Friday, October 28, 2011

No Place for Small Business Growth

The Dow jumped 162 points yesterday. Up, down...up, down...when will it stop?

Never. That’s what prices do. They go up and they go down.

Discovering...discovering...the markets will never cease discovering...

And the end of all their discoveries will be, to return to the place where they began, and to know it for the first time...
Poetry! Yes, dear reader, poets are probably better able to tell you what is going on in the world than economists. Today’s economists are tied to their worn-out, crack-pot theories. They won’t give them up...even though they do not work.

Poets at least are on the right track...probing deep into the soft, easily corrupted tissue of the human heart.

We’ll come back to that in a moment. First, we would like to tell you why unemployment is so high. Yes, dear reader, the pieces of the puzzle are coming together.

Why is unemployment so high?

Well, who creates jobs? Small businesses.

Big businesses cut jobs. That is how they maintain profit margins so they can pay bonuses to their over-paid managers.

Small businesses...growing businesses...businesses that are adding value and building wealth...create new jobs.

Why so few new jobs now? Because more and more money — capital allocation decisions — are in the hands of the feds. The feds always favor existing businesses...big businesses that make campaign contributions and whose lobbyists take them to lunch. They never favor small start-ups. The start-ups don’t have any money...or any lobbyists. The start-ups have no political power.

The feds favor big businesses in direct, obvious ways — such as tax credits, bailouts and government contracts. They also favor big businesses by making it hard for the start-ups to compete with them.

Let’s just say, dear reader, that you wanted to start a new kind of bank. You saw that the big banks are ripping off their clients...losing money...and getting bailed out by the feds. So, you figure you’ll do to the banks what Napster did to the music business or Amazon did to the book business. After all, moving money around is just an electronic, digital process. It should be dirt cheap to run a bank. You could even create a much better way for customers to hold their money. You could allow them to choose whatever currency they would like...or they could hold their cash in gold...just with a few clicks on a computer keyboard. You could set it up so no customer would ever lose money...because his account would be backed by, say, 100% physical gold. And you could cut credit card transactions and banking fees down to a fraction of what they cost today.

And you know what else? You could end inflation. And end the worry about choosing currencies...or hedging against one currency or another. You could create your own gold-backed currency!

Heck, it’s all information. A few computers. A few programmers. You could revolutionize the banking business and send Bank of America into bankruptcy even faster than it is going on its own.

Do you think you could do that, dear reader? Well, the answer is no. You can’t. Because the regulators — put in place with the conniving cooperation of the banking industry — would stop you. Otherwise, some enterprising entrepreneur would have wreaked creative destruction on the banking industry years ago. And the dinosaur banks that remained would have been wiped out in the crisis of ’07- ’09.

Instead, the feds came to the rescue of the big banks. The start-ups were shut down by the regulators. And the new jobs never happened.

That’s just banking...an obvious example. But in every industry the story is about the same. Existing businesses colluded with the feds to set up barriers to entry and to absorb savings, which could otherwise be used to start small businesses. The US government runs a deficit that is greater than the total savings of the nation. It decides where these resources go. And one place they never go is to businesses that haven’t been created yet.

Government always favors the past. It is always reactionary. It is always backward looking...trying to protect industries that were developed a long time ago. It always tends toward “zombieism,” in other words...

Many dear readers probably thought our focus on ‘zombies’ was a joke. But we’re as serious as we are about anything. And the more we look at what is going on in the US economy, the more convinced we are that zombies are behind it.

Zombieism refers to a tendency of things to become paralyzed and parasitic. When anything ages it becomes less adaptable, less flexible, more ‘stuck in its ways.’

You know the expression: ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’
That’s partly because the old dog is tired and doesn’t want to learn any new tricks. And it’s partly because he doesn’t need to. Old dogs just lie around. They eat, but they don’t hunt. Their joints are stiff. Their ambitions are few. They’ve figured out how to get the bone without much effort.

Likewise, old people often distrust anything new. They’ve seen that most new things don’t work out very well.

And they often become parasitic. They eat. But they don’t produce. It’s just natural. Often, old people mimic the grave before crawling into it. They don’t move. They don’t think. They shuffle around...like zombies.

Now, magnify these natural tendencies onto a whole economy, a whole society, a whole nation. The US has been in business for nearly 250 years. Is it any wonder it is a little fusty?

But today, instead of explaining the General Theory of Zombieism in detail, we are going to begin by asking you some questions, dear reader.

How come university tuition rose more than 8% last year, when most prices rose only half as much?

How come so few new jobs are created...in a society where so many intelligent, well-educated people are looking for work?

How come health care costs go up year after year — like education expenses — at twice the rate of the CPI...and people are no healthier?

How come the government now consumes more than $41 out of every $100 of national output...making it by far the largest allocator of capital in the world — when it is supposed to be a free enterprise system?
How come the US government — which is supposed to be the best system that 300 million smart people can come up with — is actually a system that no sane person could possibly want?

All those questions have the same answer. The whole system has become zombified...taken over by unproductive, parasitic tendencies.

More to come...

Regards,

Bill Bonner,
for The Daily Reckoning

Truisms of a Financial Crisis

By Bill Bonner

So much information and so many ideas come to us daily in the financial press. We’re able to fill up our trash basket in just minutes

In The Financial Times, for example, Larry Summers recently offered a solution to America’s housing debt problem. And in The Herald Tribune our favorite comedian, Thomas L. Friedman, tells us about the next Internet revolution and what a wonderful world it will create.

Meanwhile, stocks appear to be on the march again. The Dow is up over 4% for the week. And oil is back over $90 per barrel.

Once again, ‘recovery’ hopes are building. The Europeans just have to sort out their debt mess. And Americans too!

And that should be easy. There are so many smart people on the job!

In Europe, Monsieur Sarkozy and Frau Merkel — not to mention an army of technicians, bankers and delusional incompetents — are finding ways to solve Europe’s debt crisis. How? By adding more leverage...debt...and confusion. To simplify, today’s bad debt will be guaranteed by tomorrow’s bad debt. The authorities are just hoping that between today and tomorrow is sufficient time for them to get away. It may be a bigger problem, they say to themselves, but at least it will be someone else’s problem.

And who knows, maybe Mr. Friedman will be right. He’s wrong with such conviction and such regularity that there is bound to come the time when he is right by accident. Now he tells us he sees another ‘tech revolution’ coming, this one based on ‘the cloud’ and the social media. Surely this one is going to make us all rich...or make the world a better place...whichever comes first.

He hardly mentions the last tech revolution, which he also thought would make us all rich. It did nothing of the sort, of course. Against all odds, the last decade bucked the course of 300 years of history. With the help of the new technology — at their fingertips — Americans got poorer!

But that’s a long story.
So, let’s turn to Mr. Summers. He tells us that the problem with the US economy is that people have lost too much money on their houses. And if house prices sink further there is little chance that the economy can get out of its present low-growth slump.

Right so far. But what to do about it?

The man with all the answers steps boldly forward and proposes to make a bad situation worse. How would he address the problem of too much mortgage debt? By increasing the amount of mortgage debt!

“It is a central irony of financial crisis that while it is caused by too much confidence, too much borrowing and lending, and too much spending, it can only be resolved with more confidence, more borrowing and lending, and more spending.”

That may seem stupid to you and other sensible mortals, dear readers. But Mr. Summers sups with the gods, where the rules that cover the rest of us don’t apply. He says the problem with public policy is its “inability to appreciate this truism.”

The real truism is that Larry Summers has never understood what is going on. Nor will he. His whole career is based on not understanding. It’s served him well so far; he’ll stick with it.

The idea behind Mr. Summers’ solution is that you subsidize what doesn’t work; you reward failure. So, instead of abolishing Fannie and Freddie, for example, you give them more money...

Failed mortgage lending is a big drag on the economy. So, you lend more!

You could apply the same logic to other failed industries — such as education. Education spending has soared over the last 40 years. But test scores show there has been no payoff...no improvement at all.
One of the ways the feds shift resources to this zombie sector is with student loans. Bloomberg has the report:

William Prince, of Rosenberg, Texas, knows just how inescapable student loans can be. The 52-year-old father of two started paying off $51,000 in college debt 15 years ago and now owes $57,000. “I don’t expect to pay these loans off in my lifetime,” he says. Prince, a criminal justice major who works in private security, had to defer payments during three bouts of unemployment, and the accumulated interest left him deeper in debt.

