naked capitalism

Yves here. Having worked in Japan, it is routine for the Western media to be out of the loop. So it is entirely plausible that there would be major policy moves under way in the island nation that had not been picked up by the press here.

By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil

Rumors abound that a deal is fomenting in Japan that might lead to the inflation targeting proposal that so many progressives champion on their blogs being put in place (clarification: even though inflation targeting was announced in February, there are doubts in Japan as to its seriousness. Japan is famous for “administrative guidance” in lieu of action).

About two weeks ago the Japanese denied the rumors, but they’re still cropping up among investors. I’ve heard similar accounts through my channels. The latest account is of a deal between Prime Minister Noda and the LDP (the main opposition party) to amend the Bank of Japan law in return for tax increases. The LPD has already drafted a law imposing inflation targeting on the BoJ in order to bring down the stratospheric yen. The LPD bill is said to be similar to a 2010 proposal by Your Party to establish an inflation goal and make the tenure of BoJ leadership dependent on sticking reasonably close to the target.

So, should the neoclassical-Keynesian/neo-monetarist commentariat be pleased? The tradeoff looks ugly. If the rumors prove to be true, the Japanese government is going to engage in fiscal austerity by raising taxes so that they may pass a law that states that any central banker who fails to achieve specific price-rises will lose his or her job. But reducing fiscal deficits in a weak and already deflation prone economy is even more deflationary; it’s hard to see how the BoJ can hit the target in the face of this headwind.

In truth, we have no idea if this policy is going to be effective in any way. And if it is effective we have no idea what sort of impact its going to have. I argued the other day that inflation targeting done in isolation may well lead to investors simply pouring into various so-called inflation hedges (gold, silver and other commodities) which, in an extreme case, may lead them to pull funds out of the government bond markets, drive up yields and thus lead to more excuses for the government to engage in austerity.

I don’t know if that will happen; it is merely one of many possibilities. But nor do the champions of inflation targeting like Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias know what will happen if the policy is implemented — although they are confident because their ISLM model tells them that, theoretically, investment should rise together with a rise in inflation.

Well, we’ll see. After all, these are only rumors for now. Personally, I hope they’re not true. But if they are and the inflation-target skeptics are proved right, the champions might learn at least one lesson: throw a group of politicians what seems to be a simple and neat solution and they will pursue it with gusto — even at the expense of tried and tested, bread and butter policies that we know work.

So, to the neoclassical-Keynesian/neo-monetarist nexus: if you do throw around these sorts of ideas you’d better be certain that they will work. Because if you know anything about politics, you’d better realise what pushing them might lead to.

By Daniel Alpert, the founding Managing Partner of Westwood Capital. Cross posted from EconoMonitor

This past Sunday, Paul Krugman penned a screed in the New York Times Magazine (entitled, somewhat unflatteringly in my opinion, “Earth to Ben Bernanke”) that expanded on the content of an ongoing debate in the economics blogosphere over the contents of the mind of Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke.

Professor Krugman has posited for months now that Bernanke has come up short in failing to follow his own prescription for post-bubble, debt-deflationary economies (namely, that of Japan, which the Chairman wrote about as an academic a dozen years ago). In essence, Professor Bernanke’s view was to push both monetary and fiscal stimulus to the point at which it would generate above-natural rates of inflation for a period of time sufficient for such economies to reflate and discount the indebtedness accumulated during credit bubbles.

In the course of Krugman’s commentary he has pushed the notion that Bernanke is either politically intimidated by the right, fearful of uncontrolled inflation, or possessed of a shy personality that is vulnerable to peer pressure within the FOMC (Paul…seriously?).

While some of what is in Ben Bernanke’s mind may be made more clear with tomorrow’s FOMC meeting announcement, in the meantime allow me to rise to Chairman Bernanke’s defense and suggest to Professor Krugman, as I have in the past, a different – yet still quite Keynesian – explanation for our Fed chairman’s current point of view (and in doing so give Paul a piece of my own mind, as I doubt Ben will rise to the bait himself).

Ben Bernanke is neither overly “shy” or out of touch with the world, as Professor Krugman would have us believe. To the contrary, I believe the Chairman has correctly assessed the limitations of extraordinary monetary intervention at the zero-bound (short term interest rates at or near zero) and comprehends a present inability of the U.S. economy to generate the sustainable inflation that the professor correctly notes would help us out of our debt-deflationary slump.

I am sure that Professor Krugman agrees that the Great Recession and its sluggish aftermath saw a mammoth decline in aggregate demand. But if present levels of aggregate demand are insufficient to revive our economy, such demand must be insufficient relative to something else. And in this case – seen from a global perspective – that something else is the global aggregate supply of labor, productive capacity and, yes, even capital. Much of this excess supply can be traced to the historically sudden emergence of the post-socialist nations into the global market economy – which nations are characterized by extremely low wages relative to those of the developed world.

As a result of the foregoing, wages in the U.S. and other areas of the developed world are unable to “track” (that is, to follow along with, even on a lagging basis) the type of inflation resulting from the ocean of liquidity that quantitative and credit easing policy of the Fed, the ECB and the Bank of Japan has produced – generally speaking, inflation in highly tradable commodities and financial assets. No wage growth (because of the dampening effect of excess emerging market labor, always standing by to work cheaply where it can compete with endogenous U.S., European or Japanese labor)…no sustainable inflation. As a result, high levels of inflation tend to collapse economic activity, as limited per capita wages are shunted to oil and food, rather than to more expansionary forms of consumption.

Extraordinary monetary measures will remain a critical weapon in fighting the deflationary pressures that result from our continuing debt overhang and global wage imbalances. But I am afraid – as I believe Chairman Bernanke may well be – that attempts at “reflating-to-recover” are, in the end, somewhat counterproductive under present circumstances.

Naoto Matsumura is the only person living inside the exclusion zone and he has no electricity or running water. Reader Martha R recommended running this video as a way to commemorate the anniversary of the disaster.

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland

Warren Mosler recently ran a very succinct account of why the Fed/Bank of England’s easy monetary policies – that is, the combination of Quantitative Easing and their Zero Interest Rate Programs – might actually be killing demand in the economy.

Mosler’s argument runs something like this: when interest rates hit the floor they suck interest income payments that might flow to rentiers and savers. And no, we’re not just talking about Johnny Moneybags refusing to buy his daughter a new Prada handbag (which, say what you will, creates job opportunities). We’re also talking about regular savers and, as the Fed recently noted, pension funds seeing their income fall – not to mention certain industries, like insurance, finding their profits lowered (and hence their premiums raised?).

Mosler sums it up well:

Lowering rates in general in the first instance merely shifts interest income from ‘savers’ to borrowers. And with the federal government a net payer of interest to the economy, lowering rates reduces interest income for the economy.

He then goes on to make the point that we’d have to see borrowers spending more than savers to see any real stimulative effect on the real economy. But alas, such is probably not the case.

The only way a rate cut could add to aggregate demand would be if, in aggregate, the propensities to consume of borrowers was higher than savers. But fed studies have shown the propensities are about the same, and, again, so does the actual empirical evidence of the last several years. And further detail on this interest income channel shows that while income for savers dropped by nearly the full amount of the rate cuts, costs for borrowers haven’t fallen that much, with the difference going to net interest margins of lenders. And with lenders having a near zero propensity to consume from interest income, versus savers who have a much higher propensity to consume, this particular aspect of the institutional structure has caused rate reductions to be a contractionary and deflationary bias.

In her seminal book The Accumulation of Capital – truly a forgotten classic of 20th century economics, right up there with Keynes’ General Theory – Joan Robinson trashes out the implications of falling interest rates. Of the investor she writes:

If he has been successful in the guessing game (on the advice of his broker or backing of his own fancy) and made [investments] which have risen in price so that his capital has appreciated, he has to debate with his conscience whether he has a right to realise the appreciation and spend it, and his decision turns very much upon whether he may expect similar gains in the future, so that they are properly to be regarded as a continuing income.

