was once the case. Certainly in Latin America and Asia and increasingly in Africa, country economic teams are better qualified technically than the lower rung Ph.D.s from American and European universities to whom the IMF and World Bank entrust their missions. Local economists can do financial programming and standard macroeconomic modeling as well as or better than the people from Washington can; they also know how to do investment project analysis. To be sure, decisions about financial and project plans must include input from many other elements of a society.
We can encourage the IMF (and World Bank) to reverse the typical procedure in setting conditions for multilateral loans. Instead of waiting for it to specify the policies that must be followed to justify additional financing, country economic teams, in consultation with other agencies of their government, should be allowed to propose economic programs to the IMF. Disagreements between Washington staff assessments and the local teams could be resolved directly or by third-party arbitration. The scope of economic conditionality could also be restricted, for example, just to a balance-of-payments target, while the country could pursue its own agenda regarding inflation, income distribution, and growth.
What Christians can do
A primary part of the "principalities and powers" referred to in the Bible is composed of the political-economic institutions and processes that govern how people relate economically to each other and to God's whole creation. The church has a stake in their design. Yet many church members feel powerless to change basic political-economic reality. They think either that the economic conditions of society result "naturally" from the forces of markets that are only marginally within the power of human control, or that economic conditions result from powerful interests that are beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. Thus, there's nothing that can be done about it, or there's nothing we can do about it.
On the contrary, Mobilization for the Human Family believes that the political economy is shaped by deliberate social policy decisions; that conditions at any given time are the result of those decisions; that conditions can be changed by human decisions; and that the will of a nation's and the world's citizens about what the commitments and purposes of the nation and the world should be can be expressed in the political economy through the framework of democratic process provided in our national and transnational polity. Accordingly, we offer below some suggestions for action that may be taken by individual Christians and by our churches and their denominations to correct some correctable flaws of financial globalization.
Actions by individual Christian
- Pray for persons working in governments, international organizations, institutions, and non-governmental organizations who are trying to work toward a better world, including especially a world financial architecture that better assures fairness in capital markets.
- In the management of personal and family investments, seek fuller understanding of the uses to which the banks, companies, mutual funds, and investment counselors are putting your money. Avoid speculative investments that are likely to be made without regard to their consequences for others.
- Reflect upon decisions about work and career choices that are consistent with a Christ-like commitment to economic justice for all.
- Organize Bible study in your local congregation, where possible together with people of other backgrounds and life-styles, to learn and identify with God's continuing struggle to seek economic justice in the world.
- Commit oneself to some voluntary organization that is trying to promote greater economic justice in the local and/or global economy.
- Become involved politically in your area or nation, seeking political and economic change in the direction of economic justice.
Actions by churches and denominations
- Concern for economic justice must be fully reflected in the prayer life, worship, and educational programs and mission outreach of all congregations.
- Seek assistance from members who work for banks, brokerage houses, and mutual funds to help mould an educational program that will assist members of the congregation to become more socially responsible investors.
- Seek collaborative programs among clusters of congregations, perhaps with the aid of local Councils of Churches, to provide educational opportunities where Christians and other faith groups can come to understand some of the complex economic issues amidst which they live and work. Since virtually nothing is now available to explain the problems of financial speculation, this paper could be used to assist study of this phenomenon.
- Over and beyond educational programs, local churches - again perhaps best working together in the same neighborhood or town - can enter into a deliberate dialogue or partnership with one or more voluntary bodies in the civic society, so as to put their energies into the health of the wider society. Engagement with the International Forum on Globalization (l009 General Kennedy Avenue #2, San Francisco, CA 94129) is a good way to explore the means of influencing the debate on the globalization of trade and finance.
- At the denominational level, churches should review their investment criteria to reassure themselves that social responsibility is a primary goal of their financial management.
- Also at the denominational level, agencies responsible for the formation of social witness policies need to monitor global economic indicators on a continuing basis in order to assist its programmatic agencies to form effective and timely social witness regarding the local and national consequences of the globalization of trade and finance.
Want to know more?
Globalization is a vast topic. For a general introduction, see Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh, Field Guide to the Global Economy (New York: New Press, 2000) and Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1999). A classic introduction to the financial side of globalization is Susan Strange, Casino Capitalism, (New York: Mnchester University Press, 1986). See also Kavaljit Singh, The Globalisation of Finance: A Citizen's Guide (London: Zed Books, 1999) and John Eatwell and Lance Taylor, Global Finance at Risk: The Case for International Regulation (New York: The New Press, 2000). The best introduction to the Tobin Tax is Mahbub ul Haq et al (eds), The Tobin Tax: Coping with Financial Volatility (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). For how church people might react, see Pamela Brubaker, Globalization at What Price? (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001).
Questions For Discussion
- How have the linkages and interconnections of international finance impacted your life? On balance, do you regard them as advantages or disadvantages for a healthy Christian life?
- The frequency and severity of recent financial crises have fueled calls for a radical redesign of the rules of global finance. If you were the advisor to an international commission asked to design "A New International Financial Architecture," what would you recommend?
- Do you favor allowing sovereign nations to declare bankruptcy? What Christian traditions might be invoked to support or deny such an action?
- A growing number of civil society institutions oppose giving more money to the IMF. They point out that it is part of the Washington Consensus, the application of whose policies have made societies adjuncts of the market. Yet this paper suggests that the IMF needs more money. As a committed Christian, which view do you favor?
- Is it too late to expect justice in a globalizing world? Since much of the direction the global economy has taken is irreversible, how can a balance between market and society be negotiated? How might Christians play a role in those negotiations?
Ron Patterson says: 11/29/2017 at 11:10 amDec 05, 2017 | peakoilbarrel.com
Paulo says: 11/29/2017 at 10:36 am
Up early today and lit the shop woodstove; just waiting for light to get on with my day which always starts (after chores) with my dog and I going for a walk.Ron, I do not disagree with your post or comments, with the exception of when population will peak and the aspect/timing of social disruption?
On this morning wait for daylight I have been reading various blog sites with CNN ticking over in the background. Maybe it is the speed of the news cycle and my being used to the insanity of what is being reported, but today, after seeing the Trump tweets on Muslim Violence (film clips), the so-called tax plan, sexual misconducts, the recent reports on KSA, Yemen, Syria, and what is ramping up concerning North Korea, I think we are at a crux right now. I think there will be a Market collapse and war; perhaps global in scale. Further to that I don't see any desire or mechanism for defusing tensions or a way to recall the situation.
I am 62 and was a kid during a recent/last big social reset. I had older sibs and parents who moved us north to Canada in '68 because they had had enough. My WW2 veteran parents proclaimed they had seen enough to be afraid, and sold out to start over and build new lives. While I was thinking about it, and your post, I realized that in today's situation there are no simple answers and not really any places to run to. It seems different because of the population numbers and armaments, plus the willingness of people to pretend it's just 'tribal/crooked politics as usual'. Then, I thought about photographs and how a few catapulted us into rapid change last century. Certainly, the haunted faces of the Dust Bowl sparked a move towards reform. Images from the south and the stories of the KKK perhaps Rosa Parks herself helped galvanize the Civil Rights Movement. For me, the image of the young lady holding the dead student at Kent State, (her anguish), the burning Monk and young girl coated with napalm coupled with the lie about the Gulf of Tonkin incident pushed me into cynicism; so much that I was not surprised about the non-existent WMD of Iraq.
Perhaps it won't be an image, or story that we look back to as a turning point. Maybe it will be a tweet. Maybe it will be the Market collapse or a premptive attack on North Korea that sets everything in motion. I just think we are loaded and tamped down like a pipe bomb ready to blow.
I do not think we will continue to grow in population until 2050. I think it could start to unravel pretty fast and any day. I don't see any step back from war(s) in either the ME, or Korea.
From Wiki: (just one event that pales alongside today's triggers)
Kent State
"Just five days after the shootings, 100,000 people demonstrated in Washington, D.C., against the war and the killing of unarmed student protesters. Ray Price, Nixon's chief speechwriter from 1969 to 1974, recalled the Washington demonstrations saying, "The city was an armed camp. The mobs were smashing windows, slashing tires, dragging parked cars into intersections, even throwing bedsprings off overpasses into the traffic down below. This was the quote, student protest. That's not student protest, that's civil war."[10] Not only was Nixon taken to Camp David for two days for his own protection, but Charles Colson (Counsel to President Nixon from 1969 to 1973) stated that the military was called up to protect the administration from the angry students; he recalled that "The 82nd Airborne was in the basement of the executive office building, so I went down just to talk to some of the guys and walk among them, and they're lying on the floor leaning on their packs and their helmets and their cartridge belts and their rifles cocked and you're thinking, 'This can't be the United States of America. This is not the greatest free democracy in the world. This is a nation at war with itself.'"
I apologize if this seems North American centric; and in blinders. I wish to reiterate that our population numbers, plus increasing divide and disparity, proliferation of weapons and intolerance, coupled with environmental degradation and Climate Change, makes this much much worse. It's a gun waiting for a trigger, imho.
Yes, things are pretty bad. But things were bad during the Kent State/Nixon era. Yet we survived.Ghung says: 11/29/2017 at 11:34 amIt has been my experience, following this biosphere destruction for many years now, that people who see and understand the destruction, almost always expect things to fall apart real soon. They never do.
I once spent several months as a stockbroker. One thing I learned during that period was a truth about insider traders. That is traders who trade the stock of the company they work for. They see things happening inside their company and expect it to cause great trouble or great profit. They are almost always right and almost always way too early with their predictions. Things just never seem to happen as fast as they expected.
We, you and I and a few others, are insiders to this problem that I have described in my above post. We know something terrible is going to happen. But most of us expect it to happen way before it actually will happen.
An example is "The Population Bomb" by Paul Ehrlich. I think he was spot on, but things just did not happen as fast as he expected. I hope to avoid his mistake.
Yep, Ron, and we need to be careful about saying "this time is different". Perhaps we need a list of things that really are different this time.Dennis Coyne says: 11/29/2017 at 1:16 pmOne that should be obvious to anyone paying attention is that, in the late 60s, US debt to GDP was in the mid 30% range. It is now over 100% according to a number of sources. As Gail T. is wont to say, unserviceable debt will likely be the trigger that results in a cascading failure of financial systems, and everything else is likely to follow. In short, our financial house of cards has grown three-fold in 50 years, as the global reserve currency is tagged to nothing.
Hi Ghung,Ghung says: 11/29/2017 at 1:28 pmI think the debt problem is a little overblown. Now people use debt differently sometimes implying "total debt" and sometimes "public debt" and sometimes "central government debt". Which one are you talking about? I don't read Tverberg's stuff. Looking at your numbers and the link below
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S
it seems you are talking about total US federal government debt.
Consider Japan
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/QJPGAN770A
They have been over 100% debt to GDP since 1999 and have been around 200% since 2014.
If Japan has collapsed, I missed it. Note that I agree with the idea that when the US economy is doing well (which at present is the case), that paying down debt is a better idea than reducing taxes. I would raise taxes if anything ( a carbon tax would be ideal) and reduce the deficit to less than zero and pay down the debt.
Or just balance the budget and let economic growth reduce the debt to GDP ratio.
The figures I posted only include US government (National) debt. Total US debt (public+private) is, of course, much higher.Dennis Coyne says: 11/29/2017 at 4:49 pmUS National debt currently around $20.5 trillion.
http://www.usdebtclock.org/US GDP for 2016 per the World Bank was $18,569,100.00
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CDAs for Japan, most of what they owe is to themselves while they own a lot of that US debt, above. Japan also uses the carry trade to stay afloat.
I only posted this as being one of the things that is different about our situation ~50 years ago. People can make of it what they will. I personally think it is significant since the world runs on credit. No credit, no growth.
Hi Ghung,OFM says: 11/30/2017 at 8:17 amHard to imagine no credit. Also in the 1960s there was less borrowing by the government (so less credit) and higher growth rates (at least in the US) than today. In the old days there was concern the government would "crowd out" private debt, as if there was some fixed amount of debt the system could sustain and the system always remained at this maximum debt level.
Instead it seems the system had room for higher levels of debt as government debt as increased, but there is little evidence of "crowding out". There may be some maximum debt level that an economy can sustain and Japan may be there. Also note that 50 years ago debt was at fairly low levels, but in 1946 Debt to GDP was 118% of GDP, rapid economic growth from 1946 to 1974 reduced this debt to GDP to 31%, by 1992 it was at 61%, and in 2016 it was 105%.
Strange that the Republicans want to raise the debt higher by cutting taxes, this made sense when the economy was doing poorly during the Obama years and the aftermath of the GFC.
I agree debt could become a problem and would be worried if central government debt to GDP was 200% (as in Japan).
I also don't buy into the unfunded liabilities argument, laws change and governments don't always fulfill their promises, that is just a fact of life.
Personally I believe Tverberg is a person who has discovered a niche she can exploit and is making a living out of it. I had the pleasure of seeing her make her canned presentation at a conference once, where all the presentations were repeated several times over for three days so the entire attending crowd could see them all.Hightrekker says: 11/30/2017 at 10:25 amIf you ask her a real question, she seizes up like a deer in headlights. She knows some elementary level stuff that is worth some thought, in the case of people who know little or nothing about the overall economy and environment.
Her answer in the case of a real question is the same answer you get from a politician who doesn't WANT to answer. She just pretends you asked a DIFFERENT question, and provides a stock answer to THAT question.
She doesn't have anything to say worth listening to , in terms of the level of understanding of the contributing members of this forum.
Being a Cabbage for Christ and a AGW Denier doesn't exactly lend credibility to her work.Caelan MacIntyre says: 11/30/2017 at 9:06 pm
She denies AGW?Nathanael says: 11/29/2017 at 4:22 pm
UK government debt to GDP was well over 400% for decades running; it was never a problem. Don't worry about it. Government debt is not really debt, it's actually money.Dennis Coyne says: 11/29/2017 at 4:54 pm
Hi Nathanael,Paulo says: 11/29/2017 at 1:39 pmWhen was that?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DEBTTLGBA188A
Oh I see high debt but not 400%
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PSDOTUKA
It was over 160% from 1925 to 1952, maybe that's what you mean.
Good point on the rate. I remember my grade 11 Social Studies teacher talking to me after class in 1972. One of our class texts was The Population Bomb. He expected to see, in his lifetime, a collapse of sorts. When I asked him to expand further he described small scale gardens/farms of no more the 2 acres. The primary machinery used would be walk-behind tractors.George Kaplan says: 11/29/2017 at 1:49 pmI smiled at the memory when I bought my BCS walk-behind ten years ago. I smile every spring when I till the gardens. I still think he was right, just off on the timing (just like I was when I got out of stocks several years ago and put my money in term deposits.)
The older I get, the less I understand. I take comfort in knowing my Dad wouldn't get it, either.
I thought Ehrlich's book "The Dominant Animal" was fairly well measured, and generally in line with the post above (I haven't read the population bomb).
Dec 05, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Synoia , December 5, 2017 at 10:40 am
The Rev Kev , December 5, 2017 at 6:39 pmThe basis of this thesis was plain when the ECB was placed in Germany.
The Economic regime is: Germany books the profits, and you lazy (non Germans) book the losses.
Welcome to the neoliberal roots of the next 30 years war. The 30 years war was the imposition of the ruler's denomination, Catholicism, on the people. This next 30 years one is imposing asset stripping (rent extraction) on the people and enriching a few Aristocrats, as a dogma.
Now do you understand Brexit? Do you believe the British could not see this coming?
I'll repeat: This was the obvious outcome when the ECB was placed in Germany. I'm English and discussed this very topic with my family and friends there, and there was general agreement that German ambition would pave the path.
Those who don't know their history are condemned to repeat it.
George Phillies , December 5, 2017 at 10:47 amNow do you understand Brexit? Do you believe the British could not see this coming?
Exactly. Those average British voters weren't stupid as claimed. If the EU/Germans are trying to do this whose aims are, and I quote:
"to further erode what little sovereignty and autonomy member states have left, particularly in the area of fiscal policy, and to facilitate the imposition of neoliberal 'structural reforms' – flexibilisation of labour markets, reduction of collective bargaining rights, etc. – on reluctant countries." and the year is only 2017, then what would it be like in the EU by the year, say, 2040?
Those British voters knew exactly what was coming down the turnpike and decided to bail and accept a whole lot of present pain. It was not their fault that it turned out that their leadership turned out to be a load of stuff-ups. To reinforce the point, look at the pain and deaths that the American colonies had to endure to get out of the British Empire. Before 1777 that would not have seemed to be the logical thing to do.
Norm , December 5, 2017 at 11:24 amDoes this direction become a hazard to the United States? Mr. Putin appears to have an answer, but perhaps does not have ready yet the next step, namely the needed set of trained personnel, trays, software, and printed pieces of paper, so that one way or another a country that wants to jettison the Euro can convert its ATMs very quickly to do so. Being set up to print very large stocks of Euros from the country that is leaving also comes to mind. Readers will recognize other steps.
Unlike some years ago, fast air access from Russia to southern European countries by overflying Mr Putin's friend Turkey is now probably available.
visitor , December 5, 2017 at 12:24 pmA good summary of a situation that is too complex to be neatly summarized – so many political, historical, religious, cultural, etc. issues come into play not only for each nation involved but also on an individual level for hundreds of millions of people. My most immediate reaction to these suggestions that a militarily capable fourth Reich may be emerging is that so many people in Europe will see it being necessitated by the growing chaos in the Middle East and in Africa.
Mark P. , December 5, 2017 at 3:05 pmIn other words, Germany already effectively controls the armies of four countries. And the initiative, Foreign Policy notes, 'is likely to grow'. This is not surprising: if Germany ('the EU') wants to become truly autonomous from the US, it needs to acquire military sovereignty, which it currently lacks.
The Bundeswehr has been in a sorry state of disrepair for years, which has not improved despite policy changes regarding the military.
And I seriously doubt that Germany really "controls" the armies of four countries.
The fact is that so far Germany's military strategy was conceived only within the NATO framework -- where it could rely upon the heavy-lifting of the USA logistical train, the ground experience and battle-readiness of the French and the British, and the availability of the navies from Spain and Italy. Germany has neither the equipment, nor the personnel, nor the experience to take the lead of a EU military, and other countries will probably strenuously oppose such endeavours which would rob them from their last symbolic and practical vestiges of sovereignty.
On the other hand, as the article explains, Germany is well on its way to assert its complete dominion over the economic and institutional arrangements in the EU.
JBird , December 5, 2017 at 6:41 pmso many people in Europe will see it being necessitated by the growing chaos in the Middle East and in Africa.
True.
JerseyJeffersonian , December 5, 2017 at 8:19 pmNever let a crisis go to waste ?
Colonel Smithers , December 5, 2017 at 11:34 amAh, yes, a crisis greatly exacerbated by taking down Libya, a country which had served as a bulwark against much of the tide of migration into Southern Europe from Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as an enemy to Wahabbi/Salafist terror.
Not to mention the EU support for the dismemberment of Syria that launched its own tidal wave of migration into Europe, whilst Syria was also an enemy of Wahabbi/Salafist terror.
In light of that, one must ask, in whose interest were these actions undertaken, and at whose behest? Well?
Certainly not those of the inhabitants of the constituent "nations" of the EU (ironic quotation marks fully intended). And now Muti Merkel and the authoritarian scolds of Brussels are trying to force a quota of these migrants upon all of the "nations" – or should we say, the administrative zones – of the EU. Orban, Le Pen, the AfD, and ilk are not stupid, you know. Europeans, at least those of you who still possess a quantum of self-respect, and who honor your histories and cultures, gather your courage and tell Muti and the Commissars of Brussels that the game is over before they can inflict yet more damage. But – perhaps – you are already too comfortably numb to remember why and how to do this? Well, then, into the veal pen with you.
Christopher Dale Rogers , December 5, 2017 at 1:17 pmMany thanks, Yves.
Further to "France's corporate offensive in Italy", one-sided as France took recent exception to the take over of one its shipbuilders by an Italian rival, I would argue that it's an offensive by the EU's 1%, a strategy of immiseration facilitated by the likes of Guy Verhofstadt as per http://www.sofina.be/board-management/ . Sofina is well-connected with the French establishment by way of Eurazeo and the Italian establishment by way of Banca Leonardo.
I worked in and with "Brussels" for many years and can say that many, if not most, of the personnel involved with EU institutions are neo-liberals, neo-cons and deluded with the fantasy of an EU imperium, Greece to America's Rome. It suits them and their cheerleaders, including in Blighty, to pretend that this is due to the malign influence of Albion perfide or Anglo-Saxons. One should not expect a change of tack after Brexit. The "racaille" are profit(eer)ing too much and are able to get away with it under the cover of more Europe.
norm de plume , December 5, 2017 at 3:30 pmCS,
As far as EMU is concerned, monetarist economic thinking has been predominant in much of the Europhiles output on monetary union since the 70s, that is, prior to the UK joining the Community. Bill Mitchell has written concisely on this over the past week & is quite scathing of Mitterrand and Delors for their embrace of what we now term 'neoliberalism', combine this with a desire for an actual military arm & one really does worry about the direction of the EU, with or without the UK.
Further, and within the lecture presented by Sir Ivan Rogers last week concerning Cameron & Brexit, the fact remains both the UK Elite & Euro Elite were keen on pushing TTIP, this despite the fact many believe it was the UK pushing neoliberalism on to Europe.
I think I concur with Mitchell that a Federal EU State is a big no no for Germany, based on the fact fiscal transfers would be out of the German coffers, and this fact is amplified by the exit of the UK, which was a big net EU contributor. The rumour mill has it that Jans Weidmann will be the next ECB Head, which means we can expect more, not less austerity imposed as the EU elite push further EMU, which, is certainly not in the interests of the average Joe across the Euro member states.
Anyhow, check Bill Mitchell out, so decent material and nice to see people standing up for the Nation State, rather than supranational entities and corporations.
Eustache De Saint Pierre , December 5, 2017 at 4:09 pmBill Mitchell and the author of this piece Thomas Fazi are collaborators .
voteforno6 , December 5, 2017 at 12:22 pmMore on Guy :
Left in Wisconsin , December 5, 2017 at 12:30 pmGermany is seeking a hegemonic position in Europe what could go wrong?
nonsense factory , December 5, 2017 at 2:49 pmI found the first about 1/3 of this post informative. But then the author gets to the main thesis:
The process underway can only be understood through the lens of the geopolitical-economic tensions and conflicts between leading capitalist states and regional blocs, and the conflicting interests between the different financial/industrial capital fractions located in those states , which have always characterised the European economy. In particular, it means looking at Germany's historic struggle for economic hegemony over the European continent.
This suggests that the national battles in Europe are battles between different national "capital fractions," in particular German capital with its everlasting desire for economic hegemony over Europe against (presumably) other European national capitals that are opposed to Germany.
That does not strike me as an accurate description of the current status of Europe or the EU, and nothing in the rest of the piece suggests that this is a (the most?) useful lens for interpreting events. The author even admits that elites from smaller Euro countries are happy in the role of compradors to Germany's economically dominant capitalists and that "European elites" are united in their anti-democratic tendencies. Even the German election results show this thesis to be dubious – if "Germany" is well on its way to it's long-cherished goal of European economic hegemony, why on earth would voters be tired of Merkel? They should make her Kaiser!
JEHR , December 5, 2017 at 12:53 pmIf Germany is trying to build a mini-imperial system straddling all of Europe, then it would seek willing 'elites' in the small European countries to give a slice of pie to in exchange for their cooperation with that agenda. This is standard (neo)colonial policy today, which is best understood as the neocon/neoliberal approach the United States has taken to world domination – aka bad cop/good cop. "Accept our offer of a carpet of gold or we'll deliver a carpet of bombs", is another version of that offer. The one that can't be refused?
Jump down a few paragraphs from your quote to this:
This is because public debt in the eurozone is used as a political tool – a disciplining tool – to get governments to implement socially harmful policies (and to get citizens to accept these policies by portraying them as inevitable), which explains why Germany continues to refuse to seriously consider any form of debt relief for Greece, despite the various commitments and promises to that end made in recent years: debt is the chain that keeps Greece (and other member states) from straying 'off course'.
That would be the neoliberal mechanism of control; notice here how debts assumed by small nations are not like debts assumed by the controlling powers, either. Rather like student loan holders vs. central banks – students can't print money to pay off their debts, that's the difference.
As far as Germany's voters, well, the reality of Empire is that trickle-down is a myth. Empires always deliver the tribute from foreign holdings to a small circle of politically connected elites – British lords, French aristocrats, Wall Street billionaires, Third World tin-pot dictators, etc. The general public always suffers as a result; you have to fund the foreign military adventures over the domestic infrastructure, health care and education needs. Hence Empires always try to limit and undermine democratic rule; the German voters probably see this as well.
I'd suggest Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism as a good read (or listen) for a discussion of how this could play out.
Summer , December 5, 2017 at 1:42 pmSo, if it is true in economics that stability creates instability, then the creation of a stable Europe will undo itself in the manner that this article appears to be saying. In order to avoid conflict, the European Union has created a trading zone that has a great deal of inequality in it–not just in trade but inequality in the financial system that will continue to grow as corporations merge and become ever larger and as banks become ever more monolithic. Perhaps, national sovereignty will succumb to financial hegemony rather than becoming the victims of German hegemony.
James McFadden , December 5, 2017 at 2:19 pmAnd what would have been the plans for Britain? Big omission in the article. That was a damned if they do, damned if they don't option.
Isn't a lot of the EU's bill for Britain about making sure they pay for EU officials pensions? While everywhere else it is austerity for Eurozone and EU countries' pensioners
Yves Smith Post author , December 5, 2017 at 2:23 pmAlthough I found this article helpful in summarizing many of the changes in EU politics, the author is incorrect in his premise that the German government is at the root of the anti-democratic, neoliberal EU movement. The author ignores the dominant role that the interconnected multinational corporations ( https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228354.500-revealed–the-capitalist-network-that-runs-the-world/ ) play in running the global political economy.
69 of the top 100 economies are now corporations ( https://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/world-s-top-100-economies-31-countries-69-corporations ). National politics have become subservient to the interests of the financial economy which can move money quickly and destroy a state's economy when political decisions do not follow the neoliberal script of austerity. The author's premise that "Germany needs to seize control of the most coveted institution of them all – the ECB –, which hitherto has never been under direct German control" is backwards. It is the ECB that has had control of the German political leaders for years. Whether "Merkel now has her eyes on the ECB's presidency" or not does not matter. She is merely a cog in the corporate machine – easily replaced if she fails to follow the neoliberal agenda of austerity.
Of course we must recognize that austerity is only imposed as an attempt to inflate the debt bubble by squeezing those least capable of paying, those considered disposable in the sociopathic and mechanistic corporate hive mind. The "automatic stabilizing mechanisms" that "put the economy on 'autopilot', thus removing any element of democratic discussion and/or decision-making" are really just manifestations of the emergent behavior that this corporate super-organism expresses and imposes on the global economy. ( https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/01/ai-has-already-taken-over-its-called-the-corporation/ )
This corporate super-entity reminds me of "Omnius Prime" in the Dune universe – a computer with nearly total sociopathic control over humanity. The corporate super-entity, whose AI program's only concern is maximizing short term profits by inflating securities and equities, will eat the Earth if we allow it to continue – digesting and purging humans which have been commodified like everything else.
This total corporatization is at the root of both existential threats to humanity – nuclear war and climate change. The risk of nuclear war (primarily from some mistake or miscalculation) results from the military-industrial complex's imperial program of globalization to further multinational corporate profits and control, and climate change is a cancer driven by corporate resource exploitation that will surely kill humanity if we don't cut out the corporate tumors and stop smoking that oil.
I'm beginning to think that the only way to save humanity, to save the planet, will be a "Butlerian Jihad" to rid us of the existential threat that corporations represent. I wonder how many people will have to be consumed by this corporate monster before we rise up to kill it. There will be a cost to eliminating corporations, to ending the limited liability of the owners, but that cost will be well worth the price of saving humanity, civilization, and our ecosystem. "There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses." James Madison
John Zelnicker , December 5, 2017 at 3:13 pmArgument by assertion doesn't work here. There is no evidence whatsoever that the ECB has influence over German leaders. More generally, German politics are dominated by industrial capital, particularly its automakers, not financial capital. And in fact the Bundesbank has disproportionate influence over the ECB. And Germany has repeatedly checked measures that would provide more support to the banking system and lead to more Eurozone integration to preserve its advantaged position.
In addition, the EU is perfectly willing to take on global corporations, contrary to your claims. Did you miss the massive anti-trust fine it imposed on Microsoft, and the fines it has imposed on Google? The EU competition ruling on Google will force Google to change how it does business in a fundamental manner, and the fines (up to 10% of global revenues for a violation in a single line of business) are high enough to bring Google to heel. The EU also is requiring Apple to pay a ginormous tax bill for its special tax avoidance scheme in Ireland.
If you are going to comment on European politics, you need to know the terrain. You don't, and worse you say things that mislead readers.
Eustache De Saint Pierre , December 5, 2017 at 3:29 pmJeebus! I had no idea that Germany had extended it's claws so far into the affairs of other countries as to be integrating their army units.
I suppose it's a much better strategy than attacking those armies and risking people getting killed. :-/
But, seriously, Germany has moved far beyond it's mercantilist advantages and subjugation of Greece and other periphery nations. It has become beyond obvious to me that they learned from their experience in WWII and decided that economic hegemony was the way to go to achieve de facto political hegemony. I think the Fourth Reich is fitting.
David Swan , December 5, 2017 at 6:13 pmThank you for a finished painting, of which I had in comparison, only a sketch.
Larry , December 5, 2017 at 10:37 pmThank you for having the courage to put those two words together so chillingly: "Fourth Reich". You are not an alarmist to do so – you are right on the money. This has indeed been a deliberate decades-long campaign to install German hegemony (no "accident"), and the project is well along its way.
From here we can soberly project a future in which Europe *does* finally institute a fiscal compact – wholly on Germany's terms. Is it too outrageous to suggest that there will one day be a new Holy Roman Emperor to wear the crown of Charlemagne? And would it be too forward to make guesses as to the nationality of said emperor?
History is not over. Not by a long shot.
Then we see power blocks aligning, the US (and it's proxies), the EU under Germany, Russia, and China. Clearly we are sitting on a powder keg that is the disintegrating neo-liberal world orde. What will serve as the spark that lights the fuse? Trump and North Korea? War for fun and profit in the Middle East?
Dec 05, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Posted on December 4, 2017 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield By Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She now spends much of her time in Asia and is currently working on a book about textile artisans.
Three Democrats and three Republicans have co-sponsored a resolution, under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to scuttle the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's payday lending rule.
CRA's procedures to overturn regulations had been invoked, successfully, only once before Trump became president. Congressional Republicans and Trump have used CRA procedures multiple times to kill regulations (as I've previously discussed (see here , here , here and here ). Not only does CRA provide expedited procedures to overturn regulations, but once it's used to kill a regulation, the agency that promulgated the rule is prevented from revisiting the issue unless and until Congress provides new statutory authority to do so.