Americans now owe about $950 billion in student loans — more than their total credit-card debt. The weight of those IOUs is a frequent refrain for Occupy Wall Street protestors and their online supporters. On the “We Are the 99 Percent” Tumblr blog, which features hundreds of pictures of people holding handwritten signs describing their desperate financial situations, student loan concerns exceed those about children, unemployment, and health care, according to an analysis by Mike Konczal, a fellow with the nonprofit Roosevelt Institute.

Desperation may have something to do with that outcry. Two out of five Americans with federal student debt can’t make monthly payments and either defer, default or are delinquent, according to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Fastweb.com, a free scholarship-matching service, and FinAid.org, a source of student financial aid information...
We’ll save Larry Summers some thinking. What to do about this trillion-dollar weight of student debt? Lend the students more money!


Tuesday, October 25, 2011

The Class War Has Begun


By Frank Rich, NY Times Magazine

During the death throes of Herbert Hoover’s presidency in June 1932, desperate bands of men traveled to Washington and set up camp within view of the Capitol. The first contingent journeyed all the way from Portland, Oregon, but others soon converged from all over alone, in groups, with families until their main Hooverville on the Anacostia River’s fetid mudflats swelled to a population as high as 20,000. The men, World War I veterans who could not find jobs, became known as the Bonus Army for the modest government bonus they were owed for their service. Under a law passed in 1924, they had been awarded roughly $1,000 each, to be collected in 1945 or at death, whichever came first. But they didn’t want to wait any longer for their pre New Deal entitlement especially given that Congress had bailed out big business with the creation of a Reconstruction Finance Corporation earlier in its session. Father Charles Coughlin, the populist Radio Priest who became a phenomenon for railing against greedy bankers and financiers, framed Washington’s double standard this way: If the government can pay $2 billion to the bankers and the railroads, why cannot it pay the $2 billion to the soldiers?

The echoes of our own Great Recession do not end there. Both parties were alarmed by this motley assemblage and its political rallies; the Secret Service infiltrated its ranks to root out radicals. But a good Communist was hard to find. The men were mostly middle-class, patriotic Americans. They kept their improvised hovels clean and maintained small gardens. Even so, good behavior by the Bonus Army did not prevent the U.S. Army’s hotheaded chief of staff, General Douglas MacArthur, from summoning an overwhelming force to evict it from Pennsylvania Avenue late that July. After assaulting the veterans and thousands of onlookers with tear gas, MacArthur’s troops crossed the bridge and burned down the encampment. The general had acted against Hoover’s wishes, but the president expressed satisfaction afterward that the government had dispatched a mob albeit at the cost of killing two of the demonstrators. The public had another take. When graphic newsreels of the riotous mêlée fanned out to the nation’s movie theaters, audiences booed MacArthur and his troops, not the men down on their luck. Even the mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean, the owner of the Hope diamond and wife of the proprietor of the Washington Post, professed solidarity with the mob that had occupied the nation’s capital.

The Great Depression was then nearly three years old, with FDR still in the wings and some of the worst deprivation and unrest yet to come. Three years after our own crash, we do not have the benefit of historical omniscience to know where 2011 is on the time line of America’s deepest bout of economic distress since that era. (The White House, you may recall, rolled out recovery summer sixteen months ago.) We don’t know if our current president will end up being viewed more like Hoover or FDR. We don’t know whether Occupy Wall Street and its proliferating satellites will spiral into larger and more violent confrontations, disperse in cold weather, prove a footnote to our narrative, or be the seeds of something big.

What’s as intriguing as Occupy Wall Street itself is that once again our Establishment, left, right, and center, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke. Maybe it’s just human nature and the power of denial, or maybe it’s a stubborn strain of all-American optimism, but at each aftershock since the fall of Lehman Brothers, those at the top have preferred not to see what they didn’t want to see. And so for the first three weeks, the protests were alternately ignored, patronized, dismissed, and insulted by politicians and the mainstream news media as a neo-Woodstock for wannabe collegiate rebels without a causeand not just in Fox-land. CNN’s new prime-time hopeful, Erin Burnett, ridiculed the protesters as bongo-playing know-nothings; a dispatch in The New Republic called them an unfocused rabble of ragtag discontents. Those who did express sympathy for Occupy Wall Street tended to pat it on the head before going on to fault it for being leaderless, disorganized, and inchoate in its agenda.

Despite such dismissals, the movement, abetted by made-for-YouTube confrontations with police, started to connect with the mass public much as the Bonus Army did with a newsreel audience. The week after a Wall Street Journal editorial claimed that no one seems to care very much about the collection of ne’er-do-wells congregating in Zuccotti Park, the paper released its own poll, in collaboration with NBC News, finding that 37 percent of Americans supported the protesters, 25 percent had no opinion, and just 18 percent opposed them. The approval numbers for Occupy Wall Street published in Time and Reuters were even higher—hitting 54 percent in Time. Apparently some of those dopey kids, staggering under student loans and bereft of job prospects, have lots of parents and friends of all ages who understand exactly what they’re talking about.

Coverage increased and politicians ran for cover. Mayor Bloomberg, who had initially (and preposterously) portrayed the occupiers as a threat to the financial industry’s lower-income service workers, gingerly observed that some unspecified people are very frustrated. Though the Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, waffled when asked if he had any sympathy for Occupy Wall Street, Barack Obama publicly acknowledged the demonstrators’ broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.* (If Bloomberg and Obama are both using frustration, you can be certain it is a focus-group-tested trope chosen not to frighten the presumed sensibilities of independents.) Mitt Romney, who had first called the protests dangerous,” executed another of his patented flip-flops to assert that he, too, identifies with America’s 99 percent, not the top one percent where he’s always dwelled. Boy, I understand how these people feel, he said. (Boy, do these people not believe him.) Even Eric Cantor, who’d described the protesters as mobs, started talking about what else? frustration.

These efforts to domesticate and contain the protests are unlikely to succeed. It is not frustration that’s roiling America but anger, the anger of a full-fledged class war. Try as polite company keeps trying to ignore it, that war has been building in this country and abroad for much of this decade and has been waged in earnest in America since the fall of 2008. But the crisp agenda demanded of Occupy Wall Street will not be forthcoming. The inchoateness of our particular class war is central to its meaning. America is not Tahrir Square or the riot-scarred precincts of North London, where everyone knows at birth who is in which class and why. We pride ourselves on being a classless” democracy. We abhor ideology. When Americans left and right, young and old, express anger at an overclass, they don’t necessarily agree about who’s on which side of that class divide. The often confusing fluidity of class definitions, especially in an America as polarized as ours is now, may make our home grown class war more volatile, not less.

The tea-party right finds the hippie-scented movement in lower Manhattan repellent, but it and Occupy Wall Street are two sides of the same coin. Take Back America, the initial tea-party battle cry, would work for those in Zuccotti Park as well. The disagreement is about which America needs to be taken back, and from whom.

Provoked by Obama’s ascent, the right was ahead of the class-war curve, with Sarah Palin sounding the charge when she stuck up for the real America against the elites during the 2008 campaign. The real America, as she defined it, was in small towns those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food. In other words: It is the middle class (or at least its white precincts) that fell behind while the rich got richer. The Über-class she and her angry followers would take to the guillotine, however, is not defined by its super-wealth. It is first and foremost exemplified by potentates in the federal government, especially the Ivy League cohort of Obama closely followed by the usual right-wing populist bogeymen, the pointy-headed experts in fancy universities and the mainstream-media royalty with their gotcha questions.

Palin may now have abdicated her position on the barricades, not least because she succumbed to the financial blandishments of the unreal America, but the zeal of her constituency has not faded a bit. The right’s angry class warriors constitute the vast majority of the GOP that roughly three- quarters of the party that seems determined to resist Romney no matter what. A Harvard-educated former Massachusetts governor, especially one who embraced the social engineering of health-care reform, inspires class anger from his own party to the same degree that his private-sector record as a leveraged-buyout tycoon provokes class anger from Democrats.

But while Romney is a class enemy liberals and conservatives can unite against, perhaps nothing has revealed how much the class warriors of the right and left of our time have in common than the national outpouring after Steve Jobs’s death. Indeed, the near-universal over-the-top emotional response more commensurate with a saintly religious or civic leader, not a sometimes bullying captain of industry brought Americans of all stripes together as few events have in recent memory.

Some on the right were baffled that the ostensible Marxists demonstrating in lower Manhattan would observe a moment of silence and assemble makeshift shrines for a top one-percenter like Jobs, whose expensive products were engineered for near-instant obsolescence and produced by Chinese laborers in factories with substandard health-and-safety records. For heaven’s sake, the guy didn’t even join Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in their Giving Pledge. There is perhaps no greater image of irony, wrote the conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, than that of anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-materialist extremists of the Occupy Wall Street movement paying tribute to Steve Jobs.

