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2011 Jackass Of The Year

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There were so many contenders for TheCenterLane.com’s 2011 Jackass Of The Year award, I was ready to give up on making a decision.  Former Congressman Anthony Weiner (who never even “got lucky” with any of the women who received his “Peter Tweets”) was certainly a contender.  Another runner-up was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who chose to have an affair with his unattractive housekeeper – apparently just because she was there.

This year’s winner is Jon S. Corzine, the former Senator and Governor of New Jersey – in addition to having been the former CEO of Goldman Sachs.  Most infamously, Corzine was named chairman and CEO of MF Global in March of 2010.  It took Corzine only 20 months to drive the firm into bankruptcy.  As Stephen Foley of The Independent reported, Corzine gambled $6 billion of the firm’s money on his belief that Italy would not default on its government bonds.  When that wager was exposed, MF Global’s clients and trading partners stopped doing business with the firm.  Within a few days, MF Global went belly-up, in what became one of the ten biggest bankruptcies in American history.

On Halloween, the Deal Book blog at The New York Times discussed what happened after a discovery by federal regulators that hundreds of millions of dollars (perhaps 950) in MF Global customers’ money had gone missing:

The recognition that money was missing scuttled at the 11th hour an agreement to sell a major part of MF Global to a rival brokerage firm.  MF Global had staked its survival on completing the deal. Instead, the New York-based firm filed for bankruptcy on Monday.

Regulators are examining whether MF Global diverted some customer funds to support its own trades as the firm teetered on the brink of collapse.

One of those customers was a gentleman named Gerald Celente.  On December 17, Mr. Celente appeared on Max Keiser’s television program, On the Edge to describe what happened with his contract (placed through MF Global in April) to purchase an undisclosed quantity of December gold for an amount slightly in excess of $1,400 per ounce.  Celente skewered more individuals than Jon Corzine while describing a travesty which exposed even more of the ways by which the Commodity Futures Modernization Act has been destroying America.  Be sure to watch the interview.

On the same day as the Celente interview, The Washington Post published a piece by Barry Ritholtz, which focused on six astonishing elements of the MF Global story.  Let’s take a look at a few of those elements:

3.  As a result of MF Global’s lobbying, key rules were deregulated.  This allowed the firm to use client money to buy risky sovereign debt.

4.  In 2010, someone from the Commodities Futures Trading Commission recognized these prior deregulations had dramatically ramped clients’ exposure to risk and proposed changing those rules. Jon Corzine, MF Global’s chief executive, successfully prevented the tightening of these regulations.  Had the regulations been tightened, it would have prevented the kind of bets that lost MF Global’s segregated client monies.

5.  None of MF Global’s Canadian clients lost any money thanks to tighter regulations there.

One would think that someone in Jon Corzine’s position would have learned something from the mistakes (such as excessive leveraging and risky bets) which contributed to the financial crisis.  He didn’t.  That’s why Jon S. Corzine is the winner of TheCenterLane.com’s 2011 Jackass Of The Year award.  Congratulations, Jackass!


 

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Absence Of Anger

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I’ve been reading quite a number of articles written in anticipation of a revolutionary uprising by outraged citizens in response to the fallout from Wall Street’s giant Ponzi scheme.  The writers of these items are talking about a more significant uprising than anything we have seen from the Tea Party demonstrators.  Some are expecting riots in the streets.  Since widespread civil unrest has recently taken place in Europe, much attention has been focused on the issue of whether anything like that could happen in the United States.  From my own perspective, I just don’t see it happening.  Nevertheless, I can’t understand what keeps the American public from getting really mad at this point.  It could be due to an epidemic of Attention Deficit Disorder or excessive preoccupation with other distractions.  Perhaps some sort of far-flung conspiratorial effort is under way, involving mass hypnosis via television or drugged drinking water.

On the other hand, I do agree with those commentators on the point that the predicted insurgent reactions are entirely foreseeable.  Are they likely?  Consider what these pundits have said and decide for yourself   .  .  .

One of my favorite commentators, Paul Farrell of MarketWatch, discussed an inevitable backlash against the super-rich, who are waging class warfare by victimizing those of us down the food chain.  Nevertheless, he doesn’t really make it clear how this revolution will manifest itself.  Will there be actual physical violence  . . .  or just a “bloodbath” in the stock market?  Here is how he described it:

Yes, it’s called the Doomsday Capitalism revolution.  And I’m betting you’ll be able to track it on Twitter.