Payday Lending
As I wrote in an extended October post, CFPB Issues Payday Lending Rule: Will it Hold, as the Empire Will Strike Back, payday lending is an especially sleazy part of the finance sewer, in which private equity swamp creatures, among others, operate. The industry is huge, according to this New York Times report I quoted in my October post, and it preys on the poorest, most financially-stressed Americans:
The payday-lending industry is vast. There are now more payday loan stores in the United States than there are McDonald's restaurants. The operators of those stores make around $46 billion a year in loans, collecting $7 billion in fees. Some 12 million people, many of whom lack other access to credit, take out the short-term loans each year, researchers estimate.
The CFPB's payday lending rule attempted to shut down this area of lucrative lending– where effective interest rates can spike to hundreds of points per annum, including fees (I refer interested readers to my October post, cited above, which discusses at greater length how sleazy this industry is, and also links to the rule; see also this CFPB fact sheet and press release .)
Tactically, as with the ban on mandatory arbitration clauses in consumer financial contracts– an issue I discussed further in RIP, Mandatory Arbitration Ban , (and in previous posts referenced therein), the CFPB under director Richard Cordray made a major tactical mistake in not completing rule-making sufficiently before the change of power to a new administration- 60 "session days" of Congress, thus making these two rules subject to the CRA.
The House Financial Services Committee press release lauding introduction of CRA resolution to overturn the payday lending rule is a classic of its type, so permit me to quote from it at length:
These short-term, small-dollar loans are already regulated by all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Native American tribes. The CFPB's rule would mark the first time the federal government has gotten involved in the regulation of these loans.
.
House Financial Services Committee Chairman Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), a supporter of the bipartisan effort, said the CFPB's rule is an example of how "unelected, unaccountable government bureaucracy hurts working people."
"Once again we see powerful Washington elites using the guise of 'consumer protection' to actually harm consumers and make life harder for lower and moderate income Americans who may need a short-term loan to keep their utilities from being cut off or to keep their car on the road so they can get to work," he said. "Americans should be able to choose the checking account they want, the mortgage they want and the short-term loan they want and no unelected Washington bureaucrat should be able to take that away from them."
[Rep Dennis Ross, a Florida Republican House co-sponsor]. said, "More than 1.2 million Floridians per year rely on Florida's carefully regulated small-dollar lending industry to make ends meet. The CFPB's small dollar lending rule isn't reasonable regulation -- it's a de facto ban on what these Floridians need. I and my colleagues in Congress cannot stand by while an unaccountable federal agency deprives our constituents of a lifeline in times of need, all while usurping state authority. Today, we are taking bipartisan action to stop this harmful bureaucratic overreach dead in its tracks."
As CNBC reports in New House bill would kill consumer watchdog payday loan rule , industry representatives continue to denounce the rule, with a straight face:
"The rule would leave millions of Americans in a real bind at exactly the time need a fast loan to cover an urgent expense," said Daniel Press, a policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in a statement after the bill's introduction.
Consumer advocates think otherwise (also from CNBC):
"Payday lenders put cash-strapped Americans in a crippling cycle of 300 percent-interest loan debt," Yana Miles, senior legislative counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, said in a statement.
Prospects Under CRA
When I wrote about this topic in October, much commentary assumed that prospects for CRA overturn were weak. I emphasized instead the tactical error of failing to insulate the rule from CRA, which could have been done if the CFPB had pushed the rule through well before Trump took office:
If the payday rule had been promulgated in a timely manner during the previous administration it would not have been as vulnerable to a CRA challenge as it is now. Even if Republicans had then passed a CRA resolution of disapproval, a presidential veto would have stymied that. Trump is an enthusiastic proponent of deregulation, who has happily embraced the CRA– a procedure only used once before he became president to roll back a rule.
Now, the Equifax hack may have changed the political dynamics here and made it more difficult for Congressional Republicans– and finance-friendly Democratic fellow travellers– to use CRA procedures to overturn the payday lending rule.
The New York Times certainly seems to think prospects for a CRA challenge remote:
The odds of reversal are "very low," said Isaac Boltansky, the director of policy research at Compass Point Research & Trading.
"There is already C.R.A. fatigue on the Hill," Mr. Boltansky said, using an acronymn for the act, "and moderate Republicans are hesitant to be painted as anti-consumer.
I'm not so sure I would take either side of that bet. [Jerri-Lynn here: my subsequent emphasis.]
A more telling element than CRA-fatigue in my assessment of the rule's survival prospects was my judgment that Democrats wouldn't muster to defend the payday lending industry– although that assumption has not fully held, as this recent American Banker account makes clear:
After the payday rule was finalized in October , it was widely expected that Republicans would attempt to overturn it. It's notable, though, that the effort has attracted bipartisan support in the House.
.
Passage in the Senate, however, may be a much heavier lift. The chamber's vote to overturn the arbitration rule in late October came down to the wire, forcing Republicans to call in Vice President Mike Pence to cast the tie-breaking vote.
Bottom Line
I continue to think that this rule will survive– as the payday lending industry cannot count on a full court press lobbying effort by financial services interests. Yet as I wrote in October, I still hesitate to take either side of the bet on this issue.
Dpfaef , December 4, 2017 at 10:53 am
GF , December 4, 2017 at 11:02 amI think this whole article is totally disingenuous. There is a serious need for many Americans to have access to small amount, short term loans. While, these lenders may appear predatory, they do serve a large sector of society.
Maybe you need to read: The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives by Lisa Servon . It might be worth the read.
Jerri-Lynn Scofield Post author , December 4, 2017 at 11:11 amWhere's the Post Office Bank when you need it. This overturning of the rule is just an effort to stop the Post Office Bank from gaining traction as the alternative non-predatory source of small loans to the people. Most pay day lender companies are owned by large financial players.
Wisdom Seeker , December 4, 2017 at 3:23 pmI agree that's a far better approach and indeed, I discussed the Post Office bank in my October post– which is linked to in today's post. Permit me to quote from my earlier post:
The payday lending industry preys on the poorest financial consumers. One factor that has allowed it to flourish is current banking system's inability to provide access to basic financial services to a shocking number of Americans. Approximately 38 million households are un or underbanked– roughly 28% of the population.
Now, a sane and humane political system would long ago have responded with direct measures to address that core problem, such as a Post Office Bank (which Yves previously discussed in this post, Mirabile Dictu! Post Office Bank Concept Gets Big Boost and which have long existed in other countries.)
Regular readers are well aware of who benefits from the current US system, and why the lack of institutions that cater to the basic needs of financial consumers rather than focusing on extracting their pound(s) of flesh is not a bug, but a feature.
So, instead, the United States has a wide-ranging payday lending system. Which charges borrowers up to 400% interest rates for short-term loans, many of which are rolled over so that the borrower becomes a prisoner of the debt incurred.
lyman alpha blob , December 4, 2017 at 3:30 pmWith phrasing like "unbanked" or "underbanked", I worry that you've bought into the banking-industry framing of this issue, which I'm sure is not your intent.
Ordinary people should not need any bank (not even a government or post office bank) for everyday life, with the possible exception of mortgages. De-financialization of the medium of exchange, and basic payments, is something the public should be fighting for.
Wisdom Seeker , December 4, 2017 at 3:44 pmI would consider myself an ordinary person and I pay in cash when purchasing day to day items the vast majority of the time and yet I'd still prefer to deposit my money in a bank rather than hiding it in my mattress for any number of good reasons.
Banks aren't the problem – their predatory executives are.
Cary D Berkelhamer , December 4, 2017 at 4:32 pmBut there are, or at least ought to be, safe and secure ways to store money other than by lending it to banks or stuffing it into mattresses. Or carrying wads of cash.
For instance, a debit card (or possibly cell phone) with a secure identity / password can already act as a cashless wallet. The digital cash could be stored directly on the device, and accounted for through something similar to TreasuryDirect, without any intermediaries. But this would require the Federal Government to get serious about having a modern Digital Dollar of some kind (not bitcoin, shudder)
diptherio , December 4, 2017 at 11:08 amEven better would be State Banks. Every state should have one. I believe the State Bank of North Dakota made money in 2008. While the TBTF Banks came hat in hand to our Reps. Of course OUR Reps handed them a blank check and told them to "Make it go Away". However Post Office Banks would be GREAT!!
Vatch , December 4, 2017 at 11:19 amThis is the boilerplate argument that always gets brought up by payday loan defenders, and there is a good bit of truth to it. However, what you are not mentioning is that there are already far superior options available to pretty much any person who needs a small, short term loan. That solution is your friendly neighborhood Credit Union, most of which offer very low interest lines of overdraft coverage. I don't mind saying that it has saved my heiny on more than one occasion. Pay check a little late in arriving? No problem, transfer $200 from your overdraft account into your checking account on-line and you're good to go. Pay it back at your convenience, also on-line, at 7% APR.
Payday lenders are legal loansharks. The problems with their predatory lending model and the damage it does to low-income people are well documented. Simply pointing out that there is a reason that people end up at payday lenders is not a valid justification for the business practices of those lenders, especially when there are much better alternatives readily available.
Off The Street , December 4, 2017 at 12:10 pmPayday lenders are legal loansharks.
Very true! There are several web sites that point out how the fees associated with payday loans raise the effective annual percentage rate into the stratosphere, ranging from 300% to over 600%. Here's one:
http://paydayloansonlineresource.org/average-interest-rates-for-payday-loans/
a different chris , December 4, 2017 at 12:57 pmOne frustration that I have with legislation in general, and finance legislation in particular, is that it does not tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
In my Panglossian world, I envision a financial services bill that lays out the following:
Define the problem
Unserviced people: X percent( for discussion, say 10% to make the math easy) of people are un-serviced (or under-, or rapaciously-serviced) by conventional financial companies, whether banks, credit unions or other, whatever other is conventionally.
Unserviced and don't want: Y percent of that X percent (say, 50% of 10%, so 5%) doesn't want services.
Unserviced and want: 1-Y percent of that X percent (say, 50% of 10%, so 5%) wants services but can not get them. That could be due to various factors, ranging from bad credit (how defined?, say FICO < 600?) to geographic remoteness (no branches within miles, no internet, precious little slow mail service, whatever).Within that deemed unserved 5% of the population, what are the costs to serve and what are the alternatives?
What would an honest service provider need to provide service, accounting for credit risks and the like, and still make a profit sufficient to induce investment?
If I knew how to make and add a nice graphic, I'd include a waterfall chart here to show the costs and components of the interest and fees paid in regular and default mode. Sorry, please bear with me as I make up numbers.
Regular costs
Interest at 30%
Less: cost of funds at, say, 10%
Less: personnel, overhead, everything else at, say, 5%
Pre-tax profit: 15%Default mode costs:
Interest at 275%
Plus: Fees at 25%
Less: cost of funds 20%
Less: personnel, overhead, etc 5%
Less: added default cost not in personnel etc line, say 25%
Pre-tax profit: 250%In that little example, who couldn't make money at those rates?
Extending the notion of APR and Truth-In-Lending to include payday lenders and anyone else without a brick-and-mortar branch who wants to do business in the US, how about mandating some type of honest waterfall chart as dreamt of above?
Then cross-reference and publicize the voting on finance legislation with the campaign contributions from payday people and their ilk, and layer in the borrower costs and credit scores and other metrics in those Congressional districts and zip+4 codes and census tracts and whatever other level of granularity will help provide any amount of disinfecting sunlight to help see the scattering cockroaches.
lyle , December 4, 2017 at 7:33 pmThe problem I suspect is that your "friendly neighborhood credit union" is actually rarely anywhere near the neighborhoods where people who need these kind of loans live.
They don't have cars and mass transit is non-existent or so slow they couldn't get to the Credit Union during business hours, and back again, anyway. That's the problem with expecting Private Enterprise to be a solution for people at the bottom. They don't set up shop where those people live, or the ones that do are not exactly do-gooders.
JTMcPhee , December 4, 2017 at 1:04 pmI just checked and a lot of credit unions let you apply for a loan online, (earlier you can set up membership online). So the issue of transport and time is lessened assuming folks have some form of net access.
Wukchumni , December 4, 2017 at 1:08 pmOne might ask why there are millions of people reduced to having to get ripped off by payday and auto-title lenders, to somehow survive from week to week. Maybe because people can't make a living wage? Can't save any money, however prudent and abstemious they may be? Because inter-citizen cruelty and Calvinism are so very strong a force in this rump of an Empire?
Some of the comments here seem to build on the baseline assumption that's part of the liberal-neoliberal mantra, "You get what's coming to you (or the pittance we can't quite squeeze out of you yet)".
diptherio, I am guessing you may mean that there are models of better alternatives readily available, like paying a living wage, a social safety net for the worst off, a postal bank, national health care, stuff like that. I don't see that there are any alternatives actually available to most real people "on the ground."
diptherio , December 4, 2017 at 1:27 pmThere is an alternative to excessive payday loans, but only if you're in the military, where it's capped @ 36%.
Why not 36% for everybody?
mpalomar , December 4, 2017 at 1:36 pmYou are, of course, correct in that the underlying problem is that so many people are forced to live on so little that they need payday loans in the first place. Thanks for pointing that out.
My point is simply that in the short-term, as a matter of practicality for those of us who don't always make it until payday before running out of money, a CU overdraft account is a very good option.
lyman alpha blob , December 4, 2017 at 1:32 pmAgree. The AB article from October deadpans a description of the ins and outs governing the hellishness of the company town we're living in.
sd , December 4, 2017 at 11:14 amThis is a far superior option and thank you for bringing it up. The only problem is most banks and credit unions will not tell you it exists because they make a lot more money if you just keep bouncing checks.
I only learned about it when I worked for WAMU. We were tasked by management with promoting various new products to customers as a condition of being paid a monthly bonus which was the only thing that made the job pay enough to live on. Funny, they never asked us to promote the overdraft line of credit (aka an ODLOC), ever. I do remember one of my managers tell me that circa 2000 or so, WAMUs operating costs for the entire company for the entire year were offset just by the fees they collected off of bounced checks etc.
The fees or interest you pay for using an ODLOC are a small fraction of what you'd pay for bouncing just one check. IIRC, if I overdrew by $200 or so and paid it back on my next payday, the interest was generally less than $1. My local credit union has since added a $5 fee for accessing the ODLOC on top of the interest, but it's still much less than a bounced check fee or interest on a payday loan. I believe that depending on your credit history, you can get an ODLOC of up to $2500 or so which pretty much negates the need for any payday loans.
RepubAnon , December 4, 2017 at 11:55 amA friend of mine was evicted from her apartment because of a payday loan. She failed to pay it off in full quick enough and it spiraled out of control tripling in a very short time. I really fail to see how usury is beneficial to society.
FluffytheObeseCat , December 4, 2017 at 12:25 pmYes, there's a need for high-interest loans that bankrupt borrowers:
Mom-and-Pop Loan Sharks Being Driven Out by Big Credit Card Companies
Frank Pistone is part of the dying breed known as the American Loan Shark. Not so long ago, the loan shark flourished, offering short-term, high-interest loans to desperate people with nowhere else to turn. Today, however, Pistone and countless others like him are being squeezed out by the major credit-card companies, which can offer money to the down-and-out at lower rates of interest and without the threat of bodily harm
JTMcPhee , December 4, 2017 at 12:35 pmI read Servon's book. It is not a brief on behalf of the payday loan industry. She worked at a couple of payday lenders and explains how they serve the communities they're in, but a few things need to be noted:
The business she was most sympathetic with was a small, local one with only a couple of storefronts, in an east coast inner city. The owner and his help knew the customer base, often by name. Much of her sympathy came from her respect for the women who were dishing out the loans at the windows, not the owners and not the business model. This local joint operated like the most benign of old time pawnbroker/loansharking operation from the early part of the last century.
Most "Cash America" storefront shops (on shabby, midcentury shopping strips in inner ring scuburbs across the US) aren't this decent. They aren't "part of a community" in any sense. And the rates are usurious any way, for all of them.
Thank you to Ms. Scofield for continuing to cover this and related businesses. The upper, cleaner part of our finance industry derives more filthy lucre from these kinds of loan shops than they ever want you to know (sub-prime lending shops, title loans shops . there are a lot of modalities for fleecing the poor and the near-poor nowadays).
ger , December 4, 2017 at 12:42 pmThe NC staff must be pleased that it seems like so many subtle apologists for the looters, predators, "intelligence community," and so forth, appear to be turning up here early in the opening of new site posts. I'm guessing the Elite are not exactly quaking in fear that NC's reporting will catalyze some change that might sweep the political economy in the direction of what the mopery would categorize as "fairness," but still
Matthew Cunningham-Cook , December 4, 2017 at 3:15 pmRaised the dollar definition of middle class and declared a 'new middle class' or could it be 'new middle class' is actually referring to the 'new middle poor'. The former middle class is desperately trying to avoid a plunge into the pits of the 'poor poor'. Payday Loan predators are greasing the handrails.
John , December 4, 2017 at 9:32 pm"Where will the money-changers change money if not in the Holy Temple? Aren't we starving the priests of much-needed revenue? This Jesus guy is totally disingenuous."
sd , December 4, 2017 at 11:11 amIn good neo liberal fashion that Jesus dude got exactly what he deserved. The effrontry of that guy to chase those hard working money lenders out of the temple square. Got exactly what was coming to him.
perpetualWAR , December 4, 2017 at 12:21 pmH.J.Res.122 – Providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the rule submitted by the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection relating to "Payday, Vehicle Title, and Certain High-Cost Installment Loans".
December 1, 2017
Sponsor Rep. Ross, Dennis A. [R-FL-15] (Introduced 12/01/2017)
Rep. Hastings, Alcee L. [D-FL-20]
Rep. Graves, Tom [R-GA-14]
Rep. Cuellar, Henry [D-TX-28]
Rep. Stivers, Steve [R-OH-15]
Rep. Peterson, Collin C. [D-MN-7]jawbone , December 4, 2017 at 1:44 pmAhhh ..look at this list. TWO Florida lawbreakers introducing this banker bill. And one from Minnesota. Y'all know that Jacksonville, FL and St. Paul, MN are the two places where the forgeries continue to be provided to the financial crooks? So, it goes to figure that the lawbreakers are attempting to protect the financial crooks committing forgery in their prospective states! How appro.
Mike R. , December 4, 2017 at 1:19 pmIf any of these House critters are "representing" you, time for lots of calls to them.
And thanks, SD, for listing them. I always wonder why our vaunted free press so seldom lists the sponsors of legislation when it's reported on . Hhmm .
m .nonclassical , December 4, 2017 at 1:46 pmI have mixed feelings about this specific issue.
The larger issue of a grossly skewed economic system is what needs to be fixed.
There will always be people that lack common sense and brains regarding money. There will always be people that will take advantage of that.
I don't know how or why you would try and legislate that away.
We need to move in the direction of solving the biggest problems and not get wrapped up in the little problems.
The numbers above sound horrendous, but 7 billion in profit on 46 billion loaned is 14% return. Credit card companies are worse. 7 billion in profit off of 12 million people is $600 per person. Alot for poor folks I recognize, but not necessarily life shattering for all.The "system" loves to wrangle around with issues like this (trivial in my mind) so the handful of big ones go unattended.
Wisdom Seeker , December 4, 2017 at 3:37 pmsome have apparently not felt it necessary to bail out family members for aggressive, egregious and immediate interest rates and escalations charged by these scammers
but there certainly appears concerted effort by (likely) shills to perpetuate scams (and to discredit Consumer Financial Protection Agency and Liz Warren )
Warren-Sanders 2020
Jerri-Lynn Scofield Post author , December 4, 2017 at 8:07 pmI think there's an error in the original article, where it says:
CRA's procedures to overturn legislation had been invoked, successfully, only once before Trump became president. Congressional Republicans and Trump have used CRA procedures multiple times to kill regulations (emphasis added)
My understanding is that CRA gives Congress the power to overturn executive branch regulations , not legislation (which Congress already can overturn anyway). Is that incorrect?
P.S. It's sad that it might not even matter. Nowadays the public can't tell the difference between regulations (written by unaccountable, unelected officials who take the revolving door back to working at the firms they regulated) and legislation (written by unaccountable, only notionally elected politicians who get paid off in various ways by lobbyists for the same firms)
John k , December 4, 2017 at 8:26 pmYou're correct– fixed it! Slip of the fingers there that I didn't catch when I proofread the post. As the rest of the paragraph makes clear, CRA procedures are used to overturn regulations.
Thanks for reading my work so carefully and drawing the error to my attention.
Taras 77 , December 4, 2017 at 10:40 pmFinally bipartisan!
Trump loves it
Obomber woulda loved it
She who cannot be named woulda loved it, too.
Time for them all to get over that little spat she did it before trump should appoint her to something useful I bet she'd love secdefWhere is the lovely Debbie Wasserman schultz in all of this? She has not surprisingly been a leading cheerleader for these pay day lender sharks. but hey, what the hey, the lobby money is good!
www.warc.ch
"The prototype of the successful man in modern society is not the scientist, the inventor, the scholar. It is the financier, the gambler and those with social pull. The others share [in the winnings] sometimes, it is true, but their share is modest compared with the oligarchs and tycoons; and they don't usually keep their share for long. They are no match for the commercial prowlers."
A snap-shot of London's Mayfair district, home to the burgeoning hedge-fund phenomenon, in November 2006? Actually, no. The above words were written in 1952 by the Labour politician Aneurin Bevan in his book In Place of Fear. Bevan had a gift - his most passionate supporters would say a genius - for exposing the truth of a situation in language that could be both scintillating and pungent.
Fifty years ago, he criticised the prime minister of the day, Sir Anthony Eden, for his reckless actions during the Suez crisis. "[He] has been pretending that he is now invading Egypt in order to strengthen the United Nations," Bevan said in a famous speech in Trafalgar Square. "Every burglar of course could say the same thing: he could argue that he was entering the house in order to train the police. So, if Sir Anthony Eden is sincere in what he is saying, and he may be . . . then he is too stupid to be a prime minister!" Here was political rhetoric with a touch of prophesy about it.
It was the enduring appeal of speeches such as these that helped draw a good crowd to the fifth annual Bevan memorial lecture in London last week. The lecture was to be given by John Monks, formerly general secretary of the British Trades Union Congress, now the Brussels-based leader of the European trade union confederation.
No one in the audience would have been expecting Bevanite rhetorical fireworks from Mr Monks. That has never been his style. Between 1993 and 2003, he led the British trade union movement with modesty and distinction. He was the moderate's moderate: avoiding confrontation wherever possible and advocating partnership at work between management and employees. Business leaders were happy to do business with him.
They would not have found this lecture so easy to deal with. Confronted by today's turbo-charged capitalism, Mr Monks cast off his former moderation. He even seemed to be on the verge of recanting his commitment to the partnership model. "Partnership with who?" he asked. There has been, he said, a "disintegration of the social nexus between worker and employer - a culture containing broad social rights and obligations. The new capitalism wants none of it."
Mr Monks contrasted businesses' healthy profitability with the ruthless way some have treated their staff recently, whether through large-scale redundancies or the constant threat that jobs may be sent off-shore or outsourced. While median wages have stagnated, record executive salaries are legion.
He admitted that he had possibly been a bit naive in the past. "I did not fully appreciate what was happening on the other side of the table," Mr Monks said. While he sympathised with business leaders for the relentless pressure they find themselves under - "It cannot be easy running a firm . . . when you are up for sale every day and every night of every year" - he was appalled by the increasingly "shameless", short-termist behaviour of overpaid corporate executives. "More and more they resemble the Bourbons - and they should be aware of what eventually happened to the Bourbons."
For someone like me, who has sat through 10 years of reasonableness from John Monks, this speech was remarkable, devastating stuff. Maybe there is something in the Brussels water. Perhaps the ghost of Nye Bevan was speaking through him. Or was it just anxiety over the career choice of his daughter's boyfriend? He is now working for - you guessed it - a hedge fund. Whatever its cause, a challenge was being thrown down.
"All this is too important to be left to the practitioners who have a vested interest in obscuring what they do from the rest of us," he said. And, with bonus season fast approaching, he took one final, sweeping aim at the high rollers of "casino capitalism". Their actions are "dangerous to economic stability, traditional industry and jobs", he said. "I would like to see the City pages of the press more challenging and less respectful on these matters . . . Our future - the world's future - is too important to place in the hands of the new capitalists."
Will corporate leaders - those that have read this far anyway - simply shrug their shoulders and get back to their slashing and burning ways? Is Mr Monks merely offering a wholly predictable, knee-jerk, lefty rant? I do not think so. This general secretary just does not do lefty rants. So business people should take note. When the John Monkses of this world say enough is enough, that the capitalist system itself is sick, you can be sure that elsewhere in the world there is deep-seated, lingering resentment and unhappiness.
Half a century ago, Nye Bevan expressed a similar concern. In In Place of Fear he wrote: "There is a sense of injustice in modern society, and this induces a feeling of instability even in normal circumstances. The rewards are not in keeping with social worth, and the consciousness of this, both among the successful and the unsuccessful, will simmer and bubble, blowing up into geysers of political and social disturbance in times of economic stress."
Reading these words, you can see why so many people were prepared to come out on a dark Tuesday night...
Dec 01, 1998 | Prospect Magazine
The dominant image of the financial markets is that of a giant casino. Brash young men in red braces, driven by insatiable greed, gamble with huge sums every day. When the bets go wrong the innocent suffer. Reckless financial markets pose an immediate threat to the future prosperity of humanity.
Susan Strange, who died just after the publication of her latest book, was one of the most compelling academic advocates of the view that the global casino is out of control. Although she is not a household name, she played an important role in developing the intellectual framework to support the casino thesis. Her Casino Capitalism (1986) is a Keynesian account of the damage inflicted on the world as a result of financial deregulation which was taken up by many better known writers such as William Greider in the US and Will Hutton in Britain.
With the onset of the Asian financial crisis Strange's account of financial markets has become almost mainstream. Her ideas inform many of the discussions about a "new international financial architecture." Economists who would once have scorned her views now agree with her that deregulation has gone too far and that new forms of regulation are needed. The British government has floated the idea of a world financial authority to regulate global finance.
The IMF, once a bastion of free market economics, has conceded that capital controls may be necessary under some circumstances.
Mad Money, the sequel to Casino Capitalism, takes into account the impact of information technology and the rise of financial crime. It also places new emphasis on the role of international institutions. For example, she backs George Soros's plan for an international credit insurance corporation as a complement to the IMF.
... ... ...
Washington DeCoded
Inside Casino Capitalism Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco
By Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Harper & Row. 528 pp. $22.95In 1898, Adolphus Green, chairman of the National Biscuit Company, found himself faced with the task of choosing a trademark for his newly formed baking concern. Green was a progressive businessman. He refused to employ child labor, even though it was then a common practice, and he offered his bakery employees the option to buy stock at a discount. Green therefore thought that his trademark should symbolize Nabisco's fundamental business values, "not merely to make dividends for the stockholders of his company, but to enhance the general prosperity and the moral sentiment of the United States." Eventually he decided that a cross with two bars and an oval – a medieval symbol representing the triumph of the moral and spiritual over the base and material – should grace the package of every Nabisco product.
If they had wracked their brains for months, Bryan Burrough and John Helyar could not have come up with a more ironic metaphor for their book. The fall of Nabisco, and its corporate partner R.J. Reynolds, is nothing less than the exact opposite of Green's business credo, a compelling tale of corporate and Wall Street greed featuring RJR Nabisco officers who first steal shareholders blind and then justify their epic displays of avarice by claiming to maximize shareholder value.
The event which made the RJR Nabisco story worth telling was the 1988 leveraged buyout (LBO) of the mammoth tobacco and food conglomerate, then the 19th-largest industrial corporation in America. Battles for corporate control were common during the loosely regulated 1980s, and the LBO was just one method for capturing the equity of a corporation. (In a typical LBO, a small group of top management and investment bankers put 10 percent down and finance the rest of their purchase through high-interest loans or bonds. If the leveraged, privately-owned corporation survives, the investors, which they can re-sell public shares, reach the so-called "pot of gold"; but if the corporation cannot service its debt, everything is at risk, because the collateral is the corporation itself.
The sheer size of RJR Nabisco and the furious bidding war that erupted guaranteed unusual public scrutiny of this particular piece of financial engineering. F. Ross Johnson, the conglomerate's flamboyant, free-spending CEO (RJR had its own corporate airline), put his own company into play with a $75-a-share bid in October. Experienced buyout artists on Wall Street, however, immediately realized that Johnson was trying to play two incompatible games. LBOs typically put corporations such as RJR Nabisco through a ringer in order to pay the mammoth debt incurred after a buyout. But Johnson, desiring to keep corporate perquisites intact, "low-balled" his offer. Other buyout investors stepped forward with competing bids, and after a six-week-long auction the buyout boutique of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Company (KKR) emerged on top with a $109-a-share bid. The $25-billion buyout took its place as one of the defining business events of the 1980s
Burrough and Helyar, who covered the story for The Wall Street Journal, supply a breezy, colorful, blow-by-blow account of the "deal from hell" (as one businessman characterized a leveraged buyout). The language of Wall Street, full of incongruous "Rambo" jargon from the Vietnam War, is itself arresting. Buyout artists, who presumably never came within 10,000 miles of wartime Saigon, talk about "napalming" corporate perquisites or liken their strategy to "charging through the rice paddies, not stopping for anything and taking no prisoners."
At the time, F. Ross Johnson was widely pilloried in the press as the embodiment of excess; his conflict of interest was obvious. Yet Burrough and Helyar show that Johnson, for all his free-spending ways, was way over his head in the major leagues of greed, otherwise known as Wall Street in the 1980s. What, after all, is more rapacious: the roughly $100 million Johnson stood to gain if his deal worked out over five years, or the $45 million in expenses KKR demanded for waiting 60 minutes while Ross Johnson prepared a final competing bid?
Barbarians is, in the parlance of the publishing world, a good read. At the same time, unfortunately, a disclaimer issued by the authors proves only too true. Anyone looking for a definitive judgment of LBOs will be disappointed. Burrough and Helyar do at least ask the pertinent question: What does all this activity have to do with building and sustaining a business? But authors should not only pose questions; they should answer them, or at least try.
Admittedly, the single most important answer to the RJR puzzle could not be provided by Burrough and Helyar because it is not yet known. The major test of any financial engineering is its effect on the long-term vitality of the leveraged corporation, as measured by such key indicators as market share (and not just whether the corporation survives its debt, as the authors imply). However, a highly-leveraged RJR Nabisco is already selling off numerous profitable parts of its business because they are no longer a "strategic fit": Wall Street code signifying a need for cash in order to service debts and avoid bankruptcy.
If the authors were unable to predict the ultimate outcome, they still had a rare opportunity to explain how and why an LBO is engineered. Unfortunately, their fixation on re-creating events and dialogue – which admittedly produces a fast-moving book – forced them to accept the issues as defined by the participants themselves. There is no other way to explain the book's uncritical stance. When, for example, the RJR Nabisco board of directors tried to decide which bid to accept, Burrough and Helyar report that several directors sided with KKR's offer because the LBO boutique "knew the value of keeping [employees] happy." It is impossible to tell from the book whether the directors knew this to be true or took KKR's word. Even a cursory investigation would have revealed that KKR is notorious for showing no concern for employees below senior management after a leveraged buyout.