Yet those demonstrators who celebrated Jobs were not necessarily hypocrites at all and no more anti-capitalist than the Bonus Army of 1932. If you love your Mac and iPod, you can still despise CDOs and credit-default swaps. Jobs’s genius in the words of Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley marketing executive who worked with him early on was his ability to strip away the excess layers of business, design, and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained. The supposed genius of modern Wall Street is the exact reverse, piling on excess layers of business and innovation on ever thinner and more exotic creations until simple reality is distorted and obscured. Those in Palin’s real America may not be agitated about the economic 99-vs.-one percent inequality brought about by the rise of the financial sector in the past three decades, but, like class warriors of the left, they know that financial instruments wreaked havoc on their 401(k)s, homes, and jobs. The bottom line remains that Wall Street’s opaque inventions led directly to TARP, the taxpayers’ bank bailout that achieved the seemingly impossible feat of unifying the left and right in rage against government much as Jobs’s death achieved the equally surprising coup of unifying left and right in mourning a corporate god.

That bipartisan grief was arguably as much for the passing of a capitalist culture as for the man himself. Finance long ago supplanted visionary entrepreneurial careers like Jobs’s as the most desired calling among America’s top-tier university students, just as hedge-fund tycoons like John Paulson and Steve Cohen passed Jobs on the Forbes 400 list. Americans sense that something incalculable has been lost in this transformation that cannot be measured in dollars and cents.

There’s no handier way to track just how much American capitalism has changed since Apple’s divine, mid-�seventies birth in a garage than by following the corporate afterlife of the American icon most frequently invoked as Jobs’s antecedent in his obituaries, Thomas Alva Edison. Like Jobs, Edison wasn’t just a brilliant fount of technological breakthroughs but a businessman as well (albeit a less savvy one). He was the official founder of General Electric�known as Edison General Electric at its inception in 1890, before Edison was strong-armed into an early merger. G.E. was created to maximize the profits of his many inventions and businesses, Apple style. And like Apple, the company flourished as an exemplar of American capitalism at its most creative and productive, even in a downtime. During the Great Depression, it produced an astonishing array of Jobs-worthy �innovations�the first commercial fluorescent lamp, the first waste �Disposall,� the first night baseball game, and the first television network. This was the job-�creating, profit-making, America-�empowering corporate behemoth, spewing out refrigerators and jet engines, that would ultimately recruit Ronald Reagan as its television pitchman in the fifties.

But the G.E. born out of Edison’s genius and synergistic with Reagan’s brand of postwar jingoism is far from the G.E. of our time. Its once minor financial-services subsidiary, G.E. Capital, metastasized over the past 30 years in sync with the growth of the new Wall Street. In 1990, G.E. Capital accounted for just a quarter of G.E.’s overall profits, but by 2007, on the eve of the crash, it had gobbled up 55 percent of the bottom line. Its sophisticated gambling strategies, like those of the big banks it emulated, amounted to an ingenious get-rich-quick scheme for high-rollers until the bottom fell out, taking shareholders and employees, not to mention the country, down with it. G.E. Capital’s dependence on short-term credit was so grave that it forced G.E. to cut back its dividend for the first time since the thirties and to turn to Buffett for a $3 billion emergency cash infusion in the dark days of October 2008.

The cheerleader for ratcheting up that risk at G.E. was the CEO, Jeffrey Immelt. These days he heads the president’s ineffectual Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, despite his own corporation’s record of job-shedding in America and the revelation that G.E. paid no American taxes in 2010 (on more than $14 billion in profits, including $5.1 billion in the U.S.). Immelt is a Republican, but that didn’t prevent Palin this fall from calling G.E. �the poster child of corporate welfare and crony capitalism.� (Bill O’Reilly and Newt Gingrich joined this class-warfare chorus.) On this point, once again, there is no air between the right and Occupy Wall Street. And as both camps condemn Immelt, so they are also united in the conviction that the godfather of Obama’s economic team, Robert Rubin, is likewise a poster child for corporate welfare and crony capitalism. Rubin, whose useful cronies included his former protégés Geithner and Lawrence Summers, encouraged reckless greed and risk at Citigroup during the bubble much as Immelt did at G.E. Capital, ultimately requiring the taxpayers’ rescue of TARP.

Politicians in either party, of course, never use the term �class warfare� to describe what’s going on in America, unless it’s Republican leaders accusing Obama of waging it every time he even mildly asserts timeless liberal bromides about taxing the rich. Nor do most politicians want to talk about the depth of the crisis in present-day capitalism, since to acknowledge its scale would only dramatize how little they intend to do about it.

The whole system is screwed up, and it’s not all Wall Street’s fault�or remotely in the financial sector’s power alone to solve. As middle-class Americans have lost their jobs or watched their wages stagnate or decline while corporations pile up record profits, they’ve also seen CEOs far removed from Wall Street (at Hewlett-Packard and Yahoo most recently) walk away with rich settlements even after they’ve laid off workers en masse, mismanaged their companies, or wrecked them. But at least politicians pay lip service to the woes of the middle class. That America’s poverty rate has risen to its highest level since 1993 goes all but unmentioned by leaders in both parties. The poor, after all, don’t make campaign contributions and are unlikely to vote. And they have even less clout than usual now that Republican legislators and governors, fanning bogus fears of �voter fraud,� have mandated new, Jim Crow�style restrictions to scare away poor, elderly, and minority voters in fourteen states. In the Beltway bubble, even the local poor are out of sight and out of mind; with a 6.1 percent unemployment rate and a median income of $84,523 (versus $50,046 nationally), Washington is now the wealthiest metro area in the country and, according to Gallup, departs from all 50 states in believing by a majority that the economy is getting better.

Back in 1931, even Hoover worried that �timid people, black with despair� had �lost faith in the American system� and might be susceptible to the kind of revolutions that had become a spreading peril abroad. When Roosevelt took office, he had the confidence that his leadership could overcome that level of despair and head off radicals on the left or right. In 2011, the despair is again black, and faith in the system is shaky, but it would be hard to describe the atmosphere at Zuccotti Park or a tea-party rally as prerevolutionary. The anger of the class war across the spectrum seems fatalistic more than incendiary. No wonder. Everyone just assumes the fix is in for the highest bidder, no matter what. Take�please!�the latest bipartisan Beltway panacea: the congressional supercommittee charged by the president and GOP leaders to hammer out the deficit-reduction compromise they couldn’t do on their own. The Washington Post recently discovered that nearly 100 of the registered lobbyists no doubt charged with besieging the committee to protect the interests of the financial, defense, and health-care industries are former employees of its dozen members. Indeed, six of those members (three from each party) currently have former lobbyists on their staffs.

Elections are supposed to resolve conflicts in a great democracy, but our next one will not.

Just in time for election season, Obama has recovered his populist rhetoric (if not populism itself) and will say the right things about Wall Street, about that �frustration� out there, about the modest reforms of Dodd-Frank, and about millionaires who don’t pay their fair share of taxes. It’s not clear if anyone believes it, including him. Having been a bystander to history when the tea party harvested populist rage during the summer of 2009, he may have a tough time co-opting Occupy Wall Street now to plug the so-called enthusiasm gap in his base. There’s a serious danger that the anger could co-opt him instead. To pander to the swing state of North Carolina, the Democrats in their wisdom chose to hold their convention in a city best known as the headquarters of Bank of America, whose recent financial innovations include illegal robo-foreclosures and the $5 monthly fee on debit cards. Occupy Charlotte could be a far more telegenic show than the one happening inside the hall.

Despite all the chatter to the contrary, Obama is so far outdrawing all the GOP candidates combined in Wall Street contributions. His best hope is that that fact is blurred by either Romney, the plutocrat from central casting, or Rick Perry, a creature of lobbyists and pay-for-play government in Texas. Herman Cain’s as yet little-known corporate history would also prove problematic to Republicans: He’s not only an unabashed Alan Greenspan fan who was chairman of the Kansas City Fed but also served on the board of Aquila, an energy company that ended up paying a $10.5 million settlement for Enron-esque shenanigans. (Cain’s campaign manager hails from Americans for Prosperity, the Koch brothers’ political front.) Whatever else is to be said about Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Tim Pawlenty, and Ron Paul, they actually spent most of their pre-political careers in the aggrieved middle class. But they are all history in the presidential race, and perhaps were destined to be, given how big money plays its hand. You don’t have to like their views to find their earnest but misplaced faith in the free-market efficiency of the political system a bit poignant.

