Category Archives: The destruction of the middle class

Michael Hudson: Free Money Creation to Bail Out Financial Speculators, but not Social Security or Medicare

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

Financial crashes were well understood for a hundred years after they became a normal financial phenomenon in the mid-19th century. Much like the buildup of plaque deposits in human veins and arteries, an accumulation of debt gained momentum exponentially until the economy crashed, wiping out bad debts – along with savings on the other side of the balance sheet. Physical property remained intact, although much was transferred from debtors to creditors. But clearing away the debt overhead from the economy’s circulatory system freed it to resume its upswing. That was the positive role of crashes: They minimized the cost of debt service, bringing prices and income back in line with actual “real” costs of production. Debt claims were replaced by equity ownership. Housing prices were lower – and more affordable, being brought back in line with their actual rental value. Goods and services no longer had to incorporate the debt charges that the financial upswing had built into the system.

Financial crashes came suddenly. They often were triggered by a crop failure causing farmers to default, or “the autumnal drain” drew down bank liquidity when funds were needed to move the crops. Crashes often also revealed large financial fraud and “excesses.”

This was not really a “cycle.” It was a scallop-shaped a ratchet pattern: an ascending curve, ending in a vertical plunge. But popular terminology called it a cycle because the pattern was similar again and again, every eleven years or so. When loans by banks and debt claims by other creditors could not be paid, they were wiped out in a convulsion of bankruptcy.

Stephen Roach: America is a Zombie Nation just like Japan

Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Stephen Roach has written an Op-Ed in today’s Financial Times that is worth reading. He outlines his version of Richard Koo’s Balance Sheet Recession theorem, opining that “the global economy is being hobbled by a new generation of zombies – the economic walking dead.” His main points are: American consumers are […]

Inept Obama “Anybody but Warren” Stance Reveals Fundamental Bank v. Middle Class Fault Line

It is obvious that Elizabeth Warren should head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. No less than our favorite NC nemesis, the staunch Administration defender Economics of Contempt, has said she is “tailor made” for the job. In the face of increasingly vocal bank opposition to the notion of an effective bank watchdog for consumers, she’s done better than anyone anticipated. And despite the Republican bluster about using a pro forma session to keep the Senate in business to block a recess appointment, the Democrats could break that maneuver if they wanted to.

So why does Team Obama try to hide its choice not to appoint her behind silly “compromises” like its trial balloon of serving up the CFPB’s number two, Raj Date, as a candidate to lead the agency? The Republicans have already said they will approve no one unless they can cut off CFPB’s air supply by controlling its budget. You can’t negotiate with someone who won’t negotiate. Your options are to defy them or capitulate.

So this “compromise” is an inept sleigh of hand to shift responsibility for the Adminsitration’s refusal to appoint Warren on the Republicans.

The failure of the Team Obama to move beyond this impasse is revealing. It isn’t merely, as we have repeatedly mentioned, a sign that the Administration is in bed with the banksters. That’s a given. We predicted that Warren would not get the job.

But what is astonishing is how she has managed to out maneuver them and how Team Obama has failed for months to come up with responses. It isn’t as if this crowd feels any compunction to hide the contempt it has for the idea of keeping prior promises; just look for some of many examples, at this video Lifting the Veil, from 7:00 to 13:00, or at Glenn Greenwald’s discussion of how in mere weeks what was promised to be a mere fly over exercise in Libya is now turning into another nation-building exercise.

The Warren fiasco reveals deeper layers of the Administration’s character defects: its indifference to the plight of the middle class and its tactical incompetence

Obama Still Desperately Seeking Anybody But Warren to Head New Consumer Agency

The Administration is playing true to its craven form. And it isn’t hiding that sorry fact terribly well either.

The latest public-be-damned ploy by the Obama Administration is the floating the name of Raj Date, a former McKinsey consultant and financial services industry executive currently ensconced in the nascent Consumer Financial Protection, as the possible new head of the agency.

Remember the state of play on the nomination of the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That individual is to be in place as of July 21. Even assuming everyone plays nicely, the timetable is now too short to go through the conventional approval process, meaning a recess appointment is the only way to get a permanent leader in place.

The Republicans have taken the stance that they are not prepared to be bound by the law, meaning Dodd Frank, despite the fact that most of what is promised to do was kicked over to studies and rulemaking, which assured it will be watered down to nothingness. 44 Republican Senators wrote a letter saying they won’t approve of any nominee from either party unless the CFPB is ~~gutted~~ reformed. And they are trying to block a recess appointment through the use of a “pro forma” sessions, as they did over the Memorial Day break and presumably will over the July 4 holiday.

But the Republican intransigence works to Obama’s advantage, were he not fundamentally opposed to elevating Warren.

“Lifting the Veil”

Mark Ames referred me to the documentary “Lifting the Veil.” I’m only about 40 minutes into it and am confident it will appeal to NC readers, provided you can keep gagging in the sections that contain truly offensive archival footage (in particular, numerous clips of Obama campaign promises).