The triumph of gossip over substance is manifest in many other ways. Wall Street's deft manipulation of the business press is barely touched upon, and the laissez-faire environment procured by buyout artists via their political contributions is scarcely mentioned, crucial though it is. Nowhere are the authors' priorities more obvious than in the number of words devoted to Henry Kravis's conspicuous consumption compared to those devoted to the details of the RJR deal. In testimony before Congress last year, no less an authority than Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady – himself an old Wall Street hand – noted that the substitution of tax-deductible debt for taxable income is "the mill in which the grist of takeover premiums is ground."
In the case of RJR Nabisco, 81 percent of the $9.9 billion premium paid to shareholders was derived from tax breaks achievable after the buyout. This singularly important fact cannot be found in the book, however; nor will a reader learn that after the buyout the U.S. Treasury was obligated to refund RJR as much as $1 billion because of its post-buyout debt burden. In Barbarians, more time is spent describing Kravis's ostentatious gifts to his fashion-designer wife than to the tax considerations that make or break these deals.
Fulminations about the socially corrosive effects of greed aside, the buyout phenomenon may represent one of the biggest changes in the way American business is conducted since the rise of the public corporation, nothing less than a transformation of managerial into financial capitalism. The ferocious market for corporate control that emerged during the 1980s has few parallels in business history, but there are two: the trusts that formed early in this century and the conglomerate mania that swept corporate America during the 1960s. Both waves resulted in large social and economic costs, and there is little assurance that the corporate infatuation with debt will not exact a similarly heavy toll.
As the economist Henry Kaufman has written, the high levels of debt associated with buyouts and other forms of corporate restructuring create fragility in business structures and vulnerability to economic cycles. Inexorably, the shift away from equity invites the close, even intrusive involvement of institutional investors (banks, pension funds, and insurance companies) that provide the financing. Superficially, this moves America closer to the system that prevails in Germany and Japan, where historically the relationship between the suppliers and users of capital is close. But Germany and Japan incur higher levels of debt for expansion and investment, whereas equivalent American indebtedness is linked to the recent market for corporate control. That creates a brittle structure, one that threatens to turn the U.S. government into something of an ultimate guarantor if and when things do fall about. It is too easy to construct a scenario in which corporate indebtedness forces the federal government into the business of business. The savings-and-loan bailout is a painfully obvious harbinger of such a development.
The many ramifications of the buyout mania deserve thoughtful treatment. Basic issues of corporate governance and accountability ought to be openly debated and resolved if the American economy is to deliver the maximum benefit to society and not just unconscionable rewards to a handful of bankers, all out of proportion to their social productivity. It is disappointing, but a sign of the times, that the best book about the deal of deals fails to educate as well as it entertains.
Feb 12, 2017 | economistsview.typepad.com
anne : February 11, 2017 at 11:43 AM , 2017 at 11:43 AMhttp://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/amazons-antitrust-paradoxJanuary, 2017
Amazon's Antitrust Paradox
By Lina M. KhanAbstract
Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space. Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead. Through this strategy, the company has positioned itself at the center of e-commerce and now serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that depend upon it. Elements of the firm's structure and conduct pose anticompetitive concerns -- yet it has escaped antitrust scrutiny.
This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust-specifically its pegging competition to "consumer welfare," defined as short-term price effects-is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy. We cannot cognize the potential harms to competition posed by Amazon's dominance if we measure competition primarily through price and output.
Specifically, current doctrine underappreciates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration across distinct business lines may prove anticompetitive. These concerns are heightened in the context of online platforms for two reasons. First, the economics of platform markets create incentives for a company to pursue growth over profits, a strategy that investors have rewarded. Under these conditions, predatory pricing becomes highly rational-even as existing doctrine treats it as irrational and therefore implausible. Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend. This dual role also enables a platform to exploit information collected on companies using its services to undermine them as competitors.
This Note maps out facets of Amazon's dominance. Doing so enables us to make sense of its business strategy, illuminates anticompetitive aspects of Amazon's structure and conduct, and underscores deficiencies in current doctrine. The Note closes by considering two potential regimes for addressing Amazon's power: restoring traditional antitrust and competition policy principles or applying common carrier obligations and duties.
Dec 03, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
SpringTexan , December 2, 2017 at 12:08 pm
Big River Bandido , December 2, 2017 at 3:10 pmAnd I feel like the Democrats get so distracted. They have been talking about sexual harassment and stuff instead of the TAX BILL. It is so damn easy to get them to take their eyes off the ball! and get played again and again. . . and TRAGIC given the consequences . . .
jrs , December 2, 2017 at 3:18 pmIt's the perfect "distraction". Allows them to engage in virtue-signaling and "fighting for average Americans". It's all phony, they always "lose" in the end getting exactly what they wanted in the first place, while not actually having to cast a vote for it.
Kabuki theater in every respect.
Allegorio , December 2, 2017 at 11:07 pmIt's all related, less safety net and more inequality means more desperation to take a job, *ANY* job, means more women putting up with sexual harassment (and workplace bullying and horrible and illegal workplace conditions etc.) as the price of a paycheck.
Expat , December 2, 2017 at 8:01 amHorrible Toomey's re-election was a parallel to the Clinton/Trump fiasco. The Democrats put up a corporate shill, Katie McGinty that no-one trusted.
"Former lobbyist Katie McGinty has spent three decades in politics getting rich off the companies she regulated and subsidized. Now this master of the revolving-door wants Pennsylvania voters to give her another perch in government: U.S. Senator." Washington Examiner.
She was a Clintonite through and through, that everyone, much like $Hillary, could see through.
tony , December 2, 2017 at 9:30 amTo paraphrase the Beatles, you say you want a revolution but you don't really mean it. You want more of the same because it makes you feel good to keep voting for your Senator or your Congressman. The others are corrupt and evil, but your guys are good. If only the others were like your guys. News flash: they are all your guys.
America is doomed. And so much the better. Despite all America has done for the world, it has also been a brutal despot. America created consumerism, super-sizing and the Kardashians. These are all unforgivable sins. America is probably the most persistently violent country in the world both domestically and internationally. No other country has invaded or occupied so much of the world, unless you count the known world in which case Macedonia wins.
This tax plan is what Americans want because they are pretty ignorant and stupid. They are incapable of understanding basic math so they can't work out the details. They believe that any tax cut is inherently good and all government is bad so that is also all that matters. They honestly think they or their kids will one day be rich so they don't want to hurt rich people. They also believe that millionaires got their money honestly and through hard work because that is what they learned from their parents.
Just send a blank check to Goldman Sachs. Keep a bit to buy a gun which you can use to either shoot up a McDonalds or blow your own brains out.
And some people still ask me why I left and don't want to come back. LOL
False Solace , December 2, 2017 at 5:18 pmMacedonia of today is not the same are that conquered the world. They stole the name from Greeks.
That being said, the US is ripe for a change. Every policy the current rulers enact seems to make things better. However, I suspect a revolution would kill majority of the population since it would disrupt the all important supply chains, so it does not seem viable.
However, a military takeover could be viable. If they are willing to wipe out the most predatory portions of the ruling class, they could fix the healthcare system, install a high-employment policy and take out the banks and even the military contractors. Which could make them very popular.
Allegorio , December 2, 2017 at 11:20 pm> a military takeover could be viable
Yeah, right. Have you seen our generals? They're just more of the same leeches we have everywhere else in the 0.01%. Have you seen any of the other military dictatorships around the world, like actually existing ones? They're all brilliantly corrupt and total failures when it comes to running any sort of economy. Not to mention the total loss of civil rights. Americans have this idiotic love of their military thanks to decades of effective propaganda and think the rule of pampered generals would somehow be better than the right to vote. Bleh.
John Wright , December 2, 2017 at 10:45 amThis is a military dictatorship. The fourth and sixth amendments have been de facto repealed. Trump cared about one thing and one thing only, namely to repeal the estate tax. He is the ultimate con man and this was his biggest con. It is truly amazing how he accomplished this. He has saved his family a billion $$$. He will now turn over governing to the generals and Goldman Sachs. He may even retire. Truly amazing. One has to admire the sheer perversity of it all. When will the American electorate get tired of being conned? The fact is they have nothing but admiration for Trump. We live in a criminal culture, winner take all. America loves its winners.
Steve , December 2, 2017 at 2:45 pmThere is an old 2003 David Brooks column in which he mentions that
"The Democrats couldn't even persuade people to oppose the repeal of the estate tax, which is explicitly for the mega-upper class. Al Gore, who ran a populist campaign, couldn't even win the votes of white males who didn't go to college, whose incomes have stagnated over the past decades and who were the explicit targets of his campaign. Why don't more Americans want to distribute more wealth down to people like themselves?"
Then Brooks goes on to explain
"The most telling polling result from the 2000 election was from a Time magazine survey that asked people if they are in the top 1 percent of earners. Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-hope-over-self-interest.html
The Republicans have conditioned people to believe government services (except for defense/military) are run poorly and need to be "run like a business" for a profit.
The problem is that not all government services CAN be profitable (homeless care, mental health care for the poor, EPA enforcement, OSHA enforcement). And when attempts are made to privatize some government operations such as incarceration, the result is that the private company tries to maximize profits by pushing for laws to incarcerate ever more people.
The history of the USA as viewed by outsiders, maybe 50 years hence, will be that of a resource consuming nation that spent a vast fortune on military hardware and military adventures when it had little to fear due to geography, a nation that touted an independent press that was anything but, a nation that created a large media/entertainment industry which helped to keep citizens in line, a nation that fostered an overly large (by 2 or 3 times per Paul Whooley) parasitical financial industry that did not perform its prime capital allocation task competently as it veered from bubble to bubble and a nation that managed to spend great sums on medical care without covering all citizens.
But the USA does have a lot of guns and a lot of frustrated people.
Maybe Kevlar vests will be the fashion of the future?
MyLessThanPrimeBeef , December 2, 2017 at 4:08 pmThanks for the great link on how sadly uninformed average Americans are! I've been looking for it for a while and great comment!
Vatch , December 2, 2017 at 7:24 pmThe provision to do away with the estate tax, if not immediately, in the current versions (House and Senate) is great news for the 1%, and bad for the rest of us.
And if more people are not against that (thanks for quoting the NYTImes article), it's the failure of the rest of the media for not focusing more on it, but wasting time and energy on fashion, sports, entertainment, etc.
Sydney Conner , December 2, 2017 at 5:06 pmhe provision to do away with the estate tax . . . is great news for the 1%
I think it's even a little more extreme than that. The data is a few years old, but it is only the top 0.6% who are affected by estate taxes in the United States. See the data at these web sites:
https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-historical-table-17
https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-estate-tax-statistics-year-of-death-table-1
DHG , December 2, 2017 at 8:13 pmThanks for the succinct, accurate eloquent description of our nightmare reality.
JTMcPhee , December 2, 2017 at 10:34 pmJonathan Holland Becnel , December 2, 2017 at 11:51 amThe military adventures were largely in support of what Smedley Butler so accurately called the Great "Racket" of Monroe Doctrine colonialism and rapacious extractive "capitalism" aka "looting."
For those who haven't encountered Maj. Gen. Butler's take on his 33 years of serving the Oligokleptocracy, here's a link: https://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.html
A smart and honest fellow, who even declined as a "war hero" to serve as the oligarchs' figurehead in an earlier and clumsier plot to get rid of the trappings and regulation of "democracy:" The Business Plot, https://jtoddring.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/smedley-butler-and-the-business-plot/
It took longer and costed the rich a bit more to buy up all the bits of government, but the way they've done will likely be more compendious and lasting. Barring some "intervening event(s)".
Doomed?
Project Much?
While Republicans show their true colors, im out there seeing a resurgence of civil society. And im starting to reach Hard core Tea Party types. Jobs, Manufacturing, Actual Policy.
IOW The Revolution Is Nigh.
2018 will be a Fn watershed.
May 07, 2015 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com
"The power and influence of the financial sector threatens a continuation of the regulatory capture that contributed to the financial crisis. Financial firms, too often, have significant say in the appointment of high regulatory officials.The tendency of some former government officials to obtain highly lucrative positions in the financial sector after leaving government may well act as an inducement to those remaining in government to serve the interest of the financial sector rather than those of the public."
Brooksley Born, Finance & Society Conference, May 5, 2015
The Western Banks are all over these markets, from commodities to equities. They are creating huge amounts of money debt, and providing it to the financial industry as top down stimulus. What results is little aggregate or 'organic' growth and a series of paper asset bubbles. They should be ashamed but they are too busy plundering to feel any twinge of conscience. They are like a herd of swine, racing for the abyss.I had to chuckle when the pampered princesses and giggling jackals were talking about the jobs report tomorrow, and said that the ideal situation would be 'a strong jobs number with no wage growth,' a true 'goldilocks' scenario.
I have given up any expectation of reform from within. There will have to be some eye-opening incidents to shake the complacency of the fortunate few.
Non-Farm Payrolls tomorrow.
Have a pleasant evening.
Dec 03, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Jim Haygood , December 2, 2017 at 8:29 am
tegnost , December 2, 2017 at 8:56 amRenegade ( ex-? ) Republican David Stockman NAILS IT TO THE WALL:
To be sure, some element of political calculus always lies behind legislation. For instance, the Dems didn't pass the Wagner Act in 1935, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 or the Affordable Care Act of 2010 as exercises in pure civic virtue -- these measures targeted huge constituencies with tens of millions of votes at stake.
Still, threadbare theories and untoward effects are just that; they can't be redeemed by the risible claim that this legislative Rube Goldberg contraption being jammed through sight unseen ( in ACA redux fashion ) is for the benefit of the rank and file Republican voters, and most especially not for the dispossessed independents and Dems of Flyover America who voted for Trump out of protest against the failing status quo.
To the contrary. The GOP tax bill is of the lobbies, by the PACs and for the money. Period.
There is no higher purpose or even nugget of conservative economic principle to it. The battle cry of "pro-growth tax cuts" is just a warmed over 35-year-old mantra from the Reagan era that does not remotely reflect the actual content of the bill or disguise what it really is: namely, a cowardly infliction of more than $2 trillion of debt on future American taxpayers in order to fund tax relief today for the GOP's K Street and Wall Street paymasters.
On a net basis, in fact, fully 97% of the $1.412 trillion revenue loss in the Senate Committee bill over the next decade is attributable to the $1.369 trillion cost of cutting the corporate rate from 35% to 20% (and repeal of the related AMT). All the rest of the massive bill is just a monumental zero-sum pot stirring operation.
Stockman, who knows federal budgeting better than most of us know the contents of our own homes, goes on to shred the tax bill item by item, leaving a smoking, scorched-earth moonscape in his deadly rhetorical wake. And he's not done yet.
But Lordy, how he scourges the last hurrah of the know-nothing R party, just before it gets pounded senseless at the polls next year. Bubble III is the last hope of the retrograde Republican Congressional rabble. But it's a 50/50 proposition at best that our beloved bubble lasts through next November. :-(
ambrit , December 2, 2017 at 9:19 amthanks Jim, yes, this looks like it will knock the legs out of the "main st" economy, but over at versailles on the potomac they'll be listening to/playing the fiddle and watching the country burn while guzzling 300 dollar scotch and and admiring their campfire.
nonclassical , December 2, 2017 at 2:14 pmRight next to "Versailles on the Potomac" is the site of the former Bonus Army camp, Anacostia Flats. The burning of the Bonus Army camp at Anacostia Flats could be seen, as a red glow, from the White House. Historians charitable to Herbert Hoover suggest that Gen. Douglass MacArthur 'conned' Hoover into letting the Army 'disperse' the Bonus Army. The resulting spectacle can be said to be one of the prime reasons why the American public rejected Hoover when he ran for re-election against Franklin Roosevelt.
I don't know if Hoover played the fiddle, but MacArthur was known to be able to play politicians like one.
The lesson here, if there is one, is that the present occupant of the White House had better be very circumspect about taking advice from Generals."anacostia flats" bonus army raided by Wall Street General MacArthur which is reason in previous iteration of Wall Street power grab by "American Liberty League", ("The Plot To Seize the White House"-Jules Archer) Marine General Smedley Butler felt forced play whistle-blower, providing FDR leverage he needed to prosecute banksters.
Big River Bandido December 2, 2017 at 3:26 pmThe gist of the commenter's statement was true - Democrats are totally complicit in the end result of Republican economic and foreign policy. Until now, Republicans could only deliver on their promises when Democrats helped them out. The Democrats' enabling strategy eventually alienated their own core supporters. With this tax cut, the Republicans have shown, for the first time, the ability to enact and sign their own legislation.
The Democrats basically accommodated the Republicans long enough to ensure their own irrelevance. They will not rise again until their "mixed stances" and those who encourage them are purged.
Nov 30, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Former Goldmanite and current Minneapolis Fed president, Neel Kashkari, conducted another #AskNeel session on Twitter where the dovish FOMC voter (he was the only one to dissent to the Fed's rate hike decision earlier this year) received numerous questions. Among them was the following one from Zero Hedge:
#AskNeel You have admitted the Fed has a "third mandate" and are worried about financial instability. What do you look at to gauge "instability" and what is the biggest S&P drop the Fed will accept before intervening
-- zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 29, 2017
His response:
Our job is not to protect investors. Tech bubble bursting didn't cause crisis - only mild recession. We don't see leverage building across the economy the way it did in housing run-up. If stocks correct - fine. Need to worry about what would trigger a real crisis. #AskNeel https://t.co/Wl7Pv1BX18
-- Neel Kashkari (@neelkashkari) November 29, 2017
The answer echoed a similar response from back in March , when he claimed that he doesn't "care about stock market fall itself. Care abt potential financial instability. Stock market drop unlikely to trigger crisis."
Needless to say, Kashkari's answer was token, superficial and condescending: while he is right that the tech bubble bursting didn't cause a crisis, the Fed's dramatic easing in response to the bursting of the tech bubble bursting lay the foundations for the housing and credit bubble; in other words, the Fed responded to one bubble by creating an even bigger bubble, and the bursting of that bubble in 2007/2008 did cause a crisis: the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression to be precise. And, in turn, the bursting of the current global financial bubble - in which the Fed has been joined by all other central banks to inject $20 trillion in global liquidity, or a third of global GDP - and is the biggest in history, will have a far more disastrous outcome than the last one.
Kashkari also said that "we don't see leverage building across the economy the way it did in housing run-up", which of course is a surprisingly naive way of looking at leverage, especially following last night's explanation from Fasakanara that when one takes into account ehe world's vol-sellers, it's all just one giant, $22 trillion position shorting volatility with record gama and all-time high leverage, both explicit and synthetic. Which also makes his next statement that the Fed needs "to worry about what would trigger a real crisis" especially bizarre: we now live in a world in which the market itself, thanks to QE and NIRP, has become systemic risk (see ""It's All One Single, Giant $22 Trillion Position": How Market Risk Became Systemic Risk ").
The fact that, as Kashkari confirms, the Fed is completely oblivious to its footprint and impact in the market should be terrifying to anyone. Well, anyone but not traders because despite what Kashkari also claimed, namely that " If stocks correct - fine ", one thing we can be certain of is that the moment stocks have a 5-10% swoon, the Fed will be right back assuring traders that it will ease back on its tightening, if not launch QE4 (right, James Bullard?)
Neel..I have respect for u but I know what I saw in August 2015..market dropped 7-8% and fed speak became "the case for tightening is less compelling"...
-- jim iuorio (@jimiuorio) November 29, 2017
But wait, it gets better, because in the very next question, immediately after stating that the Fed's job is not to protect investors, in response to a question whether the Fed creates moral hazard by keeping rates extra low, Kashkari answers that " If we raised interest rates to drive down the stock market, how does that help workers/wages/employment? " Or investors, for that matter. But the point is that the Fed quite clearly is intent on keeping stocks high.
The punchline: his very next statement: "If Greenspan had acted on his irrational exuberance call the economic costs may have been high."
We pay close attention to leverage across asset classes and economy. If we raised interest rates to drive down the stock market, how does that help workers/wages/employment? If Greenspan had acted on his irrational exuberance call the economic costs may have been high. #AskNeel https://t.co/hfDycYCXkg
-- Neel Kashkari (@neelkashkari) November 29, 2017
Here's a thought: if Greenspan had acted on his "irrational exuberance" call, there would have been pain, yes, but there would never be a tech bubble, and there would never be a global financial crisis, Lehman, AIG or trillions and trillions in central bank liquidity keeping the global financial system propped up now. In fact, Kashkari's statement once again demonstrates just how utterly clueless the "macroprudential regulators" at the Fed truly are.
* * *
There were some other tangential, but notable insights from the Minneapolis Fed president. One was his accurate observation that the Fed's constantly wrong dot plots have destroyed the Fed's credibility:
I'm not a fan of the dot plot. Forward guidance is a wonderful tool. Forward misguidance may do harm and undermine our credibility . I would rather only give guidance when we are pretty sure about the path forward
In response to whether the Fed's ZIRP was responsible for "zombie companies" in the shale patch and the record glut of oil inventory, the former Goldmanite was non-commital :
I think low interest rates brought down costs for people and businesses to invest - across sectors. That is what they were designed to do. But commodity markets always have cycles of under and overinvestment.
When asked how US investors are supposed to compete with foreign buyers of US stocks, including such buyers as the Swiss National Bank which is price-indescriminate as it creates money out of thin air, Kashkari's response :
It is a global market for investors. I don't think US economic growth would be stronger if we forbade foreign investment. If we can get job and wage growth up, that will help regular Americans make ends meet and save for their futures.
That Kashkari explicitly ignored the stated implication, namely that foreign central banks buying US stocks has led to a giant asset bubble, was one more warning either how clueless or how devious and premeditated this entire asset reflation experiment truly is.
Kashkari was also asked if the Fed would "ever consider forgiving the Treasury debt on its books?" to which the answer - sadly for the Magic Money Treers who have no grasp of elementary finance - was "No. That would violate our independence and likely cause high inflation as people lost confidence in the Fed's independence. "
Among the other interesting exchanges was a question if the Fed plans on using blockchain in the future, where the response was that "researches around the Fed System are looking at it (and other fintech developments). Too soon to know how and if it will be used by the Fed."
Kashkari also touched on inflation price targeting: when asked "What level of inflation would be a reason to 'tap the brakes'?" He responded that, as price targeting would suggest, "2% core PCE on a 12-month basis would be a good place to start. We've been 1.3% for 5+ years so we should be comfortable at 2.7% for 5+ years. That's what we are saying when we call it a target and not a ceiling." In other words, Kashkari supports doubling the rate of core inflation for the next 5 years.
Finally when asked "at what point does the flattening of the Treasury curve become a concern for the Fed?" Kashkari responded that "it's a concern now. We r raising rates, driving the front end up, meanwhile inflation expectations r low keeping the long end anchored. The more we commit to driving rates higher (regardless of data), the more we risk pressuring inflation expectations to the downside." He has good reason to be concerned: the flatter - and eventually inverted - the curve gets, the more the market is telling the Fed what should be obvious to everyone, if not Kashkari: that the Fed has lost control, as Citi warned last week .
Nov 30, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Former Goldmanite and current Minneapolis Fed president, Neel Kashkari, conducted another #AskNeel session on Twitter where the dovish FOMC voter (he was the only one to dissent to the Fed's rate hike decision earlier this year) received numerous questions. Among them was the following one from Zero Hedge:
#AskNeel You have admitted the Fed has a "third mandate" and are worried about financial instability. What do you look at to gauge "instability" and what is the biggest S&P drop the Fed will accept before intervening
-- zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 29, 2017
His response:
Our job is not to protect investors. Tech bubble bursting didn't cause crisis - only mild recession. We don't see leverage building across the economy the way it did in housing run-up. If stocks correct - fine. Need to worry about what would trigger a real crisis. #AskNeel https://t.co/Wl7Pv1BX18
-- Neel Kashkari (@neelkashkari) November 29, 2017
The answer echoed a similar response from back in March , when he claimed that he doesn't "care about stock market fall itself. Care abt potential financial instability. Stock market drop unlikely to trigger crisis."
Needless to say, Kashkari's answer was token, superficial and condescending: while he is right that the tech bubble bursting didn't cause a crisis, the Fed's dramatic easing in response to the bursting of the tech bubble bursting lay the foundations for the housing and credit bubble; in other words, the Fed responded to one bubble by creating an even bigger bubble, and the bursting of that bubble in 2007/2008 did cause a crisis: the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression to be precise. And, in turn, the bursting of the current global financial bubble - in which the Fed has been joined by all other central banks to inject $20 trillion in global liquidity, or a third of global GDP - and is the biggest in history, will have a far more disastrous outcome than the last one.
Kashkari also said that "we don't see leverage building across the economy the way it did in housing run-up", which of course is a surprisingly naive way of looking at leverage, especially following last night's explanation from Fasakanara that when one takes into account ehe world's vol-sellers, it's all just one giant, $22 trillion position shorting volatility with record gama and all-time high leverage, both explicit and synthetic. Which also makes his next statement that the Fed needs "to worry about what would trigger a real crisis" especially bizarre: we now live in a world in which the market itself, thanks to QE and NIRP, has become systemic risk (see ""It's All One Single, Giant $22 Trillion Position": How Market Risk Became Systemic Risk ").
The fact that, as Kashkari confirms, the Fed is completely oblivious to its footprint and impact in the market should be terrifying to anyone. Well, anyone but not traders because despite what Kashkari also claimed, namely that " If stocks correct - fine ", one thing we can be certain of is that the moment stocks have a 5-10% swoon, the Fed will be right back assuring traders that it will ease back on its tightening, if not launch QE4 (right, James Bullard?)
Neel..I have respect for u but I know what I saw in August 2015..market dropped 7-8% and fed speak became "the case for tightening is less compelling"...
-- jim iuorio (@jimiuorio) November 29, 2017
But wait, it gets better, because in the very next question, immediately after stating that the Fed's job is not to protect investors, in response to a question whether the Fed creates moral hazard by keeping rates extra low, Kashkari answers that " If we raised interest rates to drive down the stock market, how does that help workers/wages/employment? " Or investors, for that matter. But the point is that the Fed quite clearly is intent on keeping stocks high.
The punchline: his very next statement: "If Greenspan had acted on his irrational exuberance call the economic costs may have been high."
We pay close attention to leverage across asset classes and economy. If we raised interest rates to drive down the stock market, how does that help workers/wages/employment? If Greenspan had acted on his irrational exuberance call the economic costs may have been high. #AskNeel https://t.co/hfDycYCXkg
-- Neel Kashkari (@neelkashkari) November 29, 2017
Here's a thought: if Greenspan had acted on his "irrational exuberance" call, there would have been pain, yes, but there would never be a tech bubble, and there would never be a global financial crisis, Lehman, AIG or trillions and trillions in central bank liquidity keeping the global financial system propped up now. In fact, Kashkari's statement once again demonstrates just how utterly clueless the "macroprudential regulators" at the Fed truly are.
* * *
There were some other tangential, but notable insights from the Minneapolis Fed president. One was his accurate observation that the Fed's constantly wrong dot plots have destroyed the Fed's credibility:
I'm not a fan of the dot plot. Forward guidance is a wonderful tool. Forward misguidance may do harm and undermine our credibility . I would rather only give guidance when we are pretty sure about the path forward
In response to whether the Fed's ZIRP was responsible for "zombie companies" in the shale patch and the record glut of oil inventory, the former Goldmanite was non-commital :
I think low interest rates brought down costs for people and businesses to invest - across sectors. That is what they were designed to do. But commodity markets always have cycles of under and overinvestment.
When asked how US investors are supposed to compete with foreign buyers of US stocks, including such buyers as the Swiss National Bank which is price-indescriminate as it creates money out of thin air, Kashkari's response :
It is a global market for investors. I don't think US economic growth would be stronger if we forbade foreign investment. If we can get job and wage growth up, that will help regular Americans make ends meet and save for their futures.
That Kashkari explicitly ignored the stated implication, namely that foreign central banks buying US stocks has led to a giant asset bubble, was one more warning either how clueless or how devious and premeditated this entire asset reflation experiment truly is.
Kashkari was also asked if the Fed would "ever consider forgiving the Treasury debt on its books?" to which the answer - sadly for the Magic Money Treers who have no grasp of elementary finance - was "No. That would violate our independence and likely cause high inflation as people lost confidence in the Fed's independence. "
Among the other interesting exchanges was a question if the Fed plans on using blockchain in the future, where the response was that "researches around the Fed System are looking at it (and other fintech developments). Too soon to know how and if it will be used by the Fed."
Kashkari also touched on inflation price targeting: when asked "What level of inflation would be a reason to 'tap the brakes'?" He responded that, as price targeting would suggest, "2% core PCE on a 12-month basis would be a good place to start. We've been 1.3% for 5+ years so we should be comfortable at 2.7% for 5+ years. That's what we are saying when we call it a target and not a ceiling." In other words, Kashkari supports doubling the rate of core inflation for the next 5 years.
Finally when asked "at what point does the flattening of the Treasury curve become a concern for the Fed?" Kashkari responded that "it's a concern now. We r raising rates, driving the front end up, meanwhile inflation expectations r low keeping the long end anchored. The more we commit to driving rates higher (regardless of data), the more we risk pressuring inflation expectations to the downside." He has good reason to be concerned: the flatter - and eventually inverted - the curve gets, the more the market is telling the Fed what should be obvious to everyone, if not Kashkari: that the Fed has lost control, as Citi warned last week .
Mar 19, 2017 | finance.yahoo.com
CNBC
Yellen's exit may prompt the Fed to pare its balance sheet sooner rather than later, Goldman says
Yuri Gripas | Reuters
It's often said that good things come to those who wait - but a bloated $4.5 trillion balance sheet might be a notable exception to that rule.
With the Federal Reserve facing a Herculean conundrum in unwinding its crisis-era monetary policy - and a likely leadership transition on the horizon - Goldman Sachs (GS) suggested on Saturday the central bank could move early to reduce the vast sums of government and mortgage-backed securities (MBS) it holds on its books.
In a research note to clients, the bank pointed to the likelihood that President Donald Trump may "reshape the leadership" of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the Fed's powerful policy-making body, as the terms of Fed Chair Janet Yellen and Vice Chair Stanley Fischer expire in early 2018.
"This could be important for balance sheet policy because many Republican-leaning economists have criticized quantitative easing (QE) and have expressed a preference for rapid balance sheet rundown, perhaps even through asset sales," wrote Daan Struyven, a Goldman economist.
If the new appointments-especially the new chair-are thought to favor aggressive balance sheet normalization, perhaps even including asset sales, and if all decisions are left up to the incoming team, financial markets might experience heightened uncertainty during the transition."
Goldman suggested there was a "strong 'risk management' case for an announcement of very gradual balance sheet runoff later this year," because of the political risk associated with new leadership at the Fed.
"Our forecast is that the discussion around reinvestment continues for most of this year and the plan is formally announced in December 2017," Struyven said. "At that meeting, we expect the committee to hold the funds rate steady after hiking in both June and September. We expect the quarterly hikes to resume in March 2018."
The economist harked back to 2013's "taper tantrum," in which markets reacted the Fed's suggestions of tighter monetary policy by sending bond yields surging and stocks reeling - albeit temporarily.
A potential fire sale of Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities by the Fed "could have significantly more adverse effects on financial conditions than gradual runoff, and the mere risk of such an outcome might set up another 'taper tantrum,' " Struyven added.
