Category Archives: Doomsday scenarios

Michael Hudson: Debt Deflation in America

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Edited Interview by Bonnie Faulkner September 2, 2011 (first aired on Pacifica, September 14, 2011).

“Without consumption, markets are going to shrink. Companies won’t invest, stores will close, “for rent” signs will spread on the main streets and local tax revenues will fall. Companies will lay off their employees and the economy will shrink more. Why aren’t economists talking about these effects of debt deflation, which are becoming the distinguishing phenomenon of our time? They advocate giving more money to the banks, hoping that somehow everything will be okay, as if the banks would lend out the money to fund new production and employment. Mainstream economics and political leaders in both parties are failing to ask why the banks are using these giveaways to speculate abroad, pay their managers bonuses and high salaries or to pay dividends rather than to lend to small businesses or do other things to actually get the economy moving again. This phenomenon cannot be explained without seeing that debt service is siphoning off revenue into the financial sector, which is not recycling it back into the production-and-consumption economy.”

Can European Politicians Beat the Clock and Stave Off a Crisis?

The Eurocrats finally seem to have realized time is running out. The abrupt market downdraft of last week appears to have focused their minds on the need for a much larger scale rescue mechanism of some form, with numbers like trillions attached, and that will move the Eurozone further towards fiscal integration, another badly needed outcome.

Europe Readying Yet Another “This Really Will Do the Trick” Bailout Package

Well, we are clearly in crisis mode. We are back to weekends being a period when you need to watch the news in a serious way.

And in another bit of deja vu all over again, the powers that be in Europe are readying yet another bailout plan, this one supposedly big enough to do the trick once and for all.

Top Bankruptcy Lawyer Harvey Miller on the Possibility of a Countrywide BK

Bloomberg interviewed Harvey Miller, who is regularly described as the dean of the bankruptcy bar in the US. Miller handled the Lehman bankruptcy and is thus well positioned to opine on whether Bank of America might put Countrywide into bankruptcy.

Europe Must Choose

By Delusional Economics, who is unhappy with the current dumbed-down vested interest economic reporting the Australian public is force fed on a daily basis, and takes pleasure in re-reporting the news with “bad” parts removed, and a bit of contrarian balance thrown in. Cross posted from MacroBusiness

The big news from Europe last night was the “surprising” PMI numbers. But as usual the news also goes behind the headline.

Bank of New York: A Train Wreck Waiting to Happen?

Many readers no doubt know that the so-called $8.5 billion Bank of America mortgage settlement, which was between the Charlotte bank and the Bank of New York as trustee for 530 residential mortgage securitizations, had run into some very serious headwinds. The deal had to be approved in a so-called Section 77 hearing; a number of interested parties, including some investors, the attorneys general of New York and Delaware, and the FDIC, raised questions and objections to the deal, as well as to the use of a Section 77 hearing (which sets a very high bar for opposing an agreement). Although this saga has a quite a few more rounds to go, it looks likely that any settlement will be considerably delayed and will wind up costing Bank of America a good bit more than $8.5 billion.

What has gotten less attention is the implication of the probable derailment of this deal for the Bank of New York, and its vulnerability to mortgage litigation.

Satyajit Das: The Financial Compass

By Satyajit Das, the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk

Roddy Boyd (2011) Fatal Risk: A Cautionary Tale of AIG’s Corporate Suicide; John Wiley & Sons Inc, New Jersey

Justin Cartwright (2010) Other People’s Money; Bloomsbury, London

Nicholas Dunbar (2011) The Devil’s Derivatives: The Untold Story of the Slick Traders and Hapless Regulators Who Almost Blew Up Wall Street…And Are Ready To Do It Again; Harvard Business Press, Boston, Massachusetts

Barry Eichengreen (2011) Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar; Oxford University Press, Oxford

Diana B. Henriques (2011) The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust; Times Books/ Henry Holt & Company & Scribe Publications, Melbourne

Graeme Maxton (2011) The End of Progress: How Modern Economics Has Failed Us; John Wiley, Singapore

In his novel, Justin Cartwright writes that: “There are beginning and there are ends, and there are also many ways of telling the same story.” The problem is that the great 2007 financial crisis shows no signs of ending. Far from ending, the crisis has shown a virus’ capacity to reconstitute itself. Given the literary difficulty of an uncertain end, publishers and editors have improvised in telling the story – a multiple points of the compass approach to “credit lit”.