Elections are supposed to resolve conflicts in a great democracy, but our next one will not. The elites will face off against the elites to a standoff, and the issues animating the class war in both parties won’t even be on the table. The structural crises in our economy, our government, and our culture defy any of the glib solutions proposed by current Democrats or Republicans; the quixotic third-party movements being hatched by well-heeled do-gooders are vanity productions. The two powerful forces that extricated America from the Great Depression�the courageous leadership and reformist zeal of Roosevelt, the mobilization for World War II�are not on offer this time. Our class war will rage on without winners indefinitely, with all sides stewing in their own juices, until�when? No one knows. The reckoning with capitalism’s failures over the past three decades, both in America and the globe beyond, may well be on hold until the top one percent becomes persuaded that its own economic fate is tied to the other 99 percent’s. Which is to say things may have to get worse before they get better.

Over the short term, meanwhile, the Democratic Establishment is no doubt wishing that Occupy Wall Street will melt away with the winter snows, much as its Republican counterpart hopes that the leaderless tea party will wither if Romney nails down the nomination. But even in the unlikely event that these wishes come true, it is not likely to be the end of the story. Though the Bonus Army was driven out of Washington in the similarly fraught election year of 1932, the newsreels they left behind turned out to be previews of coming attractions for the long decade still to come.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

The 8% Solution



His new book, Panderer for Power: The True Story of How Alan Greenspan Enriched Wall Street and Left a Legacy of Recession, was published by McGraw-Hill in November 2009. He was Director of Asset Allocation Services at John Hancock Financial Services in Boston. In this capacity, he set investment policy and asset allocation for institutional pension plans.

The terminal stage of Dr. Frankenstein-style central banking is disgorging ridiculous claims of authority motivated by reckless efforts to retain control. One such pincer attack is the Federal Reserve’s purported 2% inflation target. Behind our very eyes, this fictional mandate is being raised, all the more reason that savers need to speculate, not a welcome prospect with both inflationary and deflationary influences expanding and bound to burst.

A certainty of this age (post-Western-Civilization) is the ease with which libertine policies escalate to fantastic proportions even as they are failing. The Federal Reserve mumbles its 2% inflation target while the “economic literature” has sown the garden for an 8% inflation rate, in the name of “price stability.”

To be more precise, “inflation” to the Federal Reserve is conveniently defined as the consumer price index – without including food and energy. This 2% or 8% target should be understood as a negative interest rate. The Federal Reserve will (through its current policy, although this will boomerang at some point) hold Treasury yields at zero-percent. It will target inflation at 2% to 20%.

In The Beginning, at least in this short narrative, a Harvard economist told a Senate committee the United States must accept a 2% inflation rate as the cost of prosperity. That was in 1957, a very good year to wrap such a career-advancing declaration inside a Cold War mandate. “Growth” would defeat the Soviet Union.

Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney Martin did not agree. On August 13, 1957, Martin warned that recent inflationary pressures had risen from a period of strong economic growth fostered by “‘imbalances in the economy’ in which ‘rising costs and prices mutually interact upon each other over time with a spiral effect.’ . . . The person most likely to be injured in the inflationary cycle was the ‘hardworking and thrifty…little man’ on fixed income who could protect neither his income nor the value of his savings.”

Martin was doomed to lose this battle and the media misunderstood hemorrhaging inflationary tendencies. Inflation was National Worry #1 when the business editor of the New York Times calmed his readers: “Luckily, the Government has the ability and the wisdom not to let inflation break into a gallop as it has happened recently in other countries.” That was in 1966.

President Richard Nixon held a farewell gala for Martin in 1970. The soon-to-be ex-Federal Reserve chairman sobered up the tipsy revelers when he removed the punch bowl during his valedictory speech: “I wish I could turn the bank over to Arthur Burns [the next Fed Chairman] as I would have liked. But we are in deep trouble. We are in the wildest inflation since the Civil War.”

Moving ahead, Professor Ben S. Bernanke wrote a book that was well received in the right circles: Inflation Targeting: Lessons from the International Experience (2001). One of his co-authors was Frederic Mishkin. Those in the know understand the implications of Mishkin’s cooperation. The book propagated the awful euphemisms (“the zero-bound” and “inflation targeting”) used to disguise their mandate to inflate. Rather, they could have simply stated: “Let’s ruin the dollar.”

Some economists took exception. Lee Hoskins, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland from 1987 to 1991, wrote: “Pundits, economists, and some Fed officials often talk about the fight against inflation or the battle against it or the need to contain it as if it is some preternatural event. The Fed does not have to battle or contain inflation, it creates inflation…. So when a Fed official says the goal for inflation should be 2 percent, he is explicitly choosing to create that rate of inflation.” (“Zero Inflation: Goal and Target,” 2005) Hoskins is not a regular on CNBC’s short list. (See “The Education Gap.”)

Federal Reserve policy of 2% inflation is a product of failure and verbal repetition. Bernanke’s Fed needs room to maneuver (“infinite bound”), and a wide fairway to compound its broadening failure, while not losing credibility. Thus, this fictional authority is repeated over and over. Current Federal Reserve Governor Janet Yellen: “This increase in core inflation was below the 2 percent rate that I and most of my fellow Fed policymakers on the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) consider an appropriate long-term price stability objective.”

Note the structure of Yellen’s statement. She hides the arbitrary (“consider an appropriate”) under legal cover (“price stability”). The Fed and its accomplices in the professorate train the public mind through such repetition.

Even with 2% inflation touted as a mark of price stability, higher figures are working their way into the public conscience. N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economics professor who consistently establishes new lows in personal integrity, wrote a column in the April 19, 2009, New York Times: “It May Be Time to go Negative.”

It should be remembered that Mankiw made his proposal because Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s grand theory was failing. In October 2011, we know it has failed. Bernanke’s foolish interpretation of the Great Depression has done nothing to halt the housing bust. It is far worse today than in 2009, and probably about to take another tumble. This was an inevitable consequence of the credit binge, of which Bernanke’s Fed has no understanding. We have paid a heavy price for this ignorance. Investment continues its drift towards short-term trading gains and not into industries that need long-term investment to prosper. The result: a country with an inflation-adjusted median income that is 6.7% below that of June 2009.

In his 2009 column, Mankiw wrote: “[T]here is a more prosaic way of obtaining negative interest rates: through inflation. Suppose that, looking ahead, the Fed commits itself to producing significant inflation. In this case, while nominal interest rates could remain at zero, real interest rates – interest rates measured in purchasing power – could become negative. Having the central bank embrace inflation would shock economists and Fed watchers who view price stability as the foremost goal of monetary policy. But there are worse things than inflation. Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, is the perfect person to make this commitment to higher inflation….” That’s enough. Mankiw consistently makes Eddie Haskell’s syrupy conversations with Ward Cleaver sound like General Patton’s misadventure with the hospitalized soldier.

Note that Mankiw was behind the times. He needed to justifying negative interest rates even though such a course is inconsistent with the Fed’s mandated goal of “price stability.” No insufferably pliant economist would make that mistake today – note Yellen, above.

It is obvious that Mankiw is vying to head the Fed, with such maneuvers as his recently announced post as Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s economic adviser. Romney has stated he will jettison Bernanke. (Romney’s other adviser is Glenn Hubbard – See: Inside Job) The resourceful Bill Black, author (The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry) and currently professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri – Kansas City recently quoted from a paper written by Mankiw in 1993: “[I]t would be irrational for operators of the savings and loans not to loot.”

Harvard economics professor Kenneth Rogoff, author of This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, told Bloomberg News on May 19, 2009: “I’m advocating 6 percent inflation for at least a couple of years.” Rogoff has not changed course, recently advocating 6% inflation in the Financial Times.

Mankiw was quoted in the same article as declining to “put a number on what inflation rate the Fed should shoot for, saying that the central bank has computer models that would be useful for determining that.” The “model” trick is the mental ghetto that permits fourth-rate economists to become Federal Reserve chairmen.

But Mankiw is on to something. Why pin yourself to a rate, when triple-digit inflation may be required to really ruin the country?