'The uncertainty is substantial'
As the central bank begins a campaign to tighten benchmark interest rates - making a quarter-point hike just last week - it's renewed a debate over how to unwind the Fed's massive bond buying program.
Some market observers have long argued that the Fed has distorted financial conditions with QE, and the central bank faces a huge task trying to pare down its bloated balance sheet.
"The bigger the Fed's credit footprint, the more it interferes with the efficient employment and pricing of credit," wrote George Selgin, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, in a blog post last month.
"By directing a large share of savings to purchases of longer-term MBS and Treasury securities, for example, the Fed has artificially raised both the prices of those securities, and the importance of the housing market and the federal government relative to the rest of the U.S. economy," Selgin wrote. "It has also dramatically increased its portfolio's duration gap and, by so doing, the risk that it will suffer losses should it sell assets before they mature."
On Friday, Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank President Neel Kashkari, the lone dissenter against the U.S. central bank's decision last week to raise interest rates, the U.S. economy is still falling short on employment and inflation.
Kashkari, an alumnus of both Goldman Sachs and the U.S. Treasury who oversaw the government's Temporary Asset Relief Program (TARP) during the financial crisis, believes the Fed should wait on raising interest rates until it publishes a detailed plan for how and when it will reduce its $4.5 trillion balance sheet.
Goldman set forth two scenarios under which the Fed could begin trimming its balance sheet. Under an "early start, passive runoff" scenario, the bank said the Fed "gradually tapers reinvestment in December 2017 over 10 months but does not sell assets."
Conversely, under a "late start, active sales" scenario, Goldman said the Fed could cease reinvesting in bonds in July 2018 "without tapering and actively sells $40bn of assets per month."
Under the latter, the Fed could shrink its balance sheet by about $250 billion per quarter starting in the second half of next year, "with similar contributions from maturing assets and active sales," the bank added.
However, neither scenario is without its risks, Goldman's economist wrote: "While our baseline estimate suggests relatively little tightening from balance sheet rundown, the uncertainty is substantial. The 2013 'taper tantrum' also provides a reminder that the impact of balance sheet policy on financial conditions is uncertain and could be larger than our baseline estimate."
JF -> Anachronism ... Reply Monday, March 20, 2017 at 07:39 AM
Every time the Fed deals with the financial asset trading marketplaces the private parties wish to make a profit, no wonder Goldman is shilling to get the more valuable Fed holdings 'sold' to these parties.
No article on reserves or Fed asset holdings is legitimate unless it also discusses the use of administrative offset with Treasury (whether the bonds are mature and as a result, redeemable at that time, or not, they could all be offset with Treasury now).
The Fed has a lot it can do with the assets they bought with newly created money, but subsidizing the money center banks once again ought to be low on the list (moral hazard rewarded again?). The asset-handling plans should be pursued only after Treasury coordination talks are settled and according to well discussed, publicly known plans.
It is not clear to me who the public should trust here, so open public programming should be expected and press involvement sought after by the Fed. Look at the magnitudes here, no one should be looking the other way on this.
RGC -> JF... March 20, 2017 at 07:55 AM
1. The Fed does QE, buying bonds and MBS and thus raising asset prices.
2. Bond traders sell.
3. The Fed raises interest rates, thus lowering bond prices.
4. The Fed reduces QE, selling bonds and MBS and thus lowering prices.
5. Bond traders buy.
6. The Fed reverses course and lowers interest rates, thus raising bond prices.
7. Bond traders sell.
The Fed trades with public money, the bond traders trade with private money.
JF -> RGC... March 20, 2017 at 09:30 AM
RGC what is your point except to note that private interests sweep monies out of private positions in order to create the cash to buy the bond being offered by the Fed should they sell some. It is a way to sweep excess monies out of the economic system, though that is not a completed end-game unless the Fed destroys the money or it is remitted to Treasury where it covers other claims for payment (reducing the need to borrow anew) turnstiling the monies back into the economy.
It is simpler with regard to Treasury to have both sides agree to osset their position.
But offsets means that Treasury offers none or fewer bonds for sale to outsude interests, including China and other govts or within the banks or elsewhere.
Is the Fed ready to do all of these approaches, and is it coordinated with the oublic's govt via Treasury agreement?
The Fed has instruments with 8 percent coupons, I just don't like the idea of them selling these to the banking segment, at a price that allows them to profit, with little risk, especially when you consider that they were the ones who caused the financial crisis in the first place.
It will be interesting to see what the Feds do, what they do with the cash they get, and what Treasury and the Trump Administration does as more cash remittances come in (and why was this not done to help the Obama Admin look good fiscally before?).
RGC -> to JF... March 20, 2017 at 10:06 AM
I was trying to demonstrate the synergy between Wall Street and the Fed.
You can look at the Fed as an economy-regulating institution, but you can also look at it as a pipeline from public wealth to private wealth.
Jun 05, 2015 | economistsview.typepad.com
Willem Buiter, Ebrahim Rahbari, Joe Seydl at Vox EU:Secular stagnation: The time for one-armed policy is over: Stagnation is gripping several of the world's largest economies and many view this as secular, not transient.
This column argues that many economies need both demand-side stimulus and supply-side reform to close the output gap and restore potential-output growth. A combined monetary-fiscal stimulus – i.e. helicopter money – is needed to close the output gap, and this should be accompanied with extensive debt restructuring, policies to halt rising inequality, and additional public infrastructure investment.
Selected Skeptical Comments
Sandwichman -> anne:
Workers, collectively, have a single, incontrovertible lever for effecting change -- withholding their labor power. Nothing -- not even imprisonment or death -- can prevent workers from withholding their labor power! Kill me and see how much work you can get out of me.
This is the elementary fact that the elites don't want workers to know. "It is futile!" "It is a fallacy!" "You will only hurt yourselves!"
Once one comprehends the strategic importance of making the withholding of labor power taboo, everything else falls into place. Economics actually makes sense as a persuasive discourse to dissuade from the withholding of labor power.
Above all, ideology must conceal, denigrate, diminish, slander and distract from the ONE effective strategy that workers collectively have. This is the spectre that haunts all economics.
Dan Kervick:
Good stuff by Buiter et al, but here are some suggested additions to the litany of supply side woes:
1. Ineffective economic organization, both inside corporate firms and outside of them.
a. Many corporations are now quite dysfunctional as engines of long-term value creation – but not dysfunctional as vehicles of short-term value extraction for their absurdly over-incentivized key stakeholders.
b. The developed world societies are facing an extreme failure of strategic economic leadership, at both the national and global level, and at both the formal level of government and the informal level of visionary public intellectuals and industrial "captains". There is no coherent consensus on which way lies the direction of progress. Since nobody is setting the agenda for what the future looks like, risk trumps confidence everywhere and nobody knows what to invest in.
2. Dyspeptic dystopianism. The intellectual culture of our times is polluted by obsessive, nail-biting negativity and demoralizing storylines preaching hopelessness: the robots are going to destroy all the jobs; the Big One is going to bury everything, the real "neutral" interest rate is preposterously negative, etc. etc. etc. With so much doom and gloom in the air, there is no reason to invest wealth, rather than consume it. Robert Schiller touched on this at a recent talk at LSE.
3. The popular culture of 2015 America is – as in so many other areas - a tale of two cultural cities. For many of those who consume the bottom layers of it, what they are ingesting is a barbarous Pink Slime cultural sludge that makes them stupid, frivolous, dependent, impulsive and emotionally erratic – something like perpetual 15 year olds. People like this can be duped by the most shallow demagoguery and consumerist manipulation, and can't organize themselves to pursue their enlightened self-interest. Enlightened artists and cultural custodians need to step up, organize and find a way to seize the American mind back from the clutches of consumer capitalist garbage-mongers and philistine society-wreckers.
4. Laissez faire backwardness. We are struggling under left-right-center conspiracy of Pollyanna freedom fools, who despite their constant kvetching at one another all share in common the view that progress is self-organizing.
On the left we have the Chomsky and Graeber-style "libertarian socialists" who are convinced we could have a functioning and prosperous society in which seemingly every action is voluntary and spontaneous, nobody is ever compelled to do anything that their delicate little hearts don't throb to do, and who seemingly have no idea of what it takes even to run a carrot farm.
On the right, we have the clueless paranoid libertarians who think the whole world should revolve around their adolescent desire not to be "tread on", and seem to have no idea of what it takes – and what it took historically - to build a livable civilization.
In the center, we have the neoliberals, who are convinced that our world will spontaneously and beneficially organize itself if only we turn the macroeconomic tumblers and stumble on the right interest rate, or inflation rate, or some other version of the One Parameter to Rule Them All mindset. They are also too devoted to the religion of demand-goosing: the idea that everything will be all right as long as we generate enough "demand" – as though it makes no difference whether people are demanding high fructose cotton candy or the collected works of Shakespeare.
5. I'm an optimist! This is all going to change. We have nearly reached Peak Idiocracy. We're on the verge of a new age of social organization and planning and a return to mixed economy common sense and public-spirited mobilization and adulthood. This will happen because ultimately all of those teenagers will stop denying reality, and stop struggling to escape the realization that a more organized and thoughtfully planned way of life is the only thing that will work in our small, resource strapped, crowded 21st century planet.
George H. Blackford:
likbez:Since the 80s, US companies have been buying abroad to sell at home as foreign countries used our trade deficits to depress their exchange rates. Profits and income share at the top soared; wages and income share at the bottom fell, and employment was maintained by speculative bubbles and increasing debt until the last bubble burst, and the system collapsed.
There seem to be no more bubbles in the offing. The dollar is overvalued. Debt relative to income is unprecedented, and the concentration of income has created stagnation for lack of investment opportunities.
How is an increasing deficit and QE supposed to solve our problems in this situation other than by propping up a failed system that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer by increasing government debt? Does anyone really believe this sort of thing can go on forever in the absence of a fall in the value of the dollar and in the concentration of income? Who's going to be left holding the bag when this system collapses again?
It seems quite clear to me that it is going to take a very long time for the system to adjust to this situation in the absence of a fall in the value of the dollar and the concentration of income. That kind of adjustment means reallocating resources in a very dramatic way so as to accommodate an economy in which resources are allocated to serve the demands of the wealthy few in the absence of the ability of those at the bottom to expand their debt relative to income.
We didn't smoothly transition from an agricultural economy to one based on manufacturing. That transition was plagued with a great deal of civil unrest, speculative bubbles, booms and busts that eventually led to a collapse of the system and the Great Depression.
And we didn't smoothly transition out of the Great Depression. That was ended by WW II and dramatic changes in our economic system, the most dramatic changes being the role and size of government and the fall in the concentration of income for thirty-five years after 1940.
It was the fall in the concentration of income that led to mass markets (large numbers of people with purchasing power out of income) that made investment profitable after WW II in the absence of speculative bubbles, and it was the increase in the concentration of income that led to the bubble economy we have today that has led us into the Great Recession.
What this means to me is that we are not going to get out of the mess we are in today in the absence of some kind of catastrophe comparable to WW II if we, and the rest of the world, do not come to grips with the fundamental problem we face in this modern age, namely, the trade deficit and the concentration of income.
See:
I think neoliberalism naturally leads to secular stagnation. This is the way any economic system that is based on increasing of inequality should behave: after inequality reached certain critical threshold, the economy faces extended period of low growth reflecting persistently weak private demand.
An economic cycle enters recession when total spending falls below expected by producers and they realize that production level is too high relative to demand. What we have under neoliberalism is kind of Marx constant crisis of overproduction.
The focus on monetary policy and the failure to enact fiscal policy options is structural defect of neoliberalism ideology and can't be changed unless neoliberal ideology is abandoned. Which probably will not happen unless another huge crisis hit the USA. 2008 crisis, while discrediting neoliberalism, was clearly not enough for the abandonment of this ideology. Like in most cults adherents became more fanatical believers after the prophecy did not materialized.
The USA elite tried partially alleviate this problem by resorting to military Keynesianism as a supplementary strategy. But while military budget was raised to unprecedented levels, it can't reverse the tendency. Persistent high output gap is now a feature of the US economy, not a transitory state.
"Top everything" does not help iether (top cheap oil is especially nasty factor). Recent pretty clever chess gambit to artificially drop oil price playing Russian card, and sacrificing US shall industry like a pawn (remember that Saudi Arabia is the USA client state) was a very interesting move, but still expectation are now so low that cheap gas stimulus did not work as expected in the USA. It would be interesting to see how quickly oil will return to early 2014 price level because of that. That will be the sign that gambit is abandoned.
In a way behaviour of the USA elite in this respect is as irrational as behavior of the USSR elite. My impression is that they will stick to neoliberal ideology to the bitter end. But at the same time they are much more reckless. Recent attempt to solve economic problems by unleashing a new wars and relying of war time mobilization so far did not work. Including the last move is this game: Russia did not bite the offer for military confrontation that the USA clearly made by instilling coup d'état in Ukraine.
Now it look like there is a second attempt to play "madman" card after Nixon's administration Vietnam attempt to obtain concession from the USSR by threatening to unleash the nuclear war.
www.nakedcapitalism.com
April 29, 2016 by Yves Smith An interview by Gordon T. Long of the Financial Repression Authority. Originally published at his website
GORDON LONG: Thank you for joining us. I'm Gordon Long with the Financial Repression Authority. It's my pleasure to have with me today Dr. Michael Hudson Professor Hudson's very well known in terms of the FIRE economy to-I think, to a lot of our listeners, or at least he's recognized by many as fostering that concept. A well known author, he has published many, many books. Welcome, Professor Hudson.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes.
LONG: Let's just jump into the subject. I mentioned the FIRE economy cause I know that I have always heard it coming from yourself-or, indirectly, not directly, from yourself. Could you explain to our listeners what's meant by that terminology?
HUDSON: Well it's more than just people getting fired. FIRE is an acronym for Finance, Insurance and Real Estate. Basically that sector is about assets, not production and consumption. And most people think of the economy as being producers making goods and services and paying labor to produce them – and then, labour is going to buy these goods and services. But this production and consumption economy is surrounded by the asset economy: the web of Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate of who owns assets, and who owes the debts, and to whom.
LONG: How would you differentiate it (or would you) with what's often referred to as financialization, or the financialization of our economy? Are they one and the same?
HUDSON: Pretty much. The Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sector is dominated by finance. 70 to 80% of bank loans in North America and Europe are mortgage loans against real estate. So instead of a landowner class owning property clean and clear, as they did in the 19 th century, now you have a democratization of real estate. 2/3 or more of the population owns their own home. But the only way to buy a home, or commercial real estate, is on credit. So the loan-to-value ratio goes up steadily. Banks lend more and more money to the real estate sector. A home or piece of real estate, or a stock or bond, is worth whatever banks are willing to lend against it
As banks loosen their credit terms, as they lower their interest rates, take lower down payments, and lower amortization rates – by making interest-only loans – they are going to lend more and more against property. So real estate is bid up on credit. All this rise in price is debt leverage. So a financialized economy is a debt-leveraged economy, whether it's real estate or insurance, or buying an education, or just living. And debt leveraging means that a larger proportion of assets are represented by debt. So debt equity ratios rise. But financialization also means that more and more of people's income and corporate and government tax revenue is paid to creditors. There's a flow of revenue from the production-and-consumption economy to the financial sector.
LONG: I don't know if you know Richard Duncan. He was with the IMF, etc, and lives in Thailand. He argues right now that capitalism is no longer functioning, and really what he refers to what we have now is "creditism." Because in capitalism we have savings that are reinvested into productive assets that create productivity, which leads to a higher level of living. We're not doing that. We have no savings and investments. Credit is high in the financial sector, but it's not being applied to productive assets. Is he valid in that thinking?
HUDSON: Not as in your statement. It's confused.
LONG: Okay.
HUDSON: There's an enormous amount of savings. Gross savings. The savings we have that are mounting up are just about as large as they've ever been – about, 18-19% of the US economy. They're counterpart is debt. Most savings are lent out to borrowers se debt. Basically, you have savers at the top of the pyramid, the 1% lending out their savings to the 99%. The overall net savings may be zero, and that's what your stupid person from the IMF meant. But gross savings are much higher. Now, the person, Mr. Duncan, obviously-I don't know what to say when I hear this nonsense. Every economy is a credit economy.
Let's start in Ancient Mesopotamia. The group that I organized out of Harvard has done a 20-study of the origins of economic structuring in the Bronze Age, even the Neolithic, and the Bronze Age economy – 3200 BC going back to about 1200 BC. Suppose you're a Babylonian in the time of Hammurabi, about 1750 BC, and you're a cultivator. How do you buy things during the year? Well, if you go to the bar, to an ale woman, what she'd do is write down the debt that you owe. It was to be paid on the threshing floor. The debts were basically paid basically once a year when the income was there, on the threshing floor when the harvest was in. If the palace or the temples would advance animals or inputs or other public services, this would be as a debt. It was all paid in grain, which was monetized for paying debts to the palace, temples and other creditors.
The IMF has this Austrian theory that pretends that money began as barter and that capitalism basically operates on barter. This always is a disinformation campaign. Nobody believed this in times past, and it is a very modern theory that basically is used to say, "Oh, debt is bad." What they really mean is that public debt is bad. The government shouldn't create money, the government shouldn't run budget deficits but should leave the economy to rely on the banks. So the banks should run and indebt the economy.
You're dealing with a public relations mythology that's used as a means of deception for most people. You can usually ignore just about everything the IMF says. If you understand money you're not going to be hired by the IMF. The precondition for being hired by the IMF is not to understand finance. If you do understand finance, you're fired and blacklisted. That's why they impose austerity programs that they call "stabilization programs" that actually are destabilization programs almost wherever they're imposed.
LONG: Is this a lack of understanding and adherence to the wrong philosophy, or how did we get into this trap?
HUDSON: We have an actively erroneous view, not just a lack of understanding. This is not by accident. When you have an error repeated year after year after year, decade after decade after decade, it's not really insanity doing the same thing thinking it'll be different. It's sanity. It's doing the same thing thinking the result will be the same again and again and again. The result will indeed be austerity programs, making budget deficits even worse, driving governments further into debt, further into reliance on the IMF. So then the IMF turns them to the knuckle breakers of the World Bank and says, "Oh, now you have to pay your debts by privatization". It's the success. The successful error of monetarism is to force countries to have such self-defeating policies that they end up having to privatize their natural resources, their public domain, their public enterprises, their communications and transportation, like you're seeing in Greece's selloffs. So when you find an error that is repeated, it's deliberate. It's not insane. It's part of the program, not a bug.
LONG: Where does this lead us? What's the roadmap ahead of us here?
HUDSON: A thousand years ago, if you were a marauding gang and you wanted to take over a country's land and its natural resources and public sector, you'd have to invade it with military troops. Now you use finance to take over countries. So it leads us into a realm where everything that the classical economists saw and argued for – public investment, bringing costs in line with the actual cost of production – that's all rejected in favor of a rentier class evolving into an oligarchy. Basically, financiers – the 1% – are going to pry away the public domain from the government. Pry away and privatize the public enterprises, land, natural resources, so that bondholders and privatizers get all of the revenue for themselves. It's all sucked up to the top of the pyramid, impoverishing the 99%.
LONG: Well I think most people, without understanding economics, would instinctively tell you they think that's what's happening right now, in some way.
HUDSON: Right. As long as you can avoid studying economics you know what's happened. Once you take an economics course you step into brainwashing. It's an Orwellian world.
LONG: I think you said it perfectly well there. Exactly. It gets you locked into the wrong way of thinking as opposed to just basic common sense. Your book is Killing the Host . What was the essence of its message? Was it describing exactly what we're talking about here?
HUDSON: Finance has taken over the industrial economy, so that instead of finance becoming what it was expected to be in the 19 th century, instead of the banks evolving from usurious organizations that leant to governments, mainly to wage war, finance was going to be industrialized. They were going to mobilize savings and recycle it to finance the means of production, starting with heavy industry. This was actually happening in Germany in the late 19 th century. You had the big banks working with government and industry in a triangular process. But that's not what's happening now. After WW1 and especially after WW2, finance reverted to its pre-industrial form. Instead of allying themselves with industry, as banks were expected to do, banks allied themselves with real estate and monopolies, realizing that they can make more money off real estate.
The bank spokesman David Ricardo argued against the landed interest in 1817, against land rent. Now the banks are all in favor of supporting land rent, knowing that today, when people buy and sell property, they need credit and pay interest for it. The banks are going to get all the rent. So you have the banks merge with real estate against industry, against the economy as a whole. The result is that they're part of the overhead process, not part of the production process.
LONG: There's a sense that there's a crisis lying ahead in the next year, two years, or three years. The mainstream economy's so disconnected from Wall Street economy. What's your view on that?
HUDSON: It's not disconnected at all. The Wall Street economy has taken over the economy and is draining it. Under what economics students are taught as Say's Law, the economy's workers are supposed to use their income to buy what they produce. That's why Henry Ford paid them $5 a day, so that they could afford to buy the automobiles they were producing.
LONG: Exactly.
HUDSON: But Wall Street is interjecting itself into the economy, so that instead of the circular flow between producers and consumers, you have more and more of the flow diverted to pay interest, insurance and rent. In other words, to pay the FIRE sector. It all ends up with the financial sector, most of which is owned by the 1%. So, their way of formulating it is to distract attention from today's debt quandary by saying it's just a cycle, or it's "secular stagnation." That removes the element of agency – active politicking by the financial interests and Wall Street lobbyists to obtain all the growth of income and wealth for themselves. That's what happened in America and Canada since the late 1970s.
LONG: What does an investor do today, or somebody who's looking for retirement, trying to save for the future, and they see some of these things occurring. What should they be thinking about? Or how should they be protecting themselves?
HUDSON: What all the billionaires and the heavy investors do is simply try to preserve their wealth. They're not trying to make money, they're not trying to speculate. If you're an investor, you're not going to outsmart Wall Street billionaires, because the markets are basically fixed. It's the George Soros principle. If you have so much money, billions of dollars, you can break the Bank of England. You don't follow the market, you don't anticipate it, you actually make the market and push it up, like the Plunge Protection Team is doing with the stock market these days. You have to be able to control the prices. Insiders make money, but small investors are not going to make money.
Since you're in Canada, I remember the beginning of the 1960s. I used to look at the Treasury Bulletin and Federal Reserve Bulletin figures on foreign investment in the US stock market. We all used to laugh at Canada especially. The Canadians don't buy stocks until they're up to the very top, and then they lose all the money by holding these stocks on the downturn. Finally, when the market's all the way at the bottom, Canadians decide to begin selling because they finally can see a trend. So they miss the upswing until they decide to buy at the top once again. It's hilarious to look at how Canada has performed in the US bond market, and they did the same in the silver market. I remember when silver was going up to $50. The Canadians said, "Yes, we can see the trend now!" and they began to buy it. They lost their shirts. So, basically, if you're a Canadian investor, move.
LONG: So the Canadian investors are a better contrarian indicator than the front page cover, you're saying.
HUDSON: I'd think so. Once they get in, you know the bubble's over.
LONG: Absolutely on that one. What are you currently writing? What is your current focus now?
HUDSON: Well, I just finished a book. You mentioned Killing the Host . My next book will be out in about three months: J is for Junk Economics . It began as a dictionary of terms, so I can provide people with a vocabulary. As we got in the argument at the beginning of your program today, our argument is about the vocabulary we're using and the words you're using. The vocabulary taught to students today in economics – and used by the mass media and by government spokesmen – is basically a set of euphemisms. If you look at the television reports on the market, they say that any loss in the stock market isn't a loss, it's "profit taking". And when they talk about money. the stock market rises – "Oh that's good news." But it's awful news for the short sellers it wipes out. Almost all the words we get are kind of euphemisms to conceal the actual dynamics that are happening. For instance, "secular stagnation" means it's all a cycle. Even the idea of "business cycles": Nobody in the 19 th century used the word "business cycle". They spoke about "crashes". They knew that things go up slowly and then they plunge very quickly. It was a crash. It's not the sine curve that you have in Josef Schumpeter's book on Business Cycles . It's a ratchet effect: slow up, quick down. A cycle is something that is automatic, and if it's a cycle and you have leading and lagging indicators as the National Bureau of Economic Research has. Then you'd think "Oh, okay, everything that goes up will come down, and everything that goes down will come up, just wait your turn." And that means governments should be passive.
Well, that is the opposite of everything that's said in classical economics and the Progressive Era, when they realized that economies don't recover by themselves. You need a-the government to step in, you need something "exogenous," as economist say. You need something from outside the system to revive it. The covert idea of this business cycle analysis is to leave out the role of government. If you look at neoliberal and Austrian theory, there's no role for government spending, and no role of public investment. The whole argument for privatization, for instance, is the opposite of what was taught in American business schools in the 19 th century. The first professor of economics at the Wharton School of Business, which was the first business school, was Simon Patten. He said that public infrastructure is a fourth factor of production. But its role isn't to make a profit. It's to lower the cost of public services and basic inputs to lower the cost of living and lower the cost of doing business to make the economy more competitive. But privatization adds interest payments, dividends, managerial payments, stock buybacks, and merges and acquisitions. Obviously these financialized charges are factored into the price system and raise the cost of living and doing business.
LONG: Well, Michael, we're-I thank you for the time, and we're up against our hard line. I know we didn't have as much time as we always like, so we have to break. Any overall comments you'd like to leave with our listeners who might be interested this school of economics?
HUDSON: Regarding the downturn we're in, we're going into a debt deflation. The key of understanding the economy is to look at debt. The economy has to spend more and more money on debt service. The reason the economy is not recovering isn't simply because this is a normal cycle. And It's not because labour is paid too much. It's because people are diverting more and more of their income to paying their debts, so they can't afford to buy goods. Markets are shrinking – and if markets are shrinking, then real estate rents are shrinking, profits are shrinking. Instead of using their earnings to reinvest and hire more labour to increase production, companies are using their earnings for stock buybacks and dividend payouts to raise the share price so that the managers can take their revenue in the form of bonuses and stocks and live in the short run. They're leaving their companies as bankrupt shells, which is pretty much what hedge funds do when they take over companies.
So the financialization of companies is the reverse of everything Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and everyone you think of as a classical economist was saying. Banks wrap themselves in a cloak of classical economics by dropping history of economic thought from the curriculum, which is pretty much what's happened. And Canada-I know since you're from Canada, my experience there was that the banks have a huge lobbying power over government. In 1979, I wrote for the IRPP Institute there on Canada In the New Monetary Order . At that time the provinces of Canada were borrowing money from Switzerland and Germany because they could borrow it at much lower interest rates. I said that this was going to be a disaster, and one that was completely unnecessary. If Canadian provinces borrow in Francs or any other foreign currency, this money goes into the central bank, which then creates Canadian dollars to spend. Why not have the central bank simply create these dollars without having Swiss francs, without having German marks? It's unnecessary to have an intermediary. But the more thuggish banks, like the Bank of Nova Scotia, said, "Oh, that way's the road to serfdom." It's not. Following the banks and the Austrian School of the banks' philosophy, that's the road to serfdom. That's the road to debt serfdom. It should not be taken now. It lets universities and the government be run by neoliberals. They're a travesty of what real economics is all about.
LONG: Michael, thank you very much. I learned a lot, appreciate it; certainly appreciate how important it is for us to use the right words on the right subject when we're talking about economics. Absolutely agree with you. Talk to you again?
HUDSON: Going to be here.
LONG: Thank you for the time.
Donald , April 29, 2016 at 7:33 amAlejandro , April 29, 2016 at 9:06 amInteresting, but after insulting Duncan, Hudson says the banks stopped partnering with industry and went into real estate, which sounded like what Duncan said.
I mention this because for a non- expert like myself it is sometimes difficult to tell when an expert is disagreeing with someone for good reasons or just going off half- cocked. I followed what Hudson said about the evils of the IMF, but didn't see where Duncan had defended any of that, unless it was implicit in saying that capitalism used to function better.
Michael Hudson , April 29, 2016 at 9:54 amMichael Hudson from the interview;
"As we got in the argument at the beginning of your program today, our argument is about the vocabulary we're using and the words you're using. The vocabulary taught to students today in economics – and used by the mass media and by government spokesmen – is basically a set of euphemisms ."Almost all the words we get are kind of euphemisms to conceal the actual dynamics that are happening."
May consider it's about recognizing and deciphering the "doublespeak", "newspeak", "fedspeak", "greenspeak" etc, whether willing or unwitting using words for understanding and clarifying as opposed to misleading and confusing dialectic as opposed to sophistry.
Leonard C.Tekaat , April 29, 2016 at 12:19 pmWhat I objected to was the characterization of today's situation as "financialization." I explained that financialization is the FIRST stage - when finance WORKS. We are now in the BREAKDOWN of financialization - toward the "barter" stage.
Treating "finance" as an end stage rather than as a beginning stage overlooks the dynamics of breakdown. It is debt deflation. First profits fall, and as that occurs, rents on commercial property decline. This is already widespread here in New York, from Manhattan (8th St. near NYU is half empty) to Queens (Austin St. in Forest Hills.).SomeCallMeTim , April 29, 2016 at 5:23 pmI wrote an article you might be interested in reading. It outlines a tax policy which would help prevent what you are discussing in your article. The abuse of credit to receive rents and long term capital gains.
The title is "Congress Financialized Our Economy And Created Financial Crisis & More Poverty" Go to http://www.taxpolicyusa.wordpress.com
Skippy , April 29, 2016 at 8:33 pmThank you for another eye-opening exposition. My political economy education was negative (counting a year of Monetarism and Austrian Economics around 1980), so I appreciate your interviews as correctives.
From your interview answer to the question about what we, the 99+% should do,I gathered only that we should not try to beat the market. Anything more than that?
Eduardo Quince , April 29, 2016 at 7:41 amFrom my understanding, post Plaza banking lost most of its traditional market to the shadow sector, as a result, expanded off into C/RE and increasingly to Financialization of everything sundry.
Disheveled Marsupial interesting to note Mr. Hudson's statement about barter, risk factors – ?????
cnchal , April 29, 2016 at 8:30 am"secular stagnation" means it's all a cycle
Actually not.
One of the most important distinctions that investors have to understand is the difference between secular and cyclical trends Let us begin with definitions from the Encarta® World English Dictionary:
Secular – occurring only once in the course of an age or century; taking place over an extremely or indefinitely long period of time
Cycle – a sequence of events that is repeated again and again, especially a causal sequence; a period of time between repetitions of an event or phenomenon that occurs regularly
Excerpted from: http://contrarianinvestorsjournal.com/?p=405#
MikeNY , April 29, 2016 at 9:57 amSecular stagnation from http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=secular-stagnation
Secular stagnation is a condition of negligible or no economic growth in a market-based economy . When per capita income stays at relatively high levels, the percentage of savings is likely to start exceeding the percentage of longer-term investments in, for example, infrastructure and education, that are necessary to sustain future economic growth. The absence of such investments (and consequently of the economic growth) leads to declining levels of per capita income (and consequently of per capita savings). With the reduced percentage savings rate converging with the reduced investment rate, economic growth comes to a standstill – ie, it stagnates. In a free economy, consumers anticipating secular stagnation, might transfer their savings to more attractive-looking foreign countries. This would lead to a devaluation of their domestic currency, which would potentially boost their exports, assuming that the country did have goods or services that could be exported.