The point that Robinson is making is that investors have a peculiar morality – she calls it a ‘peasant morality’ – which leads them to separate in their own mind their capital and their income. Investors tend to prefer to spend based on income – that is: dividends, interest etc. – and preserve their capital intact. It’s a bit like the drug dealer’s street wisdom: “Never get high on your own supply”. Spending out of capital – even if this capital has accumulated in the short-to-medium run – is seen by the investor as being somehow immoral. And for this reason investors tend not to dip into their outstanding capital lest their net worth fall as a result.

Robinson then goes on to make a point that would certainly resonate with bond traders today who are, due in large part to the Fed and the Bank of England’s easy monetary policies, seeing value increase and yields (which are essentially interest income) fall.

If the value of [the investor’s] holdings has risen, not because of his personal skill as [an investor], but because of a general fall in the level of interest rates which is expected to be permanent, he is faced with a different problem. For the time being his receipts are unchanged and the value of his [investments] has risen, but, unless all his holdings are in very long-dated bonds, or in shares in whose future capacity to pay dividends the market has great confidence, he will later have to replace money at a lower return, so that his prospect of future income has fallen.

Robinson’s point is that in the investor’s mind his income has fallen. And such a fall in income leads him to retract consumption spending. This leads, as Mosler points out, to a dampening of effective demand in the economy.

It also, I should think, affects investor psychology in that a lack of future income leads them to see the future as being all the more bleak. Their prospect of future income having fallen, this could well lead to a far greater propensity to hoard. It could also make investors more edgy as they try to preserve their capital in what has come to seem like a very uncertain environment. This could lead them to seek out what they think to be safe investments – such as gold and other commodities – thereby inflating bubbles that further exacerbate consumer spending power.

Monetary policy is a slippery beast indeed. But it has become the mantra of the day. For many central bankers, whom I have no doubt go to bed at night dreaming that their governments would initiate stimulus programs, it is all they have. That said, they should really take a look at the facts and not assume simple causal relations that may hold good (to some extent) some of the time, but by no means hold good all of the time.

Yet, the internet commentariat continue to call for more ‘innovative’ monetary policy. A good recent example of this is Clare Jones over at the FT:

What’s clear already though is that, unless the Fed opts to give more quantitative easing — or something more radical — a try, there’s little else it can do to lower the cost of borrowing.

Analysts need to drop their preconceptions. There are very few hard and fast causal relations in capitalist or any other economies. These economies are constantly changing and as they toss this way and that causal relations alter and break down. To try to come up with simple rules to understand the workings of an economy is to excuse oneself for giving up on actually thinking things through.

In truth, negative real interest rates – which, I believe, is what Jones is alluding to – even if they could be implemented (which I don’t believe they can), would be rather dangerous in the current environment. They would likely lead to more hoarding behaviour as investors became ever more nervous about the future. Its expansionary fiscal policy we need. Strong-armed expansionary fiscal policy. There is no alternative.

The structured credit analytics/research firm R&R Consulting released a bombshell today, and it strongly suggests that prevailing prices on non-GSE (non Freddie and Fannie) residential mortgage backed securities, which are typically referred to as “private label” are considerably overvalued.

R&R Consulting described how the reports presented to RMBS investors show losses at the loan level (which is super eye-numbing detail in the investor reports) that have NOT been allocated to the bonds (boldface ours):

On the securities performing at December 2011, a universe of approximately $1.42 trillion, R&R estimate the amount of additional losses likely to materialize is $300 billion, with one-third concentrated in ten arranger names, including Countrywide, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan. About 17,000 tranches, or 34% of the universe analyzed by R&R, may lose up to 83% of their remaining principal.

In addition, R&R estimates that approximately $175 billion of losses already incurred on the loans have not yet been allocated to the bonds in the related transactions. Failure to allocate realized loan losses could distort the valuation of related RMBS tranches.

In the course of conducting valuations on RMBS, the R&R analytics team discovered widespread, serious, repeated data discrepancies. Ann Rutledge, a founding principal, asked the team to measure the magnitude of the discrepancy on the RMBS universe. To do this, R&R subtracted cumulative losses allocated to the tranches from unallocated, expected losses, calculated as the sum of defaults, bankruptcies, foreclosures and REOs minus recoveries. “The results were very disturbing: $175 billion of unallocated current losses and $300 billion of imminent losses,” Rutledge said.

Now you might say, how can investors NOT know this is happening? Have you ever looked at an investor report on MBS? They are really really nerdy. Summary stuff up front, tons of pages of detail. Now bond fund managers are presumably paid to care about nerdy stuff like this, but I have spoken to some MBS lifers who have gone to the buy side, and they tell me that the level of expertise among MBS investors is not high.

But, but, but….some of you are protesting….surely these errors are just innocent mistakes? That’s a nice theory, but the numbers are huge, and the “mistakes” happen to line up with more profit for servicers:

The implication for bond holders in RMBS is significant with respect to both estimates. Subordinated securities in the RMBS with probable future losses ought to be written down by such losses but instead may be continuing to receive interest owed to more senior tranches. It could also mean that servicers are earning fees against loans that have already been liquidated, which also reduces the amount of cash to pay senior bond holders. For example, in one month, servicers could generate $75 million or more in inappropriate fees against the $175 billion in unallocated losses.

Translation: when the servicers don’t write down the bonds in a securitization to allow for ACTUAL and pretty certain losses, the effect is that junior tranches show artificially high balances (remember, as losses occur, the effect is to wipe out tranches from the bottom of the securitization up. The riskiest tranche fails first, then the next riskiest, and so on).

Servicers ALSO advance principal and interest to bondholders when borrowers quit paying, in theory up to the mortgage balance (we’ve seen cases where advances exceeded the mortgage balance). Then when they foreclose and liquidate the loan, the servicer reimburses himself for the advances and his fees and foreclosure costs first.

So, if they report artificially high balances in junior tranches, they are paying interest to investors who don’t deserve it. The result, when the foreclosure occurs and the real estate is sold, is that the interest overpayment to the junior bondholders reduces the monies that should have gone to the senior bondholders. Oh, and those junior bondholders are more likely to be hedgies, and those senior bondholders are more likely to be pension funds, bond fund (the sort that you might hold in your 401 (k) and insurers. The costs to the insurance industry alone means that this is not a fat cat investor issue but affects all of us (losses to insurers eventually lead to higher insurance premiums to compensate for the shortfall in investment income).

Reports like this are why I am cynical about talk of mortgage “investigations”. The evidence of servicer misconduct is rife. I’ve gotten numerous reports about various types of servicer scams, not just ones that hurt borrowers, but tons that impact investors (for instance, it is common, and it may be pervasive, that servicers delay reporting the liquidation of a loan to the investors. Why? The longer a loan appears to be in the pool, the longer they can collect servicing fees).

To my knowledge, the R&R report is the first effort to place a dollar figure on one type of mortgage-investor-related abuses. I’m not surprised it is so large. What I am surprised at is that no investor seems to have noticed this type of pilfering.

Although it is remarkably difficult to come up with decent data, from what I can tell, the Japanese bubble was considerably bigger relative to the size of its economy than the US debt binge was. Yet even though the Japanese aftermath has been remarkably protracted, and arguably worsened by a slow and cautious initial response, visitors to Japan find the country wearing its malaise remarkably well.

One of the reasons may be the Japanese preoccupation with employment. Entrepreneurs are revered not for making money but for creating jobs. Japanese companies went to great lengths to keep workers, cutting senior pay to preserve manning. That was done largely for cultural reasons, since companies are seen as being like families.

But was this preoccupation also good economic policy, and might it have played a more direct role in buffering the worse effects of the bubble aftermath? In this interview, Pavlina Tcherneva argues that the way policymakers think about growth, that demand drives employment, may be backwards.