Ames’ mini-review:

It begins with John Stauber, one of the great anti-PR writers, and historian Sharon Smith laying out the flat rancid truth: That the Democratic Party of today is the Big Co-apter. The Republicans have always been the party of corporate interests; and the Democrats portray themselves as agents of social change and progressive/populist opposition to corporate power, but the Democratic Party’s job is to co-apt these anti-corporate movements and subvert them to the same (or a different faction of) corporate interests.

To complete our two-corporate-party farce, we have an alleged third choice, a so-called opposition “Third Party,” the largest “neither left nor right”/”neither Democrat nor Republican” third party for the past three decades. And that party is…ta-dum!…Libertarianism. Which was nothing but a corporate PR project designed to co-apt the whole realm of Third Party opposition and subvert it to the most radical corporate agenda of all. In other words, even our Third Party/outside-the-system party is nothing but the most purified, most extreme pro-corporate party of all!

At this point you have to assume that the oligarchy is just laughing at us. “Hey, here’s an idea–let’s make the opposition to our fake-two-party system nothing but our corporate wish-list we send to Santa every year, and package that as the radical opposition.” “No way Mr Koch, there’s no way they’ll buy it–everyone today who’s against the two-party system is on the radical Left.” “Just give me a couple of decades, and a few billion dollars, you’ll see…” CUT TO TODAY: “Holy shit, you were right, Chuck! Ah-hah-hah-hah! The suckers have nowhere to go but right into our mouths–doors one, two and three our ours! Mwah-hah-hah!”

As black activist Leonard Pinkney says, “The Democrats are the foxes, and the Republicans are the wolves–and they both want to devour you.” So what does that make Libertarians? Avian flu viruses?

Michael Hudson: Will Greece Let EU Central Bankers Destroy Democracy?

Yves here. This is a long and important post. Hudson reports that he has gotten a great deal of correspondence from Greece saying that articles like this arguing against the pending stripping of Greece by banks are being translated and circulated widely to provide moral support. If you cannot read this piece in full, please be sure to read the discussion at the end of how Iceland stared down its foreign creditors.

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. Cross posted from CounterPunch.

Promoting the financial sector at the economy’s expense

When Greece exchanged its drachma for the euro in 2000, most voters were all for joining the Eurozone. The hope was that it would ensure stability, and that this would promote rising wages and living standards. Few saw that the stumbling point was tax policy. Greece was excluded from the eurozone the previous year as a result of failing to meet the 1992 Maastricht criteria for EU membership, limiting budget deficits to 3 percent of GDP, and government debt to 60 percent.

The euro also had other serious fiscal and monetary problems at the outset. There is little thought of wealthier EU economies helping bring less productive ones up to par, e.g. as the United States does with its depressed areas (as in the rescue of the auto industry in 2010) or when the federal government does declares a state of emergency for floods, tornados or other disruptions. As with the United States and indeed nearly all countries, EU “aid” is largely self-serving – a combination of export promotion and bailouts for debtor economies to pay banks in Europe’s main creditor nations: Germany, France and the Netherlands. The EU charter banned the European Central Bank (ECB) from financing government deficits, and prevents (indeed, “saves”) members from having to pay for the “fiscal irresponsibility” of countries running budget deficits. This “hard” tax policy was the price that lower-income countries had to sign onto when they joined the European Union…..

At issue is whether Europe should succumb to centralized planning – on the right wing of the political spectrum, under the banner of “free markets” defined as economies free from public price regulation and oversight, free from consumer protection, and free from taxes on the rich.

The crisis for Greece – as for Iceland, Ireland and debt-plagued economies capped by the United States – is occurring as bank lobbyists demand that “taxpayers” pay for the bailouts of bad speculations and government debts stemming largely from tax cuts for the rich and for real estate, shifting the fiscal burden as well as the debt burden onto labor and industry.

“Debtors’ Prison”: Bob Kuttner on the Costs of Rentier Rule

Bob Kuttner has an elegant and important article at American Prospect, “Debtors’ Prison“. It’s an evocative, historical form of the argument made here and elsewhere: that advanced economies have gone down a disastrously bad path in not writing down debt that can’t realistically be paid.

The usual poster child for “why not writing down debts is a bad idea” is Japan, but that isn’t gripping enough to evoke the right responses. Even though its post-bubble growth has been dreadful, Japan is still a well-run, tidy country with a low crime rate, universal health care, long life expectancy, and tolerable unemployment. That in turn is due to factors that do not obtain much of anywhere else: Japan was very cohesive to begin with, and its elites chose to have their incomes fall relative to everyone else to save jobs. Wage compression at large companies has increased dramatically. This is the polar opposite of what has happened in the rest of the world, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots has widened.

Kuttner provides another set of examples as to why we need to get the creditor boot off all our necks:

Fortune Confirms Pervasive Defects in Bank of America Mortgage Documents

Do you remember the brouhaha over testimony by a senior executive in Countrywide’s mortgage servicing unit last year? It called into question whether mortgages had been conveyed properly to securitizations, which in turn would impair Bank of America’s ability to foreclose.

Let me refresh your memory. As we wrote last year:

Testimony in a New Jersey bankruptcy court case provides proof of the scenario we’ve depicted on this blog since September, namely, that subprime originators, starting sometime in the 2004-2005 timeframe, if not earlier, stopped conveying note (the borrower IOU) to mortgage securitization trust as stipulated in the pooling and servicing agreement….