Persistent low growth, especially in Europe, has been attributed by some to secular stagnation initiated by stronger European economies, such as Germany, in the past few years.
Words. What they mean depends on who's talking.
Secular stagnation is when the predators of finance have eaten too many sheeple.
digi_owl , April 29, 2016 at 7:44 amSecular stagnation is when the predators of finance have eaten too many sheeple.
This.
Alejandro , April 29, 2016 at 9:18 amSad to see Hudson parroting the line about banks lending out savings
Enquiring Mind , April 29, 2016 at 9:02 amThat's not what he said. Re-read or re-listen, please.
tegnost , April 29, 2016 at 9:52 amHudson says
Markets are shrinking – and if markets are shrinking, then real estate rents are shrinking, profits are shrinking.Real estate rents in this latest asset bubble, whether commercial or residential, appear to have been going up in many markets even if the increases are slowing. That rent inflation will likely turn into rent deflation, but that doesn't appear to have happened yet consistently.
Perhaps he meant to say that markets are going to shrink as the debt deflation becomes more evident?
Synoia , April 29, 2016 at 10:06 amI think what it means is it's getting harder to squeeze the blood out of the turnip
rfdawn , April 29, 2016 at 10:52 amWhat Turnip? Its become a stone, fossilized..
ke , April 29, 2016 at 10:22 amYes, I think we are into turnip country now. Figure 1 in this prior article looks clear enough – even if you don't like the analysis that went with it. Wealth inequality still climbs but income inequality has plateaued since Clinton I. Whatever the reasons for that, the 1% should be concerned – where is the ROI?
ke , April 29, 2016 at 12:49 pmBarter has always existed and always will. Debt money expands and contracts the middle class, acting as a feedback signal, which never works over the long term, because the so encapsulated system can only implode, when natural resource liquidation cannot be accelerated. The whole point is to eliminate the initial requirement for capital, work. Debt fails because both sides of the same coin assume that labor can be replaced. The machines driven by dc technology are not replacing labor; neither the elites nor the middle class can fix the machines, which is why they keep accelerating debt, to replace one failed technology only to be followed by the next, netting extortion by whoever currently controls the debt machine, which the majority is always fighting over, expending more energy to avoid work, like the objective is to avoid sweating, unless you are dumb enough to run on asphalt with Nike gear.
meeps , April 29, 2016 at 5:36 pmLabor has no problem with multiwhatever presidents, geneticists, psychologists, or economists, trying to hunt down and replace labor, in or out of turn, but none are going to be any more successful than the others. Trump is being employed to bypass the middle class and cut a deal. There is no deal. Labor is always going to pay males to work and their wives to raise children. Obviously, the majority will vote for a competing economy, and it is welcome to do so, but if debt works so well, why is the majority voting to kidnap our kids with public healthcare and education policies.
Robert Coutinho , April 29, 2016 at 9:29 pmI'm not sure I heard an answer to the question of what people, who might be trying to save for the future or plan for retirement, can do? Is the point that there isn't anything? Because I'm definitely between rocks and hard places
ke , April 29, 2016 at 7:22 pmYeah, he basically said there is no good savings plan. Big-money interests have rigged the rules and are now manipulating the market (this used to be the definition of what was NOT allowed). Thus, they use computer algorithms to squeeze small amounts out of the market millions of times. This means that the "investments" are nothing of the sort. You don't "invest" in something for milliseconds. He said that the 1% are mostly just trying to hold on to what they have. Very few trust the rigged markets.
Russell , April 29, 2016 at 10:00 pmIf Big G can print to infinity, print, but then why book it as debt to future generations?
The future is already becoming the present, because the millenials aren't paying.
cnchal , April 30, 2016 at 4:36 amLow rent & cheap energy are key to the arts & innovations. My model has to work for airports, starts at the fuel farm as the CIA & MI6 Front Page Avjet did. Well before that was Air America. I wonder if now American Airlines itself is a Front.
All of America is a Front far as I can about tell. Hadn't heard that Manhattan rents were coming down. Come in from out of town, how you going to know? Not supposed to I guess.
I got that textbook and I liked that guy John Commons. He says capitalism is great, but it always leads to Socialism because of unbridled greed.
The frenzy to find another stable cash currency showing in Bit Coin and the discussion of Future Tax Credits while the Euro is controlled by the rent takers demands change on both sides of the Atlantic.
We got shot dead protesting the war, and civil rights backlash is the gift that keeps giving to the Southerners looking up every day in every courthouse town, County seat is all about spreading fear and desperation.
How to change it all without violence is going to be really tricky.
Procopius , April 30, 2016 at 8:10 amMany thanks for the shout out to Canada.
. . . So, basically, if you're a Canadian investor, move.
LONG: So the Canadian investors are a better contrarian indicator than the front page cover, you're saying.
HUDSON: I'd think so. Once they get in, you know the bubble's over.
When one reads the financial press in Canada, every dollar extracted by the lords of finance is a glorious taking by brilliant people at the top of the financial food chain from the stupid little people at the bottom, but when it counts, there was silence, in cooperation with Canada's one percent.
The story starts about five years ago, with smart meters. Everyone knows what they are, a method by which electrical power use can be priced depending on the time of day, and day of the week.
To make this tasty, Ontario's local utilities at first kept the price the same for all the time, and then after all the meters were installed, came the changes, phased in over time. Prices were increased substantially, but there was an out. If you changed your living arrangements to live like a nocturnal rodent and washed your clothes in the middle of the night, had supper later in the evening or waited for weekend power rates you could still get low power rates, from the three tier price structure.
The local utilities bought the power from the government of Ontario power generation utility, renamed to Hydro One, and this is where Michael Hudson's talk becomes relevant.
The successful error of monetarism is to force countries to have such self-defeating policies that they end up having to privatize their natural resources, their public domain, their public enterprises, their communications and transportation, like you're seeing in Greece's selloffs. So when you find an error that is repeated, it's deliberate. It's not insane. It's part of the program, not a bug .
LONG: Where does this lead us? What's the roadmap ahead of us here?
HUDSON: A thousand years ago, if you were a marauding gang and you wanted to take over a country's land and its natural resources and public sector, you'd have to invade it with military troops. Now you use finance to take over countries. So it leads us into a realm where everything that the classical economists saw and argued for – public investment, bringing costs in line with the actual cost of production – that's all rejected in favor of a rentier class evolving into an oligarchy. Basically, financiers – the 1% – are going to pry away the public domain from the government. Pry away and privatize the public enterprises, land, natural resources, so that bondholders and privatizers get all of the revenue for themselves. It's all sucked up to the top of the pyramid, impoverishing the 99% .
Eighteen months ago, there was an election in Ontario, and the press was on radio silence during the whole time leading up to the election about the plans to "privatize" Hydro One. I cannot recall one instance of any mention that the new Premier, Kathleen Wynne was planning on selling Hydro One to "investors".
Where did this come from? Did the little people rise up and say to the politicians "you should privatize Hydro One" for whatever reason? No. This push came from the 1% and Hydro One was sold so fast it made my head spin, and is now trading on the Toronto Stock exchange.
At first I though the premier was an economic ignoramus, because Hydro One was generating income for the province and there was no other power supplier, so one couldn't even fire them if they raised their prices too high.
One of the arguments put forward by the 1% to privatize Hydro One was a classic divide and conquer strategy. They argued that too many people at Hydro One were making too much money, and by privatizing, the employees wages would be beat down, and the resultant savings would be passed on to customers.
Back to Michael Hudson
. . . The whole argument for privatization, for instance, is the opposite of what was taught in American business schools in the 19th century. The first professor of economics at the Wharton School of Business, which was the first business school, was Simon Patten. He said that public infrastructure is a fourth factor of production. But its role isn't to make a profit . It's to lower the cost of public services and basic inputs to lower the cost of living and lower the cost of doing business to make the economy more competitive. But privatization adds interest payments, dividends, managerial payments, stock buybacks, and merges and acquisitions . Obviously these financialized charges are factored into the price system and raise the cost of living and doing business .
Power prices have increased yet again in Ontario since privatization, and Canada's 1% are "making a killing" on it. There has been another change as well. Instead of a three tier price structure, there are now two, really expensive and super expensive. There is no longer a price break to living like a nocturnal rodent. The 1% took that for themselves.
I am so tired of seeing that old lie about Old Henry and the $5 a day. I realize it was just a tossed off reference to something most people believe for the purpose of describing a discarded policy, but the fact is very, very few of Old Henry's employees ever got that pay. See, there were strings attached.
Old Henry hired a lot of spies, too. He sent them around to the neighborhoods where his workers lived (it was convenient having them all in Detroit). If the neighbors saw your kid bringing a bucket of beer home from the corner tavern for the family, you didn't get the $5.
If your lawn wasn't mowed to their satisfaction, you didn't get the $5. If you were thought not to bathe as often as they liked, you didn't get the $5. If you didn't go to a church on Sundays, you didn't get the $5. If you were an immigrant and not taking English classes at night school, you didn't get the $5. There were quite a lot of strings attached. The whole story was a public relations stunt, and Old Henry never intended to live up to it; he hated his workers.
Nov 22, 2017 | www.zerohedge.com
Macro-prudential regulations follow financial crises, rarely do they precede one. Even when evidence is abundant of systemic risks building up, as is today, regulators and policymakers have a marked tendency to turn an institutional blind eye, hoping for imbalances to fizzle out on their own – at least beyond the duration of their mandates. It does not work differently in economics than it does for politics, where short-termism drives the agenda, oftentimes at the expenses of either the next government, the broader population or the next generation.
It does not work differently in the business world either, where corporate actions are selected based on the immediate gratification of shareholders, which means pleasing them at the next round of earnings, often at the expenses of long-term planning and at times exposing the company itself to disruption threats from up-and-comers.
Long-term vision does not pay; it barely shows up in the incentive schemes laid out for most professions . Economics is no exception. Orthodoxy and stillness preserve the status quo, and the advantages hard earned by the few who rose from the ranks of the establishment beforehand.
Yet, when it comes to Central Banking, and more in general policymaking, financial stability should top the priority list. It honorably shows up in the utility function, together with price stability and employment, but is not pursued nearly as actively as them. Central planning and interventionism is no anathema when it comes to target the decimals of unemployment or consumer prices, yet is residual when it comes to master systemic risks, relegated to the camp of ex-post macro-prudential regulation. This is all the more surprising as we know all too well how badly a deep unsettlement of financial markets can reverberate across the real economy, possibly leading into recessions, unemployment, un-anchoring of inflation expectations and durable disruption to consumer patterns. There is no shortage of reminders for that in the history books, looking at the fallout of dee dives in markets in 1929, 2000 and 2007, amongst others.
Intriguingly, the other way round is accepted and even theorized. Manipulating bond and stock prices, directly or indirectly, is mainstream policy theory today. From Ben Bernanke's 'portfolio balance channel theory', to the relentless pursuit of the 'wealth effect' via financial repression under Janet Yellen and Haruhiko Kuroda, to Mario Draghi tackling the fragmentation of credit markets across the EU via direct asset purchases, the practice has become commonplace. To some, like us, the 'wealth effect' may be proving to be more of an 'inequality effect' than much, leading to populism and constantly threatening regime change, but that is beyond the scope of this note today.
What we want to focus on instead is the direct impact that monetary interventionism like Quantitative Easing ('QE') and Negative or Zero Interest Rate Policies ('NIRP' or 'ZIRP') have on the structure of the market itself, how they help create a one-sided investment community, oftentimes long-only, fully invested when not levered up, relying on record-highs for bonds and stocks to perpetuate themselves endlessly - despite a striking disconnect from fundamentals, life-dependent on the lowest levels of volatility ever seen in history . The market structure morphed under the eyes of policymakers over the last few years, to become a pressure cooker at risk of blowing-up, with a small but steadily growing probability as times goes by and the bubble inflates. The positive feedback loops between monetary flooding and the private investment community are culpable for transforming an ever present market risk into a systemic risk, and for masking as peaceful what is instead an unstable equilibrium and market fragility.
Positive Feedback Loops create divergence from general equilibrium, and Systemic RisksPositive feedback loops , in finance like in biology, chemistry, cybernetics, breed system instability, as they orchestrate a further divergence from equilibrium . An unstable equilibrium is defined as one where a small disturbance is sufficient to trigger a large adjustment.
QE and NIRP have two predominant effects on markets: (i) relentless up-trend in stocks and bonds (the 'Trend Factor') , dominated by the buy-the-dip mentality, which encapsulates the 'moral hazard' of investors knowing Central Banks are prompt to come to their rescue (otherwise known as 'Bernanke/Yellen/Kuroda/Draghi put'), and (ii) the relentless down-trend in volatility the 'Volatility Factor').
Two Factors Explain All: Trend and VolatilityThe most fashionable investment strategies these days are directly impacted by either one or both of these drivers. Such strategies make the bulk of the overall market, after leverage or turnover is taken into account : we will refer to them in the following as 'passive' or 'quasi-passive' . The trend impacts the long-only community, crowning it as a sure winner, making the case for low- cost passive investing. The low volatility permeates everything else, making the case for full- investment and leverage.
The vast majority of investors these days are not independent from the QE environment they operate within : ETFs and index funds, Risk Parity funds and Target Volatility vehicles, Low Volatility / Short Volatility vehicles, trend-chasing algos, Machine Learning-inspired funds, behavioral Alternative Risk Premia funds. They are the poster children of the QE world. We estimate combined assets under management of in excess of $8trn across the spectrum. They form a broad category of 'passive' or 'quasi-passive' investors, as are being mechanically driven by two main factors: trend and volatility.
Source: Fasanara Presentations | Market Fragility - How to Position for Twin Bubbles Bust, 16 th October 2017. The slide is described in details in this video recording.
Extraordinary monetary policies have feedback loops with the asset management industry as a whole, reinforcing the effects on markets of such policies in a vicious – or virtuous - cycle . QE and NIRP help a large number of investment strategies to flourish, validating their success and supporting their asset gathering in the process, and are in return helped in boosting bond and stock markets by their flows joining the already monumental public flows.
Private flows so reach singularity with public flows, and the whole market economy morphs into a one big common bet on ever-rising prices, in shallow volatility. Here is the story of how $15trn of money printing by major Central Banks in the last ten years, of which $3.7trn in 2017 alone, is joined by total assets of $8trn managed into buying the same safe and risk assets across, with leverage, indiscriminately.
How Market Risk became Systemic RiskLet's give a cursory look at the main players involved (a recent presentation we did is recorded here) . As markets trend higher, no matter what happens (ever against the shocked disbeliefs of Brexit, Trump, an Italian failed referendum and nuclear threats in North Korea), investors understand the outperformance that comes from pricing risks out of their portfolios entirely and going long-only and fully-invested. Whoever under-weighs positions in an attempt to be prudent ends up underperforming its benchmarks and is then penalized with redemptions. Passive investors who are long-only and fully invested are the winners, as they are designed to be bold and insensitive to risks. As Central Banks policies reduce the level of interest rates to zero or whereabouts, fees become ever more relevant, making the case for passive investing most compelling. The rise of ETF and passive index funds is then inevitable.
According to JP Morgan, in the last 10 years, $2trn left active managers in equities and $2trn entered passive managers (pag.39 here) . We may be excused for thinking they are the same $ 2trn of underlying investors progressively pricing risk provisions out of books, de facto , while chasing outperformance and lower fees.
To be sure, ETFs are a great financial innovation, helping reducing costs in an expensive industry and giving entry to markets previously un-accessible to most investors. Yet, what matters here is their impact on systemic risks, via positive feedback loops. In circular reference, beyond Central Banks flows, markets are helped rise by such classes of valuations-insensitive passive investors, which are then rewarded with further inflows, with which they can then buy more. The more expensive valuations get, the more they disconnect from fundamentals, the more divergence from equilibrium occurs, the larger fat-tail risks become.
In ever-rising markets, 'buy-and-hold' strategies may only possibly be outsmarted by 'buy-the-dip' strategies. Whatever the outcome of risk events, be ready to buy the dip quickly and blindly. As more investors design themselves up to do so, the dips are shallower over time, leading to an S&P500 that never lost 3% in 2017, an historical milestone. Machine learning is another beautiful market innovation, but what is there to learn from the time series of the last several years, if not that buy- the-dip works, irrespective of what caused the dip. Big Data is yet another great concept, shaping the future of us all. Yet, most data ever generated in humankind dates back three years only, in and by itself a striking limitation. The quality of the deduction cannot exceed the quality of the time series upon which the data science was applied. If the time series is untrustworthy, as is heavily influenced by monumental public flows ($300bn per months), what trust can we put on any model output originating from it? What pattern recognition can we really be hopeful of getting, in the first place? May some of it just be a commercial disguise for going long, selling volatility and leveraging up in various shapes or forms? What is hype and what is real? A short and compromised data series makes it hard, if not possible, to really know. Once public flows abate and price discovery is let free again, then and only then will we be in a position to know the difference.
Low volatility does what trending markets alone cannot. A state of low volatility presents the appearance of stuporous, innocuous, narcotized markets, thus enticing new swathes of unfitting investors in, mostly retail-type 'weak hands'. Weak hands are investors who are brought to like investments by certain characteristics which are uncommon to the specific investment itself, such as featuring a low volatility. It is in this form that we see bond-like investors looking at the stock market for yield pick-up purposes, magnetized by levels of realized volatility similar to what fixed income used to provide with during the Great Moderation. It is in this form that Tech companies out of the US have started filling the coffers of not just Growth ETF, where they should rightfully reside, but also Momentum ETF, and even, incredibly, Low-Volatility ETF.
Low volatility is also a dominant input for Risk Parity funds and Target Volatility vehicles . The lower the volatility, the higher the leverage allowed in such players, mechanically. All of which are long-only players, joining public flows, again helping the market rise to record levels in the process, in circular reference. Rewarded by new inflows, the buying spree gathers momentum, in a virtuous circle. Valuations are no real input in the process, volatility is what matters the most. Volatility is not risk, except for them it is.
It goes further than that. It is not only the level of volatility that count, but its direction too . As volatility implodes, relentlessly, into historical lows never seen before in history, a plethora of investment strategies is launched to capitalize on just that, directly: Short Volatility vehicles . They are the best performing strategy of the last decade, by and large. The problem here is that, due to construction, as volatility got to single-digit territory, relatively small spikes are now enough to trigger wipe-out events on several of these instruments. Our analysis shows that if equity volatility doubles up from current levels (while still being half of what it was as recently as in August 2015), certain Short Vol ETFs may stand to lose up to 75% or more. Moreover, short positions on long-vol ETFs can lose up to 250% of capital. For some, 'termination events' are built into contracts for sudden losses of this magnitude, meaning that the notes would be prematurely withdrawn. It is one thing to expect a spike in volatility to cause losses, it is quite another to know that a minor move is all it takes to trigger a default event.
On such spikes in volatility, Morgan Stanley Quant Derivatives Strategy desk warns further that market makers may be forced to rebalance their exposure non-linearly on a spike in volatility. A drop in the S&P 500 of 5% in one day may trigger approximately $ 400mn of Vega notional of rebalancing (pag.48 here) . We estimate that half a trillion dollars of additional selling on S&P stocks may occur following a correction of between 5% and 10%. That is a lot of selling, pre-set in markets, waiting to strike. Unless you expect the market to not have another 5% sell-off, ever again.
For more details, we describe the role of these different players in a recent video presentation and in our June Investment Outlook and May Investment Outlook.
It's All One Big PositionWhat do ETFs, Risk Parity and Target Vol vehicles, Low Vol / Short Vol vehicles, trend-chasing algos, Machine Learning, behavioral Alternative Risk Premia, factor investing have in common? Except, of course, being the 'winners take all' of QE-driven markets. They all share one or more of the following risk factors: long-only, fully invested when not leveraged-up, short volatility, short correlation, short gamma Thanks to QE and NIRP, the whole market is becoming one single big position.
The 'Trend Factor' and the 'Volatility Factor' are over-whelming, making it inevitable for a high- beta, long-bias, short-vol proxy to disseminate across. Almost inescapably so, given the time series the asset management industry has to deal with, and derive its signals from.
Several classes of investors may move to sell in lock-steps if and when markets turn. The boost to asset prices and the zero-volatility environment created the conditions for systemic risks in the form of an over-compensation to the downside. Record-low volatility breeds market fragility, it precedes system instability.
Flows Matter, Both Ways!We will know soon if the fragility of markets is that bad. The undoing of loose monetary policies (NIRP, ZIRP) will create a liquidity withdrawal of over $1 trillion in 2018 alone (pag.61-62 here) . The reaction of the passive and quasi-passive communities will determine the speed of the adjustment in the pricing for both safe and risk assets, and how quickly risk provisions will re- enter portfolios. Such liquidity withdrawal will represent the first real crash-test for markets in 10 years.
As public spending on Wall Street abates, the risk is evident of seeing the whole market turning with it. The shocks of Trump and Brexit did not manage to derail markets for long, as public flows were overwhelming. Flows is what mattered, above all elusive, over-fitting economic narratives justifying price action at the margin. Flows may matter again now as they fade
Systemic Risk is Not Just About Banks: Look at FundsThe role of trending markets is known when it comes to systemic risks: a not sufficient but necessary condition. Most trends do not necessarily lead to systemic risks, but hardly systemic risks ever build up without a prolonged period of uptrend beforehand. Prolonged uptrends in any asset class hold the potential to instill the perception that such asset class will grow forever, irrespective of the fundamentals, and may thus lead to excessive risk taking, excess leverage, the formation of a bubble and, ultimately, systemic risks. The mind goes to the asset class of real estate, its undeterred uptrend into 2006/2007, its perception of perpetuity ("we have never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis'' Ben Bernanke) , the credit bubble built on banks hazardous activities on subprime mortgages as a result, and the systemic risks which emanated, with damages spanning well beyond the borders of real estate.
The role of volatility is also well-researched, especially low volatility. Hayman Minsky, in his " Financial Instability Hypothesis '' in 1977, analyses the behavioral changes induced by a reduction of volatility, postulating that economic agents observing a low risk are induced to increase risk taking, which may in turn lead to a crisis: "stability is destabilizing". In a recent study, Jon Danielsson, Director of the Systemic Risk Centre at the LSE, finds unambiguous support for the 'low volatility channel', insofar as prolonged periods of low volatility have a strong predictive power over the incidence of a banking crisis, owing to excess lending and excess leverage . The economic impact is the highest if the economy stays in the low volatility environment for five years : a 1% decrease in volatility below its trend translates in a 1.01% increase in the probability of a crisis. He also finds that, counter-intuitively, high volatility has little predictive power : very interesting, when the whole finance world at large is based on retrospective VAR metrics, and equivocates high volatility for high risk.
Both a persistent trend and prolonged low-volatility can lead banks to take excessive risks. But what about their impact on the asset management industry?
Thinking at the hard economic impact of the Great Depression (1929-1932) and the Great Recession (2007-2009), and the eminent role played by banks in both, it comes as little surprise that the banking sector captures all the attention. However, what remains to be looked into, and perhaps more worrying in today's environment, is the role of prolonged periods of uptrend and low-vol on the asset management industry
In 2014, the Financial Stability Board (FSB), an international body that makes recommendations to G20 nations on financial risks, published a consultation paper asking whether fund managers might need to be designated as " global systemically important financial institution " or G-SIFI, a step that would involve greater regulation and oversight. It did not result in much, as the industry lobbied in protest, emphasizing the difference between the levered balance sheet of a bank and the business of funds.
The reason for asking the question is evident: (i) sheer size , as the AM industry ballooned in the last few years, to now represent over [15trnXX] for just the top 5 US players!, (ii) funds have partially substituted banks in certain market-making activities, as banks dialed back their participation in response to tighter regulation and (iii) , funds can indeed do damage: think of LTCM in 1998, the fatal bailout of two Real Estate funds by Bear Stearns in 2007, the money market funds 'breaking the buck' in 2008 amongst others.
But it is not just sheer size that matters for asset managers. What may worry more is the positive feedback loops discussed above and the resulting concentration of bets in one single global pot , life-dependent on infinite momentum/trend and ever-falling volatility. Positive feedback loops are the link for the sheer size of the AM industry to become systemically relevant. Today more than ever, they morph market risks in systemic risks.
Volatility will not forever be low, the trend will not forever go: how bad a damage when it stops? As macro prudential policy is not the art of "whether or not it will happen" but of "what happens if", it is hard not to see this as a blind spot for policymakers nowadays.
ebworthen , Nov 22, 2017 10:55 AM
Let it Go , Nov 22, 2017 11:49 AMIn other words, it's a Ponzi scheme.
Batman11 , Nov 22, 2017 12:47 PMI have never seen it this bad, the numbers are all moutof wack!
It seems many of us are drawn to a good illusion and this proves true for most people in their daily life as well. In some ways, it could be said that our culture has become obsessed with avoiding what is real.
We must remember that politicians and those in power tend to throw people under the bus rather than rise up and take responsibility for the problems they create. The article below looks at how we have grown to believe things are fine.
http://The Allure Of Ilusions-Five Favorite Financial Myths.html
Batman11 -> Batman11 , Nov 22, 2017 12:51 PMThe real estate boom features all the unknowns in today's thinking, which is why they are global.
This simple equation is unknown.
Disposable income = wages – (taxes + the cost of living)
You can immediately see how high housing costs have to be covered by wages; business pays the high housing costs for expensive housing adding to costs and reducing profits. The real estate boom raises costs to business and makes your nation uncompetitive in a globalised world.
The unproductive lending involved that leads to financial crises.
The UK:
The economy gets loaded up with unproductive lending as future spending power has been taken to inflate the value of the nation's housing stock. Housing is more expensive and the future has been impoverished.
US:
Unproductive lending is not good for the economy and led directly to 1929 and 2008.
Neoliberalism's underlying economics, neoclassical economics, doesn't look at private debt and so no one really knew what they were doing.
The real estate boom feels good for a reason that is not known to today's thinkers.
Monetary theory has been regressing since 1856, when someone worked out how the system really worked.
Credit creation theory -> fractional reserve theory -> financial intermediation theory
"A lost century in economics: Three theories of banking and the conclusive evidence" Richard A. Werner
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521915001477
" banks make their profits by taking in deposits and lending the funds out at a higher rate of interest" Paul Krugman, 2015. He wouldn't know, that's financial intermediation theory.
Bank lending creates money, which pours into the economy fuelling the boom; it is this money creation that makes the housing boom feel so good in the general economy. It feels like there is lots of money about because there is.
The housing bust feels so bad because the opposite takes place, and money gets sucked out of the economy as the repayments overtake new lending. It feels like there isn't much money about because there isn't.
They were known unknowns, the people that knew weren't the policymakers to whom these things were unknown.
The global economy told policymakers there was something seriously wrong in 2008, but they ignored it, I didn't.
Batman11 -> Batman11 , Nov 22, 2017 1:25 PMThe most fundamental of all fundamentals was unknown.
The relationship between debt and money.
the money supply = all the debt in the system, public and private
M3 is going exponential before 2008, a credit bubble is underway (debt = money)
The FED and everyone else doesn't realise.
Batman11 -> Batman11 , Nov 22, 2017 1:31 PMThis is why austerity doesn't work in a balance sheet recession, e.g. Greece.
The IMF predicted Greek GDP would have recovered by 2015 with austerity.
By 2015 it was down 27% and still falling.
Oh dear.
Richard Koo had to explain the problem to the IMF.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YTyJzmiHGk
They had pushed Greece into debt deflation by cutting Government spending with austerity.
It wasn't just the IMF, the Troika all went along with this fatally flawed policy, this means the ECB and EU Commission also didn't know what they were doing.
Richard Koo had watched as Western "experts" told Japan to cut Government spending and seen the fall in GDP as the economy went downhill. The only way to get things going again was to increase Government spending and he has had decades to work out what was going on.
The Troika's bad economics has been wreaking havoc across the Club-Med.
Mark Blythe looks at the data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6vV8_uQmxs&feature=em-subs_digest-vrecs
It comes out of knowledge that is missing from the mainstream.
Radical Marijuana , Nov 22, 2017 3:15 PMBalancing the budget ............ be careful you might head into debt deflation.
If the private sector aren't borrowing the Government needs to borrow to keep the money supply stable.
You don't want to end up like Greece do you?
Muppet , Nov 22, 2017 7:03 PMAnother superficially correct analysis of "Positive Feedback Loops create divergence from general equilibrium, and Systemic Risks." The vicious feedback loops which have the most leverage are all aspects of the funding of the political processes, which have resulted in runaway systems of legalized lies, backed by legalized violence, the most important of which are the ways that the powers of public governments enforce frauds by private banks, the big corporations that have grown up around those big banks.
About exponentially advancing technologies have enabled enforced frauds to become about exponentially more fraudulent. The underlying drivers were the ways that the combined money/murder systems developed, whose social successfulness became more and more based on maximizing maliciousness. From a superficial point of view, those results may appear to be due to incompetence, however, from a deeper point of view those results make sense as due to the excessively successful applications of the methods of organized crime through the political processes, due to the vicious feedback loops of the funding of those political processes.
The only connections between human laws and natural laws are the abilities to back up lies with violence. Natural selection pressures have driven Globalized Neolithic Civilization to develop the most dishonest artificial selection systems possible, while the continuation of the various vicious feedback loops that made and maintained those developments are driving about exponentially increasing dishonesty. Although the laws of nature are not going to stop working, and the laws of nature underpinned the runaway development of excessively successful vicious feedback loops of organized crime, on larger and larger scales, to result in Globalized Neolithic Civilization, the overall results are that Civilization is becoming about exponentially more psychotic. Since Civilization necessarily operates according to the principles and methods of organized crime, while those who became the biggest and best organized forms of organized crime, namely, banker dominated governments, also necessarily became most dishonest about themselves, and yet, their bullshit social stories continue to dominate the public schools, and mainstream mass media, as well as the publicly significant controlled "opposition" groups.
Political economy is INSIDE human ecology, and therefore, the greatest systematic risks are to be found in the tragic trajectory of human ecologies which are almost totally buried under maximized maliciousness. "Public debates" about the human death control systems are based on previously having being as deceitful and treacherous as possible regarding those topics. The most extreme forms of that manifest as the ways that money is measurement backed by murder. Of course, that the debt controls are backed by the death controls are issues which are generally not publicly admitted nor addressed.
Global Neolithic Civilization has become almost totally based on being able to enforce frauds, in ways which have become about exponentially more fraudulent, as the vicious feedback loops which enable that to happen automatically reinforce themselves to get worse, faster. The almost total triumph of enforced frauds has resulted in social "realities" which are becoming exponentially more insane, since the social successfulness of enforced frauds requires the most people do not understand that, because they have been conditioned to not want to understand that. Rather, almost everyone takes for granted deliberately ignoring and misunderstanding the laws of nature in the most absurdly backward ways possible, because of the long history of successful warfare based on deceits and treacheries becoming the more recent history of successful finance based on enforcing frauds, despite that tragic trajectory of vicious feedback loops resulting in about exponentially increasing overall fraudulence.