I tend to avoid the year end retrospective/forecast blizzard, although some of the more creative compilations can be fun.

However, some 2012 forecasts crossed my screen, and two were such striking outliers that I thought I’d call them to your attention and seeing if readers have come across other Extreme Predictions for the new year (aside from the Mayan end of the world sort).

The first come from Matt Yglesias, “Happy Days Are Here Again! Don’t believe the naysayers: An economic recovery is right around the corner.” No, this is not a parody, this is a real article. And whoever came up with the title at Slate has a subversive sense of humor. The song, “Happy Days are Here Again,” was an end-of-Roaring 20s confection (published and first recorded in 1929), and made famous in a 1930s movie and as the theme song for FDR’s 1932 presidential campaign. Needless to say, happy days (at least on the material front) proved to be far more remote than that standard promised.

Yglesias’s argument is (basically) that with interest rates super low, consumers will start “investing” again in cars, durable goods and housing. He relies on the idea of the natural rate of interest of Knut Wicksell. Yglesias claims it is “so fundamental that people sometimes forget to return to it.” Huh? This is the old loanable funds theory; it has been debunked repeatedly, recently and rather decisively debunked in an critically important BIS paper earlier this year by Claudio Borio (who with William White of the BIS called the international housing bubble in 2003) and Piti Disyatat. This paper makes an key conceptual contribution to economics yet does not seem to have gotten the attention it deserves (certainly not in the econoblogsophere, no doubt because it is too threatening to orthodox ideas).

To give you an idea of how far Yglesias has to stretch to make his case, his argument that the US has a housing shortage refers back to a recent Slate article of his own, which in turn refers back to another article of his that argues that we merely had a bubble in home prices, not home construction.

He ignores the overhang of unsold properties and shadow inventory (we have a post from Michael Olenick on that tomorrow that suggests it may be much larger than most people think), or what Calculated Risk calls “the distressing gap.”

Per CR:

Following the housing bubble and bust, the “distressing gap” appeared mostly because of distressed sales. The flood of distressed sales has kept existing home sales elevated, and depressed new home sales since builders can’t compete with the low prices of all the foreclosed properties.

I expect this gap to eventually close once the number of distressed sales starts to decline.

Let’s put this more simply: Japan has had 20 years of super low interest rates, and banks competing so desperately to lend to corporations that credit spreads are razor thin. People and businesses are not going to borrow and invest if they are not confident of their future. With short job tenures, over 30 years of stagnant real worker wages (and falling in the most recent 12 months), exactly what is there for the bulk of the population to be optimistic about?

We’ve had a very successful three decade effort to break the bargaining power of labor, and covered that up with rising consumer debt levels. That paradigm is over, but no one in authority seems willing to go back to an economic model where rising worker wages drive economic growth. Until we get policies that address that issue, I don’t see a reason to be expect robust growth levels.

On the other end of the spectrum, Max Gardener, a bankruptcy lawyer better known as the informal leader of a large group of effective foreclosure defense attorneys, has published his predictions for 2012. He manages to be more pessimistic than I am (well actually, I find his forecast for unemployment a bit cheerier than mine).

Admittedly, his ones on housing are realistic, which makes them sobering, For instance:

Home Values: Home values will continue to decline during 2012 and I do not expect the bottom of the real estate market to be reached until the 3rd Quarter of 2014. My best guess for any type of sustained recovery in the housing market is no sooner than the 3rd Quarter of 2021. The number of homes in foreclosure will double or triple from 2011 levels and home values will drop by another 15% to 20% by the end of year. I do not expect to see any real recovery in the housing market until at least 2022. A massive number of bank-owned homes (Real Estate Owned or REO property) will be turned into rental properties by the banks and/or mortgage servicers and many more foreclosed on homes will be sold in bulk sales to investors for the same purpose.

And we have this:

Nuclear Nightmares: Early in the New Year, Israel, with technical and logistical support from the United States, will launch a major military strike on all Iranian nuclear facilities and Iran will respond by deploying massive world-wide terrorist attacks and will engage in efforts to cut off all sea routes for the shipment of oil from the Gulf Region. The uncertainty of all out war with US troops on the ground will be present throughout the year and active US military intervention is at least a 50-50 bet.

Eeek!

I suggest you read his Top 12 Predictions for 2012 in full.

Steve Hansen, who did well with his 2011 forecast, wisely choses to duck this year as much as he can (2012 Predictions: Just a Dice Roll). But I have to believe that readers know of other pundits who have made Extreme Predictions. Which are your favorites?

Edward Harrison here.

The post by Randall Wray below is an interesting one because it points out how the world has changed since the end of the gold standard and why the sovereign debt crisis is centered in the euro zone.

While I have an Austrian bias overall, for me, MMT is the best way to think about nonconvertible floating exchange rate systems as distinct from fixed exchange rate, currency board, pegged and convertible systems. The difference is policy space and what I would call the bond vigilante relief valve. In the old gold convertible system, the Central Bank had to jack up rates to prevent an outflow of gold.

In the old days, only by adjusting the gold peg could countries under attack get away with low rates once the vigilantes were on to them. That’s what happened during the Great Depression. Once the conversion was broken, the currency depreciated and depression lessened immediately.

Today the release valve is the currency because there is no gold tether. So the currency gives way, not interest rates. And to the degree that interest rates would increase, the Central Bank can print. The currency revulsion question then is always currency depreciation, inflation and even hyperinflation (when and under what preconditions) not interest rate spikes.

Sovereigns with significant foreign currency liabilities face the same issues – as we saw in Iceland in 2008. In the Russia and Argentina defaults last decade, those countries had foreign currency liabilities and a currency peg. This was the problem. It’s different for nonconvertible floating exchange rate currencies issued by a sovereign with no foreign currency obligations.

Where the bond vigilante story is usually flawed is in thinking that the bond vigilantes have power. Shorting government bonds when the central bank is politically aligned with the Treasury is a sure-fire way to lose lots of money. The consolidated government’s balance sheet consists of IOU liabilities that it can manufacture in infinite quantities. Why would anyone think they can win that game? It’s like my writing Yves IOUs for blog points. Maybe I write more than I can ever cover her for. But I create the points. I can always create more. if I write too many, their value depreciates.

The Europeans are currency users with a Central Bank that is not politically aligned. This is a very different institutional arrangement to the US. The Fed can ‘financially repress’ all it wants. They control rates. Long-term, the result will be currency depreciation relative to other CB’s not repressing. But if everyone is engaged in financial repression i.e forcing negative real interest rates across the curve – and I think they all will be – then clearly its only hard currency that wins: gold, land, etc. After an initial bond vigilante run, Bill Gross has got religion on this too.

Paul Krugman gets it too. I didn’t always think this was the case. But now Krugman is way out in front on this one as Randy attests in the post below.

From an investing standpoint you have to get this one right. The bond vigilante paradigm has been false in Japan and now in the US as well. If you had seen rates in Japan at 2% and shorted them saying they would come up, you would have lost your shirt. Conversely, if one uses the currency sovereignty paradigm, the short-JGBs trade is one that one would have avoided.

What a cautious investors should do is shun repressed assets and seek next best alternatives in similar assets classes or in different currencies – corporate over government bonds, Canadian over US, etc. Indonesia, for example is an opportunity.

One last note: Bill Gross had a good piece in the FT about what I have dubbed ‘permanent zero’. He called it the ugly side of ultra-cheap money. I think he’s onto something that worries me as well. It’s the same sort of thing we saw in Japan and it means, critically, that when the economy hits recession, the yield curve flattens even more and banks get savaged by this while the asset side of their balance sheet falls apart. They are then forced to sell good assets to delever and that causes a negative spiral. For the US, the next recession will be like this – and it will be nasty for risk assets as a result.

