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EuroTARP Faces Criticism

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May 10, 2010

Who would have thought that Mother’s Day would coincide with the announcement of a 720-billion-euro bailout fund to resolve the sovereign debt crisis in the European Union?  Here’s how The New York Times broke the story:

In an extraordinary session that lasted into the early morning hours, finance ministers from the European Union agreed on a deal that would provide $560 billion in new loans and $76 billion under an existing lending program.  Elena Salgado, the Spanish finance minister, who announced the deal, also said the International Monetary Fund was prepared to give up to $321 billion separately.

Officials are hoping the size of the program — a total of $957 billion — will signal a “shock and awe” commitment that will be viewed in the same vein as the $700 billion package the United States government provided to help its own ailing financial institutions in 2008.

The package was much higher than expected, and represented an audacious step for a bloc that had been criticized for acting tentatively, and without unity, in the face of a mounting crisis.

*   *   *

Financial unease has been mounting.  Riots in Greece, ever-tightening terms of credit and the unexplained free fall in the American stock market last Thursday have compounded the sense that the European Union’s inability to address its sovereign debt crisis might lead to the type of systemic collapse that followed the fall of Lehman Brothers.

The debt crisis began with Greece teetering toward default, and fear quickly spread about other weak economies like Portugal, Spain and even Italy.  Previous efforts by the European Union to shore up investor confidence were viewed as too little, too late, with the markets making clear that they were looking for a bolder plan.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of The Telegraph provided us with an informative, yet critical look at the plan:

The walls of fiscal and economic sovereignty are being breached.  The creation of an EU rescue mechanism with powers to issue bonds with Europe’s AAA rating to help eurozone states in trouble — apparently €60bn, with a separate facility that may be able to lever up to €600bn — is to go far beyond the Lisbon Treaty.  This new agency is an EU Treasury in all but name, managing an EU fiscal union where liabilities become shared.  A European state is being created before our eyes.

No EMU country will be allowed to default, whatever the moral hazard.

*   *   *

For now, the world has avoided a financial cataclysm that would have been as serious and far-reaching as the collapse of Lehman Brothers, AIG, Fannie and Freddie in September 2008, and perhaps worse given the already depleted capital ratios of banks and the growing aversion to sovereign debt.

*   *   *

The answer to this — if the objective is to save EMU — is for Germany to boost its growth and tolerate higher ‘relative’ inflation.  This would allow the South to close the gap without tipping into a 1930s Fisherite death spiral.  Yet Europe will have none of it.  The weekend deal demands yet more belt-tightening from the South.  Portugal is to shelve its public works projects.  Spain has pledged further cuts.  As for Germany, it is preparing fiscal tightening to comply with the new balanced budget amendment in its Grundgesetz.

While each component makes sense in its own narrow terms, the EU policy as a whole is madness for a currency union.  Stephen Lewis from Monument Securities says Europe’s leaders have forgotten the lesson of the “Gold Bloc” in the second phase of the Great Depression, when a reactionary and over-proud Continent ground itself into slump by clinging to deflationary totemism long after the circumstances had rendered this policy suicidal.  We all know how it ended.

Back here in the United States, Karl Denninger of The Market Ticker pulled no punches in criticizing the idea of attempting to solve a debt crisis by creating more debt:

This package was calculated to bring about a market reaction similar to what our Federal Reserve and Congress did in 2008 and 2009.  The problem is that the ECB and EU are not similarly situated, in that they don’t have (in the opinion of the market) a solid balance sheet to lever up upon.  Indeed, the problem is within the sovereign balance sheets upon which the EU and ECB rest, and as such this little “program” announced this evening leads me to wonder:

Do they really think the markets are stupid enough to fall for this line of Ouroboros nonsense?

I guess we shall see if, in the coming days, the markets discern the truth of where the funding has to come from, and that in point of fact it is the very nations that are in trouble that have to – somehow – manage to both cut their fiscal deficits and sell more debt (which increases those deficits) to fund their package.

Indeed, I suspect Bernanke and his pals “re-opened” the swap lines not because of current dollar funding problems (there aren’t any) but because he knows this won’t and can’t work, as unlike in the US there is no strong balance sheet to which the debt can be transferred and then refinanced at a lower rate, unlike in the US.

Ben Bernanke would probably hate to see all his hard work at devaluing the dollar go to waste.  One of his worst nightmares would likely involve the dollar’s rise above the value of the euro.   American exports to Europe would become too expensive for those 55-year-old retirees.  Europeans wouldn’t be taking their holidays in America this summer because it would become too expensive, given the new exchange rate.  Whether or not EuroTARP really works as intended, there are plenty of people on Wall Street anticipating a huge rebound in stock prices this week.