Various superficially correct analyses, such as the one in the article above, are typical of the content on Zero Hedge , which does not come remotely close to recognizing the degree to which the dominate natural languages and philosophy of science have undergone series of compromises with the biggest bullies' bullshit-based world views, which became the banksters' bullshit about economics. Although it is theoretically possible for human beings to better understand themselves and Civilization, it continues to become more and more politically impossible to do so, due to the ever increasing vicious feedback loops of enforced frauds achieving symbolic robberies ...
Although the laws of nature are never going to stop working, it is barely possible to exaggerate the degree to which Civilization overall is becoming about exponentially more psychotic, due to the social "realities" based on successfully enforcing frauds becoming more and more out of touch with the surrounding, relatively objective, physical and biological facts. The various superficially correct analyses presented on Zero Hedge regarding that kind of runaway collective psychosis, driven by the vicious feedback loops of the funding of all aspects of the funding of the political processes, tend to always grossly understate the seriousness of that situation, especially including the crucial issues of how to operate the human murder systems after the development of weapons of mass destruction, which is unavoidable due to the rapid development of globalized electronic monkey money frauds, backed by the threat of force from apes with atomic weapons.
Those who believe that possessing precious metals, or cryptocurrencies, etc., are viable solutions to those problems are not remotely close to being in the right order of magnitude. Although there is no doubt that exponentially more "money" is being made out of nothing as debts, in order to "pay" for strip-mining the natural resources of a still relatively fresh planet, and so, there is no doubt that the exponentially decreasing value of that "money" is driving the accumulation of apparent anomalies, such as outlined in the article above, the actually crucial issues continue to be the ways that money is measurement backed by murder, as the most abstract ways that private property are claims backed by coercions. Stop-gap individual responses to the runaway fraudulence, such as faith in possessing precious metals or cryptocurrencies, make some relative sense in terms of the public "money" supplies becoming exponentially more fraudulent, but otherwise dismally fail to be in the ball park of the significant issues driven by prodigious progress in physical sciences, WITHOUT any genuine progress in political sciences, other than to continue to be able to better enforce bigger frauds, through the elaborations of oxymoronic scientific dictatorships, which adamantly refuse to become more genuinely scientific about themselves.
Primates with about exponentially increasing physical technologies continue to deliberately ignore and misunderstand themselves as much as is humanly possible, due to the history of warfare making and maintaining the currently existing political economy, whose maliciousness is manifesting through runaway vicious feedback loops, whereby the excessively successful control of Civilization through applications of the methods of organized crime are resulting in that Civilization manifesting runaway criminal insanities. Indeed, in that context, where there is almost nothing but the central core of triumphant organized crime, namely bankster dominated governments, surrounded by various layers of controlled "opposition" groups, which stay within the same bullshit-based frames of reference regarding those phenomena, the overall situation is that society becoming about exponentially sicker and insane.
That Civilization has been driven by natural selection pressures to manifest runaway psychoses is not going to stop the laws of nature from continuing to work through that Civilization. However, that will nevertheless drive the currently dominate artificial selection systems to become increasingly psychotic, in ways whereby their vicious feedback loops are less and less able to be sanely responded to ... Although some human beings have better and better understood some general energy systems, e.g., electric and atomic energy, etc., since warfare was the oldest and best developed forms of social science and engineering, whose successfulness was based on being able to maximize maliciousness, and since those then enabled successful finance to become based on runaway enforced frauds, human beings living within Globalized Neolithic Civilization are so hidebound by adapting to living inside those vicious feedback loops based on being able to enforce frauds that those human beings are mostly unwilling and unable to better understand themselves as also manifestations of general energy systems.
As the report, embedded in the article, begins by quoting Leonardo da Vinci:
"Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else."
In general, "Asset Managers" are stuck inside taking for granted that everything they do has become almost totally based on being able to enforce frauds, despite some of them noticing the increasingly blatant ways that there are accumulating apparent anomalies in those systems, as vicious feedback loops drive those systems to become about exponentially more fraudulent, and therefore increasingly unbalanced. To come to better terms with those apparent anomalies requires going through series of intellectual scientific revolutions and profound paradigm shifts, which overall become ways that human beings better understand themselves as manifestations of general energy systems. However, since doing so requires recognizing how and why governments are necessarily the biggest forms of organized crime, dominated by the best organized gangsters, the banksters, it continues to be politically impossible to accomplish that.
At each open, algos compute the increase in their AUM from the prior day and their margin reach. They then begin buying. All algos do this. Buying whenever cash/margin exists; selling whenever profit targets exist. On pullbacks, the algos withdraw, volume evaporates, minimizing the drop. The algos collectively increase equity prices without consideration of the value of the money involved. Not valuations. No fundamentals. Just ones and zeroes. Just a program.
Mar 06, 2016 | naked capitalism
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PERIES: James, the Council of Economic Advisors, they put out economic forecasts each year. And there has been some wildly optimistic ones. For example, if you look at the 2010 predictions for 2012 and 2013 they have not quite been attained. And one would say it was done in the interest of trying to make the administration that they were serving more impressive. But what accounts for this particular attack on Friedman's projection and other fellow economists?
GALBRAITH: This was a classic case of professional bad manners and rank-pulling. What we had here were four former chairs of the president's Council of Economic Advisors, and two from President Obama, two from President Clinton, who decided to use their big names and their titles in order to launch an attack on a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts who had written a paper evaluating the Sanders economic program.
It's likely that the four bigwigs thought that Professor Friedman was a Bernie Sanders supporter. In fact, as of that time he was a Hillary Clinton supporter and a modest donor to her campaign. What he had done was simply to write his evaluation of the economic effects of the ambitious Sanders reform program. The four former council chairs announced that on the basis of their deep commitment to rigor and objectivity, they had discovered that this forecast was unrealistic. And what I pointed out was that that claim was based on no evidence and no analysis whatsoever. And when you pressed down on it you found that it was simply based on the obvious fact that we haven't seen the kinds of growth rates that Professor Friedman's analysis suggested the Sanders program would produce. And for a very simple reason: the Sanders program is bigger. It's more ambitious than anything we've seen in recent years, so it's not surprising that when you put it through a model it generates a higher growth rate.
So that was the basic underlying facts, and these guys, two men and two women, announced that they, that it was a disreputable study, but failed to present any analysis that suggested they'd actually even read the paper before they denounced it. And that's what I pointed out in my counter letter, in a number of articles that have appeared since.
PERIES: James, so in your letter, how do you counter them? What methods did you use to come to your conclusions?
GALBRAITH: Well, I, no need to say anything beyond the fact that I had looked in their letter for the rigor that they were so proud of, for the objectivity and the analysis that they were so proud of, and I'd found that they had not done any. They had not made any such claim, not done any such work.
So that began to provoke a discussion. It's fair to say ultimately, without apologizing for effectively launching an ad hominem attack on an independent academic researcher, one of the former chairs, Christina Romer of President Obama's council, and her husband David Romer, a fellow economist, did produce a paper in which they spelled out their differences with the, with the Friedman paper. But that, again, raised another set of interesting issues which we've continued to discuss at various, various outlets of the press.
PERIES: Now, James Friedman's claim that the growth rate from Sanders' plan to be around 5.3 percent. And some economists, including Dean Baker at the Center for Economic Policy and Research, have claimed that this is unrealistic. What do you make of that?
GALBRAITH: Well, the question is whether it is an effect, let's say, a reasonable projection, of putting the Sanders program into an economic model. And the answer to that question, yes, Professor Friedman did a reasonable job. He spelled out what the underlying assumptions that he was using were. He spelled out the basic rules of thumb that macroeconomists had used for decades to assess the effects of an economic program. In this case, an expansionary economic program. And he ran them through his model and reported the results, a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
Now, one can be skeptical. And I am, and Dean Baker is, lots of people are skeptical that the world would work out quite that way, because lots of things, in fact, happen which are not accounted for in a model. And we've talked, we've basically put together a list of things that you think might be problematic. But the exercise here was not to put everything into paper that might happen in the world. The exercise was to take the kind of bare bones that economists use to assess and to compare the consequences of alternative programs, and to ask what kind of results do you get out? And that's what, again, what Jerry Friedman did. It was a reasonable exercise, he came up with a reasonable answer, and he reported it.
PERIES: Now, Friedman seems to think that the rate of full employment in 1999 is attainable. However, many labor economists seem to think that the larger share of the elderly currently in society compared to 1999 explains some of the lack of labor participation, which creates a lower full employment ceiling that's contradicting Friedman's report. Your thoughts on that?
GALBRAITH: Well, I think it is a fact that the population is getting older. But as, I think, any economist would tell you, that when you offer jobs in the labor market, the first thing that happens is the people who are looking for work take those jobs. The second thing that happens is that people who might look for work when jobs were available start coming back into the labor market. And if that is not enough to fill the vacancies that you have, it's perfectly open to employers to raise their wages so as to bring more people in, or to increase the pace at which they innovate and substitute technology for labor so that they don't need the work.
So there's no real crisis involved in the situation if it turns out five years from now we're at 3.5 percent unemployment, and they were beginning to run short of labor. That's not a reason to, at this stage, say no, we're not going to engage in the exercise and run a more expansionary, vigorous reform program, a vigorous infrastructure project, a major reform of healthcare, a tuition-free public education program. All of those things, which were part of what Friedman put into his paper, should be done anyway. The fact that the labor market forecast might prove to have some different, the labor market might have different characteristics in five years' time is from our present point of view just a, it's an academic or a theoretical proposition, purely.
PERIES: And Friedman's paper, he looks at a ten-year forecast. Did you feel that when you looked at the specifics of that, including college, universal healthcare, infrastructure spending and of course, expanding Social Security and so on, that those categories and his predictions or projections, rather, made sense to you?
GALBRAITH: Well, again, what he was doing was running a program of a certain scale, of a large scale, through a set of standard macroeconomic assumptions. And that, again, is a reasonable exercise. If you ask me what my personal view is, I've written a whole book called The End of Normal in which I lay out reasons for my chronic pessimism about the capacity of the world economy to absorb a great deal more rapid economic growth.
But that's not in the standard models, and it would not be appropriate to layer that on to a forecast of this kind. What Friedman was criticized for was not for putting his thumb on the scale, but for failing to put his thumb on the scale. In fact, that was the reasonable thing to do.
On the contrary, and on the other side, when Christina and David Romer did put out their forecast, their own criticism of the Friedman paper, they concluded by asserting that if this program were tried, inflation would soar. So they there were making an allegation for which, again, they had no evidence and no plausible model, that in the world in which we presently live would produce that result.
So what we had here was a, what was essentially an academic exercise that produced a result that was highly favorable to the Sanders position, and showed that if you did an ambitious program you would get a strong growth response. It's reasonable, certainly, for the first three or four years that that would transpire in practice. And what happened was that people who didn't like that result politically jumped on it in a way which was, frankly speaking, professionally irresponsible, in my view. It was designed to convey the impression, which it succeeded in doing for a brief while through the broad media, that this was not a reputable exercise, and that there were responsible people on one side of the debate, and irresponsible people on the other.
And that was, again, something that–an impression that could be conveyed through the mass media, but would not withstand scrutiny, and didn't withstand scrutiny, once a few of us stood up and started saying, okay, where's your evidence, on what are you basing this argument? And revealed the point, which the Romers implicitly conceded, and I give them credit for that, that in order to criticize a fellow economist you need to do some work.
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Keith , March 6, 2016 at 4:45 am
Keith , March 6, 2016 at 6:29 amThe true nature of Capitalism has obviously been forgotten over time. Today we think it brings prosperity to all, but that was certainly never the intention. Today's raw Capitalism is showing its true nature with ever rising inequality. Capitalism is essentially the same as every other social system since the dawn of civilization. The lower and middle classes do all the work and the upper, leisure Class, live in the lap of luxury. The lower class does the manual work; the middle class does the administrative and managerial work and the upper, leisure, class live a life of luxury and leisure.
The nature of the Leisure Class, to which the benefits of every system accrue, was studied over 100 years ago. "The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions", by Thorstein Veblen. (The Wikipedia entry gives a good insight. It was written a long time ago but much of it is as true today as it was then. This is the source of the term conspicuous consumption.) We still have our leisure class in the UK, the Aristocracy, and they have been doing very little for centuries. The UK's aristocracy has seen social systems come and go, but they all provide a life of luxury and leisure and with someone else doing all the work.
Feudalism – exploit the masses through land ownership. Capitalism – exploit the masses through wealth (Capital)
Today this is done through the parasitic, rentier trickle up of Capitalism:
a) Those with excess capital invest it and collect interest, dividends and rent.
b) Those with insufficient capital borrow money and pay interest and rent.All this was much easier to see in Capitalism's earlier days.
Malthus and Ricardo never saw those at the bottom rising out of a bare subsistence living. This was the way it had always been and always would be, the benefits of the system only accrue to those at the top.It was very obvious to Adam Smith:
"The Labour and time of the poor is in civilised countries sacrificed to the maintaining of the rich in ease and luxury. The Landlord is maintained in idleness and luxury by the labour of his tenants. The moneyed man is supported by his extractions from the industrious merchant and the needy who are obliged to support him in ease by a return for the use of his money. But every savage has the full fruits of his own labours; there are no landlords, no usurers and no tax gatherers."
Like most classical economists he differentiated between "earned" and "unearned" wealth and noted how the wealthy maintained themselves in idleness and luxury via "unearned", rentier income from their land and capital.
We can no longer see the difference between the productive side of the economy and the unproductive, parasitic, rentier side. This is probably why inequality is rising so fast, the mechanisms by which the system looks after those at the top are now hidden from us.
In the 19th Century things were still very obvious.
1) Those at the top were very wealthy
2) Those lower down lived in grinding poverty, paid just enough to keep them alive to work with as little time off as possible.
3) Slavery
4) Child LabourImmense wealth at the top with nothing trickling down, just like today.
This is what Capitalism maximized for profit looks like. Labour costs are reduced to the absolute minimum to maximise profit. The beginnings of regulation to deal with the wealthy UK businessman seeking to maximise profit, the abolition of slavery and child labour. The function of the system is still laid bare. The lower class does the manual work; the middle class does the administrative and managerial work and the upper, leisure, class live a life of luxury and leisure. The majority only got a larger slice of the pie through organised Labour movements.
By the 1920s, mass production techniques had improved to such an extent that relatively wealthy consumers were required to purchase all the output the system could produce and extensive advertising was required to manufacture demand for the chronic over-supply the Capitalist system could produce. They knew that if wealth concentrated too much there would not be enough demand. In the 1950s, when Capitalism had healthy competition, it was essential that the Capitalist system could demonstrate that it was better than the competition. The US was able to demonstrate the superior lifestyle it offered to its average citizens.
Now the competition has gone, the US middle class is being wiped out. The US is going third world, with just rich and poor and no middle class. Raw Capitalism can only return Capitalism to its true state where there is little demand and those at the bottom live a life of bare subsistence.
When you realise the true nature of Capitalism, you know why some kind of redistribution is necessary and strong progressive taxation is the only way a consumer society can ever be kept functioning.
A good quote from John Kenneth Galbraith's book "The Affluent Society", which in turn comes from Marx.
"The Marxian capitalist has infinite shrewdness and cunning on everything except matters pertaining to his own ultimate survival. On these, he is not subject to education. He continues wilfully and reliably down the path to his own destruction"
Marx made some mistakes but he got quite a lot right.
Keith , March 6, 2016 at 1:11 pmThanks to Michael Hudson, whose ideas anyone will recognise who has read his book.
"Killing the Host"
If you haven't read it, do so immediately.
Keith , March 6, 2016 at 1:17 pmPerhaps, Western civilization had already cultivated and concentrated psychopathic personality traits in its elite before Capitalism ever begun. Early European history is an endless procession of wars at home and abroad as the elite took their wealth by force and the masses were kept in check by force whenever necessary.
No peaceful group could ever survive this relentless onslaught of millennia. This psychopathic elite then took their warlike ways to every corner of the earth. The wealthy elite from this era then became the wealthy elite of the next Capitalist era. Even today their bloodlust cannot be sated as they look to control a global empire.
Vatch , March 6, 2016 at 5:00 pm"We came, we saw, he died" rinse and repeat for 5,000 years.
Jim Young , March 6, 2016 at 12:27 pmCertainly countless hundreds of peaceful, responsible, inclusive, open, empathetic indigenous societies have been co-opted/overthrown by the western model.
Yes, but it's not just the western model that overthrows peaceful societies. The empires of China, the Japanese monarchies, the empires of India (together with a cringeworthy caste system), the human sacrificing Aztecs, Mayas, and Incas, all prove that tyranny is not a western invention.
When a local population becomes too large to be supported by simple egalitarian hunting and gathering, something else is required. That something is agriculture, and almost inevitably, the organization, specialization, and partial urbanization required by large scale agricultural society leads to exploitation and tyranny. This is seen in the earliest societies for which we have a written record, Sumer and Egypt.
Clive , March 6, 2016 at 12:37 pmThanks for the explanations of Veblen and Galbraith, which I find enduring basics over more than 100 years of speculation, real investment, and the best way to keep consumer society healthy.
My unschooled, simple, way to measure the health of an economy is in the Velocity of Money in the real economy of useful products and services. It appears to be very far below where it was when we did our best, and lower than when we first started measuring it near the beginning of the Great Depression.
Keith , March 6, 2016 at 1:58 pmOr, pictorially illustrated .
I'm thinking of having my Christmas Cards printed with it on the front this year.
For The Win , March 6, 2016 at 5:46 amIn addition ..
By the 1920s, mass production techniques had improved to such an extent that relatively wealthy consumers were required to purchase all the output the system could produce and extensive advertising was required to manufacture demand for the chronic over-supply the Capitalist system could produce.
They knew that if wealth concentrated too much there would not be enough demand.
Of course the Capitalists could never find it in themselves to raise wages and it took the New Deal and Keynesian thinking to usher in the consumer society.
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell , March 6, 2016 at 2:08 pmColonialism and fiscal conservatism
Fiscal conservatism, which champions a balanced budget and expenditure restraints, is often hailed as a politico-economic philosophy as well as a policy of financial responsibility. In practice, it has been used as an argument against free spending by governments which can lead to high levels of debt and inflation. It has not been a positive philosophy which advocates the pro-growth and stability benefits coming from balanced budgets. Rather, it is a negative one – reacting against excessive spending and its consequences. This is probably why modern examples of fiscal conservatism in the United States and the United Kingdom have not led to sustainable growth or a significant reduction in public debt. Instead, in the case of the Ronald Reagan era in the US in the 1980s, public debt soared as fiscal conservatism and other policies were abandoned.
mpr , March 6, 2016 at 9:12 amA Monetarily Sovereign government does not need to reduce debt. In the U.S. (which is Monetarily Sovereign) federal so-called "debt" is actually the total of deposits in T-security accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank. In short, "debt" is bank deposits.
Why anyone would want to reduce the size of deposits at the world's safest bank is a mystery to me - other than the misleading use of the word "debt."
While all bank accounts are, in fact, debt of banks, most banks boast about the size of their depositors' accounts.
Contrary to popular myth, federal debt (i.e. deposits at the FRB) does not lead to inflation. America's "debt" has grown more than 9,000% in the past 75 years, and the Fed is struggling to create inflation.
diptherio , March 6, 2016 at 9:57 amGalbraith is probably my favorite economist, and eminently reasonable here. It makes me think that Sanders should have used him, or someone like him as an adviser/in house economist, rather than relying on external analyses like Friedman. It would possibly have given his program more gravitas – first amongst elites, and then more generally. At least it would have had a chance of changing the broader discussion. Whether you agree with it or not, right now the general MSM reporting on the Sanders plan is that it doesn't add up.
John Zelnicker , March 6, 2016 at 10:25 amI want to know why he hasn't been prominently featuring Prof. Kelton and her economic policy prescriptions. What's up with that?
Rodger Malcolm Mitchell , March 6, 2016 at 2:19 pmThis is speculative, but since Prof. Kelton is actually the economist for the Minority (the Democrats) of the Senate Banking committee, there may be reasons of protocol that Sanders isn't using her policy ideas at the moment.
Another possibility is that trying to introduce a new economic paradigm while running for the nomination may be a bridge too far. If Sanders tried to explain to people that taxes don't fund federal spending, etc., heads would explode.
I'm also not sure how one would use Prof. Kelton's ideas without bringing in a whole bunch of MMT concepts. Maybe if Sanders wins the nomination he can begin to bring some of these ideas into the conversation.
Kurt Sperry , March 6, 2016 at 11:48 amHe won't use her ideas simple because the American voter in not yet amenable to the facts of Monetary Sovereignty .
Try explaining even to your best friend that:
1. Unlike state and local taxes, Federal taxes do not fund federal spending.
2. Even if FICA were eliminated, Social Security and Medicare benefits dramatically could (and should) be increased. There are no federal "trust funds."
3. Federal deficits are necessary for economic growth
4. Federal "debt" is nothing more than deposits in T-security accounts at the Federal Reserve Bank.
5. America never has had, and is absolutely in no danger of, hyper-inflation.Perhaps, if Bernie wins the election, he will be freer to educate the masses, as well as the economics community, but meanwhile he has to claim the popular myth that federal spending has to be "paid for" by taxes.
MaroonBulldog , March 6, 2016 at 1:00 pmIs the American public, trained/indoctrinated to think of the USG budget in terms of a household budget analogy, ready for MMT? I think it's politically OK to use MMT informed policies–"deficits don't matter"–as the Republicans have, but not OK to openly acknowledge doing so. MMT runs head on into bedrock beliefs like the protestant moral virtues of thrift and fiscal responsibility. People cling to this stuff as tightly as they cling to their religion and guns.
Yves Smith Post author , March 6, 2016 at 3:01 pmMMT is a volatile, explosive doctrine. Tell an ordinary off-the-street taxpayer that Federal taxes don't fund Federal expenditures, that Federal taxes destroy the money they collect and so keep inflation at desired levels, and ready yourself to answer this:
"If I'm just paying taxes so the money can be burned, why should I pay taxes? What good does paying taxes for that do me, or people like me?"
And be prepared not to have your answer heard, comprehended, or accepted, after it is given.
It could lead directly and quickly to the end of a system of tax collection based on voluntary compliance. It could ignite a revolution.
MMT is an unpopular doctrine. Whether it is the true theory, or a truer theory than others, of the state of the world–is not the point.
Jim Young , March 6, 2016 at 11:56 amShe can't. She's his staffer (on the Senate Budget Committee) so she is now allowed to work on the campaign. It would be a big ethics violation and would produce a scandal. Staffers cannot work on any of their bosses campaigns, including re-elections. Remember, they are government employees, not on Sanders' personal payroll.
susan the other , March 6, 2016 at 11:49 amMy old party has worked hard to try discredit James Galbraith. I was faced with some ridicule from a Bush era international negotiator for trying to read "The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too" in an airport waiting area.
To me, too many of the supposed (and actual) intellectuals and high level advisers were experts in rationalizing and explaining the chosen party views, but still employed the Cato Institute suggestion to use "Leninist" propaganda techniques as put forth in the 1996 Newt Gingrich/Frank Luntz GoPac memo, "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control."
I don't oppose them (at that level) expressing their well thought out views, even using the "persuasive" techniques described in the document at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4443.htm but I do fault them for trying to prevent people from freely exploring far more comprehensive information and views.
We left the party ancestors had founded and stayed loyal to for 5 generations, though, because of the lower level dirty tricksters ("opposition researchers") that wanted us to corrupt the processes as one fund raiser told me, "We have to fight dirtier than Democrats."
Galbraith is a voice that must be listened to, just as there may be many others that we should be able to listen to (as I assume we could have under the old "Fairness Doctrine" before the corporate take over of almost all fully accessible media).
jack , March 6, 2016 at 1:09 pmstg Galbraith said casually about the thesis of his new book: This really is the new normal for capitalism – meaning low growth – because there is not much growth left. So maybe we are headed for a no growth world in which stability and sustainability dictate enterprise which is used to maintain a steady state – so that sounds more socialist than capitalist out of necessity. I believe this is our future too. And I think I understand Varoufakis' and Galbraith's "modest proposal" in a clearer light because growth must be used going forward not willy-nilly, but to achieve our ends. And also too – a while back the link that effectively said we had it backwards when we assume that capitalism supports socialism – because capitalism in reality lives off and is only possible under sufficient socialism. And it seems the 4 presidential advisors are more out to lunch than their letter showed.
Detroit Dan , March 6, 2016 at 4:49 pmAs somebody asked above, I am still left wondering where Justin Wolfer's NYTimes piece fits into all this?
Bernard , March 6, 2016 at 1:22 pmCan't respond to all the nonsense. I just read Wolfer's piece and it seems to miss the point (as with the Romers), as noted in the following 2 articles. I especially recommend the 2nd one from John Cassidy in the New Yorker.
Friedman-Response-to-the-Romers
Bernie Sanders and the Case for a New Economic-Stimulus Packageas usual, i hear a lot "they" failed conservatism, never, Conservatism is just the age old avenue to "scam" the other. Bush "failed" at conservatism, i.e., it was Bush's fault not the ideology of Conservatism. on and on, this self repeated/reinforced "idea" that we have just not "found" the correct "application" of the ideal/reality that is Conservatism.
it does get old, too. all the people killed due to Conservatism and its' perpetrators. Greed, in other words, and the age old scam with "new and improved" tactics. These people have no concept of what "society" is, why we are all interrelated. to scam one is to scam us all. and these people are definitely not Christian in the "Jesus Christ" i've always heard about. Whatsoever you do unto the poor, you do unto me!
i just suppose psychopaths use any avenue for their "crimes." as i've heard, too, any great fortune is usually the result of a great crime.
somethings never change.
Jun 19, 2015 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com
This video below may help one to understand some of the seemingly obtuse demands from the Troika with regard to Greece.
The video is a bit dated, but the debt scheme it describes remains largely unchanged. The primary development has been the creation of an experiment called the European Union and the character of the targets. One might also look to the wars of 'preventative intervention' and 'colour revolutions' that raise up puppet regimes for examples of more contemporary economic spoliation. From largely small and Third World countries, the candidates for debt peonage have become the smaller amongst the developed Western countries, the most vulnerable on the periphery. And even the domestic populations of the monetary powers, the US, Germany, and the UK, are now feeling the sting of financialisation, debt imposition through crises, and austerity. What used to only take place in South America and Africa has now taken place in Jefferson County Alabama. Corrupt officials burden taxpayers with unsustainable amounts of debt for unproductive, grossly overpriced projects.
It would be wrong in these instances to blame the whole country, the whole government, or all corporations, except perhaps for sleepwalking, and sometimes willfully, towards the abyss. For the most part a relatively small band of scheming and devious fellows abuse and corrupt every form of government and organization and law in order to achieve their private ambitions, often using various forms of intimidation and reward. It is an old, old story. And then there is the mass looting enable by the most recent financial crisis and Bank bailouts. If the people will not take on the chains of debt willingly, you impose them indirectly, while giving the funds to your cronies who will use them against the very people who are bearing the burdens, while lecturing them on moral values and thrift. It is an exceptionally diabolical con game.
The TPP and TTIP are integral initiatives in this effort of extending financial obligations, debt, and control. You might ask yourself why the House Republicans, who have fought the current President at every turn, blocking nominees and even stages many mock votes to repeatedly denounce a healthcare plan that originated in their own think tank and first implemented by their own presidential candidate, are suddenly championing that President's highest profile legislation, and against the opposition of his own party? The next step, after Greece is subdued, will be to extend that model to other, larger countries. And to redouble the austerity at home under cover of the next financial crisis by eliminating cash as a safe haven, and to begin the steady stream of digital 'bailing-in.'
This is why these corporatists and statists hate gold and silver, by the way. And why it is at the focal point of a currency war. It provides a counterweight to their monetary power. It speaks unpleasant truths. It is a safe haven and alternative, along with other attempts to supplant the IMF and the World Bank, for the rest of the world. So when you say, the Philippines deserved it, Iceland deserved it, Ireland deserved it, Africa deserves it, Jefferson County deserved it, Detroit deserved it, and now Greece deserves it, just keep in mind that some day soon they will be saying that you deserve it, because you stood by and did nothing.
Because when they are done with all the others, for whom do you think they come next? If you wish to see injustice stopped, if you wish to live up to the pledge of 'never again,' then you must stand for your fellows who are vulnerable. The economic hitmen have honed their skills among the poor and relatively defenseless, and have been coming closer to home in search of new hunting grounds and fatter spoils.
There is nothing 'new' or 'modern' about this. This is as old as Babylon, and evil as sin. It is the power of darkness of the world, and of spiritual wickedness in high places. The only difference is that it is not happening in the past or in a book, it is happening here and now.
"Economic powers continue to justify the current global system where priority tends to be given to speculation and the pursuit of financial gain. As a result, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of the deified market, which becomes the only rule." Francis I, Laudato Si
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7gxkgssngU
You may also find some information about the contemporary applications of these methods in The IMF's 'Tough Choices' On Greece by Jamie Galbraith.
"Plunderers of the world, when nothing remains on the lands to which they have laid waste by wanton thievery, they search out across the seas. The wealth of another region excites their greed; and if it is weak, their lust for power as well. Nothing from the rising to the setting of the sun is enough for them. Among all others only they are compelled to attack the poor as well as the rich. Robbery, rape, and slaughter they falsely call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace."
Tacitus, Agricola Posted by Jesse at 11:46 AM Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook Share to Pinterest
Category: currency war, debt peonage, debt slavery, neo-colonialism, new world order
Jun 26, 2015 | naked capitalism
Yves here. In May, we wrote up and embedded the report on how NYU exploits students and adjuncts in "The Art of the Gouge": NYU as a Model for Predatory Higher Education. This article below uses that study as a point of departure for for its discussion of how higher education has become extractive.
By David Masciotra, the author of Mellencamp: American Troubadour (University Press of Kentucky). He has also written for Salon, the Atlantic and the Los Angeles Review of Books. For more information visit www.davidmasciotra.com. Originally published at Alternet
Higher education wears the cloak of liberalism, but in policy and practice, it can be a corrupt and cutthroat system of power and exploitation. It benefits immensely from right-wing McCarthy wannabes, who in an effort to restrict academic freedom and silence political dissent, depict universities as left-wing indoctrination centers.
But the reality is that while college administrators might affix "down with the man" stickers on their office doors, many prop up a system that is severely unfair to American students and professors, a shocking number of whom struggle to make ends meet. Even the most elementary level of political science instructs that politics is about power. Power, in America, is about money: who has it? Who does not have it? Who is accumulating it? Who is losing it? Where is it going?
Four hundred faculty members at New York University, one of the nation's most expensive schools, recently released a report on how their own place of employment, legally a nonprofit institution, has become a predatory business, hardly any different in ethical practice or economic procedure than a sleazy storefront payday loan operator. Its title succinctly summarizes the new intellectual discipline deans and regents have learned to master: "The Art of The Gouge."
The result of their investigation reads as if Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka collaborated on notes for a novel. Administrators not only continue to raise tuition at staggering rates, but they burden their students with inexplicable fees, high cost burdens and expensive requirements like mandatory study abroad programs. When students question the basis of their charges, much of them hidden during the enrollment and registration phases, they find themselves lost in a tornadic swirl of forms, automated answering services and other bureaucratic debris.