That’s my piece. Randall Wray’s post is below.

This post first appeared at "Great Leap Forward”, Randall Wray’s EconoMonitor blog.

As Mae Moore says, “It’s a Funny World” (2002). Let’s try to make sense of two news reports. Help me if you can.

1. Republicans reject the payroll tax holiday because it does not go far enough. To complicate matters, the Senate has already gone on its Xmas holiday and is refusing to come back. That leaves the Republicans in a bit of a pickle—they are going to raise taxes on the average American by $1000 per year because they refuse to support a 2 month holiday extension.

Right. Congress wants its long holiday from work, but does not want to give Americans a holiday from paying a regressive tax—the payroll tax—that for the bottom 70% of American workers takes away more income than the Federal Income tax. It is a job killer, too—as it raises the cost of employing Americans over the cost of employing workers just about anywhere on earth (few other countries tax work and employment the way we do—our payroll tax makes American workers more than 12% more expensive). So Republicans want to take away the payroll tax holiday and kill jobs.

That is a rather nice election strategy. And it is bad enough that they’re mainly running clowns for President. With the exception of Ron Paul, is there any serious candidate in the running? No, I didn’t think so. What, they actually WANT President Obama for 4 more years? Why? To continue to bail-out Wall Street? To continue to look the other way while banksters trash the economy?

Apparently the Republicans are hold-outs because they want two noxious additions to the payroll tax holiday legislation. First, they want an environment-killing Keystone pipeline—so they want that linked to the extension of the payroll tax holiday. The wording they prefer forces the President to forego any reasoned analysis of the wisdom of the pipeline by rushing a decision within 60 days. Second, they want to end the extended unemployment compensation benefits—to kill any jobs that the payroll tax holiday created. Right. We’ve been too kind to the environment and to the workers who lost their jobs because of Wall Street’s excesses, so let’s take away the payroll tax holiday and kill as many jobs as we can.

The logic escapes me. Extending the payroll tax holiday while reducing the time unemployed workers can collect benefits is a zero sum game. Do Republicans really want to fiddle while the economy slips into Great Depression 2.0? Yes they do. They see that as a win-win. They’ll run some Bozo the Clown, lose the election, and then stick Obama with the coming depression. And they hope to also stick him with an environmental nightmare to hasten the end of life as we know it.

Oh, sure, there will be life after Keystone. You’ve seen some of the science fiction movies that attempt to divine it. I’d put my money on the dystopian Mad Max or A Boy and His Dog. I expect that is a future that many of the current Republican candidates would embrace: one with insignificant, ineffectual governmental constraint on unbridled pursuit of macho self-interest. Newt! It’s your party platform.

2. The World Discovers Modern Money Theory. Who wuddavthought? The problem with the Euro is that formerly sovereign nations gave up their currencies to adopt a foreign currency called the Euro. Now, MMT followers have been saying that since the Euro was proposed. It was a system designed to fail, and like all systems designed to fail the only question was when. We now know the “when” is January 2012—when the Euro banks fail and Italy leaves the union.

But we were ignored for a decade and a half, while economists and policymakers celebrated the glorious “Union”. Heck, the union was so great that the EMU invited every Tom, Dick, and Harry nation to join up. They added nations with wages and living standards that were barely above subsistence level—indeed, nations that were willing to reduce living standards below subsistence if only they could join and reap the supposed benefits of joining the most dysfunctional empire ever constructed.

And they let Germany add cheap workers within its eastern half and then extend its reach to those low cost new additions as it came to account for 75% to 80% of all European exports. There has never been any international arrangement, anywhere, at any time in human history, that so-favored a nation. And when things went predictably bad for all of Germany’s neighbors, Germany pointed its finger at its victims and insisted that they were at fault for Germany’s success. No more porridge for them!

As evidence that the world is coming around (finally) to the MMT view, take a look at Dean Baker’s excellent piece.

Now here’s the ironic thing. It seems to have been none other than Paul Krugman who made it safe for others to adopt MMT. He shined his headlights on the obvious: the reason why interest rates on government debt are not exploding in countries like Japan, the US, and the UK is because they issue their own currencies.

Japan is the champion nation in terms of budget deficits and government debt relative to GDP. Many have long argued (wrongly) that this is because holders happen to have addresses in Japan. Nonsense. A sovereign government that issues its own currency makes interest payments on its debt in exactly the same manner whether the holder has an address at the South Pole or on Mars: a keystroke to a savings deposit at the central bank. What matters is whether the country issues its own currency.

That is why the little spat between the UK and France—with France insisting that credit agencies ought to down-grade the UK before they downgrade France—is so silly. France can have a debt ratio under 15% of GDP and still be forced to default. The UK can have a debt ratio above Japan’s 200% and still face no chance of involuntary default. That is the beauty and utility of issuing your own currency. France is a currency user and its fate depends on Germany—which is busy sucking up every spare Euro it can lay its greedy hands on. France is no better off than the panhandler on the street corner begging for pocket change—a user of currency, not an issuer.

So, Krugman shined the headlights on the difference between a currency issuer and a currency user. It is now time for everyone to follow Dean Baker—to look for the car keys under those MMT headlights.

3. Olly Olly Oxen Free: it is safe to come out of the dark. A sovereign government faces no financial constraints. We can have payroll tax holiday extensions and unemployment benefit extension. Heck why don’t we go whole-hog and actually create jobs for the unemployed? We need 25 million of them. We can afford them. All we need to do is to find useful things for them to do. That ain’t hard.

“The Conservative belief that there is some law of nature which prevents men from being employed, that it is “rash” to employ men, and that it is financially ‘sound’ to maintain a tenth of the population in idleness for an indefinite period, is crazily improbable – the sort of thing which no man could believe who had not had his head fuddled with nonsense for years and years… Our main task, therefore, will be to confirm the reader’s instinct that what seems sensible is sensible, and what seems nonsense is nonsense. We shall try to show him that the conclusion, that if new forms of employment are offered more men will be employed, is as obvious as it sounds and contains no hidden snags; that to set unemployed men to work on useful tasks does what it appears to do, namely, increases the national wealth; and that the notion, that we shall, for intricate reasons, ruin ourselves financially if we use this means to increase our well-being, is what it looks like – a bogy.” –John Maynard Keynes 1972, 90-92

By Rumplestatskin, a professional economist with a broad range of interests and a diverse background in property development, environmental economics research and economic regulation. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.

What few seem to appreciate, either inside or outside of Japan, is just how strong the resulting Japanese recovery from 2002-2008 was. It was the longest unbroken recovery of Japan’s postwar history, and, while not as strong as pre-bubble Japanese performance, was in fact stronger than the growth in comparable economies even when fuelled by their own bubbles.

How on Earth did Japan manage that with their ageing population and zero population growth? Indeed, Japan outperformed Australia in productivity growth since 2000 and very nearly kept pace with real GDP per capita growth.

Australia’s average annual real growth in GDP per capita since 2000 is 1.28%. While I can’t find a direct measure from the Japanese Statistical agency, using the World Bank data collection I can make a comparison of real GDP growth per capita of Australia and Japan using a common methodology. Using these statistics I find that Australia had a mean annual growth in real GDP per person since 2000 of 1.8% while Japan’s was 1.4%.

Australia’s economic performance is terms of productivity growth looks pitiful in comparison to Japan. Average annual Total Factor Productivity growth since 2000 was a shy 0.47% (including a productivity recession in 2004-05) while Japan recorded a strong 1.77% over the same period (data from OECD here).

Of course there is always unemployment to consider.  The graph below shows that on this measure, Australia is also behind Japan (having been in front for just the period 2007-2008).  Some longitudinal data is here.

Recent research also suggests that Japan’s economic track record was unfairly blemished by asset price deflation followed by short recessions in the 1990s (1993, 1997 and 1998). The graph below (from here - including 20yr data set), shows Japan’s solid performance over the past decade, with their longest boom since WWII occurring from 2002-2008.