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More Damned Lies Than You Can Count

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March 15, 2010

Thanks to the great work of Anton Valukas, as court-appointed bankruptcy examiner investigating the collapse of Lehman Brothers, people are finally beginning to realize how significant a role fraud plays on Wall Street.  It turned out that the Enron scandal wasn’t the once-in-a-lifetime event people thought it was.  Accounting fraud occurs on a regular basis, as does fraudulent stock price manipulation.  The 2200-page report prepared by Valukas and his team at Jenner & Block has everyone talking.  It’s about time.

Other lies are getting more exposure as well.  President Obama justified the bank bailouts with the rationale that giving the money to the banks creates a “money multiplier” effect because banks can loan out 8-10 dollars for every bailout dollar they get, giving the economy more bang for the bailout buck.  As I pointed out on September 21, Australian economist Steve Keen published a fantastic report from his website, explaining how the “money multiplier” myth, fed to Obama by the very people who helped cause the crisis, was the wrong paradigm to be starting from in attempting to save the economy.  Here’s some of what Professor Keen had to say:

He justified giving the money to the lenders, rather than to the debtors, on the basis of “the multiplier effect” from bank lending:

the truth is that a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans to families and businesses, a multiplier effect that can ultimately lead to a faster pace of economic growth.  (page 3 of the speech)

This argument comes straight out of the neoclassical economics textbook.  Fortunately, due to the clear manner in which Obama enunciates it, the flaw in this textbook argument is vividly apparent in his speech.

This “multiplier effect” will only work if American families and businesses are willing to take on yet more debt:  “a dollar of capital in a bank can actually result in eight or ten dollars of loans”.

So the only way the roughly US$1 trillion of money that the Federal Reserve has injected into the banks will result in additional spending is if American families and businesses take out another US$8-10 trillion in loans.

*  *  *

If the money multiplier was going to “ride to the rescue”, private debt would need to rise from its current level of US$41.5 trillion to about US$50 trillion, and this ratio would rise to about 375% — more than twice the level that ushered in the Great Depression.

This is a rescue?  It’s a “hair of the dog” cure:  having booze for breakfast to overcome the feelings of a hangover from last night’s binge.  It is the road to debt alcoholism, not the road to teetotalism and recovery.

Fortunately, it’s a “cure” that is also highly unlikely to work, because the model of money creation that Obama’s economic advisers have sold him was shown to be empirically false over three decades ago.

Now that Australia’s economy is beginning to recover, they have already found it necessary to begin raising interest rates.  As I pointed out last September:

If only Mr. Obama had stuck with his campaign promise of “no more trickle-down economics”, we wouldn’t have so many people wishing they lived in Australia.

Michael Shedlock (“Mish”) recently referred to Professor Keen’s debunking of the money multiplier myth in a fantastic essay:

However, conventional wisdom regarding the money multiplier is wrong.  Australian economist Steve Keen notes that in a debt based society, expansion of credit comes first and reserves come later.

Indeed, this is easy to conceptualize:  Banks lent more than they should have, and those loans are going bad at a phenomenal rate.  In response, the Fed has engaged in a huge swap-o-rama party with various banks (swapping treasuries for collateral of dubious value) in addition to turning on the printing presses.

This was done so that banks would remain “well capitalized”. The reality is those excess reserves are a mirage.  Banks need those reserves for credit losses coming down the pike, as unemployment rises, foreclosures mount, and credit card defaults soar.

Banks are not well capitalized, they are insolvent, unwilling and unable to lend.

Blogger George Washington recently wrote an extensive, thought-provoking piece about public banking and other potential alternatives to resolve the economic crisis, which appeared at the Naked Capitalism website.  The essay began with a discussion of Steve Keen’s work in exposing the “money multiplier” as a sham.

Speaking of shams, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich recently wrote a great essay entitled, “The Sham Recovery”.  Reich has exposed the propagandists touting the imaginary economic recovery in his unique, clear style:

Business cheerleaders naturally want to emphasize the positive.  They assume the economy runs on optimism and that if average consumers think the economy is getting better, they’ll empty their wallets more readily and — presto! — the economy will get better.  The cheerleaders fail to understand that regardless of how people feel, they won’t spend if they don’t have the money.

It’s always nice when a big lie gets exposed.   It’s even better that we are now learning that the true cause of the financial crisis was plain, old sleaze.