Often the additional fees add up to thousands of dollars, and that comes on top of the already hefty tuition, currently $46,000 per academic year, which is more than double its rate of 2001. Tuition at NYU is higher than most colleges, but a bachelor's degree, nearly anywhere else, still comes with a punitive price tag. According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2014–2015 school year was $31,231 at private colleges, $9,139 for state residents at public colleges, and $22,958 for out-of-state residents attending public universities.
Robert Reich, in his book Supercapitalism, explains that in the past 30 years the two industries with the most excessive increases in prices are health care and higher education. Lack of affordable health care is a crime, Reich argues, but at least new medicines, medical technologies, surgeries, surgery techs, and specialists can partially account for inflation. Higher education can claim no costly infrastructural or operational developments to defend its sophisticated swindle of American families. It is a high-tech, multifaceted, but old fashioned transfer of wealth from the poor, working- and middle-classes to the rich.
Using student loan loot and tax subsidies backed by its $3.5 billion endowment, New York University has created a new administrative class of aristocratic compensation. The school not only continues to hire more administrators – many of whom the professors indict as having no visible value in improving the education for students bankrupting themselves to register for classes – but shamelessly increases the salaries of the academic administrative class. The top 21 administrators earn a combined total of $23,590,794 per year. The NYU portfolio includes many multi-million-dollar mansions and luxury condos, where deans and vice presidents live rent-free.
Meanwhile, NYU has spent billions, over the past 20 years, on largely unnecessary real estate projects, buying property and renovating buildings throughout New York. The professors' analysis, NYU's US News and World Report Ranking, and student reviews demonstrate that few of these extravagant projects, aimed mostly at pleasing wealthy donors, attracting media attention, and giving administrators opulent quarters, had any impact on overall educational quality.
As the managerial class grows, in size and salary, so does the full time faculty registry shrink. Use of part time instructors has soared to stratospheric heights at NYU. Adjunct instructors, despite having a minimum of a master's degree and often having a Ph.D., receive only miserly pay-per-course compensation for their work, and do not receive benefits. Many part-time college instructors must transform their lives into daily marathons, running from one school to the next, barely able to breathe between commutes and courses. Adjunct pay varies from school to school, but the average rate is $2,900 per course.
Many schools offer rates far below the average, most especially community colleges paying only $1,000 to $1,500. Even at the best paying schools, adjuncts, as part time employees, are rarely eligible for health insurance and other benefits. Many universities place strict limits on how many courses an instructor can teach. According to a recent study, 25 percent of adjuncts receive government assistance.
The actual scandal of "The Art of the Gouge" is that even if NYU is a particularly egregious offender of basic decency and honesty, most of the report's indictments could apply equally to nearly any American university. From 2003-2013, college tuition increased by a crushing 80 percent. That far outpaces all other inflation. The closest competitor was the cost of medical care, which in the same time period, increased by a rate of 49 percent. On average, tuition in America rises eight percent on an annual basis, placing it far outside the moral universe. Most European universities charge only marginal fees for attendance, and many of them are free. Senator Bernie Sanders recently introduced a bill proposing all public universities offer free education. It received little political support, and almost no media coverage.
In order to obtain an education, students accept the paralytic weight of student debt, the only form of debt not dischargeable in bankruptcy. Before a young person can even think about buying a car, house or starting a family, she leaves college with thousands of dollars in debt: an average of $29,400 in 2012. As colleges continue to suck their students dry of every dime, the US government profits at $41.3 billion per year by collecting interest on that debt. Congress recently cut funding for Pell Grants, yet increased the budget for hiring debt collectors to target delinquent student borrowers.
The university, once an incubator of ideas and entrance into opportunity, has mutated into a tabletop model of America's economic architecture, where the top one percent of income earners now owns 40 percent of the wealth.
"The One Percent at State U," an Institute for Policy Studies report, found that at the 25 public universities with the highest paid presidents, student debt and adjunct faculty increased at dramatically higher rates than at the average state university. Marjorie Wood, the study's co-author, explained told the New York Times that extravagant executive pay is the "tip of a very large iceberg, with universities that have top-heavy executive spending also having more adjuncts, more tuition increases and more administrative spending.
Unfortunately, students seem like passive participants in their own liquidation. An American student protest timeline for 2014-'15, compiled by historian Angus Johnston, reveals that most demonstrations and rallies focused on police violence, and sexism. Those issues should inspire vigilance and activism, but only 10 out of 160 protests targeted tuition hikes for attack, and only two of those 10 events took place outside the state of California.
Class consciousness and solidarity actually exist in Chile, where in 2011 a student movement began to organize, making demands for free college. More than mere theater, high school and college students, along with many of their parental allies, engaged the political system and made specific demands for inexpensive education. The Chilean government announced that in March 2016, it will eliminate all tuition from public universities. Chile's victory for participatory democracy, equality of opportunity and social justice should instruct and inspire Americans. Triumph over extortion and embezzlement is possible.
This seems unlikely to happen in a culture, however, where even most poor Americans view themselves, in the words of John Steinbeck, as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires." The political, educational and economic ruling class of America is comfortable selling out its progeny. In the words of one student quoted in "The Art of the Gouge," "they see me as nothing more than $200,000."
washunate June 26, 2015 at 10:07 amAwesome question in the headline.
At a basic level, I think the answer is yes, because on balance, college still provides a lot of privatized value to the individual. Being an exploited student with the College Credential Seal of Approval remains relatively much better than being an exploited non student lacking that all important seal. A college degree, for example, is practically a guarantee of avoiding the more unseemly parts of the US "justice" system.
But I think this is changing. The pressure is building from the bottom as academia loses credibility as an institution capable of, never mind interested in, serving the public good rather than simply being another profit center for connected workers. It's actually a pretty exciting time. The kiddos are getting pretty fed up, and the authoritarians at the top of the hierarchy are running out of money with which to buy off younger technocratic enablers and thought leaders and other Serious People.
washunate June 26, 2015 at 10:17 am
P.S., the author in this post demonstrates the very answer to the question. He assumes as true, without any need for support, that the very act of possessing a college degree makes one worthy of a better place in society. That mindset is why colleges can prey upon students. They hold a monopoly on access to resources in American society. My bold:
Adjunct instructors, despite having a minimum of a master's degree and often having a Ph.D., receive only miserly pay-per-course compensation for their work, and do not receive benefits.
What does having a masters degree or PhD have to do with the moral claim of all human beings to a life of dignity and purpose?
flora June 26, 2015 at 11:37 am
There are so many more job seekers per job opening now than, say, 20 or thirty years ago that a degree is used to sort out applications. Now a job that formerly listed a high school degree as a requirement may now list a college degree as a requirement, just to cut down on the number of applications.
So, no, a B.A. or B.S. doesn't confer moral worth, but it does open more job doors than a high school diploma, even if the actual work only requires high school level math, reading, science or technology.
I agree a phd often makes someone no more useful in society. However the behaviour of the kids is rational *because* employers demand a masters / phd.
Students are then caught in a trap. Employers demand the paper, often from an expensive institution. The credit is abundant thanks to govt backed loans. They are caught in a situation where as a collective it makes no sense to join in, but as an individual if they opt out they get hurt also.
Same deal for housing. It's a mad world my masters.
What can we do about this? The weak link in the chain seems to me to be employers. Why are they hurting themselves by selecting people who want higher pay but may offer little to no extra value? I work as a programmer and I often think " if we could just 'see' the non-graduate diamonds in the rough".
If employers had perfect knowledge of prospective employees *and* if they saw that a degree would make no difference to their performance universities would crumble overnight.
The state will never stop printing money via student loans. If we can fix recruitment then universities are dead.
washunate June 26, 2015 at 2:22 pm
Why are they hurting themselves by selecting people who want higher pay but may offer little to no extra value?
Yeah, I have thought a lot about that particular question of organizational behavior. It does make sense, conceptually, that somebody would disrupt the system and take people based on ability rather than credentials. Yet we are moving in the opposite direction, toward more rigidity in educational requirements for employment.
For my two cents, I think the bulk of the answer lies in how hiring specifically, and management philosophy more generally, works in practice. The people who make decisions are themselves also subject to someone else's decisions. This is true all up and down the hierarchical ladder, from board members and senior executives to the most junior managers and professionals.
It's true that someone without a degree may offer the same (or better) performance to the company. But they do not offer the same performance to the people making decisions, because those individual people also depend upon their own college degrees to sell their own labor services. To hire significant numbers of employees without degrees into important roles is to sabotage their own personal value.
Very few people are willing to be that kind of martyr. And generally speaking, they tend to self-select away from occupations where they can meaningfully influence decision-making processes in large organizations.
Absolutely, individual business owners can call BS on the whole scam. It is a way that individual people can take action against systemic oppression. Hire workers based upon their fit for the job, not their educational credentials or criminal background or skin color or sexual orientation or all of the other tests we have used. But that's not a systemic solution because the incentives created by public policy are overwhelming at large organizations to restrict who is 'qualified' to fill the good jobs (and increasingly, even the crappy jobs).
Laaughingsong June 26, 2015 at 3:03 pm
I am not so sure that this is so. So many jobs are now crapified. When I was made redundant in 2009, I could not find many jobs that fit my level of experience (just experience! I have no college degree), so I applied for anything that fit my skill set, pretty much regardless of level. I was called Overqualified. I have heard that in the past as well, but never more so during that stretch of job hunting. Remember that's with no degree. Maybe younger people don't hear it as much. But I also think life experience has something to do with it, you need to have something to compare it to. How many times did our parents tell us how different things were when they were kids, how much easier? I didn't take that on board, did y'all?
sam s smith June 26, 2015 at 4:03 pm
I blame HR.
For various reasons, people seeking work these days, especially younger job applicants, might not possess the habits of mind and behavior that would make them good employees – i.e., punctuality, the willingness to come to work every day (even when something more fun or interesting comes up, or when one has partied hard the night before), the ability to meet deadlines rather than make excuses for not meeting them, the ability to write competently at a basic level, the ability to read instructions, diagrams, charts, or any other sort of necessary background material, the ability to handle basic computation, the ability to FOLLOW instructions rather than deciding that one will pick and choose which rules and instructions to follow and which to ignore, trainability, etc.
Even if a job applicant's degree is in a totally unrelated field, the fact that he or she has managed to complete an undergraduate degree–or, if relevant, a master's or a doctorate – is often accepted by employers as a sign that the applicant has a sense of personal responsibility, a certain amount of diligence and educability, and a certain level of basic competence in reading, writing, and math.
By the same token, employers often assume that an applicant who didn't bother going to college or who couldn't complete a college degree program is probably not someone to be counted on to be a responsible, trainable, competent employee.
Obviously those who don't go to college, or who go but drop out or flunk out, end up disadvantaged when competing for jobs, which might not be fair at all in individual cases, especially now that college has been priced so far out of the range of so many bright, diligent students from among the poor and and working classes, and now even those from the middle class.
Nevertheless, in general an individual's ability to complete a college degree is not an unreasonable stand-in as evidence of that person's suitability for employment.
Roland June 27, 2015 at 5:14 pm
Nicely put, Ben.
Students are first caught in a trap of "credentials inflation" needed to obtain jobs, then caught by inflation in education costs, then stuck with undischargeable debt. And the more of them who get the credentials, the worse the credentials inflation–a spiral.
It's all fuelled by loose credit. The only beneficiaries are a managerial elite who enjoy palatial facilities.
As for the employers, they're not so bad off. Wages are coming down for credentialled employees due to all the competition. There is such a huge stock of degreed applicants that they can afford to ignore anyone who isn't. The credentials don't cost the employer–they're not spending the money, nor are they lending the money.
Modern money makes it possible for the central authorities to keep this racket going all the way up to the point of general systemic collapse. Why should they stop? Who's going to make them stop?
Bobbo June 26, 2015 at 10:19 am
The only reason the universities can get away with it is easy money. When the time comes that students actually need to pay tuition with real money, money they or their parents have actually saved, then college tuition rates will crash back down to earth. Don't blame the universities. This is the natural and inevitable outcome of easy money.
Yes, college education in the US is a classic example of the effects of subsidies. Eliminate the subsidies and the whole education bubble would rapidly implode.
washunate June 26, 2015 at 11:03 am
I'm very curious if anyone will disagree with that assessment.
An obvious commonality across higher education, healthcare, housing, criminal justice, and national security is that we spend huge quantities of public money yet hold the workers receiving that money to extremely low standards of accountability for what they do with it.
tegnost June 26, 2015 at 11:38 am
Correct, it's not the universities, it's the culture that contains the universities, but the universities are training grounds for the culture so it is the universities just not only the universities Been remembering the song from my college days "my futures so bright i gotta wear shades". getting rich was the end in itself, and people who didn't make it didn't deserve anything but a whole lot of student debt,creating perverse incentives. And now we all know what the A in type a stands for at least among those who self identify as such, so yes it is the universities
Chris in Paris June 26, 2015 at 12:07 pm
I don't understand why the ability to accept guaranteed loan money doesn't come with an obligation by the school to cap tuition at a certain percentage over maximum loan amount? Would that be so hard to institute?
Student loans are debt issuance. Western states are desperate to issue debt as it's fungible with money and marked down as growth.
Borrow 120K over 3 years and it all gets paid into university coffers and reappears as "profit" now. Let some other president deal with low disposable income due to loan repayments. It's in a different electoral cycle – perfect.
jrd2 June 26, 2015 at 11:50 am
You can try to argue, but it will be hard to refute. If you give mortgages at teaser rates to anybody who can fog a mirror, you get a housing bubble. If you give student loans to any student without regard to the prospects of that student paying back the loan, you get a higher education bubble. Which will include private equity trying to catch as much of this money as they possibly can by investing in for profit educational institutions just barely adequate to benefit from federal student loan funds.
A lot of background conditions help. It helps to pump a housing bubble if there's nothing else worth investing in (including saving money at zero interest rates). It helps pump an education bubble if most of the jobs have been outsourced so people are competing more and more for fewer and fewer.
Beans June 26, 2015 at 11:51 am
I don't disagree with the statement that easy money has played the biggest role in jacking up tuition. I do strongly disagree that we shouldn't "blame" the universities. The universities are exactly where we should place the blame. The universities have become job training grounds, and yet continue to droll on and on about the importance of noble things like liberal education, the pursuit of knowledge, the importance of ideas, etc. They cannot have it both ways. Years ago, when tuition rates started escalating faster than inflation, the universities should have been the loudest critics – pointing out the cultural problems that would accompany sending the next generation into the future deeply indebted – namely that all the noble ideas learned at the university would get thrown out the window when financial reality forced recent graduates to chose between noble ideas and survival. If universities truly believed that a liberal education was important; that the pursuit of knowledge benefitted humanity – they should have led the charge to hold down tuition.
washunate June 26, 2015 at 12:47 pm
I took it to mean blame as in what allows the system to function. I heartily agree that highly paid workers at universities bear blame for what they do (and don't do) at a granular level.
It's just that they couldn't do those things without the system handing them gobs of resources, from tax deductability of charitable contributions to ignoring anti-competitive behavior in local real estate ownership to research grants and other direct funding to student loans and other indirect funding.
Regarding blaming "highly paid workers at universities" – If a society creates incentives for dysfunctional behavior such a society will have a lot of dysfunction. Eliminate the subsidies and see how quicly the educational bubble pops.
James Levy June 26, 2015 at 2:45 pm
You are ignoring the way that the rich bid up the cost of everything. 2% of the population will pay whatever the top dozen or so schools will charge so that little Billy or Sue can go to Harvard or Stanford. This leads to cost creep as the next tier ratchet up their prices in lock step with those above them, etc. The same dynamic happens with housing, at least around wealthy metropolitan areas.
daniel June 26, 2015 at 12:07 pm
Hi to you two,
A European perspective on this: yep, that's true on an international perspective. I belong to the ugly list of those readers of this blog who do not fully share the liberal values of most of you hear. However, may I say that I can agree on a lot of stuff.
US education and health-care are outrageously costly. Every European citizen moving to the states has a question: will he or she be sick whilst there. Every European parent with kids in higher education is aware that having their kids for one closing year in the US is the more they can afford (except if are a banquier d'affaires ). Is the value of the US education good? No doubt! Is is good value for money, of course not. Is the return on the money ok? It will prove disastrous, except if the USD crashed. The main reason? Easy money. As for any kind of investment. Remember that this is indeed a investment plan
Check the level of revenues of "public sector" teaching staff on both sides of the ponds. The figure for US professionals in these area are available on the Web. They are indeed much more costly than, say, North-of-Europe counterparts, "public sector" professionals in those area. Is higher education in the Netherlands sub-par when compared to the US? Of course not.
Yep financing education via the Fed (directly or not) is not only insanely costly. Just insane. The only decent solution: set up public institutions staffed with service-minded professionals that did not have to pay an insane sum to build up the curriculum themselves.
Are "public services" less efficient than private ones here in those area, health-care and higher education. Yep, most certainly. But, sure, having the fed indirectly finance the educational system just destroy any competitive savings made in building a competitive market-orientated educational system and is one of the worst way to handle your educational system.
Yep, you can do a worst use of the money, subprime or China buildings But that's all about it.
US should forget about exceptionnalism and pay attention to what North of Europe is doing in this area. Mind you, I am Southerner (of Europe). But of course I understand that trying to run these services on a federal basis is indeed "mission impossible".
Way to big! Hence the indirect Washington-decided Wall-Street-intermediated Fed-and-deficit-driven financing of higher education. Mind you: we have more and more of this bankers meddling in education in Europe and I do not like what I see.
John Zelnicker June 27, 2015 at 1:36 pm
@washunate – 6/26/15, 11:03 am. I know I'm late to the party, but I disagree. It's not the workers, it's the executives and management generally. Just like Wall Street, many of these top administrators have perfected the art of failing upwards.
IMNSHO everyone needs to stop blaming labor and/or the labor unions. It's not the front line workers, teachers, retail clerks, adjunct instructors, all those people who do the actual work rather than managing other people. Those workers have no bargaining power, and the unions have lost most of theirs, in part due to the horrible labor market, as well as other important reasons.
We have demonized virtually all of the government workers who actually do the work that enables us to even have a government (all levels) and to provide the services we demand, such as public safety, education, and infrastructure. These people are our neighbors, relatives and friends; we owe them better than this.
/end of rant
Roland June 27, 2015 at 5:20 pm
Unionized support staff at Canadian universities have had sub-inflation wage increases for nearly 20 years, while tuition has been rising at triple the rate of inflation.
So obviously one can't blame the unions for rising education costs.
Spring Texan June 28, 2015 at 8:03 am
Thanks for your rant! You said a mouthful. And could not be more correct.
Adam Eran June 26, 2015 at 12:18 pm
Omitted from this account: Federal funding for education has declined 55% since 1972. Part of the Powell memo's agenda.
It's understandable too; one can hardly blame legislators for punishing the educational establishment given the protests of the '60s and early '70s After all, they were one reason Nixon and Reagan rose to power. How dare they propose real democracy! Harumph!
To add to students' burden, there's the recent revision of bankruptcy law: student loans can no longer be retired by bankruptcy (Thanks Hillary!) It'll be interesting to see whether Hillary's vote on that bankruptcy revision becomes a campaign issue.
I also wonder whether employers will start to look for people without degrees as an indication they were intelligent enough to sidestep this extractive scam.
washunate June 26, 2015 at 1:54 pm
I'd be curious what you count as federal funding. Pell grants, for example, have expanded both in terms of the number of recipients and the amount of spending over the past 3 – 4 decades.
More generally, federal support for higher ed comes in a variety of forms. The bankruptcy law you mention is itself a form of federal funding. Tax exemption is another. Tax deductabiliity of contributions is another. So are research grants and exemptions from anti-competitive laws and so forth. There are a range of individual tax credits and deductions. The federal government also does not intervene in a lot of state supports, such as licensing practices in law and medicine that make higher ed gatekeepers to various fiefdoms and allowing universities to take fees for administering (sponsoring) charter schools. The Federal Work-Study program is probably one of the clearest specific examples of a program that offers both largely meaningless busy work and terrible wages.
As far as large employers seeking intelligence, I'm not sure that's an issue in the US? Generally speaking, the point of putting a college credential in a job requirement is precisely to find people participating in the 'scam'. If an employer is genuinely looking for intelligence, they don't have minimum educational requirements.
Laughingsong June 26, 2015 at 3:12 pm
I heard that Congress is cutting those:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/12/10/congress-cuts-federal-financial-aid-for-needy-students/different clue June 28, 2015 at 3:06 am
Why would tuition rates come down when students need to pay with "real money, money they or their parents have actually saved. . . " ? Didn't tuition at state universities begin climbing when state governments began boycotting state universities in terms of embargoing former rates of taxpayer support to them? Leaving the state universities to try making up the difference by raising tuition? If people want to limit or reduce the tuition charged to in-state students of state universities, people will have to resume paying former rates of taxes and elect people to state government to re-target those taxes back to state universities the way they used to do before the reductions in state support to state universities.
Jesper June 26, 2015 at 10:29 am
Protest against exploitation and risk being black-listed by exploitative employers -> Only employers left are the ones who actually do want (not pretend to want) ethical people willing to stand up for what they believe in. Not many of those kind of employers around . What is the benefit? What are the risks?
Tammy June 27, 2015 at 4:35 pm
What is the benefit? What are the risks?
I am not a progressive, yet, there is always risk for solidary progress.Andrew June 26, 2015 at 10:53 am
The author misrepresents the nature and demands of Chile's student movement.
Over the past few decades, university enrollment rates for Chileans expanded dramatically in part due to the creation of many private universities. In Chile, public universities lead the pack in terms of academic reputation and entrance is determined via competitive exams. As a result, students from poorer households who attended low-quality secondary schools generally need to look at private universities to get a degree. And these are the students to which the newly created colleges catered to.
According to Chilean legislation, universities can only function as non-profit entities. However, many of these new institutions were only nominally non-profit entities (for example, the owners of the university would also set up a real estate company that would rent the facilities to the college at above market prices) and they were very much lacking in quality. After a series of high-profile cases of universities that were open and shut within a few years leaving its students in limbo and debt, anger mounted over for-profit education.
The widespread support of the student movement was due to generalized anger about and education system that is dearly lacking in quality and to the violation of the spirit of the law regulating education. Once the student movement's demands became more specific and morphed from opposing for profit institutions to demanding free tuition for everyone, the widespread support waned quickly.
And while the government announced free tuition in public universities, there is a widespread consensus that this is a pretty terrible idea as it is regressive and involves large fiscal costs. In particular because most of the students that attend public universities come from relatively wealthy households that can afford tuition. The students that need the tuition assistance will not benefit under the new rules.
I personally benefited from the fantastically generous financial aid systems that some private American universities have set up which award grants and scholarships based on financial need only. And I believe that it is desirable for the State to guarantee that any qualified student has access to college regardless of his or her wealth I think that by romanticizing the Chilean student movement the author reveals himself to be either is dishonest or, at best, ignorant.
RanDomino June 27, 2015 at 12:23 pm
The protests also involved extremely large riots.
The Insider June 26, 2015 at 10:57 am
Students aren't protesting because they don't feel the consequences until they graduate.
One thing that struck me when I applied for a student loan a few years back to help me get through my last year of graduate school – the living expense allocation was surprisingly high. Not "student sharing an apartment with five random dudes while eating ramen and riding the bus", but more "living alone in a nice one-bedroom apartment while eating takeout and driving a car". Apocryphal stories of students using their student loans to buy new cars or take extravagant vacations were not impossible to believe.
The living expense portion of student loans is often so generous that students can live relatively well while going to school, which makes it that much easier for them to push to the backs of their minds the consequences that will come from so much debt when they graduate. Consequently, it isn't the students who are complaining – it's the former students. But by the time they are out of school and the university has their money in its pocket, it's too late for them to try and change the system.
lord koos June 26, 2015 at 11:42 am
I'm sure many students are simply happy to be in college the ugly truth hits later.
optimader June 26, 2015 at 12:39 pm
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/education/compete-students-colleges-roll-out-amenities
Sophomore Noell Conley lives there, too. She shows off the hotel-like room she shares with a roommate.
"As you walk in, to the right you see our granite countertops with two sinks, one for each of the residents," she says.
A partial wall separates the beds. Rather than trek down the hall to shower, they share a bathroom with the room next door.
"That's really nice compared to community bathrooms that I lived in last year," Conley says.
To be fair, granite countertops last longer. Tempur-Pedic is a local company - and gave a big discount. The amenities include classrooms and study space that are part of the dorm. Many of the residents are in the university's Honors program. But do student really need Apple TV in the lounges, or a smartphone app that lets them check their laundry status from afar?
"Demand has been very high," says the university's Penny Cox, who is overseeing the construction of several new residence halls on campus. Before Central Hall's debut in August, the average dorm was almost half a century old, she says. That made it harder to recruit.
"If you visit places like Ohio State, Michigan, Alabama," Cox says, "and you compare what we had with what they have available to offer, we were very far behind."
Today colleges are competing for a more discerning consumer. Students grew up with fewer siblings, in larger homes, Cox says. They expect more privacy than previous generations - and more comforts.
"These days we seem to be bringing kids up to expect a lot of material plenty," says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of the book "Generation Me."
Those students could be in for some disappointment when they graduate, she says.
"When some of these students have all these luxuries and then they get an entry-level job and they can't afford the enormous flat screen and the granite countertops," Twenge says, "then that's going to be a rude awakening."
Some on campus also worry about the divide between students who can afford such luxuries and those who can't. The so-called premium dorms cost about $1,000 more per semester. Freshman Josh Johnson, who grew up in a low-income family and lives in one of the university's 1960s-era buildings, says the traditional dorm is good enough for him.
"I wouldn't pay more just to live in a luxury dorm," he says. "It seems like I could just pay the flat rate and get the dorm I'm in. It's perfectly fine."
In the near future students who want to live on campus won't have a choice. Eventually the university plans to upgrade all of its residence halls.So I wonder who on average will fair better navigating the post-college lifestyle/job market reality check, Noell or Josh? Personally, I would bet on the Joshes living in the 60's vintage enamel painted ciderblock dorm rooms.
optimader June 26, 2015 at 12:47 pm
Universities responding to the market
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2012/08/29/10-Public-Colleges-with-Insanely-Luxurious-Dorms
Competition for students who have more sophisticated tastes than in past years is creating the perfect environment for schools to try to outdo each other with ever-more posh on-campus housing. Keeping up in the luxury dorm race is increasingly critical to a school's bottom line: A 2006 study published by the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers found that "poorly maintained or inadequate residential facilities" was the number-one reason students rejected enrolling at institutions.
PHOTO GALLERY: Click Here to See the 10 Schools with Luxury DormsPrivate universities get most of the mentions on lists of schools with great dorms, as recent ratings by the Princeton Review, College Prowler, and Campus Splash make clear. But a few state schools that have invested in brand-new facilities are starting to show up on those reviews, too.
While many schools offer first dibs on the nicest digs to upperclassmen on campus, as the war for student dollars ratchets up even first-year students at public colleges are living in style. Here are 10 on-campus dormitories at state schools that offer students resort-like amenities.
Jerry Denim June 26, 2015 at 4:37 pm
Bingo! They don't get really mad until they're in their early thirties and they are still stuck doing some menial job with no vacation time, no health insurance and a monstrous mountain of debt. Up until that point they're still working hard waiting for their ship to come in and blaming themselves for any lack of success like Steinbeck's 'embarrassed millionaires.' Then one day maybe a decade after they graduate they realize they've been conned but they've got bills to pay and other problems to worry about so they solider on. 18 year-olds are told by their high school guidance councilors, their parents and all of the adults they trust that college while expensive is a good investment and the only way to succeed. Why should they argue? They don't know any better yet.
different clue June 28, 2015 at 3:09 am
Perhaps some students are afraid to protest for fear of being photographed or videographed and having their face and identity given to every prospective employer throughout America. Perhaps those students are afraid of being blackballed throughout the Great American Workplace if they are caught protesting anything on camera.
Today isn't like the sixties when you could drop out in the confidence that you could always drop back in again. Nowadays there are ten limpets for every scar on the rock.
seabos84 June 26, 2015 at 11:16 am
the average is such a worthless number. The Data we need, and which all these parasitic professional managerial types won't provide –
x axis would be family income, by $5000 increments.
y axis would be the median debt level
we could get fancy, and also throw in how many kids are in school in each of those income increments.BTW – this 55 yr. old troglodyte believes that 1 of the roles (note – I did NOT say "The Role") of education is preparing people to useful to society. 300++ million Americans, 7 billion humans – we ALL need shelter, reliable and safe food, reliable and safe water, sewage disposal, clothing, transportation, education, sick care, power, leisure, we should ALL have access to family wage jobs and time for BBQs with our various communities several times a year. I know plenty of techno-dweebs here in Seattle who need to learn some of the lessons of 1984, The Prince, and Shakespeare. I know plenty of fuzzies who could be a bit more useful with some rudimentary skills in engineering, or accounting, or finance, or stats, or bio, or chem
I don't know what the current education system is providing, other than some accidental good things for society at large, and mainly mechanisms for the para$ite cla$$e$ to stay parasites.rmm.
Adam Eran June 26, 2015 at 12:22 pm
Mao was perfectly content to promote technical education in the new China. What he deprecated (and fought to suppress) was the typical liberal arts notion of critical thinking. We're witnessing something comparable in the U.S.
This suppression in China led to an increase in Mao's authority (obviously), but kept him delusional. For example, because China relied on Mao's agricultural advice, an estimated 70 million Chinese died during peacetime. But who else was to be relied upon as an authority?
Back the the U.S.S.A. (the United StateS of America): One Australian says of the American system: "You Yanks don't consult the wisdom of democracy; you enable mobs."
Tammy June 27, 2015 at 4:41 pm
Mao was perfectly content to promote technical education in the new China. What he deprecated (and fought to suppress) was the typical liberal arts notion of critical thinking. We're witnessing something comparable in the U.S. We're witnessing something comparable in the U.S.
Mao liked chaos because he believed in continuous revolution. I would argue what we're experiencing is nothing comparable to what China experienced. (I hope I've understood you correctly.)
I am pretty sure a tradition of protest to affect political change in the US is a rather rare bird. Most people "protest" by changing their behavior. As an example, by questioning the value of the 46,000 local private college tuition as opposed the the 15k and 9k tiered state college options. My daughter is entering the freshman class next year, we opted for the cheaper state option because, in the end, a private school degree adds nothing, unless it is to a high name recognition institution.
I think, like housing, a downstream consequence of "the gouge" is not to question - much less understand - class relations, but to assess the value of the lifetyle choice once you are stuck with the price of paying for that lifestyle in the form of inflated debt repayments. Eventually "the folk" figure it out and encourage cheaper alternatives toward the same goal.
There's probably little point in engaging in political protest. Most people maximise their chances of success by focusing on variables over which they have some degree of control. The ability of most people to have much effect on the overall political-economic system is slight and any returns from political activity are highly uncertain.
How does anyone even expect to maintain cheap available state options without political activity? By wishful thinking I suppose?
The value of a private school might be graduating sooner, state schools are pretty overcrowded, but that may not at all be worth the debt (I doubt it almost ever is on a purely economic basis).
RabidGandhi June 27, 2015 at 7:57 pm
Maybe if we just elect the right people with cool posters and a hopey changey slogan, they'll take care of everything for us and we won't have to be politically active.