It appears that turning Japanese is not the tragedy it is made out to be by popular economic commentators. Here’s just one example of the popular perception-

As it turned out, Japanese investors lost nominal wealth equal to three entire years’ GDP. And the economy today hasn’t grown in 17 years or created a single new job.

Nor has the debt been reduced. Instead of permitting the private sector to destroy and pay off its debt, the public sector fought against it…borrowing heavily to try to bring about a recovery. Result: no recovery…and almost exactly the same amount of debt. But while the private sector paid off its debt, the public sector picked up the borrowing. Now it’s the government that owes money all over town.

Detractors cite the massive and growing public debt in Japan as a problem.  But if the debt is denominated in Yen, and interest rates are set near zero, the burden from the debt is minimal. In fact, Modern Monetary theorists might claim public debt in ones own currency is never a burden because government can enact future policys to pay down debt with freshly printed money. I’ll leave that particulars of this option to a future MMT debate.

The above graph confirms that Japanese government debt has replaced a substantial portion of private debt since the early 1990s. In my view this is a justified effort to keep the value of the yen stable by maintaining money in circulation – an approach that could be adopted in Australia in the coming decade, with government debt replacing household debt for the same reason.

One must keep in mind that it is probably not the intention of the Japanese government to ever pay off this debt. I am sure they are happy to continue to progress with a high savings rate, high productivity, high GDP, net exports and almost every other fundamental ingredient for economic success.  Turning Japanese appears to be about fundamental economic prosperity cradled in an unfamiliar monetary framework.

Tips, suggestions, comments and requests to rumplestatskin@gmail.com + follow me on Twitter @rumplestatskin

By Zarathustra, who is the founder of Hong Kong blog Also sprach Analyst. He was educated at the London School of Economics and the Chinese University of Hong Kong and was once a Hong Kong-based equity research analyst focusing on Hong Kong real estate (which he did not really like), with a secondary coverage on China real estate sector (which he actually hated). Cross posted from MacroBusiness

Zero interest rate policy and quantitative easing is not working to stimulate the real economy. No country has succeeded. The pioneer of quantitative easing, the Bank of Japan, failed (and Japanese yen is uber-strong). The Federal Reserve has failed, and the Bank of England has failed.

Before going to quantitative easing, let’s consider whether zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) works. Michael Pettis offered some interesting observations recently in his newsletter. He says that even though theory reckons that lowering interest rates should make people less likely to save, and to consume more, empirical data suggest the otherwise. In fact, people save more when rates are low, not less:

In China, for example, deposit rates are seriously negative and have been negative for many years, and yet the household savings rate is nonetheless very high. In fact it seems that, as a rule, countries with repressed interest rates have higher, not lower savings rates.

What’s more, I have seen US historical data that suggests that when interest-rate declines have coincided with falling, not rising, stock and real estate markets (as they have recently), the savings rate usually rises rather than declines. In other words households care mainly about their wealth, not about the reward for postponing consumption.

So in an environment where the asset side of household’s balance sheet is falling in value (as in recent years in the US), it makes sense for households to save more, regardless of the interest rates. That’s debt deleveraging or balance sheet recession as we know it.

Now let’s consider Japan. It underwent debt deleveraging or a balance sheet recession for two decades. As corporate balance sheets were underwater because the asset side was falling in value, corporates increased their saving level. Thus there plenty of demand for holding Japanese yen (and for that matter, Japanese Government bonds as a vehicles for savings). That’s why JGBs yields are so low, because the saving level in the corporate sector has increased.

Of course, when everyone is saving and not spending and borrowing, asset prices will be under even more pressure, and that encourages even more debt deleveraging as that pushes everyone’s balance sheet even deeper under water. So we have a vicious circle of falling asset prices, increasing saving level, and deflation.

If central banks can’t break this deflationary vicious circle even as they are getting bigger and bigger, Prof. Nick Rowe considers the following somewhat bizarre endgame in his terrific post:

What happens as we push this process to the limit, and keep on reducing the long run inflation rate, down to zero, and then into deflation? The central bank keeps on getting bigger and bigger, and owns a larger and larger share of the total assets in the economy. It buys all the short-term government bonds, then all the long-term government bonds, then all the commercial bonds, then all the shares, then all the land, then all the houses….Because as the rate of inflation falls, falls to zero, and keeps on falling into negative territory, people will want to hold more and more of their wealth in the form of central bank money. And unless the central bank satisfies that demand, by selling them money and buying their other assets, the result will be an excess demand for money and recession.

Where does it end? Do we ever hit some absolute liquidity trap where people want to hold money rather than any other asset? Well, not really. Because the central bank has to keep on buying assets that people do not want to hold because they want to hold money instead.

It doesn’t end in a liquidity trap. It ends when the central bank runs out of things to buy, because it already owns everything, right down to your house, furniture, and toothbrush, which it rents back to you. It ends in communism.

Karl Marx certainly did not say that quantitative easing can achieve his goal, although he did want to see the following according to the Communist Manifesto:

Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

By Washington’s Blog

Tokyo Radiation Exceeds Chernobyl In Some Places … Japanese Government and Experts Discuss Evacuation

As I noted last month, radiation in some parts of Tokyo is higher than in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.

Yesterday, Al Jazeera pointed out:

Experts estimate the radiation leaked from Fukushima nuclear plant will exceed that of Chernobyl.

***

The need to evacuate parts of the sprawling capital of 35 million may have once seemed an incredible prospect but some experts say the possibility can no longer be ignored.

Indeed, as Japan Times reports today, the Japanese government started discussing the potential need to evacuate Japan soon after the quake hit:

In the days immediately after the crisis began at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the government received a report saying 30 million residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would have to be evacuated in a worst-case scenario, former Prime Minister Naoto Kan revealed in a recent interview.

***

“It was a crucial moment when I wasn’t sure whether Japan could continue to function as a state,” he said.

After the March 11 earthquake and tsunami crippled the plant, Kan instructed several entities to simulate a worst-case scenario. One of those assessments said everyone residing within 200 to 250 km of the plant — an zone that would encompass half to all of Tokyo and cut clear across Honshu to the Sea of Japan — would have to be evacuated.

Things Are Getting Worse – Not Better – In Japan

While this is a worst-case scenario, things are getting worse – rather than better – at Fukushima. See this, this, this and this.

Now that Steve Jobs has retired from Apple, Jamie Dimon seems determined to assume his role as the CEO with the most effective reality distortion sphere. You can infer that from the magnitude of the whoppers he is telling and the size of the audience he is trying to bamboozle.

But while Jobs’ Svengali tendencies have gotten more than occasional mention, they weren’t a major failing. Jobs not only saved Apple, but he spearheaded the development of important new product categories. By contrast, Dimon has long been a bully, a smart and capable bully, but a bully nevertheless (I have reports going back to his first year at Harvard Business School, and it takes some doing to be memorably obnoxious by dint of the competition in that category).

Now on the surface, Dimon’s latest brazen remark isn’t quite as gross as my headline suggests. He is merely saying that US banks should not be subject to the new incoming international bank rules, known as Basel III. That might seem to be a narrower statement, but as we show, when you parse his logic, it amounts to banking uber alles.

Here is the relevant section of an interview published today in the Financial Times:

New international bank capital rules are “anti-American” and the US should consider pulling out of the Basel group of global regulators, Jamie Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, has said….

The Basel III capital rules are designed to make the financial system safer by making banks build up risk-absorbent “core tier one” capital to at least 7 per cent of risk-weighted assets. The biggest, including JPMorgan, have to reach 9.5 per cent.

“I’m very close to thinking the United States shouldn’t be in Basel any more. I would not have agreed to rules that are blatantly anti-American,” he said. “Our regulators should go there and say: ‘If it’s not in the interests of the United States, we’re not doing it’.”