*   *   *

This new preemptive war is already in progress, and America’s billionaires are the aggressors:  Buffett’s billionaire buddies on the Forbes lists, his Wall Street banker buddies, his exporter buddies in China, all of Buffett’s buddies in this “rich class” are already engaged in a hostile takeover war against the American middle class, against the working class and the poor, against all Americans not on the Forbes lists of billionaires.

*   *   *

Here’s how I imagine this revolution unfolding as a series of rapid-fire tweets, as citizen-warriors pass along this collection of earlier warnings to reenergize and drive the rest of America to rebel against Buffett’s “rich class,” tweets that will trigger an anti-capitalist revolution.

Warning to all investors:  Prepare now, play defense.  Expect an economic upheaval rivaling the 1929 crash, creating a climate for true reform that will make the 1930s look like a real tea party.

At The Curious Capitalist blog, Stephen Gandel pondered what would result from all the fear and loathing about whether the Federal Reserve would begin another round of quantitative easing.  His essay was entitled, “Will the Federal Reserve Cause a Civil War?”  Mr. Gandel focused on a recent posting at the Zero Hedge website, which quoted this observation by Karl Denninger:

In a very real sense, Bernanke is throwing Granny and Grandpa down the stairs – on purpose.  He is literally threatening those at the lower end of the economic strata, along with all who are retired, with starvation and death, and in a just nation where the rule of law controlled instead of being abused by the kleptocrats he would be facing charges of Seditious Conspiracy, as his policies will inevitably lead to the destruction of our republic.

Stephen Gandel analyzed the potential for civil war as a consequence of more quantitative easing with this logic:

Lower rates do tend to favor borrowers over savers.  And the largest borrowers in the country are banks, speculators and large corporations.  The largest spenders in our country though tend to be individuals.  Consumer spending makes up 70% of the economy.  And the vast majority of consumers are on the low-end of the income scale.  So I think it is a valid question to ask whether the Fed’s desire to drive down interest rates at all costs policy is working.  Companies are already borrowing at low rates. They are just not spending.        .   .   .

That being said, civil war, probably not.  “It is a gross exaggeration,” says Allan Meltzer, who is a top Fed historian at Carnegie Mellon.  “I cannot recall ever learning about riots or civil war even when the Fed made other mistakes.”

Meanwhile, the prognostications of a gentleman named Gerald Celente appear to be gaining a good deal of traction.  Here are some of Celente’s thoughts as they appeared in his own Trend Alert newsletter, back in April of 2009:

“Nothing short of total repudiation of our entrenched systems can rescue America,” said Celente.  “We are under the control of a two-headed, one party political system.  Wall Street controls our financial lives; the media manipulates our minds.  These systems cannot be changed from within. There is no alternative.  Without a revolution, these institutions will bankrupt the country, keep fighting failed wars, start new ones, and hold us in perpetual intellectual subjugation.”

*   *   *

“I am calling for an ‘Intellectual Revolution’.  I ask American citizens to free their minds from the tyranny of ‘Dumb Think.’  This is a revolution about thinking – not manning the barricades.  It’s about brain power – not brute force.”

It would seem that some degree of anger would be required to incite an “Intellectual Revolution” —  even one without any acts of insurrection.  At this point, it just doesn’t appear as though the American taxpayers are really there yet – Tea Party or not.  People who “want their country back” aren’t the people who will lead this charge.  Watch out for the people who want their jobs, homes and money back.  They will be the ones with the requisite anger to seek real change – as opposed to the “change you can believe in”.


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The End

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July 29, 2010

The long-awaited economic recovery seems to be coming to a premature end.  For over a year, many pundits have been anticipating a “jobless recovery”.  In other words:  don’t be concerned about the fact that so many people can’t find jobs – the economy will recover anyway.  These hopes have been buoyed by the widespread corporate tactic of cost-cutting (usually by mass layoffs) to gin-up the bottom line in time for earnings reports.  This helps inflate stock prices and produce the illusion that the broader economy is experiencing a sustained recovery.  The “jobless recovery” advocates ignore the extent to which the American economy is consumer-driven.  If those consumers don’t have jobs, they aren’t going to be spending money.

Although many observers seem to take comfort in the assumption that the jobless rate is below ten percent, many are beginning to question the validity of the statistics to that effect provided by the Department of Labor.  AOL’s Daily Finance website provided this commentary on the June, 2010 unemployment survey conducted by Raghavan Mayur, president of TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence:

The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who’s unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation.  That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department’s jobless numbers.