The following sequence is a lesson in how bureaucracies insinuate their failures into accepted policy.
Stanley Fischer, current Governor of the Bank of Israel, doctoral Ph.D. thesis adviser to Ben S. Bernanke and to Greg Mankiw (at MIT), with stops at every institution of impeccable prestige among the anointed (chief economist at the World Bank, vice chairman of Citigroup) professed in 1997 that: “The fundamental task of a central bank is to preserve the value of the currency.” That is the first sentence in “Maintaining Price Stability,” a paper published when Fischer was First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. Five paragraphs later (wasting no time) Fischer wrote: “Barro (1995) and Sarel (1996) do not find a clear negative relationship below 8 percent inflation…” That is, as long as it remains at 8 percent or below, inflation is not a burden to economic growth.

We can be sure the conclusion rested on the result of some computer model. Barro (1995) and Sarel (1996) cited as their authority Fischer (1993), which is noted later in Fischer (1997).
In 2001, IMF economic researchers Mohsin S. Khan and Abdelhak S. Senhadji wrote a staff paper “Threshold Effects in the Relationship between Inflation and Growth.” The authors declare “[F]irst identified by Fischer (1993)” [addressing inflation below an 8 percent rate], “inflation does not have a significant effect on growth, or it may even show a slightly positive effect.” Note the change from the (1997) model Fischer from whom they quote: from “do not find clear negative relationship below 8 percent inflation,” to “it [8% inflation] may even show a slightly positive effect.” This sequence was arranged by Sheehan (2011)

In 1978, Federal Reserve Governor Henry C. Wallich spoke before the graduating seniors at Fordham University. His topic was inflation. Wallich explained the loser is labor. “Inflation becomes a means of exploiting labor’s money illusion.”

His speech is interesting in a contemporary context. The Wall Street protestors, who are probably building igloos in front of the Nome, Alaska city hall by now, are on to something; or, it seems, some things; but they are diffusing their influence. One of the protestors’ tendencies leans towards a government solution. This is a barren tangent. A supersized government uses supersized banks to remain supersized.

Wallich told the Fordham students, that government is one of the winners in an inflation. From this Federal Reserve official: “It [inflation] allows the politician to make promises that cannot be met in real terms, because, as the government overspends trying to keep those promises, the value of those benefits shrinks.” This creates a “diminishing ability of households to provide privately for the future…. One may ask whether it is not an essential attribute of a civilized society to be able to make that kind of provision for the future.”

Wallich went on to emphasize “the increasing uncertainty in providing privately for the future pushes people who are seeking security toward the government.” If alive today, he would not be surprised the protestors are looking to the government for help. Wallich (1914-1988) grew up in Berlin and lived through what he warned against (1978).

Wallich added that inflation “creates a vacuum in the private sector into which the government moves.” He worried that the consequences of the inflation would be “a shift into the third dimension, away from democracy and toward authoritarianism.”

In Wallich’s Germany, Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) spoke at Nuremberg (1934):

“It is no sign of wise leadership to acquaint the nation with hard facts over night. Crises must be prepared for not only politically and economically, but also psychologically. Here propaganda has its place. It must prepare the way actively and educationally. Its task is to prepare the way for practical actions. It must follow these actions step by step, never losing sight of them. In a manner of speaking, it provides the background music. Such propaganda in the end miraculously makes the unpopular popular, enabling even a government’s most difficult decisions to secure the resolute support of the people. A government that uses it properly can do what is necessary without running the risk of losing the masses.”

Did QE2 Cause the (Present) Recession?

Randall Forsyth of Barron’s asks this rather intriguing question:

While the Fed mulls more ambitious plans to tell the public how it will steer the economy in the future, perhaps the monetary authorities should reflect on the results of their recent efforts. As notes long-time Fed watcher Lacy Hunt of Hoisington Investment Management in Austin, Texas, the unintended consequences of its policies have all but superseded their professed aims. For instance, QE2—the Fed’s purchase of $600 billion of Treasury securities completed in June—caused the current slowdown instead of giving the economy a boost, he writes in Hoisington’s Quarterly Review and Outlook. Real disposable income was lower in August than in December, in part because of the jump in commodity costs. “While rising equity values helped a few consumers, inflation in necessities, such as food and fuel, decimated real incomes for the average family. Thus, the emergent cyclical weakness that lies ahead can be directly related to the unintended consequences of quantitative easing,” Hunt says.
The Fed’s current policy of attempting to flatten the yield curve by buying long-term Treasury securities and offsetting it with sales of shorter-dated paper—Operation Twist 2.0, after a similar gambit in the early 1960s—also could backfire. The FOMC minutes said the policy was expected “to help make broader financial conditions more accommodative.” Translated from Fed speak, lower long-term rates will make borrowers more willing to borrow while lenders will be more eager to lend.
But, Hunt points out, ultra-low interest rates could have the opposite effect. To earn a profit, banks have to cover their costs, from payroll, overhead, taxes and “elevated” fees to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Then they have to earn a spread to compensate for the risk the borrower could default. At very low interest rates, there aren’t enough basis points left to lend profitably. The historical precedent is Japan, where banks would rather buy government bonds than make loans . . .”
Pretty ugly stuff, and I fear all too accurate.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Occupy Wall Street Must Occupy Congress, AG offices

By Barry Ritholtz,

There is an unfocused financial rage in the United States.

It was born in the late 1990s on an unholy trinity of accounting swindles, the dotcom collapse and analyst scandals. It grew on a housing boom and bust that created 5 million (and counting) foreclosures, leaving more than a quarter of bank financed homes worth less than their mortgages. It matured on a growing wealth disparity that eviscerated the middle class, and brought back the plutocracy of the 1920s. It reached its peak with the bailout of reckless bankers, who were rewarded for their irresponsibility with the greatest wealth transfer in human history.

And now, it seems to be finding a new voice with the movement known as Occupy Wall Street (OWS).

Like the Tea Party, OWS began as a loose collection of people who knew they were getting a raw economic deal — but were unsure as to precisely why. They both started with a surge of grassroots politics. Both tapped into the national zeitgeist, feeding on an unfocused economic angst. When the Tea Party first burst onto the national stage, I had high hopes they might address some of the persistent economic problems our two-party political system was ignoring. But the Tea Party tilted to the right, shifting from the economic to the partisan. Obamacare and taxes – neither of which were responsible for a laundry list of economic woes facing the nation – became their focus.

That move created a vacuum. Since then, we have been waiting for a group of angry Americans to fill the void. It did not look like OWS was going to be the ones to do so. Especially with the way the Media was either ignoring them, or portraying them as a group of slacker hippies, fringe dwellers and kooks.

Credit the Daily Show with changing all that. Jon Stewart’s team surfaced a video of a senior NYPD officer pepper-spraying some young girls for no apparent reason. NYC may not be Libya, but that clip of abusive police behavior – and the young women collapsing in obvious agony – ramped up the mainstream coverage. What Rick Santelli’s infamous rant on CNBC did for the Tea Party, the NYPD pepper spray video did for the Wall Street protesters
.
Now, the founders of OWS must consider what to do next. They surely do not want to let the momentum and energy dissipate. They see the Tea Party as hugely influential, but highly partisan, and up until now the Tea Party has been far less willing to criticize corporate interests than OWS.
The founders of OWS are aware of how the Tea Party was Jiu Jitsued by the existing GOP political establishment. OWS want to avoid a similar fate. Such an end could occur of the leaders of MoveOn.org, a partisan Democratic group, gets their way. They have bulled their way into the media, pretending to speak for OWS. (The media are suckers for a simple narrative, and MoveOn.org provides that).

Hence, OWS needs to demonstrate a few things: A clear leadership. A consistent message. But most importantly of all, some specific policy objectives.

To become as focused and influential as the Tea Party, what Occupy Wall Street needs a simple set of goals. Not a top 10 list — that’s too unwieldy, and too unfocused. Instead, a simple 3 part agenda, that responds to some very basic problems regardless of political party. It must address the key issues, have a specific legislative agenda, and finally, effect lasting change. By keeping it focused on the foibles of Wall Street, and on issues that actually matter, it can become a rallying cry for an angry nation
.
I suggest the following three as achievable goals that will have a lasting impact:
1. No more bailouts: Bring back real capitalism
2. End TBTF banks
3. Get Wall Street Money out of legislative process
Let’s look at each of these in turn:

1. No more bailouts/Bring Back Real Capitalism!
The United States was once a capitalist system. Companies lived and died on their own successes. “Corporate Welfare” – the term coined by Wisconsin senator William Proxmire – came into being in 1971 with the bailout of Lockheed Aircraft. Thus began a run of corporatism and bailouts of connected companies, not capitalism. Some firms, less than successful in a competitive marketplace, chose instead to suckle at the teat of the public trough. Innovation, execution and hard work were replaced with lobbying, crony capitalism and bailouts of failure. Of course, all paid for by taxpayers.
“Socialism for bankers, wrenching capitalism for the working stiff” is not a slogan you are likely to see on a bumper sticker anytime soon. But that’s wht the US had morphed into.
America needs to end this system of spoils. There should be no more bailouts, no more crony capitalism, no more government determined winners and losers. We simply cannot live in a society of privatized gains and socialized losses.