Mr Dimon also criticised global liquidity rules, arguing that regulations that viewed covered bonds – a European market feature – as highly liquid but discounted government-backed mortgage-backed securities in the US were unfair and that other details hit investment banking activity core to US banks hardest.

Regulators say all countries compromised on agreeing the rules, which put eight banks – five from outside the US – in the top level of capital. But Mr Dimon said there was a threat that Asian banks, in particular, could take US market share because of the combination of US domestic and global rules.

“I think any American president, secretary of Treasury, regulator or other leader would want strong, healthy global financial firms and not think that somehow we should give up that position in the world and that would be good for your country,” said Mr Dimon. “If they think that’s good for the country then we have a different view on how the economy operates, how the world operates.”

Let’s start with some background. Treasury secretary Geithner said repeatedly during the Dodd Frank process that the shortcomings in the legislation didn’t matter all that much, since having banks carry larger capital buffers would do the trick, and that was coming with Basel III. In other words, Geithner argued the higher capital requirements to be imposed by international rulemaking process was where the critical banking regulatory fix would happen. And this is what Dimon is now, loudly, out to undermine.

Let’s go to the Dimon argument, such as it is. What about “international” does he not understand? If you want to play outside America’s borders, you can expect to be subject to different rules. The Eurozone, much to the consternation of US and UK players, has basically told the Anglo private equity firms to go to hell. They are forbidden both from doing deals in EU countries and from raising funds there unless they register and obey local rules. The Eurozone has gotten sick of rapacious foreign players buying decent European companies, cutting jobs, saddling them with lots of debt, and shrugging their shoulders when they miscalculate (often) and the rent extraction kills the company. The EU rules, among other things, will restrict how much a PE firm could lever up a portfolio company.

There is also what I assume is a deliberate misrepresentation on the part of Dimon. The Basel III rules are not implemented verbatim by national regulators; there is a more than a bit of tweaking and adjustment going on. Given the loud support that Geithner has given to the Basel III process (and the damage it would do to the US reputation in international bodies when emerging economies are already questioning the Anglo-Saxon model and demanding a bigger role), it’s hard to imagine the US acting on Dimon’s demands and repudiating the Basel III process. But he may be using this temper tantrum to get the US implementation to cut some slack on some issues near and dear to his heart.

Dimon interestingly assumes that the US can defy the will of other regulators. That’s probably true now, given that regulators in advanced economies all seem to adhere to neoliberal dogma. The interesting and glaring exception is the UK, which is forcing its banks to ring-fence their retail operations. The new standards (“Vickers,” for the commission’s chairman) require a capital cushion of up to 20%, with the largest ringfenced banks having at least 17% of equity and bonds and a further loss-absorbing buffer of up to 3% if “the supervisor has concerns about their ability to be resolved without cost to the taxpayer”. If Basel III’s 9.5% capital requirement is “anti American”, then how “anti British”, in Dimon’s world, is Vickers?

But it isn’t at all a given. Dimon’s assumption is that he has nothing to lose by pushing for his aggressive ask. But the Eurozone implemented Basel II before the US. Its banks are likely to howl about the costs of the equity and liquidity provisions, but they happen to be preoccupied right now, and the near certainty of further state intervention on their behalf is likely to weaken their ability to press for waivers when the Eurocrisis abates.

As we have stated before, both the ECB and the Fed could implement binding requirements on major international banks. Any real bank needs access to the central bank-run settlement systems in the dollar and euro; you need to be a full scale player in those currencies, and going through correspondents to get access to those clearing systems would be very cumbersome and costly (I had a client look at it for the US and conclude it was a non-starter). There is no way for the banks to innovate around these systems.

The next bizarre bit in Dimon’s rant is his characterization of Basel III as “anti-American.” What, because it is named for a Swiss city?

If you believe the PR of the US regulators (and this is one case where bank analysts agree with their take), US banks are better capitalized that Eurobanks. Forcing everyone to adhere to new capital standards will work to the competitive advantage of US banks, since they are further along. But anyone with an operating brain cell knows that Dimon’s real beef is not on the effect on American bank’s competitive standing, but on his pay package, which is a function of its bottom line. Any effort to make banking safer will lower their profits. That is what Dimon objects to; the specifics of his argument are simply to serve as cover for his real beef.

Dimon manages to play yet another jingoistic card, acting as if Basel III singles out US banks when a majority of the financial firms subject to the most stringent rules are outside the US. And he raises the truly bizarre specter of “Asian” hordes invading the US. Huh? Does he mean HSBC? I presume not, that’s a UK bank. The only Asian bank in the top 10 is Mitsubishi UFJ, and the Japanese are not likely to be in aggressive expansion mode (they’ve never gotten the knack institutionally of hiring and managing good top level foreigners; I know of a very few Japanese executives who have figured it out and did a good job when they were posted in the US, but as soon as they were rotated back to Japan, their successors made a hash of what they had put in place).

The Chinese are even less likely to move in near term (long term is a completely different matter). First, the Chinese were apparently interested in investing in US players in the crisis and were rebuffed. But having worked repeatedly with foreign banks in the US, building a denovo operation (or using small acquisitions as a platform) is a completely different kettle of fish. And going from the Chinese market of heavy state control and limited product scope to the US is like saying a drayage company can operate a supersonic plane because both are in the transportation business. I’ve seen what a hard time foreign banks have had in the US with a vastly lesser skill gap (one they closed over a period of decades). The Chinese are too far behind skill-wise to constitute a threat in the US until they can acquire the skills via a major acquisition (and that was not the scenario Dimon was hinting at).

And it goes without saying that Dimon made clear that he believe that what is good for banks is good for the US, when that has been demonstrably false for at least the last decade.

What’s striking about Dimon’s comments is how brazen they are. He’s not making clever, narrowly accurate but substantively misleading comments. Much of what he says and implies is unadulterated bunk. The fact that he peddles this tripe shows how confident he is that his message will go unchallenged. And that in turn reveals that he is secure in his belief that the banks have won the war; all he is caviling about is the speed of the mop-up operation.

By Marshall Auerback, a hedge fund manager, portfolio strategist, and Roosevelt Institute fellow. A version of this post appeared at New Economic Perspectives.

Forget about the S&P downgrade, which has had ZERO impact on the global equity markets. The downgrade was supposed to mean that it would be more likely that the US government would not be able to pay its debt than previously assumed. IF the markets took this warning seriously, then they would have attached a higher risk premium to US government bonds. Of course, the opposite occurred. US bonds soared in price. In other words, investors, both here and abroad, voted with money as loudly as possible that they view the US government debt as a very safe haven in a time of financial turmoil

So if it wasn’t the S&P downgrade which caused this downward cascade in the global equity markets, then what was it? By far, the most important factor currently driving the market’s bear trends is Europe or, more specifically, the future of the euro and the European Monetary Union. Systemic risk has migrated across the Atlantic to the euro zone.

And after the recent joke of a summit between German Chancellor Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy, it appears yet again that Europe’s policy makers have comprehensively blown it. Their persistent reluctance to get ahead of the looming systemic ticking bomb at the heart of the euro project has reached the point where it is likely to doom the euro’s existence. Their repeated “rescue plans” (and equally fatuous statements about new committees and “euro solidarity”) can no longer mask the central problem, which is that countries with very different economies are yoked to the same currency in the absence of a fiscal transfer union which would otherwise facilitate growth, not ongoing economic depression and political turmoil.

Rather than attempting to stave off a double-dip recession by easing fiscal and monetary policy, the European Central Bank (ECB) has gone careening off in the opposite direction. The euro project is consequently being turned into a Hooverian instrument of economic torture from sado-monetarists, such as Jean-Claude Trichet, who see each bailout as a way for irresponsible nations to offload their liabilities onto their fitter neighbors, rather than considering the flawed institutional structures which created the need for these stop-gap measures in the first place. Interest rates have been raised, and member states have been forced into self-defeating austerity programmes which, by destroying growth, have made underlying debt dynamics even worse. It is hard to imagine a more tragic and self-defeating type of policy mix. It is 1937 writ large.

