Author Archives: Yves Smith

Links 12/22/14

Christie Allies Offer Dubious Defenses for Payments Made to His Wife’s Firm

Increasingly defensive responses from the Christie administration and friendly media outlets show that David Sirota’s relentless reporting on pension fund improprieties is starting to draw blood.

The New York Times ran a story last week that recapped (and cited) the Sirota’s reporting on a new Garden State impropriety: that of Christie’s wife, Mary Pat, being hired by hedge fund Angelo Gordon after the firm had been told by the state to liquidate a $150 million custom fund. That should be uncontroversial except Angelo Gordon has failed to sell a portion of the fund after three years, meaning it is still generating fees from New Jersey even as Christie’s wife works there. This relationship looks to run afoul of New Jersey’s strict pay-to-play rules, which state officials from “being involved” in “any official manner” in which they have direct or indirect personal or financial interest.

The Newark Star Ledger also wrote up the story, with the addendum that Tom Bruno, chairman of the state’s largest pension fund, called for an ethics investigation.

The day after the Times story appeared in print, the Newark Star Ledger in an editorial tried to depict the accounts as off base. The timing of the response, coming so quickly on the heels of the Times’ account, strongly suggests that it was planted. An all-too-consistent feature of the rebuttals to Sirota’s charges is that they play fast and loose with facts. The bone of contention is that the state is still paying fees to Angelo Gordon, when by all normal standards payments should have ceased years ago.

The War to Start All Wars: The 25th Anniversary of the Forgotten Invasion of Panama

Yves here. Why is war becoming a dominant line of business for a soi-disant democracy? In the 19th century, the consensus among the capitalist classes was that armed conflict was bad for business. Europe had a nearly 100 year of peace, with only short-lived conflicts as punctuation.

The rationale for America’s militaristic foreign policy was that spreading democracy would promote peace, since as conventional wisdom had it, democracies don’t go to war with other democracies. But the more accurate statement might be that many democracies (Russia and most countries in South America being noteworthy exceptions) have accepted the US security umbrella and are no longer capable of defending themselves (for instance, Mathew D. Rose noted that “much of the German military hardware is dysfunctional due to austerity and endemic corruption“). But the promise of a Pax Americana in the wake of the fall of the USSR has instead morphed into the US running ongoing wars and counterinsurgencies, even as our troops are strained to the breaking point. And it’s clear that these campaigns are more about looting than about making America and its allies safer. The classic Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War has an afterword which discusses the failed Iraq peace, pointing out that it was absurd to expect the Iraqi army to be able to stand up against foreign attack (this years before it collapsed when ISIS looked cross-eyed at it). Similarly, that a big part of the failure to reconstruct the country was due to the use of US contractors. Not only did they cost ridiculously more, but the failure to employ local firms and hire locals meant little of the spending went into the Iraq economy. Rebuilding would also have given young men meaningful and well-paid work. The absence of that made them good raw material for the opposition.

In other words, America has turned long-standing commercial logic on its head. Yet there has been perilous little in the way of complaint from the business community. Is it because one of America’s recent growth engined, the tech industry, gets far too much in the way of goodies from defense-related R&D to challenge this equation? Or that US multinationals believe, rightly or wrongly, that the safety of their extended supply chains depends on military might, and so they see their interests as aligned with US adventurism? Or is it simply that the US has gotten to be very good at propaganda (see Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy, for a long-form treatment), with the result that many people operate from assumptions that would not stand up to scrutiny?

Putin: Battered, Bruised But Not Broken

Yves here. The triumphalism among Western commentators as the ruble plunged last week is more than a little cringe-making. We’re not yet in Two Minute Hate territory yet, but this feels like a warmup. Robert Parry provides an insanity check:

Official Washington’s “group think” on the Ukraine crisis now has a totalitarian feel to it as “everyone who matters” joins in the ritualistic stoning of Russian President Putin and takes joy in Russia’s economic pain, with liberal economist Paul Krugman the latest to hoist a rock…

Indeed, much of what Krugman finds so offensive about Putin’s Russia actually stemmed from the Yeltsin era following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 when the so-called Harvard Boys flew to Moscow to apply free-market “shock therapy” which translated into a small number of well-connected thieves plundering Russia’s industry and resources, making themselves billionaires while leaving average Russians near starvation.