*   *   *

In fact, Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled “The Unemployment Myth,” that the government had “cooked the books” by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low.  At the time, Goolsbee was a professor at the University of Chicago.  When asked whether Goolsbee still believes the government undercounts unemployment, a White House spokeswoman said Goolsbee wasn’t available to comment.

Such undercounting of unemployment can be an enormously dangerous exercise today.  It could lead  some lawmakers to underestimate the gravity of the labor market’s problems and base their policymaking on a far-less-grim picture than actually exists.  Economically, and socially, that would make a bad situation much worse for America.

“The implications of such undercounting is that policymakers aren’t going to be thinking as big as they should be,” says Ginsburg, also a professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College.  “It also means that [consumer] demand is not going to be there, because the income from people who are employed isn’t going to be there.”

Frank Aquila of Sullivan & Cromwell recently wrote an article for Bloomberg BusinessWeek, discussing the possibility that we could be headed into the second leg of a “double-dip” recession:

The sputtering economy and talk of a possible second recession have certainly rattled an already fragile American consumer.  Consumer confidence is now at its lowest level in a year, and consumer spending tumbled in May and June.  Since consumer spending accounts for more than two-thirds of  U.S. economic growth, a nervous consumer is not a good omen for a robust recovery.

Job creation is a key factor in increasing consumer confidence.  While economists estimate that we need economic growth of 4 percent or more to stimulate significant job creation, the economy has grown at only about 2 percent to 3 percent, with a slowdown expected in the second half.

*   *   *

With governments struggling under the weight of ballooning budget deficits and businesses waiting for the return of sustained growth, it is the American consumer who will have to lift the global economy out of the mire.  Given the recent news and current consumer sentiment, that appears to be an unlikely prospect in the near term.

The same government that found it necessary to provide corporate welfare to those “too big to fail” financial institutions has now become infested with creatures described by Barry Ritholtz as “deficit chicken hawks”.  The deficit chicken hawks are now preaching the gospel of “austerity” as an excuse for roadblocking any further efforts to use any form of stimulus to end the economic crisis.  One of the gurus of the deficit chicken hawks is economic historian Niall Ferguson.  Because Ferguson is just an economic historian, a real economist – Brad DeLong — had no trouble exposing the hypocrisy exhibited by the Iraq war cheerleader, while revisiting an article Ferguson had written for The New York Times, back in 2003.  Matthew Yglesias had even more fun compiling and publishing a Ferguson (2003) vs. Ferguson (2010) debate.

At The Daily Beast, Sir Harry Evans emphasized how the sudden emphasis on “austerity” is worse than hypocrisy:

As for the banks, one of the obscenities of our time is that so many in the financial community who owe their survival to the massive taxpayer bailouts, not only rewarded themselves with absurd bonuses, but now have the gall to sport the plumage of deficit hawks.  The unemployed?  Let them eat cake, the day after tomorrow.

Gerald Celente, publisher of The Trends Journal, wrote a great essay for The Daily Reckoning website entitled, “Let Them Eat Losses”.  He pointed out how the kleptocracy violated and destroyed the “very essence of functioning capitalism”.  Worse yet, our government betrayed us by forcing the taxpayers “to finance the failed financiers”:

No individual, business, institution, nation or empire is too-big-to-fail.  Had true capitalism been allowed to function unimpeded, the bloated, over-extended, inefficient and gluttonous firms and industries would have failed.  There would have been hardships and losses but, finally rid of its financial tapeworms, the purged system could be restored to health.

No “ism” or “ology” — regardless of purity of intent or moral foundation — is immune to corruption and abuse.  While capitalism itself is being blamed for the excesses that brought on financial chaos, prior to the most recent gambling binge, in tandem with the blanket dismantling of safeguards and the overt takeover of Washington by Wall Street, capitalism was responsible for creating one of the world’s most successful and universally admired societies.

As I discussed on July 8, because President Obama lacked the political courage to advance an effective economic stimulus package last year, the effects of his “semi-stimulus” have now abated and we are headed into another recession.  Reuters reported on July 27 that Robert Shiller, professor of economics at Yale University and co-developer of Standard and Poor’s S&P/Case-Shiller Index, gave us this unsettling macroeconomic prognostication:

“For me a double-dip is another recession before we’ve healed from this recession … The probability of that kind of double-dip is more than 50 percent,” Shiller said.

“I actually expect it.”

During the last few months of 2009, did you ever think that someday you would be looking back at that time as “the good old days”?