Of course refusal to engage politically because the returns to oneself by doing so are small really IS the tragedy of the commons. Thus one might say it's ethical to engage politically in order to avoid it. Some ethical action focuses on overcoming tragedy of the commons dilemmas. Of course the U.S. system being what it is I have a hard time blaming anyone for giving up.
chairman June 26, 2015 at 11:37 am
The middle class, working class and poor have no voice in politics or policy at all, and they don't know what's going on until it's too late. They've been pushed by all their high school staff that college is the only acceptable option - and often it is. What else are they going to do out of high school, work a 30 hour a week minimum wage retail job? The upper middle class and rich, who entirely monopolize the media, don't have any reason to care about skyrocketing college tuition - their parents are paying for it anyway. They'd rather write about the hip and trendy issues of the day, like trigger warnings.
To the contrary, they're hardly advised by "their high school staff"; nonetheless, subway ads for Phoenix, Monroe, etc. have a significant influence.
Uncle Bruno June 26, 2015 at 11:58 am
They're too busy working
Also Tinder.
collegestudent June 26, 2015 at 12:39 pm
Speaking as one of these college students, I think that a large part of the reason that the vast majority of students are just accepting the tuition rates is because it has become the societal norm. Growing up I can remember people saying "You need to go to college to find a good job." Because a higher education is seen as a necessity for most people, students think of tuition as just another form of taxes, acceptable and inevitable, which we will expect to get a refund on later in life.
Pitchfork June 26, 2015 at 1:03 pm
I teach at a "good" private university. Most of my students don't have a clue as to how they're being exploited. Many of the best students feel enormous pressure to succeed and have some inkling that their job prospects are growing narrower, but they almost universally accept this as the natural order of things. Their outlook: if there are 10 or 100 applicants for every available job, well, by golly, I just have to work that much harder and be the exceptional one who gets the job.
Incoming freshmen were born in the late 90s - they've never known anything but widespread corruption, financial and corporate oligarchy, i-Pads and the Long Recession.
But as other posters note, the moment of realization usually comes after four years of prolonged adolescence, luxury dorm living and excessive debt accumulation.
Tammy June 27, 2015 at 4:49 pm
Most Ph.D.'s don't either. I'd argue there have been times they have attempted to debate that exploitation is a good–for their employer and himself/herself–with linguistic games. Mind numbing . To be fair, they have a job.
Gottschee June 26, 2015 at 1:34 pm
I have watched the tuition double–double!–at my alma mater in the last eleven years. During this period, administrators have set a goal of increasing enrollment by a third, and from what I hear, they've done so. My question is always this: where is the additional tuition money going? Because as I walk through the campus, I don't really see that many improvements–yes, a new building, but that was supposedly paid for by donations and endowments. I don't see new offices for these high-priced admin people that colleges are hiring, and in fact, what I do see is an increase in the number of part-time faculty and adjuncts. The tenured faculty is not prospering from all this increased revenue, either.
I suspect the tuition is increasing so rapidly simply because the college can get away with it. And that means they are exploiting the students.
While still a student, I once calculated that it cost me $27.00/hour to be in class. (15 weeks x 20 "contact hours" per week =
300 hours/semester, $8000/semester divided by 300 hours = $27.00/hour). A crude calculation, certainly, but a starting point. I did this because I had an instructor who was consistently late to class, and often cancelled class, so much that he wiped out at least $300.00 worth of instruction. I had the gall to ask for a refund of that amount. I'm full of gall. Of course, I was laughed at, not just by the administrators, but also by some students.Just like medical care, education pricing is "soft," that is, the price is what you are willing to pay. Desirable students get scholarships and stipends, which other students subsidize; similarly, some pre-ACA patients in hospitals were often treated gratis.
Students AND hospital patients alike seem powerless to affect the contract with the provider. Reform will not likely be forthcoming, as students, like patients, are "just passing through."
Martin Finnucane June 26, 2015 at 2:10 pm
Higher education wears the cloak of liberalism, but in policy and practice, it can be a corrupt and cutthroat system of power and exploitation.
I find the "but" in that sentence to be dissonant.
Mark Anderson June 26, 2015 at 3:12 pm
The tuition at most public universities has quadrupled or more over the last 15 to 20 years precisely BECAUSE state government subsidies have been
slashed in the meantime. I was told around 2005 that quadrupled tuition at the University of Minnesota made up for about half of the state money that the legislature had slashed from the university budget over the previous 15 years.It is on top of that situation that university administrators are building themselves little aristocratic empires, very much modeled on the kingdoms of corporate CEOs
where reducing expenses (cutting faculty) and services to customers (fewer classes, more adjuncts) is seen as the height of responsibility and accountability, perhaps
even the definition of propriety.Everyone should read the introductory chapter to David Graeber's " The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy."
In Chapter One of this book entitled "The Iron law of Liberalism and the Era of Total Bureaucratization" Graeber notes that the US has become the most rigidly credentialised society in the world where
" in field after field from nurses to art teachers, physical therapists, to foreign policy consultants, careers which used to be considered an art (best learned through doing) now require formal professional training and a certificate of completion."
Graeber, in that same chapter, makes another extremely important point. when he notes that career advancement in may large bureaucratic organizations demands a willingness to play along with the fiction that advancement is based on merit, even though most everyone know that this isn't true.
The structure of modern power in the U.S., in both the merging public and private sectors, is built around the false ideology of a giant credentialized meritorcracy rather than the reality of arbitrary extraction by predatory bureaucratic networks.
armchair June 26, 2015 at 3:27 pm
Anecdote: I was speaking to someone who recently started working at as a law school administrator at my alma mater. Enrollment is actually down at law schools (I believe), because word has spread about the lame legal job market. So, the school administration is watching its pennies, and the new administrator says the administrators aren't getting to go on so many of the all expense paid conferences and junkets that they used to back in the heyday. As I hear this, I am thinking about how many of these awesome conferences in San Diego, New Orleans and New York that I'm paying back. Whatever happened to the metaphorical phrase: "when a pig becomes a hog, it goes to slaughter"?
Another anecdote: I see my undergrad alma mater has demolished the Cold War era dorms on one part of campus and replaced it with tons of slick new student housing.
MaroonBulldog June 26, 2015 at 7:15 pm
No doubt those Cold War era dorms had outlived their planned life. Time for replacement. Hell, they had probably become inhabitable and unsafe.
Meanwhile, has your undergraduate school replaced any of its lecture courses with courses presented same model as on-line traffic school? I have a pending comment below about how my nephew's public university "taught" him introductory courses in accounting and macroeconomics that way. Please be assured that the content of those courses was on a par with best practices in the on-line traffic school industry. It would be hilarious if it weren't so desperately sad.
Roquentin June 26, 2015 at 5:04 pm
I read things like this and think about Louis Althusser and his ideas about "Ideological State Apparatuses." While in liberal ideology the education is usually considered to be the space where opportunity to improve one's situation is founded, Althusser reached the complete opposite conclusion. For him, universities are the definitive bourgeois institution, the ideological state apparatus of the modern capitalist state par excellance. The real purpose of the university was not to level the playing field of opportunity but to preserve the advantages of the bourgeoisie and their children, allowing the class system to perpetuate/reproduce itself.
It certainly would explain a lot. It would explain why trying to send everyone to college won't solve this, because not everyone can have a bourgeois job. Some people actually have to do the work. The whole point of the university as an institution was to act as a sorting/distribution hub for human beings, placing them at certain points within the division of labor. A college degree used to mean more because getting it was like a golden ticket, guaranteeing someone who got it at least a petit-bourgeois lifestyle. The thing is, there are only so many slots in corporate America for this kind of employment. That number is getting smaller too. You could hand every man, woman, and child in America a BS and it wouldn't change this in the slightest.
What has happened instead, for college to preserve its role as the sorting mechanism/preservation of class advantage is what I like to call degree inflation and/or an elite formed within degrees themselves. Now a BS or BA isn't enough, one needs an Master's or PhD to really be distinguished. Now a degree from just any institution won't do, it has to be an Ivy or a Tier 1 school. Until we learn to think realistically about what higher education is as an institution little or nothing will change.
Any credential is worthless if everybody has it. All information depends on contrast. It's impossible for everybody to "stand out" from the masses. The more people have college degrees the less value a college degree has.
sid_finster June 26, 2015 at 5:49 pm
When I was half-grown, I heard it said that religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, in that no one believes in God anymore, at least not enough for it to change actual behavior.
Instead, buying on credit is the opiate of the masses.
MaroonBulldog June 26, 2015 at 6:58 pm
My nephew asked me to help him with his college introductory courses in macroeconomics and accounting. I was disappointed to find out what was going on: no lectures by professors, no discussion sessions with teaching assistants; no team projects–just two automated correspondence courses, with automated computer graded problem sets objective tests – either multiple choice, fill in the blank with a number, or fill in the blank with a form answer. This from a public university that is charging tuition for attendance just as though it were really teaching something. All they're really certifying is that the student can perform exercises is correctly reporting what a couple of textbooks said about subjects of marginal relevance to his degree. My nephew understands exactly that this is going on, but still .
This is how 21st century America treats its young people: it takes people who are poor, in the sense that they have no assets, and makes them poorer, loading them up with student debt, which they incur in order to finance a falsely-so-called course of university study that can't be a good deal, even for the best students among them.
I am not suggesting the correspondence courses have no worth at all. But they do not have the worth that is being charged for them in this bait-and-switch exercise by Ed Business.
MaroonBulldog June 27, 2015 at 1:39 am
After further thought, I'd compare my nephew's two courses to on-line traffic school: Mechanized "learning" – forget it all as soon as the test is over – Critical thinking not required. Except for the kind of "test preparation" critical thinking that teaches one to spot and eliminate the obviously wrong choices in objective answers–that kind of thinking saves time and so is very helpful.
Not only is he paying full tuition to receive this treatment, but his family and mine are paying taxes to support it, too.
Very useful preparation for later life, where we can all expect to attend traffic school a few times. But no preparation for any activity of conceivable use or benefit to any other person.
Spring Texan June 28, 2015 at 8:07 am
Good story. What a horrible rip-off!
P. Fitzsimon June 27, 2015 at 12:26 pm
I read recently that the business establishment viewed the most important contribution of colleges was that they warehoused young people for four years to allow maturing.
Fred Grosso June 27, 2015 at 4:55 pm
Where are the young people in all this? Is anyone going to start organizing to change things? Any ideas? Any interest? Are we going to have some frustrated, emotional person attempt to kill a university president once every ten years? Then education can appeal for support from the government to beef up security. Meanwhile the same old practices will prevail and the rich get richer and the rest of us get screwed.
Come on people step up.
Unorthodoxmarxist June 27, 2015 at 6:22 pm
The reason students accept this has to be the absolutely demobilized political culture of the United States combined with what college represents structurally to students from the middle classes: the only possibility – however remote – of achieving any kind of middle class income.
Really your choices in the United States are, in terms of jobs, to go into the military (and this is really for working class kids, Southern families with a military history and college-educated officer-class material) or to go to college.
The rest, who have no interest in the military, attend college, much like those who wanted to achieve despite of their class background went into the priesthood in the medieval period. There hasn't been a revolt due to the lack of any idea it could function differently and that American families are still somehow willing to pay the exorbitant rates to give their children a piece of paper that still enables them to claim middle class status though fewer and fewer find jobs. $100k in debt seems preferable to no job prospects at all.
Colleges have become a way for the ruling class to launder money into supposed non-profits and use endowments to purchase stocks, bonds, and real estate. College administrators and their lackeys (the extended school bureaucracy) are propping up another part of the financial sector – just take a look at Harvard's $30+ billion endowment, or Yale's $17 billion – these are just the top of a very large heap. They're all deep into the financial sector. Professors and students are simply there as an excuse for the alumni money machine and real estate scams to keep running, but there's less and less of a reason for them to employ professors, and I say this as a PhD with ten years of teaching experience who has seen the market dry up even more than it was when I entered grad school in the early 2000s.
A Real Black Person purple monkey dishwasher June 28, 2015 at 9:13 pm
"Colleges have become a way for the ruling class to launder money into supposed non-profits and use endowments to purchase stocks, bonds, and real estate. "
Unorthodoxmarxist, I thought I was the only person who was coming to that conclusion. I think there's data out there that could support our thesis that college tuition inflation may be affecting real estate prices. After all, justification a college grad gave to someone who was questioning the value of a college degree was that by obtaining a "a degree" and a professional job, an adult could afford to buy a home in major metropolitan hubs. I'm not sure if he was that ignorant, (business majors, despite the math requirement are highly ideological people. They're no where near as objective as they like to portray themselves as) or if he hasn't been in contact with anyone with a degree trying to buy a home in a metropolitan area.
Anyways, if our thesis is true, then if home prices declined in 2009, then college tuition should have declined as well, but it didn't at most trustworthy schools. Prospective students kept lining up to pay more for education that many insiders believe is "getting worse" because of widespread propaganda and a lack of alternatives, especially for "middle class" women.
Pelham June 27, 2015 at 7:04 pm
It's hard to say, but there ought to be a power keg of students here primed to blow. And Bernie Sanders' proposal for free college could be the fuse.
But first he'd have the light the fuse, and maybe he can. He's getting huge audiences and a lot of interest these days. And here's a timely issue. What would happen if Sanders toured colleges and called for an angry, mass and extended student strike across the country to launch on a certain date this fall or next spring to protest these obscene tuitions and maybe call for something else concrete, like a maximum ratio of administrators to faculty for colleges to receive accreditation?
It could ignite not only a long-overdue movement on campuses but also give a big boost to his campaign. He'd have millions of motivated and even furious students on his side as well as a lot of motivated and furious parents of students (my wife and I would be among them) - and these are just the types of people likely to get out and vote in the primaries and general election.
Sanders' consistent message about the middle class is a strong one. But here's a solid, specific but very wide-ranging issue that could bring that message into very sharp relief and really get a broad class of politically engaged people fired up.
I'm not one of those who think Sanders can't win but applaud his candidacy because it will nudge Hillary Clinton. I don't give a fig about Clinton. I think there's a real chance Sanders can win not just the nomination but also the presidency. This country is primed for a sharp political turn. Sanders could well be the right man in the right place and time. And this glaring and ongoing tuition ripoff that EVERYONE agrees on could be the single issue that puts him front-and-center rather than on the sidelines.
Rosario June 28, 2015 at 1:18 am
I finished graduate school about three years ago. During the pre-graduate terms that I paid out of pocket (2005-2009) I saw a near 70 percent increase in tuition (look up KY college tuition 1987-2009 for proof).
Straight bullshit, but remember our school was just following the national (Neoliberal) model.
Though, realize that I was 19-23 years old. Very immature (still immature) and feeling forces beyond my control. I did not protest out of a) fear [?] (I don't know, maybe, just threw that in there) b) the sheepskin be the path to salvation (include social/cultural pressures from parent, etc.).
I was more affected by b). This is the incredible power of our current Capitalist culture. It trains us well. We are always speaking its language, as if a Classic. Appraising its world through its values.
I wished to protest (i.e. Occupy, etc.) but to which master? All of its targets are post modern, all of it, to me, nonsense, and, because of this undead (unable to be destroyed). This coming from a young man, as I said, still immature, though I fear this misdirection, and alienation is affecting us all.
John June 28, 2015 at 10:42 am
NYU can gouge away. It's filled with Chinese students (spies) who pay full tuition.
Feb 22, 2017 | econospeak.blogspot.com
Sandwichman -> Sandwichman ... February 24, 2017 at 08:36 AM
John Kenneth Galbraith, from "The Great Crash 1929":
"In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.)
At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in – or more precisely not in – the country's business and banks.
This inventory – it should perhaps be called the bezzle – amounts at any moment to many millions [trillions!] of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle.
In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly.
In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks."
Sanwichman, February 24, 2017 at 05:24 AM
For nearly a half a century, from 1947 to 1996, real GDP and real Net Worth of Households and Non-profit Organizations (in 2009 dollars) both increased at a compound annual rate of a bit over 3.5%. GDP growth, in fact, was just a smidgen faster -- 0.016% -- than growth of Net Household Worth.
From 1996 to 2015, GDP grew at a compound annual rate of 2.3% while Net Worth increased at the rate of 3.6%....
-- Sanwichman
anne -> anne... February 24, 2017 at 05:25 AM
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=cOU6
January 15, 2017
Gross Domestic Product and Net Worth for Households & Nonprofit Organizations, 1952-2016
(Indexed to 1952)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=cPq1
January 15, 2017
Gross Domestic Product and Net Worth for Households & Nonprofit Organizations, 1992-2016
(Indexed to 1992)
anne -> Sandwichman ... February 24, 2017 at 03:35 PM
The real home price index extends from 1890. From 1890 to 1996, the index increased slightly faster than inflation so that the index was 100 in 1890 and 113 in 1996. However from 1996 the index advanced to levels far beyond any previously experienced, reaching a high above 194 in 2006. Previously the index high had been just above 130.
Though the index fell from 2006, the level in 2016 is above 161, a level only reached when the housing bubble had formed in late 2003-early 2004.
Real home prices are again strikingly high:
http://www.econ.yale.edu/~shiller/data.htm Reply Friday, February 24, 2017 at 03:34 PM anne -> Sandwichman ... February 24, 2017
Valuation
The Shiller 10-year price-earnings ratio is currently 29.34, so the inverse or the earnings rate is 3.41%. The dividend yield is 1.93. So an expected yearly return over the coming 10 years would be 3.41 + 1.93 or 5.34% provided the price-earnings ratio stays the same and before investment costs.
Against the 5.34% yearly expected return on stock over the coming 10 years, the current 10-year Treasury bond yield is 2.32%.
The risk premium for stocks is 5.34 - 2.32 or 3.02%:
anne -> anne..., February 24, 2017 at 05:36 AM
What the robot-productivity paradox is puzzles me, other than since 2005 for all the focus on the productivity of robots and on robots replacing labor there has been a dramatic, broad-spread slowing in productivity growth.
However what the changing relationship between the growth of GDP and net worth since 1996 show, is that asset valuations have been increasing relative to GDP. Valuations of stocks and homes are at sustained levels that are higher than at any time in the last 120 years. Bear markets in stocks and home prices have still left asset valuations at historically high levels. I have no idea why this should be.
Sandwichman -> anne... February 24, 2017 at 08:34 AM
The paradox is that productivity statistics can't tell us anything about the effects of robots on employment because both the numerator and the denominator are distorted by the effects of colossal Ponzi bubbles.
John Kenneth Galbraith used to call it "the bezzle." It is "that increment to wealth that occurs during the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." The current size of the gross national bezzle (GNB) is approximately $24 trillion.
Ponzilocks and the Twenty-Four Trillion Dollar Question
http://econospeak.blogspot.ca/2017/02/ponzilocks-and-twenty-four-trillion.html
Twenty-three and a half trillion, actually. But what's a few hundred billion? Here today, gone tomorrow, as they say.
At the beginning of 2007, net worth of households and non-profit organizations exceeded its 1947-1996 historical average, relative to GDP, by some $16 trillion. It took 24 months to wipe out eighty percent, or $13 trillion, of that colossal but ephemeral slush fund. In mid-2016, net worth stood at a multiple of 4.83 times GDP, compared with the multiple of 4.72 on the eve of the Great Unworthing.
When I look at the ragged end of the chart I posted yesterday, it screams "Ponzi!" "Ponzi!" "Ponz..."
To make a long story short, let's think of wealth as capital. The value of capital is determined by the present value of an expected future income stream. The value of capital fluctuates with changing expectations but when the nominal value of capital diverges persistently and significantly from net revenues, something's got to give. Either economic growth is going to suddenly gush forth "like nobody has ever seen before" or net worth is going to have to come back down to earth.
Somewhere between 20 and 30 TRILLION dollars of net worth will evaporate within the span of perhaps two years.
When will that happen? Who knows? There is one notable regularity in the data, though -- the one that screams "Ponzi!"
When the net worth bubble stops going up...
...it goes down.
Nov 15, 2017 | www.nakedcapitalism.com
Alex Azar: Can There Be Uglier Scenarios than the Revolving Door? Posted on November 15, 2017 by Lambert Strether By Lambert Strether
Clearly, Alex Azar, nominated yesterday for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services by the Trump Administration, exemplifies the case of the "revolving door," through which Flexians slither on their way to (or from) positions of public trust. Roy Poses ( cross-posted at NC ) wrote, when Azar was only Acting Secretary:
Last week we noted that Mr Trump famously promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Last week, despite his previous pledges to not appoint lobbyists to powerful positions, he appointed a lobbyist to be acting DHHS Secretary. This week he is apparently strongly considering Mr Alex Azar, a pharmaceutical executive to be permanent DHHS Secretary, even though the FDA, part of DHHS, has direct regulatory authority over the pharmaceutical industry, and many other DHHS policies strongly affect the pharmaceutical industry. (By the way, Mr Azar was also in charge of one lobbying effort.)
So should Mr Azar be confirmed as Secretary of DHHS, the fox guarding the hen house appears to be a reasonable analogy.
Moreover, several serious legal cases involving bad behavior by his company, and multiple other instances of apparently unethical behavior occurred on Mr Azar’s watch at Eli Lilly. So the fox might be not the most reputable member of the species.
So you know the drill…. The revolving door is a species of conflict of interest . Worse, some experts have suggested that the revolving door is in fact corruption. As we noted here , the experts from the distinguished European anti-corruption group U4 wrote ,
The literature makes clear that the revolving door process is a source of valuable political connections for private firms. But it generates corruption risks and has strong distortionary effects on the economy , especially when this power is concentrated within a few firms.
The ongoing parade of people transiting the revolving door from industry to the Trump administration once again suggests how the revolving door may enable certain of those with private vested interests to have excess influence, way beyond that of ordinary citizens, on how the government works, and that the country is still increasingly being run by a cozy group of insiders with ties to both government and industry. This has been termed crony capitalism.
Poses is, of course, correct. (Personally, I've contained my aghastitude on Azar, because I remember quite well how Liz Fowler transitioned from Wellpoint to being Max Baucus's chief of staff when ObamaCare was being drafted to a job in Big Pharma , and I remember quite well the deal with Big Pharma Obama cut, which eliminated the public option , not that the public option was anything other than a decreasingly gaudy "progressive" bauble in the first place.)
In this post, I'd like to add two additional factors to our consideration of Azar. The first: Democrat credentialism makes it hard for them to oppose Azar. The second: The real damage Azar could do is on the regulatory side.[1]
First, Democrat credentialism. Here is one effusive encomium on Azar. From USA Today, "Who is Alex Azar? Former drugmaker CEO and HHS official nominated to head agency" :
"I am glad to hear that you have worked hard, and brought fair-minded legal analysis to the department," Democratic Sen. Max Baucus said at Azar's last confirmation hearing.
And:
Andy Slavitt, who ran the Affordable Care Act and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services during the Obama administration, said he has reason to hope Azar would be a good secretary.
"He is familiar with the high quality of the HHS staff, has real-world experience enough to be pragmatic, and will hopefully avoid repeating the mistakes of his predecessor," Slavitt said.
So, if Democrats are saying Azar is "fair-minded" and "pragmatic" -- and heaven forfend that the word "corruption"[2] even be mentioned -- how do they oppose him, even he's viscerally opposed to everything Democrats supposedly stand for? (Democrats do this with judicial nominations, too.) Azar may be a fox, alright, but the chickens he's supposedly guarding are all clucking about how impeccable his qualifications are!
Second, let's briefly look at Azar's bio. Let me excerpt salient detail from USA Today :
1. Azar clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia .
2. Azar went to work for his mentor, Ken Starr , who was heading the independent counsel investigation into Bill and Hillary Clinton's Whitewater land deal.
3. Azar had a significant role in another major political controversy when the outcome of the 2000 presidential election hinged on a recount in Florida . Azar was on the Bush team of lawyers whose side ultimately prevailed [3]
For any Democrat with a memory, that bio provokes one of those "You shall know them by the trail of the dead" moments. And then there's this:
When Leavitt replaced Thompson in 2005 and Azar became his deputy, Leavitt delegated a lot of the rule-making process to Azar.
So, a liberal Democrat might classify Azar as a smooth-talking reactionary thug with a terrible record and the most vile mentors imaginable, and on top of it all, he's an effective bureaucratic fixer. What could the Trump Administration possibly see in such a person? Former (Republican) HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt explains:
"Understanding the administrative rule process in the circumstance we're in today could be extraordinarily important because a lot of the change in the health care system, given the fact that they've not succeeded legislatively, could come administratively."
We outlined the administration strategy on health care in "Trump Adminstration Doubles Down on Efforts to Crapify the Entire Health Care System (Unless You're Rich, of Course)" . There are three prongs:
1) Administratively, send ObamaCare into a death spiral by sabotaging it
2) Legislatively, gut Medicaid as part of the "tax refom" package in Congress
3) Through executive order, eliminate "essential health benefits" through "association health plans"
As a sidebar, it's interesting to see that although this do-list is strategically and ideologically coherent -- basically, your ability to access health care will be directly dependent on your ability to pay -- it's institutionally incoherent, a bizarre contraption screwed together out of legislation, regulations, and an Executive order. Of course, this incoherence mirrors to Rube Goldberg structure of ObamaCare itself, itself a bizarre contraption, especially when compared to the simple, rugged, and proven single payer system. ( Everything Obama did with regulations and executive orders, Trump can undo, with new regulations and new executive orders . We might compare ObamaCare to a child born with no immune system, that could only have survived within the liberal bubble within which it was created; in the real world, it's not surprising that it's succumbing to opportunistic infections.[2])
On #1, The administration has, despite its best efforts, not achieved a controlled flight into terrain with ObamaCare; enrollment is up. On #2, the administration and its Congressional allies are still dickering with tax reform. And on #3 . That looks looks like a job for Alex Azar, since both essential health benefits and association health plans are significantly affected by regulation.
So, yes, there are worse scenarios than the revolving door; it's what you leave behind you as the door revolves that matters. It would be lovely if there were a good old-fashioned confirmation battle over Azar, but, as I've pointed out, the Democrats have tied their own hands. Ideally, the Democrats would junk the Rube Goldberg device that is ObamaCare, rendering all of Azar's regulatory expertise null and void, but that doesn't seem likely, given that they seem to be doing everything possible to avoid serious discussion of policy in 2018 and 2020.
NOTES
[1] I'm leaving aside what will no doubt be the 2018 or even 2020 issue of drug prices, since for me that's subsumed under the issue of single payer. If we look only at Azar's history in business, real price decreases seem unlikely. Business Insider :
Over the 10-year period when Azar was at Lilly, the price of insulin notched a three-fold increase. It wasn't just Lilly's insulin product, called Humalog. The price of a rival made by Novo Nordisk has also climbed, with the two rising in such lockstep that you can barely see both trend lines below.
The gains came despite the fact that the insulin, which as a medication has an almost-century-long history, hasn't really changed since it was first approved.
Nice business to be in, eh? Here's that chart:
It's almost like Lilly (Azar's firm) and Novo Nordisk are working together, isn't it?
[2] Anyhow, as of the 2016 Clinton campaign , the Democrat standard -- not that of Poses, nor mine -- is that if there's no quid pro quo, there's no corruption.
[3] And, curiously, "[HHS head Tommy] Thompson said HHS was in the eye of the storm after the 2001 terrorist attacks, and Azar had an important role in responding to the resulting public health challenges, as well as the subsequent anthrax attacks "
MedicalQuack , November 15, 2017 at 10:31 am
diptherio , November 15, 2017 at 11:25 amOh please, stop quoting Andy Slavitt, the United Healthcare Ingenix algo man. That guy is the biggest crook that made his money early on with RX discounts with his company that he and Senator Warren's daughter, Amelia sold to United Healthcare. He's out there trying to do his own reputation restore routine. Go back to 2009 and read about the short paying of MDs by Ingenix, which is now Optum Insights, he was the CEO and remember it was just around 3 years ago or so he sat there quarterly with United CEO Hemsley at those quarterly meetings. Look him up, wants 40k to speak and he puts the perception out there he does this for free, not so.
a different chris , November 15, 2017 at 2:01 pmI think you're missing the context. Lambert is quoting him by way of showing that the sleazy establishment types are just fine with him. Thanks for the extra background on that particular swamp-dweller, though.
petal , November 15, 2017 at 12:52 pmNot just the context, it's a quote in a quote. Does make me think Slavitt must be a real piece of work to send MQ so far off his rails
sgt_doom , November 15, 2017 at 1:21 pmAlex Azar is a Dartmouth grad (Gov't & Economics '88) just like Jeff Immelt (Applied Math & Economics '78). So much damage to society from such a small department!
Jen , November 15, 2017 at 7:56 pmNice one, petal !!!
Really, all I need to know about the Trumpster Administration:
From Rothschild to . . . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilbur_Ross
Since 2014, Ross has been the vice-chairman of the board of Bank of Cyprus PCL, the largest bank in Cyprus.
He served under U.S. President Bill Clinton on the board of the U.S.-Russia Investment Fund. Later, under New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Ross served as the Mayor's privatization advisor.
jo6pac , November 15, 2017 at 2:13 pmOr from a "small liberal arts college" (which is a university in all but name, because alumni).
Tim Geitner ('82 – Goverment)
Hank Paulson ('68 – English)Alfred , November 15, 2017 at 2:53 pmWell it's never ending game in the beltway and we serfs aren't in it.
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/11/15/trump-adds-to-washingtons-swamp/
I don't believe that the President's "swamp" ever consisted of crooked officials, lobbyists, and cronies I think it has always consisted of those regulators who tried sincerely to defend public interests.
It was in the sticky work of those good bureaucrats that the projects of capitalists and speculators bogged down. It is against their efforts that the pickup-driving cohort of Trump_vs_deep_state (with their Gadsden flag decals) relentlessly rails.
Trump has made much progress in draining the regulatory swamp (if indeed that is the right way to identify it), and no doubt will make considerably more as time wears on, leaving America high and dry. The kind of prevaricator Trump is may simply be the one who fails to define his terms.
Henry Moon Pie , November 15, 2017 at 4:13 pm
I think we've moved past the revolving door. We hear members of the United States Senate publicly voice their concerns about what will happen if they fail to do their employers' bidding (and I'm not talking about "the public" here). In the bureaucracy, political appointees keep accruing more and more power even as they make it clearer and clearer that they work for "the donors" and not the people. Nowhere is this more true than the locus through which passes most of the money: the Pentagon. The fact that these beribboned heroes are, in fact, setting war policy on their own makes the knowledge that they serve Raytheon and Exxon rather than Americans very, very troubling.
I suspect Azar's perception is that he is just moving from one post to another within the same company.
Watt4Bob , November 15, 2017 at 5:28 pm
Larry , November 15, 2017 at 8:01 pmPerfect cartoon over at Truthout
I'm amazed there is enough private security available on this planet to keep these guys safe.
Big pharma indeed has so much defense from the supposed left. It combines their faith in technological progress, elite institutions, and tugs on the heart strings with technology that can save people from a fate of ill health or premature death. Of course, the aspect of the laws being written to line the pockets of corrupt executives is glossed over. While drug prices and medical costs spiral ever higher, our overall longevity and national health in the US declines. That speaks volumes about what Democrats really care about.