2. End Too Big To Fail /Restore Competition
As George Shultz once said, “”If they’re too big to fail, make them smaller.”
The current economic approach of “Too Big to Fail” is itself a failure. It reduces economic competition, concentrates risk, and raises costs for consumers.
I agree with University of Missouri–Kansas City (UMKC) professor of Economics and Law William Black, who notes that the TBTF moniker is misleading. We should start calling these firms by the more accurate phrase “Systemically Dangerous Institutions” (SDIs). TBTF makes it sound like the size is the problem – in reality, the systemically, regardless of size, is what we should be focused on. SDI is an accurate phrase, and appropriately pejorative.
The TBTF size has brought a different set of problems: The bailouts have made the top 10 SDI an even bigger, less competitive oligarchy. We need to bring back competition by limiting the size of these firms. We can do that by capping their deposits, in terms of total percentage or a specific dollar amounts. There are many ways to accomplish this, including an FDIC caps on deposit insurance. And if the OWS people were smart, they would bring in former FDIC chair Sheila Bair (now private citizen) into the discussion.

3. Take Congress back from Wall Street
Whatever changes come, they will only be temporary if the current system of spoils is allowed to continue.
The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly on campaign finance reform, finding against voters and in favor of corporate interests. The only way to take the government back is a Constitutional Amendment.
The United States has become a “corporatocracy.” Campaign finance and lobbying money has so utterly corrupted Congress that we might as well put elected officials up for bid on eBay – that is how corrupted the system has become. We have even seen the State Attorneys Generals become targets of aggressive lobbying, most recently in Florida. We must become a democracy again, where one man one vote matters. To do that, Wall Street money must be taken out of the process.
The only way to accomplish that goal and have it withstand Supreme Court review is a Constitutional Amendment, mandating public financing of Congressional elections and criminalizing the purchases of politicians. We need to marginalize lobbyists, and make voters the most important people in the nation (again).