As we indicated back in September, it appeared that Countrywide, and likely many other subprime orignators quit conveying the notes to the securitization trusts sometime in the 2004-2005 time frame. Yet bizarrely, they did not change the pooling and servicing agreements to reflect what appears to be a change in industry practice. Our evidence of this change was strictly anecdotal; this bankruptcy court filing, posted at StopForeclosureFraud provides the first bit of concrete proof. The key section:

As to the location of the note, Ms. DeMartini testified that to her knowledge, the original note never left the possession of Countrywide, and that the original note appears to have been transferred to Countrywide’s foreclosure unit, as evidenced by internal FedEx tracking numbers. She also confirmed that the new allonge had not been attached or otherwise affIXed to the note. She testified further that it was customary for Countrywide to maintain possession of
the original note and related loan documents.

Countrywide tried, in a thoroughly unconvincing manner, to retreat from the damaging testimony.

Abigail Field, an attorney who has regularly written on the mortgage mess at Daily Finance, published an article at Fortune that looks into whether DeMartini was simply being truthful and the notes were not conveyed correctly, which would mean Bank of America has a very big mess on its hands. Her conclusions are damning:

Michael Hudson: Replacing Economic Democracy with Financial Oligarchy

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. Cross posted from CounterPunch.

Soon after the Socialist Party won Greece’s national elections in autumn 2009, it became apparent that the government’s finances were in a shambles. In May 2010, French President Nicolas Sarkozy took the lead in rounding up €120bn ($180 billion) from European governments to subsidize Greece’s unprogressive tax system that had led its government into debt – which Wall Street banks had helped conceal with Enron-style accounting.

The tax system operated as a siphon collecting revenue to pay the German and French banks that were buying government bonds (at rising interest risk premiums). The bankers are now moving to make this role formal, an official condition for rolling over Greek bonds as they come due, and extend maturities on the short-term financial string that Greece is now operating under. Existing bondholders are to reap a windfall if this plan succeeds. Moody’s lowered Greece’s credit rating to junk status on June 1 (to Caa1, down from B1, which was already pretty low), estimating a 50/50 likelihood of default. The downgrade serves to tighten the screws yet further on the Greek government. Regardless of what European officials do, Moody’s noted, “The increased likelihood that Greece’s supporters (the IMF, ECB and the EU Commission, together known as the “Troika”) will, at some point in the future, require the participation of private creditors in a debt restructuring as a precondition for funding support.”

The conditionality for the new “reformed” loan package is that Greece must initiate a class war by raising its taxes, lowering its social spending – and even private-sector pensions – and sell off public land, tourist sites, islands, ports, water and sewer facilities. This will raise the cost of living and doing business, eroding the nation’s already limited export competitiveness. The bankers sanctimoniously depict this as a “rescue” of Greek finances.

Doug Smith: Shock Therapy For Economics, Part 1

By Douglas K. Smith, author of On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me

In “Economics In Crisis”, professor Brad DeLong notes:

The most interesting moment at a recent conference held in Bretton Woods … came when Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf (asked) Larry Summers, “[Doesn’t] what has happened in the past few years simply suggest that [academic] economists did not understand what was going on?”

DeLong agreed with Summers’ response: “the problem is that there is so much that is “distracting, confusing, and problem-denying in…the first year course in most PhD programs.” As a result, even though “economics knows a fair amount,” it “has forgotten a fair amount that is relevant, and it has been distracted by an enormous amount.” DeLong then goes on to call for serious change in what economics departments do and teach.

In Part 2 of this post, I’m going to address the realities of ‘serious change’; and, in that context, what is troubling for INET about Summers’ presence at the recent Bretton Woods gathering. I’ll do this from my experience in leading and guiding real change as well as by contrasting INET with another, smaller, and more nascent effort called Econ4.

For now, though, let’s put aside the serious lack of self-respect in paying any attention at all to a world historical failure like Summers (Why is this arrogant sophist even on anyone’s C list, let alone A list? Why isn’t Summers wearing sack cloth and rolling in ashes?). Instead, let’s respond to DeLong’s ‘fessing up to the crisis in economics:

On the Treasury’s Curious Denial That Geithner Blocked Deal on Irish Debt

This is getting interesting. The US Treasury has roused itself to issue a narrow denial of an op-ed in the Irish Independent by one of Ireland’s most highly respected economists (by virtue of his having predicted a very severe housing crash), Morgan Kelly. To recap briefly, Kelly said that the IMF was willing last November to haircut €30 billion of unguaranteed bonds by roughly two-thirds on average, but that Geithner’s disapproval on a conference call killed the idea:

The deal was torpedoed from an unexpected direction. At a conference call with the G7 finance ministers, the haircut was vetoed by US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner who, as his payment of $13 billion from government-owned AIG to Goldman Sachs showed, believes that bankers take priority over taxpayers. The only one to speak up for the Irish was UK chancellor George Osborne, but Geithner, as always, got his way.

The Irish Independent today reported on the Treasury’s objection: