Author Archives: Yves Smith

Don Quijones: Spain Cranks Up Political Repression

Yves here. In contrast with the way that political repression is gradually becoming the new normal in America, Don Quijones chronicles how rapidly it is being put in place in Spain to curb protests against austerity and bank-favoring policies. The extreme form of shredding democracy to protect commercial interests was Chile, where as a writer put it, “People died so markets could be free.”

Links 8/13/14

Summer 2007 Deja Vu: Banks and Short Sellers Dump Risk on Chumps Via Complex Products

NC contributor Michael Crimmins flagged a Bloomberg article yesterday that described the proliferation of complex synthetic structures, depicting it as return to some of the bad risk-shifting of the blowout phase of the last credit bubble.

The amusing bit is the headline was toned down after the post was launched (you can tell by looking at the URL, which almost certainly tracks the original). The current version is the anodyne “JPMorgan Joins Goldman in Designing Derivatives for a New Generation.” But the very first paragraph flags the troubling resemblance to the last hurrah of the pre-crisis credit mania:

Banks Withdrawing from Repo Market

The Wall Street Journal reports that banks have become much less active participants in the repo market, which is a critical source of short-term liquidity for big investors. Is this due to a Fed accident or is it by design?

New Study Says U.S. Underestimated Keystone XL Emissions

Yves here. Some advocates greenhouse gas reduction policies argue that the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline is misguided, since it represented a lot of political capital spent against a not-terribly-significant target. However, this post does reveal an important coda: that of the Administration’s characteristic dishonesty, in this case around climate change issues. Other examples, chronicled at length here and here, is Obama’s pro-fracking climate change headfake, which conveniently fails to include methane emissions in his new carbon containment policies.

Elites Finally Starting to Get that Inequality is Messing Up Growth

Even though there has been a big uptick in news stories on rising economic inequality, and more chatter among economists about the idea that high levels of inequality are associated with lower growth, much of the messaging has come from the Democrats desperate to use the one dog whistle that might rally their badly abused base. Even though inequality has risen under Obama, thanks to policies that favored rescuing banks and enriching the medical-industrial complex over helping ordinary citizens, the Democrats are all too willing to rely on their perceived lesser-evilism relative to the Republicans. After all, it was only Romney’s billionaire warts that kept Obama from what would otherwise have been a well-deserved 2012 defeat.

But while the Administration has been pushing inequality as a useful campaign theme (the signal was inviting Thomas Piketty to meet with Treasury Secretary Jack Lew), in parallel, it also appears that some of the expressions of concern about inequality among the policy classes are genuine.

Links 8/12/14

Obamacare: Complexity and Crapification Mean Rescission Abuses Are Alive and Well

Yves here. Obamacare is proving to be a graduate-level course in the study of craponomics. What distinguished good old fashioned mere shoddiness from crapification is that crapification is institutionalized and on its way to becoming systemic. And as this discussion illustrates, one often-used ploy is unnecessary product complexity, so that what Elizabeth Warren called “tricks and traps” can be characterized as consumer neglect and error, meaning they and not the sneaky, misleading vendor are at fault.

We were early to point out that Obamacare would do nothing to eliminate the widespread practice by insurers of canceling coverage when policy-holders submit large claims, meaning when they expect the insurance to act like insurance. The reason was that it continues to allow insurers to cancel policies for fraud, and the definition of fraud is astonishingly broad.

Quelle Surprise! SEC Goes Easy on Big Political Donors

David Sirota at the International Business Times wrote up a study by Maria Correira of the London Business School that examined how often firms that corrected their financial statements from 1996 to 2006 were subject to SEC enforcement actions. It should come as no surprise that big political donors get off easy. From Sirota’s account: […]

Rather Than Prosecutions, Fed Pressuring Banks to Pay Miscreants Less

Your humble blogger must confess to being partly wrong about the Fed’s recent realization that banksters had learned the right lesson from the crisis: crime pays. We were incredulous that the central bank had missed the fact that financial firm employees were unrepentant and their executives saw no reason to make real changes (hence all the howling about reform measures that are pretty minor relative to the damage done). From a recent post:

This story would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

Climate Movement Agenda: One Million (Frequent) Electric Buses Plus Protected Bikeways, “Everywhere”

Yves here. Hoexter makes an important point, that many climate activists’ proposals have focused on energy sources, as in promoting more use of solar or wind energy, and haven’t focused on how consumers use energy, as in the related infrastructure. Whether or not you agree with his proposals for electric busses and bicycles, they do make for a point of departure in getting to pragmatic reforms.

Links 8/11/14

Hillary Clinton: The Goldwater Girl Reveals Herself in an Atlantic Interview

As much as I was dutifully chugging along on a normal-NC-fare type of post, the fisticuffs that broke out in comments yesterday over America’s hypocritical and destructive foreign policies (320 comments, an unheard-of level for Links, particularly on a summer weekend), indicates that US war-mongering is the top concern of many readers.

It thus seemed more fitting to highlight a truly disconcerting interview of Hillary Clinton by Jeffrey Goldberg in the Altlantic, in which he came off as more temperate that Hillary. Here is why that alone is striking.

Guitar Center and Private Equity’s Magical Growth Curve

Yves here. We’ve featured Eric Garland’s past posts on Guitar Center, a case study of how a private equity firms (originally Bain Capital, now Ares Capital as a result of a restructuring when the company was on the verge of failure) run businesses into the ground for fun and profit. Garland stresses that the assumptions that Guitar Center and its owners are touting for growth, given the state of big box retails, amount to an advanced case of magical thinking. Garland also focuses on the broader impact of the Bain/Ares misrule, namely the damage done to employees and vendors.