A national campaign to get that amendment on every ballot in every state should be the objective.
~~~
You will note that these three goals are issues that both the Left and the Right — Libertarians and Liberals — should be able to agree upon. These are all doable measurable goals, that can have a real impact on legislation, the economy and taxes.

But amending the Constitution to eliminate dirty money from politics is an essential task. Failing to do that means backsliding from whatever gains are made. Whatever is accomplished will be temporary without campaign finance reform . . .

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Occupy Wall Street


(speach by Slavoj Zizek, NYC October 9)

Part One

…2008 financial crash more hard earned private property was destroyed than if all of us here were to be destroying it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is tuning into a nightmare. We are not destroying anything. We are only witnessing how the system is destroying itself. We all know the classic scenes from cartoons. The cart reaches a precipice. But it goes on walking. Ignoring the fact that there is nothing beneath. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street – Hey, look down! (cheering).

In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times.

A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors. So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink ,it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.

This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom war and terrorism and so on falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here: You are giving all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after. When we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then. I don’t want you to remember these days, you know, like - oh, we were young, it was beautiful. Remember that our basic message is: We are allowed to think about alternatives. The rule is broken. We do not live in the best possible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly difficult questions that confront us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organization can replace capitalism? What type of new leaders do we want?
Remember: the problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system that pushes you to give up. Beware not only of the enemies. But also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat. They will try to make this into a harmless moral protest. They think (??? unintelligible). But the reason we are here is that we have enough of the world where to recycle coke cans…

Part Two

….Starbucks cappuccino. Where 1% goes to the world’s starving children. It is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture. After the marriage agencies are now outsourcing even our love life, daily.

Mic check

We can see that for a long time we allowed our political engagement also to be outsourced. We want it back. We are not communists. If communism means the system which collapsed in 1990, remember that today those communists are the most efficient ruthless capitalists. In China today we have capitalism which is even more dynamic than your American capitalism but doesn’t need democracy. Which means when you criticize capitalism, don’t allow yourselves to be blackmailed that you are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and capitalism is over.
The change is possible. So, what do we consider today possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand in technology and sexuality everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon. You can become immortal by biogenetics. You can have sex with animals or whatever. But look at the fields of society and economy. There almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes a little bit for the rich, they tell you it’s impossible, we lose competitivitiy. You want more money for healthcare: they tell you impossible, this means a totalitarian state. There is something wrong in the world where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for health care. Maybe that ??? set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standards of living. We want better standards of living. The only sense in which we are communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature. The commons of what is privatized by intellectual property. The commons of biogenetics. For this and only for this we should fight.

Communism failed absolutely. But the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not Americans here. But the conservative fundamentalists who claim they are really American have to be reminded of something. What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What’s the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other. And who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense the Holy Spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostalgically remembering what a nice time we had here. Promise ourselves that this will not be the case.

We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much!

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

The Eight Marks of Fascist Policy


By Lew Rockwell
10/07/11 John T. Flynn, like other members of the Old Right, was disgusted by the irony that what he saw, almost everyone else chose to ignore. In the fight against authoritarian regimes abroad, he noted, the United States had adopted those forms of government at home, complete with price controls, rationing, censorship, executive dictatorship, and even concentration camps for whole groups considered to be unreliable in their loyalties to the state.

After reviewing this long history, John T. Flynn proceeds to sum up with a list of eight points he considers to be the main marks of the fascist state.

As I present them, I will also offer comments on the modern American central state.

Point 1. The government is totalitarian because it acknowledges no restraint on its powers.

This is a very telling mark. It suggests that the US political system can be described as totalitarian. This is a shocking remark that most people would reject. But they can reject this characterization only so long as they happen not to be directly ensnared in the state’s web. If they become so, they will quickly discover that there are indeed no limits to what the state can do. This can happen boarding a flight, driving around in your hometown, or having your business run afoul of some government agency. In the end, you must obey or be caged like an animal or killed. In this way, no matter how much you may believe that you are free, all of us today are but one step away from Guantanamo.

As recently as the 1990s, I can recall that there were moments when Clinton seemed to suggest that there were some things that his administration could not do. Today I’m not so sure that I can recall any government official pleading the constraints of law or the constraints of reality to what can and cannot be done. No aspect of life is untouched by government intervention, and often it takes forms we do not readily see. All of healthcare is regulated, but so is every bit of our food, transportation, clothing, household products, and even private relationships.

Mussolini himself put his principle this way: “All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” He also said: “The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative.”

I submit to you that this is the prevailing ideology in the United States today. This nation, conceived in liberty, has been kidnapped by the fascist state.

Point 2. Government is a de facto dictatorship based on the leadership principle.

I wouldn’t say that we truly have a dictatorship of one man in this country, but we do have a form of dictatorship of one sector of government over the entire country. The executive branch has spread so dramatically over the last century that it has become a joke to speak of checks and balances. What the kids learn in civics class has nothing to do with reality.

The executive state is the state as we know it, all flowing from the White House down. The role of the courts is to enforce the will of the executive. The role of the legislature is to ratify the policy of the executive.

Further, this executive is not really about the person who seems to be in charge. The president is only the veneer, and the elections are only the tribal rituals we undergo to confer some legitimacy on the institution. In reality, the nation-state lives and thrives outside any “democratic mandate.” Here we find the power to regulate all aspects of life and the wicked power to create the money necessary to fund this executive rule.

As for the leadership principle, there is no greater lie in American public life than the propaganda we hear every four years about how the new president/messiah is going to usher in the great dispensation of peace, equality, liberty, and global human happiness. The idea here is that the whole of society is really shaped and controlled by a single will — a point that requires a leap of faith so vast that you have to disregard everything you know about reality to believe it.

And yet people do. The hope for a messiah reached a fevered pitch with Obama’s election. The civic religion was in full-scale worship mode — of the greatest human who ever lived or ever shall live. It was a despicable display.

Another lie that the American people believe is that presidential elections bring about regime change. This is sheer nonsense. The Obama state is the Bush state; the Bush state was the Clinton state; the Clinton state was the Bush state; the Bush state was the Reagan state. We can trace this back and back in time and see overlapping appointments, bureaucrats, technicians, diplomats, Fed officials, financial elites, and so on. Rotation in office occurs not because of elections but because of mortality.

Point 3. Government administers a capitalist system with an immense bureaucracy.

The reality of bureaucratic administration has been with us at least since the New Deal, which was modeled on the planning bureaucracy that lived in World War I. The planned economy — whether in Mussolini’s time or ours — requires bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is the heart, lungs, and veins of the planning state. And yet to regulate an economy as thoroughly as this one is today is to kill prosperity with a billion tiny cuts.

This doesn’t necessarily mean economic contraction, at least not right away. But it definitely means killing off growth that would have otherwise occurred in a free market.

So where is our growth? Where is the peace dividend that was supposed to come after the end of the Cold War? Where are the fruits of the amazing gains in efficiency that technology has afforded? It has been eaten by the bureaucracy that manages our every move on this earth. The voracious and insatiable monster here is called the Federal Code that calls on thousands of agencies to exercise the police power to prevent us from living free lives.

It is as Bastiat said: the real cost of the state is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that don’t exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is stolen from us. The state has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters our home at night and steals all that we love.

Point 4. Producers are organized into cartels in the way of syndicalism.
Syndicalist is not usually how we think of our current economic structure. But remember that syndicalism means economic control by the producers. Capitalism is different. It places by virtue of market structures all control in the hands of the consumers. The only question for syndicalists, then, is which producers are going to enjoy political privilege. It might be the workers, but it can also be the largest corporations.

In the case of the United States, in the last three years, we’ve seen giant banks, pharmaceutical firms, insurers, car companies, Wall Street banks and brokerage houses, and quasi-private mortgage companies enjoying vast privileges at our expense. They have all joined with the state in living a parasitical existence at our expense.

This is also an expression of the syndicalist idea, and it has cost the US economy untold trillions and sustained an economic depression by preventing the postboom adjustment that markets would otherwise dictate. The government has tightened its syndicalist grip in the name of stimulus.

Point 5. Economic planning is based on the principle of autarky.

Autarky is the name given to the idea of economic self-sufficiency. Mostly this refers to the economic self-determination of the nation- state. The nation-state must be geographically huge in order to support rapid economic growth for a large and growing population.

This was and is the basis for fascist expansionism. Without expansion, the state dies. This is also the idea behind the strange combination of protectionist pressure today combined with militarism. It is driven in part by the need to control resources.

Look at the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. We would be supremely naive to believe that these wars were not motivated in part by the producer interests of the oil industry. It is true of the American empire generally, which supports dollar hegemony.

It is the reason for the planned North American Union.

The goal is national self-sufficiency rather than a world of peaceful trade. Consider, too, the protectionist impulses of the Republican ticket. There is not one single Republican, apart from Ron Paul, who authentically supports free trade in the classical definition.

From ancient Rome to modern-day America, imperialism is a form of statism that the bourgeoisie love. It is for this reason that Bush’s post-9/11 push for the global empire has been sold as patriotism and love of country rather than for what it is: a looting of liberty and property to benefit the political elites.

6. Government sustains economic life through spending and borrowing.

This point requires no elaboration because it is no longer hidden. There was stimulus 1 and stimulus 2, both of which are so discredited that stimulus 3 will have to adopt a new name. Let’s call it the American Jobs Act.

With a prime-time speech, Obama argued in favor of this program with some of the most asinine economic analysis I’ve ever heard. He mused about how is it that people are unemployed at a time when schools, bridges, and infrastructure need repairing. He ordered that supply and demand come together to match up needed work with jobs.

Hello? The schools, bridges, and infrastructure that Obama refers to are all built and maintained by the state. That’s why they are falling apart. And the reason that people don’t have jobs is because the state has made it too expensive to hire them. It’s not complicated. To sit around and dream of other scenarios is no different from wishing that water flowed uphill or that rocks would float in the air. It amounts to a denial of reality.

Still, Obama went on, invoking the old fascistic longing for national greatness. “Building a world-class transportation system,” he said, “is part of what made us an economic superpower.” Then he asked, “We’re going to sit back and watch China build newer airports and faster railroads?”

Well, the answer to that question is yes. And you know what? It doesn’t hurt a single American for a person in China to travel on a faster railroad than we do. To claim otherwise is an incitement to nationalist hysteria.

As for the rest of this program, Obama promised yet another long list of spending projects. Let’s just mention the reality: No government in the history of the world has spent as much, borrowed as much, and created as much fake money as the United States. If the United States doesn’t qualify as a fascist state in this sense, no government ever has.

