Yves here. Italy provides an intriguing example of how austerity inflicts damage on businesses. Here, one of the ways that the government is making its fiscal deficit look better is by paying companies that provide services to it slowly, or not at all.
Read more...Yves here. Understandably, US reporting on the just-finished APEC summit focused on Obama’s objectives and supposed achievements. Russia has historically not been a major force in the region and thus received less coverage here. It was therefore surprising to see our man in Japan Clive tell us that Japanese media coverage of Putin at APEC was on a par with the column-inches given to Obama.
On Real News Network, Michael Hudson describes how Putin is shifting Russia’s export focus and economic alliances towards Asia, particularly China. Putin did better at the APEC summit than most Western sources acknowledge, and that could have longer-term ramifications for the US.
Read more...Yves here. The EU has gone so far astray of its original aims that its corruption and resulting fissures seem beyond repair, yet as Mathew D. Rose discusses in depth, its leaders remain dangerously complacent.
Read more...Yves here. This brief post by Doug Short is even more important than it appears to be. We had an outburst of neoliberal orthodoxy in comments yesterday on a post that discussed how wealth of most households had fallen since 1987. Some readers assigned blame for stagnant average worker wages (which was a big contributor to the lack of growth in household wealth) to immigrants, particularly Mexicans and H1-B visa workers.
The Doug Short chart below looks at corporate profit share versus labor share. This pinpoints the degree to which wage stagnation is the result of corporate managers and executives succeeding in cutting the pie to favor themselves (executive pay has become increasingly linked to stock prices, and relentless focus on short-term earnings, as well as stock buybacks, do wonders for earnings per share).
Read more...Yves here. In a bit of synchronicity, Lambert and I were discussing how bad America is at running an empire. Iraq by any standards was not doing all that well under Saddam Hussein. Growth was lousy due to Western sanctions, and he was thuggish in his methods of maintaining control. Yet he ran a secular government and hostilities between Shia and Sunni were a non-issue. After our invasion, hospitals were basically looted. Electricity barely worked in Baghdad, and wasn’t working all that well long after the US occupied Iraq. Any member of the professional classes that could leave the country did (this was well reported in Australia in 2003 and 2004). So we broke a country…as a demonstration project? For what end? The US also made a botch of the fall of the USSR, with our neoliberal reforms facilitating a plutocratic land-grab in Russia by well-placed insiders, with key Western aides participating in the plunder. OIFVet points out that, contrary to Western ideology, the lives of ordinary Bulgarians was better under the old USSR (Russia is now showing net gains; I’m told Moscow now looks to be on a par with Berlin).
The British took their imperial project far more seriously than we have ours. A big reason that they were more successful is that they built infrastructure, in the form of putting in place a British bureaucracy run by civil servants. And producing those civil servants was the top priority of the education system. C. Northcote Parkinson reports that the top Cambridge and Oxford graduates went to India. The next rank were civil servants in the UK. The ones at the bottom of the heap went into business.
Now there is a lot not to like about a British-style bureaucracy; they are stereotypically rigid and procedure-driven. The Australian Taxation Office is hugely taxpayer-unfriendly if you are a business, compared to the IRS (for instance, when I was there, you needed a receipt for every expense, and not just a credit card receipt. If you had a charge from a newsstand, they wanted to see that it really was a business periodical and not, say porn).
But the rigidity meant it was less easily corrupted, and that no one would question that the government was the paramount authority (a notion that most US regulators seem to have forgotten). Admittedly, with the rise of neoliberalism, no one seems to care about governing well any more, so there hasn’t been much thinking on how to run government in the 20th and 21st century that isn’t really about private sector profiteering.
This article looks at a symptom of the US’ misguided thinking about our imperial project: that of the role of our military bases. It isn’t much discussed in polite company, for instance, that the Saudis had repeatedly asked us to remove our base there because it was causing a lot of discord. We had ignored their request. It took 9/11 to get us to depart.
Read more...In the wake of the Republican trouncing of the feckless Democrats in the midterm elections, there’s been an upsurge of calls of alarm on both the right and the left that the Administration and its big business allies in both parties will try to push the toxic trade deal known as the TransPacific Partnership through. That is in part due to Administration messaging that the talks are gaining momentum, as Obama asserted a mere two days ago. But not only do the negotiations appear to be going nowhere, but the Administration appears to be losing clout in the region as China is playing a considerably shrewder trade and investment game.
Read more...The more rocks you turn over in public pension land, the more creepy crawlies you find. No wonder private equity has such a secrecy fetish. The most obvious, and most offensive to the public, are so-called pay-to-play scandals, in which public officials who are in a position to influence how funds are invested, take campaign funding from individuals or firms who are currently managing government funds or in short order get a mandate.
Read more...Yves here. In case you harbored any doubts, the International Energy Agency (IEA), feels compelled to remind the consuming public that our current bout of cheap oil prices won’t be with us for all that long.
Read more...Yves here. This Real News Network interview on the results of the latest Survey of Consumer Finances paint a picture familiar to most readers: the rich are becoming richer while those with less wealth are falling further and further behind.
David Rosnick of CEPR makes an important observation in passing. The decline in the position of typical households is even worse the the Consumer Finances survey indicates. In 1989, many workers had pensions. Far fewer do now. The value of pensions isn’t included in these surveys due to the difficulty of determining what they are worth on a current basis. But they clearly are significant assets that relatively few working age people have now.
Read more...Bob sent me a post from Slashdot which should serve as a wake-up call as to how difficult it is to protect yourself on the Internet if you are a mere mortal. They quote an Electronic Frontier Foundation report on how encryption is being subverted:
Read more...I’m still hugely behind on the AIG bailout trial, and hope to show a ton more progress in the next week. I’m posting the transcript for days three the trial; you can find the first two days here and other key documents here.
The first week was consumed with the testimony of the painfully uncooperative Scott Alvarez, the general counsel of the Board of Governors, who Matt Stoller argued needs to be fired, and the cagier-seeming general counsel of the New York Fed, Tom Baxter. Unlike Alvarez, Baxter at least in text seemed to be far more forthcoming than Alvarez and more strategic in where he dug in his heels. But the revelations about the Morgan Stanley rescue alone are juicy. The main actors have sold a carefully concocted story for years.
Read more...Yves here. As Elizabeth Warren inches to the left on overall economic policy, one wonders if she’s actually shifting her views or responding to Hillary Clinton trying to rebrand herself as a populist. In fairness to Warren, it’s difficult not to be deeply inculcated in flawed economic thinking and thus hostage to false ideas like “We depend on China and Japan to finance our federal spending.” I look at my pre-crisis coverage and am embarrassed to see that sort of idea treated as obviously true. But if nothing else, the shift in Warren’s stance may be a sign that the Overton window is moving a smidge away from the right. After all, a big reason the Republicans so badly trounced the Dems in the midterms wasn’t just Democratic party fecklessness, but also that the Republicans kept their Tea Party extremists well out of the limelight and toned down the anti-women, anti-gay (and outside the border states) the anti-immigrant rhetoric. That actually amounts to a shift to the center, even if more for show than for real.
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