How long will voters in rich countries stand for this? Perhaps not much longer as the Germans in particular appear to have no stomach to withstand the costs required to save the currency union. So what is this problem at the heart of the euro project?

Let’s go back to first principles: it is important to recognize the difference between sovereign and non-sovereign currencies. A government with a non-sovereign currency, issuing debts either in foreign currency or in domestic currency pegged to foreign currency (or to a precious metal, such as gold), faces solvency risk. However, a government that spends by using its own floating and non-convertible currency cannot be forced into default, unless they willingly choose to do so (such as the US Congress almost prepared to contemplate during its recent debt ceiling negotiations). It is why a country like Japan can run government debt-to-GDP ratios that are more than twice as high as the “high debt” PIIGS, while enjoying extremely low interest rates on sovereign debt. A nation operating with its own currency can always spend by crediting bank accounts, and that includes spending on interest. Thus, there is no default risk in terms of a capacity to pay (as opposed to political WILLINGNESS to pay).

But as has been noted by many critics of the common currency project, the relation of member countries to the European Monetary Union (EMU) is more similar to the relation of the treasuries of member states of the United States to the Fed than it is of the US Treasury to the Fed. A country like Ireland is more like New York within the EMU than a sovereign state. This means it has little domestic policy space to use monetary or fiscal policy to deal with crisis. The upshot has been that in the face of the first large negative demand shock to hit the region, the nation states have quickly found they cannot use fiscal policy in a responsible way to protect its economy from rising unemployment and collapsing income. In a normal federation, the national government can always ensure the solvency of the constituent parts via fiscal transfers. In the legal design of the EMU, there is no such role specified and attempts by the member states to cushion the demand collapse quickly raised the ire of the Euro elites with the ECB leading the charge to impose austerity on errant governments.

In the US, states have no power to create currency; in this circumstance, taxes really do ‘finance’ state spending and states really do have to borrow (sell bonds to the markets) in order to spend in excess of tax receipts. Purchasers of state bonds do worry about the creditworthiness of states, and the ability of American states to run deficits depends at least in part on the perception of creditworthiness. While it is certainly true that an individual state can always fall back on US government help when required (although the recent experience of the debt ceiling negotiations makes that assumption less secure), it is not so clear that the individual countries in the euro zone are as fortunate. Functionally, each nation state operates the way individual American states do, but with ONLY individual state treasuries.

The euro dilemma, then, is somewhat akin to the Latin American dilemma, such as countries like Argentina regularly experienced during the time that they operated currency pegs. Given the institutional constraints, deficit spending in effect requires borrowing in a “foreign currency”, according to the dictates of private markets and the nation states are externally constrained. That’s why Ireland and Latvia are in a mess and suffer from solvency issues. It’s also why California suffers from a solvency issue or Italy or Spain. Not the US or Japan, which explains why the latter has been able to borrow money at around 1% for the past two decades, despite a public debt to GDP ratio about twice the US or the euro zone.

At this juncture, however, there isn’t enough time to create a “United States of Europe”, which is why the ECB has resumed its bond buying operations to put a floor on the bonds and alleviate concerns about the solvency issues of the individual nation states. The ECB has received a lot of criticism for this. In one sense, the criticisms are legitimate: The ECB is in effect playing a “fiscal role” for which they are ill-suited. They buy time by buying the bonds.

But the bond buying attacks the symptoms, rather than the underlying problems. And it’s fundamentally undemocratic: In taking up this role – by way of the ad hoc bailouts and secondary bond market purchases the ECB has become a sort of fiscal tsar unanswerable to any national electorate.

The hope is that by backstopping the bonds, the ECB can persuade the markets that countries like Italy and Greece are not insolvent and that these countries will resume funding them. Even with Italian and Spanish bonds now dipping below 5% recently, this has proved to be a fatuous hope because the contagion has now spread into core countries such as France. Europeans still have to get the institutional arrangements right and the ECB, as the sole issuer of euros, is the only instrument that today can play this role, albeit imperfectly, but there is a better way.

Immediate relief can be provided by the ECB, which should be directed to create and distribute several trillion euros across all euro zone nations on a per capita basis. This would not constitute a “bailout” as such as Germany (with the largest per capita economy) would be the largest recipient. Each individual eurozone nation would be allowed to use this emergency relief as it sees fit. Greece might choose to purchase some of its outstanding public debt; others might choose fiscal stimulus packages. While this might sound much like the current bail-out, in which the ECB buys government bonds in the secondary markets from banks (assuming the risk of a default by Greece, for example), the emergency package outlined here (first proposed by Warren Mosler) would be under the discretion of the individual nations.

Hence, the ECB would finance current government operations if national governments chose that course of action. And if they found that a country was abusing the privilege (for example, Greece being deficient in tax collection), it could withhold the payments until compliance was achieved. In effect, the sanction would be more credible as it would constitute the ECB withholding carrots, rather than beating up fiscally stressed countries with a stick and seeking compliance with a country already in dire economic straits. More significantly, the revenue sharing proposal would address the contagion impact, as the ECB could continue the distributions to other countries, even as it punished the “recalcitrant problem children”.

We emphasise that this does not address the problem of deficient aggregate demand, but does address the solvency issue, which is the main systemic threat to the euro zone right now (indeed, to the entire global economy). By persuading the markets that most of the euro zone is creditworthy, the risk of the markets shutting these countries down diminishes considerably. As these countries fund themselves on credible terms in the private markets, they can begin to grow again.

Of course, putting the problem in this context and putting out a figure that has a trillion euro handle on it, makes it harder to believe that it will be politically palatable to the ECB or its stronger creditor nations such as Germany. Which is why we think that our earlier suggestion might become the more likely endgame:

The likely result of a German exit would be a huge surge in the value of the newly reconstituted DM. In effect, then, everybody devalues against the economic powerhouse which is Germany and the onus for fiscal reflation is now placed on the most recalcitrant member of the European Union. Germany will likely have to bail out its banks, but this is more politically palatable than, say, bailing out the Greek banks (at least from the perspective of the German populace).

The question remains: do the Germans ultimately quit the euro to save Germany or do they take the view that their fate is too intertwined with the common currency and that departure imposes an even greater economic and political cost?

If the latter, the Germans have to be made to understand that core problem at the heart of the euro zone is NOT a problem of “Mediterranean profligacy”. Many people, particularly in Germany, express the view that the Italian, Greek or Portuguese governments (and by association their people) are to blame for this crisis – accessing cheap loans from Northern European banks, not paying enough taxes, not working hard enough, etc (this also seems to be a common view amongst readers of this blog).

One thing is clear from the remarks that continue to emanate from Europe’s main policy makers. They do not understand basic accounting identities. They fail to see any kind of relationship between their own export model and their trading partners.

For example, it is ironic (and more than a touch hypocritical) that Germany chastises its neighbors, like Greece, or its trading partners like the U.S., for their “profligacy”, but relies on these countries “living beyond their means” to produce a trade surplus that allows its own government to run smaller budget deficits.

It’s even more extreme within the euro zone in the context of the global economy. The European Monetary Union bloc as a whole runs an approximately balanced current account with the rest of the world. Hence, within Euroland it is a zero-sum game: one nation’s current account surplus is offset by a deficit run by a neighbor. And given triple constraints — an inability to devalue the euro, a global downturn, and the most dominant partner within the bloc, Germany, committed to running its own trade surpluses — it seems quite unlikely that poor, suffering nations like Greece or Ireland could move toward a current account surplus and thereby help to reduce its own government “profligacy”.