None of this would be possible but for the role of the Federal Reserve, the great lender to the world. This institution is absolutely critical to US fiscal policy. There is no way that the national debt could increase at a rate of $4 billion per day without this institution.

Under a gold standard, all of this maniacal spending would come to an end. And if US debt were priced on the market with a default premium, we would be looking at a rating far less than A+.

Point 7. Militarism is a mainstay of government spending.

Have you ever noticed that the military budget is never seriously discussed in policy debates? The United States spends more than most of the rest of the world combined.

And yet to hear our leaders talk, the United States is just a tiny commercial republic that wants peace but is constantly under threat from the world. They would have us believe that we all stand naked and vulnerable. The whole thing is a ghastly lie. The United States is a global military empire and the main threat to peace around the world today.

To visualize US military spending as compared with other countries is truly shocking. One bar chart you can easily look up shows the US trillion-dollar-plus military budget as a skyscraper surrounded by tiny huts. As for the next highest spender, China spends 1/10th as much as the United States.

Where is the debate about this policy? Where is the discussion? It is not going on. It is just assumed by both parties that it is essential for the US way of life that the United States be the most deadly country on the planet, threatening everyone with nuclear extinction unless they obey. This should be considered a fiscal and moral outrage by every civilized person.

This isn’t only about the armed services, the military contractors, the CIA death squads. It is also about how police at all levels have taken on military-like postures. This goes for the local police, state police, and even the crossing guards in our communities. The commissar mentality, the trigger-happy thuggishness, has become the norm throughout the whole of society.

If you want to witness outrages, it is not hard. Try coming into this country from Canada or Mexico. See the bullet-proof-vest- wearing, heavily armed, jackbooted thugs running dogs up and down car lanes, searching people randomly, harassing innocents, asking rude and intrusive questions.

You get the strong impression that you are entering a police state. That impression would be correct.

Yet for the man on the street, the answer to all social problems seems to be more jails, longer terms, more enforcement, more arbitrary power, more crackdowns, more capital punishments, more authority. Where does all of this end? And will the end come before we realize what has happened to our once-free country?

Point 8. Military spending has imperialist aims.

Ronald Reagan used to claim that his military buildup was essential to keeping the peace. The history of US foreign policy just since the 1980s has shown that this is wrong. We’ve had one war after another, wars waged by the United States against noncompliant countries, and the creation of even more client states and colonies.

US military strength has led not to peace but the opposite. It has caused most people in the world to regard the United States as a threat, and it has led to unconscionable wars on many countries. Wars of aggression were defined at Nuremberg as crimes against humanity.

Obama was supposed to end this. He never promised to do so, but his supporters all believed that he would. Instead, he has done the opposite. He has increased troop levels, entrenched wars, and started new ones. In reality, he has presided over a warfare state just as vicious as any in history. The difference this time is that the Left is no longer criticizing the US role in the world. In that sense, Obama is the best thing ever to happen to the warmongers and the military-industrial complex.

As for the Right in this country, it once opposed this kind of military fascism. But all that changed after the beginning of the Cold War. The Right was led into a terrible ideological shift, well documented in Murray Rothbard’s neglected masterpiece The Betrayal of the American Right. In the name of stopping communism, the right came to follow ex-CIA agent Bill Buckley’s endorsement of a totalitarian bureaucracy at home to fight wars all over the world.

At the end of the Cold War, there was a brief reprise when the Right in this country remembered its roots in noninterventionism. But this did not last long. George Bush the First rekindled the militarist spirit with the first war on Iraq, and there has been no fundamental questioning of the American empire ever since. Even today, Republicans elicit their biggest applause by whipping up audiences about foreign threats, while never mentioning that the real threat to American well-being exists in the Beltway.

What Happened to the Jobs?


By John Mauldin
July 7, 2011

So How’s That Stimulus Thing Working Out?

The US jobs report came out this morning, and it was simply dismal. This week we look at not only the jobs report but also “what-if” proffers for the US and global economies. There’s a lot to cover, so let’s jump in.

First, there were only 18,000 jobs created in June, the lowest since September 2010. While private employment rose by 57,000, government workers dropped by 39,000, continuing a trend as governments at all levels work to cut their budgets. Long-time readers know I think it is important to look at the direction of the revisions, and we got no help. May was revised down by 29,000 jobs and April a further down 15,000.

I saw some headlines and talking heads in the mainstream media saying the poor number was due to “seasonals,” and I just shook my head. If you are that reflexively bullish when presented with what was clearly a bad report, how can you be taken seriously? You know who you are. And then Philippa Dunne of the Liscio Report sent the following note. She is one of the best data mavens there is on jobs and employment.

“After the release, some bulls turned to that old reliable excuse – bad seasonals. According to one analysis making the rounds, had the BLS used last year’s factor – computed, of course, using exactly the same concurrent technique as this year’s factor – the gain would have been 221,000! (Whoever did this made a mistake by comparing the NSA and SA levels for the two months – you have to compare the over-the-month changes.) Still, if you’re going to play this game, you should be consistent, and apply last year’s seasonals to several months, not just one. If you do that, May’s gain of 25,000 would turn into a loss of 19,000, and June’s gain would be a mere 73,000, all total payrolls. In any case, why should you do that? The seasonals are recomputed every month based on recent experience and calendar quirks, and should be more aggressive in a recovery. (Hope we won’t be using the trend set in the depth of the recession as the bar going forward.) Also, there is no adjustment to the headline number – the sectors are adjusted separately (96 different industries at the 3-digit NAICS level, to be precise) and the total is the sum of those components. The whole argument is bogus.”

The household survey was even worse. Total employment fell by 445,000. Full-time employment is down by 0.5% in the last year, while part-time is up 3%. David Rosenberg calls this the just-in-time labor market. The total number of unemployed rose to over 14 million. If you count the discouraged workers not in the official unemployed, the total number rises to 20.6 million, up 483,000 last month. This put the unemployment rate back up to 9.2%.

We were told that the stimulus would have us down to 6.5% unemployment by now. The team at e21 has the real story:

“Back in January 2009, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein of the Obama adminstration produced a report estimating future unemployment rates with and without a stimulus plan. Their estimates, which were widely circulated, projected that unemployment would approach 9% without a stimulus, but would never exceed 8% with the plan. The estimates, along

If you update the graph for today’s report, you find that there is another red dot higher than the last one. The last three months have seen the unemployment rate rise (chart from e21). They further note:

“For example, there is new research that suggests that the stimulus may actually have resulted in a net loss of jobs. Regardless of the exact number of jobs lost or created, however, the fact that some economists are even arguing that it had a negative impact tells you that the stimulus may very well have been a wash overall.


“Larry Lindsey offered his own review of the stimulus this week, arguing that it failed what’s colloquially known as the Sharp Pencil Test. As he explains, ‘if you sit down and do a back of the envelope calculation of the [stimulus] program’s costs and benefits, there is no way to conjure up numbers that allow it to make sense.’ Here is more on how Lindsey applies this test to the stimulus:

“ ‘[E]ven if you buy the White House’s argument that the $800 billion package created 3 million jobs, that works out to $266,000 per job. Taxing or borrowing $266,000 from the private sector to create a single job is simply not a cost effective way of putting America back to work. The long-term debt burden of that $266,000 swamps any benefit that the single job created might provide.’

“At minimum, the public now deserves a response from policymakers about what they have learned from 2009 and 2010 – about what actually does and does not help get the economy growing and producing more jobs.”

The small businesses that are the real drivers of employment are not participating the way they do in a normal recovery. Bill Dunkelberg, fishing buddy and the chief economist for the National Federation of Independent Business, writes me this afternoon:

“Writing about our current weak economy (Philadelphia Inquirer Currents, June 26), Mark Zandi argued that employment will improve because ‘…U.S. companies are in great financial shape’. Dr. Zandi must be referring to companies like GE which just posted profits of $17 billion (and paid no income taxes) and whose CEO is the head of President Obama’s job creation committee. This is the view in Washington and Wall Street that only thinks in terms of the “biggies” (that make large donations to re-election committees). For perspective, GE employs about 150,000 people in the U.S. Last week, over 400,000 people filed initial claims for unemployment (e.g. lost their jobs). There are 6 million firms in the U.S. that employ 1 or more workers. This includes GE, but 90% of them have fewer than 20 employees. These firms are not ‘in great financial shape’ as Dr. Zandi asserts. In a recent survey of a sample of 350,000 of them, 46% reported that profits were still falling two years into the ‘recovery’ compared to 18% reporting that earnings were improving. Firms like GE might hire more due to their good fortune, but there aren’t many of them and they don’t employ many workers anyway. It’s the small businesses that Treasury Secretary Geithner said must be taxed more to support government that provide the needed jobs, not ‘tax-free’ GE. Regulations such as the new mandatory sick leave passed by City Council are detrimental to the job creation needed by making labor more expensive to hire, a bad idea.

“Dr. Zandi also suggests that state and local governments be given more funding to prevent the predicted loss of 250,000 public sector jobs over the next 12 months, funded I guess by more debt, since the Federal government is a bit short of cash (like $1.5 trillion in deficit). ‘Ending this job loss would go a long way to lifting the job market,’ he asserts. My math says that would reduce job loss by about 5,000 per week. With monthly job loss over 400,000, this hardly makes a difference. Government employment has become bloated because governments don’t have to worry about profitability. When faced with budget problems, politicians tend to make cuts in services like libraries or police protection that hurt voters to show taxpayers why the government can’t live with less instead of cutting patronage jobs and the like whose efforts would not be missed. Government can’t create jobs, but it can create a lot of policies and taxes that prevent jobs from being created.”

I wrote last year about the studies that show that on a net job-creation basis, large businesses reduced their employment over the last two decades. Of course, there are exceptions; but on average, large businesses are not where you get new jobs.

And many of the jobs we got this last month, as few as they were, were not of the high-paying variety. Leisure and hospitality were up 34,000. The average work week was down, and earnings dropped a penny an hour. After inflation, workers are behind, year over year.

By the way, I get the unemployment thing. Today we found out that my daughter Amanda has lost her job. Sales at the place she worked were down a lot. Another two of my kids can’t get enough hours. At 17, Trey is looking for a job, but so far no luck. It’s tough out there. Let’s look at a few charts from David Rosenberg. First is the average duration of unemployment, which has risen to an all-time high.

This Time Is Different
I have quoted at length in past letters from Ken Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s masterful work, This Time is Different. While the market may have been surprised by such a low jobs number, it is PRECISELY what is typical following a credit crisis, as they demonstrate in their book.

And now the Fed is done with QE2 (except that they will take the mortgage roll-off from their portfolio and use it to buy treasuries), and the fiscal authorities are going to put the brakes on government spending, or at least slow things down.

Everything is very fluid, but the headlines in today’s Wall Street Journal suggest a deal on the order of $4 trillion in on the table. I assume it will be back-loaded, but it is a start. But assume that the first year sees real spending cuts of $200 billion. That is a reduction of 1.5% in GDP. It’s that pesky old equation I keep using:

GDP = C (total consumption) + I (Investments) + G (government Spending) + net exports

Now, the literature suggests that the effect on the economy from a reduction in G should be over within about 4 quarters, on average. But then we reduce “G” again the next year. Maybe not by as much overall, but at least by another $50-100 billion. This is going to put a real headwind in the face of economic growth for years, but we simply have to do it or we become Greece.

The economy will already be slowing down. A recession in 2012 is a real possibility if there is any type of shock coming from Europe, and what will happen there is anyone’s guess. I think most European leaders are basing their thinking more on hope than on reality. When Greece defaults there will be a domino effect; you can count on it. And you could actually see a banking crisis before we get actual sovereign defaults.

Gentle reader, you need to understand that the market does not get it. Neither in Europe nor in the US. When someone says the market has already priced in a default, go back and ask them how well the market priced in a crisis in the spring of 2008. The market doesn’t know jack.

I got a lot of internet buzz from a throwaway line in an interview on CNBC in London. I said that if the market knew what Bernanke and the leadership of the central banks talked about after their third glass of wine, the market would wet its pants. That is not to suggest I don’t think Bernanke or Trichet can hold their liquor. It means that they get the problem more than they let on in public and are simply trying to stem as much damage as they can.

Banking crises are followed by credit crises by 2-3 years. It is getting close to that time. We need 3-3.5% GDP growth in the US to really make a dent in jobs. We are not going to get it. There is nothing we can do other than Muddle Through as best we can. Prepare accordingly.