Matt Stoller: Authorized Losses – The Lehman Lesson UBS’s Rogue Trader Missed

By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller

I read this headline in Bloomberg: UBS Has $2B Loss; Man Arrested in London. Apparently, a rogue trader lost $2 billion, and is now sitting in jail because the trade was unauthorized by senior management. Since it’s the 3rd anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, I figure it’s a good time to be nostalgic about who is authorized to lose what.

The Fed Bails Out Eurobanks Yet Again

Watching re-enactments of scenes from the global financial crisis is a very peculiar experience indeed. The opening by the Fed of currency swap lines to allow the ECB and other central banks to extend dollar funding to Eurobanks was seen as an extreme measure the first time around, a sign of how close to the abyss the financial system had come. This time, allegedly because the powers that be acted before things got quite so dire, bank stocks rallied impressively. Similarly, the media treated this move as just another episode in the ongoing Perils of Pauline drama running on the other side of the Atlantic. The $2 billion loss by a UBS rogue trader got far more extensive coverage, even though rogue traders also seem to be all of a muchness.

Matt Stoller: Happy Lehman Brothers Bankruptcy Day

By Matt Stoller, the former Senior Policy Advisor to Rep. Alan Grayson and a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. You can reach him at stoller (at) gmail.com or follow him on Twitter at @matthewstoller. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0

Lehman’s bankruptcy happened three years ago today. It should be quite clear at this point that another Lehman is going to happen again. Policymakers didn’t deal with the crisis of 2008-2009; they turned it into a much longer crisis with far greater lasting damage.

Anne Sibert: The damaged ECB legitimacy

Yves here. This post may strike readers as a tad wonky, but the role and governance of central banks has become a subject of debate in the US, and I expect it to move more into the spotlight in the EU as the crisis continues. And as you read the post, the ECB had been trying to avoid scrutiny for good reason. It manages to make the oft-criticized Fed look good.

Anne Siebert is the wife of former central banker, now Citigroup chief economist Willem Buiter, who was a very outspoken and vocal critic of the Fed during the crisis, particularly of its “quasi fiscal role,” meaning the way it subsidized banks in ways that involved taking real balance sheet risk outside Congressional budgetary processes. Buiter argued this might well be a violation of the Constitution.

He and Siebert have written and done advisory work together, often for central banks. They were called in by Iceland shortly before its crisis erupted, and apparently told the central bank it was toast. Her experience makes Siebert a commentator who cannot easily be ignored.

By Anne Siebert, Professor and Head of the School of Economics, Mathematics and Statistics at Birkbeck College, London and a member of the a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Central Bank of Iceland. Cross posted from VoxEU

The European Central Bank was once known for its obsessive focus on price stability. Since the global economic crisis, however, its role has extended to preventing the insolvency of banks and sovereign countries. This column argues that such a move has badly harmed the institution’s legitimacy – something that will damage both its policy effectiveness and confidence in the governing bodies of the EU as a whole.

Euro SOS

This is a lively discussion on RT which starts from the contrarian perspective of trying to find a silver lining in the Eurozone crisis. One of the panelists is Michael Hudson, who has been a vocal critic of how austerity programs are being used to strip Greece of sovereignity (on top of the minor complication that these programs are certain to fail). It also discusses the prospects for the survival of the euro and who the winners and losers would be in a breakup.

Jurgen Stark = Credit Anstalt 2.0 (and Euromarkets Reacting Accordingly)

It is remotely possible that the EU officialdom will temporarily reverse the train wreck that started last Friday with the resignation of Jurgen Stark from the ECB. That was seen as a sign that Germany has adopted bailout fatigue as official policy. That in turn would mean that Greece will not get any more money lifelines (which as commentators predicted some time ago, means a likely banking crisis, which was the reason for them not to exit the Eurozone).

Mr. Market is giving a big vote of no confidence in European leadership, although the FTSE has reversed some of its early-session losses.