The piece goes on to debunk in considerable detail the caricature of Putin presented in America, the most important element being the charge that Putin was the aggressor in Ukraine and is therefore getting what he deserved. Mind you, Putin is still an authoritarian, but we don’t find that objectionable in many of our putative allies, starting with the Saudis.

Bill Black: Obama and Holder Choose Banksters Over Whistleblowers

Yves here. At this point, the Obama administration’s fealty to banksters is a “dog bites man” story. Nevertheless, it’s useful to catalogue particular incidents to show how consistent its behavior is. The latest case study is its shoddy treatment of whistleblowers.

Links 12/19/14

Mathew D. Rose: Germany’s Dubious Successes

Germany will have clocked up a number of dubious concomitant successes this year. But these products of German hubris look like pyrrhic victories

John Helmer: Ukraine Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko Accused in Colorado Court

Yves here. Helmer was first to provide in-depth reporting on the US citizen and State-Department supported Natalie Jaresko, who was mysteriously parachuted into the post of Ukraine Finance Minister a few weeks ago. Jaresko is in the midst of a nasty divorce from her former business partner. As Helmer wrote:

It hasn’t been rare for American spouses to go into the asset management business in the former Soviet Union, and make profits underwritten by the US Government with information supplied from their US Government positions or contacts. It is exceptional for them to fall out over the loot.

Helmer gives us the latest update on this protracted battle, and what it says about the Natalie Jaresko’s willingness to play fast and loose.

Housing Bubble 2 Goes Nuts: San Francisco Home Sales Plunge 20%, Prices Soar 27%

Yves here. Wolf Richter is keeping tabs on the latest, peculiar housing bubble, in which real estate prices on the top end continue to rise into the stratosphere, while mid-range and cheaper properties languish. Nowhere has this pattern been more evident than in California and in particular, San Francisco.

Links 12/18/14

Jeb Bush: The Forrest Gump of Financial Improprieties?

The Financial Times has an unusual story featured prominently today. As Jeb Bush has made a soft launch of his presidential campaign, the pink paper has published a surprisingly long list of financial relationships that do not put the Florida governor in a particularly good light.

The intriguing part isn’t so much a history of ~~dubious-looking~~ complicated money dealings. It’s the fact that many of them are live.

We Are Eight Years Old

birthday cake with candles eight years old Every year, I use the birthday post to thank the people who have contributed to the success of this site over time. Now that we are eight years old, that list is so long that any effort to do it justice will inevitably neglect some key people. So I hope no one takes offense at an oversight.

I started writing this blog because it seemed like a good idea at the time. More specifically, it seemed at that time that there were things that needed to be said. In the fall and winter of 2006, if you read between the lines of the Financial Times and Bloomberg, it was not hard to see that credit risk was grossly underpriced across all debt instruments, or to put it another way, that we were in the midst of a huge credit bubble. And you’d never be able to discern that by reading the Wall Street Journal or New York Times. It was clear this wall of liquidity, as it was described at the time, was going to end badly, but when and how was an open question.

Michael Pettis: Is China Really Turning Away from the Dollar?

Yves here. This important post by Michael Pettis addresses whether the efforts of the Chinese to diversify their foreign investments away from the dollar will be a negative for the US. Pettis is skeptical of that thesis, and some of his reasons are intriguing. Like quite a few experts, he doubts that China’s role in sponsoring an infrastructure bank will be a game changer, and he also points out, as we have regularly, that the Chinese cannot deploy their foreign exchange reserves domestically without driving the renminbi to the moon (via selling foreign currencies to buy RMB), which is the last thing they want to have happen. A more surprising, but well argued thesis is that reduced Chinese purchases of US bonds would be a net plus for the US.

Get a cup of coffee. This is a meaty, important article.

Joseph Stiglitz: Economics Must Address Wealth and Income Inequality

Yves here. This interview with Joesph Stiglitz is pretty subversive for a talk with a Serious Economist. Stiglitz doesn’t simply talk about the problem of inequality, but the drivers that most mainstream economists choose to ignore, such as the rise of monopoly/oligopoly power, worker exploitation, and how central banks have allowed banks to engage increasingly in speculative rather than productive lending.