The ECB appears to suffer from the same conceptual confusion. They do not appear to make the connection between financial balances and nominal GDP growth -, as in, if the domestic private sector has a high desired net saving position (that is, seeks to save more than they invest, and either net accumulate financial assets or net reduce financial liabilities), nominal GDP growth will slow (or even contract) unless the fiscal balance is reduced, the current account balance is increased, or some combination thereof in sufficient size.

They seem to understand financial balances must balance ex post, and so the sector balances are interconnected. They do not appear to recognize the issuer of money and the creators of credit generally hold the key to the ability of sectors to deficit spend, and that deficit spending is required to generate the increase in income out of which new gross saving can occur. But with the chimera of “expansionary fiscal consolidations” getting revealed with Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and soon Spain all in recession, maybe we have an opportunity to connect the dots for more people on this.

What about the issue of laziness, corruption, poor tax collection, all of the charges usually hurled against the so-called “PIIGS” countries? To this we would simply ask, even if the “Club Med” countries are lazy and don’t pay taxes, why did this crisis come now? As Bill Mitchell has noted, these countries didn’t just become “lazy” when they joined the EMU. Why didn’t, say, the Italian government face insolvency prior to joining the EMU? The point is that it might be sensible if the Italian government could get the high income earners to pay more tax and it might be sensible to raise productivity but, as Mitchell has argued, none of these things are intrinsic to their crisis.

No, the problem is the Euro and it is a shared problem across the Euro zone. And this is what is beginning to dawn on the markets, as the contagion spreads from the periphery into the core.
Consider the chart constructed by the economist, Rebecca Braeu, of Standish Management:

The red line refers to Germany’s leading economic indicators – order books, exports, etc., and point to dramatically slower growth in the months ahead. Germany is in effect also a passenger on the Titanic, as Italian Finance Minister Guilio Tremonti recently noted. It might be in the first-class cabin, rather than steerage (or Irish stowaways, as the Germans no doubt view the former “Celtic Tiger”), but when the boat hits the iceberg, all passengers are affected.

Until now, the Eurocrats have either remained in denial about the mounting stress fractures within the system, or forced weaker countries to impose even greater fiscal austerity on their suffering populations, which has exacerbated the problems further. And there has been a complete lack of consistency of principle. When larger countries such as Germany and France routinely violated spending limits a few years ago, this was conveniently ignored (or papered over), in contrast to the vituperative criticism now being hurled at the Mediterranean profligates. The EU’s repeated tendency to make ad hoc improvisations of EMU’s treaty provisions, rather than engaging in the hard job of reforming its flawed arrangements, are a function of a silly ideology which is neither grounded in political reality, nor economic logic. As a result, a political firestorm, which completely undermines the euro’s credibility, is potentially in the offing.

And to judge from the flaccid statement that accompanied the conclusion of the Merkel-Sarkozy summit yesterday, it appears that even at this late stage, policy makers don’t get it, or just cannot summon up the political will for the huge conceptual leap forward required to save the euro. The Germans are paralysed politically and things are moving too fast for their policy makers to respond quickly. And their political leadership has neither leveled with the electorate in regard to the magnitude of the problem, nor the costs associated with ongoing punishments of the so-called profligates. Whenever a German political leader opens his/her mouth it is to announce bad news, like the recent statement by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble that the German government was opposed to any increase in the EFSF’s resources, or the creation of a euro bond, even though such a move is essential for the medium-term stabilisation of financial markets.
At this juncture, then, it seems more likely that the Germans will try to save themselves by pulling out of the euro zone (and then they recapitalise their own banks, as they did following German reunification). They take the Benelux countries with them (which have already closely converged with Germany’s economy) and have a “Greater DM” bloc and buy the rest of Europe on the cheap with their newly reconstituted DMs.

The Club Med nations, such as Greece, Italy, and Spain are saved because the euro plunges and they get to export their way out of this. The euro becomes a soft currency country again and these countries go back to living with higher inflation, higher exports and probably a generally more comfortable way of life.

Interestingly enough, the country which really gets screwed in this type of environment is France which is neither a true “Club Med” economy, but has yet to undertake many of the structural reforms of its German counterpart which it is seeking to emulate. Its economy is more akin to that of Italy, but should it seek to become part of the “greater DM bloc”, then its industrial base will likely face a huge competitive threat from Italy. It could well be eviscerated. And the social reaction could be severe. Remember, the guillotine was invented in France.

As for Germany, the irony is that divorce from the euro zone will likely not prove to be the panacea that many in the country now think. As the newly reconstituted DM soars to Swiss franc type levels (the DM likely to be seen as a “hard currency” and a credible repository of savings flows), it is likely that German businesses will use their highly valued Deutschmarks to buy European assets on the cheap. Anschluss economics writ large. They will then move a large proportion of their manufacturing to other European countries, to take advantage of the cheaper labour costs, likely resulting in a lower standard of living for the average German worker. It will prove to be a form of fools’ gold for a large proportion of the German electorate, who will soon realize they were sold yet another bill of goods by their politicians.

In any case, there appear to be no happy outcomes here (although as my friend, Tom Ferguson always reminds me, “If you want to have a happy ending, go see a Disney film”). We therefore appear to be entering most dangerous time for Europe since World War II.

After a very bad day in the US, Asian markets swooned and European markets fell again, but their declines are less gut wrenching. 2-3% falls in most Euromarkets at the opening (2.5% for the FTSE, 2% for the Dax, and 3.5%.for the Milan’s FTSE-MIB) but for the most part, they have come back somewhat as of this hour. The FTSE is now down 2.2%, the CAC 40 a mere 1.2%, the DAX 2.7%, and the FTSE-MIB has is in positive territory, up 0.25%. This follows plunges of 3.7% for the Nikkei and 4.5% for the Hang Seng indexes.

US futures had been up modestly as of now (9 points for the Dow and 2.5 points for the S&P 500) but are now in negative territory (67 points for the Dow and 6.4 for the S&P). Non-farm payrolls are released before trading opens, and a disappointing number could kick off more widespread selling (one analyst opined that it would take “a really strong report” of 150,000 or more job additions in July, to have a lasting impact on investor worries). The euro is up a smidge, 1.41 to the dollar, and the yen has strengthened to 78.5 despite heavy intervention by the Bank of Japan on Thursday.

There is plenty of evidence of rattled nerves. Commodities took a hit, another sign that deflationary expectations are taking hold. But perhaps the biggest change in attitude is lost faith that central bankers can or will intervene successfully. Bond purchases by the ECB did little to calm markets (a recovery in Italian and Spanish bonds quickly reversed). The Fed seems bizarrely preoccupied with inflation although the real problem is that what the US needs is fiscal stimulus to offset consumer deleveraging and failure of businesses to invest. We actually need more bankruptcies and asset writedowns in combination with more aggressive spending. In Euroland, the scope of the sovereign debt crisis has now reached the too big to fail Italy, and one of my German press reading contacts said that finance minister Wolfgang Schauble nixed yesterday the notion of enlarging rescue facilities.

Even though the US media has tended to focus on a series of bad data releases as teh trigger for the declines, in addition to no one being happy with the immediate resolution of the faux debt ceiling crisis, the bigger source of near term risk is the escalating Eurozone crisis (and Europe in not halfway around the world from an economic standpoint; the US economy is considerable integrated into it, with roughly 25% of S&P earnings dependent on it, for instance).

Thanks to the failure of the ECB intervention yesterday to accomplish much, Eurozone leader appear to recognize the need to Do Something, but given that they seem to need to Do Something every two weeks or so, their response time is increasingly lagging market demand.

On a cheery note, Marc Faber deems stocks to be “extremely oversold” and argued for a 40 to 50 point bounce on the S&P. But remember, violent rallies are a bear market staple.

A useful discussion with Marshall Auerback on Fox News on the debt ceiling deal and the implications of a possible downgrade of US Treasuries. Enjoy!