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Matt Taibbi Deserves An Award

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June 25, 2009

Like many people, I found out about Matt Taibbi as a result of his frequent appearances on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.  Last spring, Matt appeared on Real Time to discuss his research into the global economic crisis and the resulting scheme of numerous bailouts engineered in response to each sub-crisis of this economic catastrophe.  My March 26 piece: “Understanding The Creepy Bailouts“, quoted from Matt’s fantastic article for Rolling Stone magazine, entitled: “The Big Takeover”.  (At that time, the “Big Takeover” link led to the complete article.  Rolling Stone now provides only abbreviated versions of its published articles on line.)  One important theme of Matt’s commentary was evident in this passage:

The mistake most people make in looking at the financial crisis is thinking of it in terms of money, a habit that might lead you to look at the unfolding mess as a huge bonus-killing downer for the Wall Street class.  But if you look at it in purely Machiavellian terms, what you see is a colossal power grab that threatens to turn the federal government into a kind of giant Enron — a huge, impenetrable black box filled with self-dealing insiders whose scheme is the securing of individual profits at the expense of an ocean of unwitting involuntary shareholders, previously known as taxpayers.

Matt has a unique way of discussing the extremely complicated, technical issues involved in the financial crisis, by breaking them down into understandable, plain-language points.  Unfortunately, most mainstream journalists lack either the understanding or the courage (or both) to discuss our financial predicament in such a frank, informative manner.  Take for example:  Fareed Zakaria’s discussion of the economic catastrophe as it appeared in Newsweek under the title “The Capitalist Manifesto”.  Nobody could to a better job of ripping that thing to shreds than Matt Taibbi himself.  With his June 24 blog entry, he did just that:

Zakaria works hard to tell the crisis story minus these outrageous details.  Then he goes on to argue that, basically, nothing should be done.  We mostly just need a “gut check”; we, all of us, need to rediscover that little voice in all of us that says, “if it doesn’t feel right, we shouldn’t be doing it.”  I mean, that is actually what he wrote.  No one needs to go to jail, we don’t need to worry about who’s to blame, we just need, you know, do a better job using our trusty moral compasses to navigate the seas of life.  It’s classic Zakaria in the sense that he attacks ugly political phenomena with tired cliches and hack pablum until you’re almost too bored to keep your eyes open, then in the end reduces it all to a dumbed-down t-shirt that carries us forward to another cycle of political inaction: Laissez-faire capitalism doesn’t rip off people, people rip off people!

Matt’s previous blog entry on June 18, focused on one of my favorite subjects:  the hideous monster we have come to know as Goldman Sachs.  I had written a piece about that entity on May 21, discussing how Paul Farrell of MarketWatch and John Crudele of the New York Post had been voicing the same suspicions I had been harboring about Goldman.  After reading Matt Taibbi’s June 18 article, I enthusiastically sent the link to my friends.  This stuff was just too good!  Matt was laying it on the line in a way few others had the courage or the skill to do.  I doubt whether many in the mainstream media will follow his lead.  Here is one of the highlights from that piece:

Any way you slice it, Goldman was responsible for putting tens of billions of toxic mortgages on the market, resulting in mass foreclosures, mass depletion of retirement funds, and a monstrously over-leveraged financial system that we will now all be bailing out for the next half-century or so.  All of this so that Goldman could make a few billion bucks acting as the middleman in all of these deadly transactions.

If that weren’t enough, Matt pointed out that the upcoming issue of Rolling Stone would feature another of his reports  —  this one focused exclusively on Goldman Sachs.  That issue (#1082-83, with the Jonas Brothers on the cover) is now on the newsstands.  Matt’s article:  “The Wall Street Bubble Machine” is best explained in the subtitle:

From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression  — And they’re about to do it again.

In case you are wondering how they’re going to do it again  . . .  Matt reports that it will be by way of the “Cap and Trade” program.  Goldman has already positioned itself to serve as one of our government’s premier carbon credit pimps.  Matt offered this explanation:

Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot.  Will this market be bigger than the energy-futures market?

“Oh, it’ll dwarf it,” says a former staffer on the House energy committee.

Matt’s “bottom line” paragraph at the conclusion of the essay underscores what I believe are America’s biggest problems:  “lobbying” and “campaign contributions” (our tradition of legalized graft).  Our government is not just one of laws . . . it is one of loopholes, exemptions and waivers.  Those things cost money.  The people who have the money to “invest” in such machinations, usually find themselves rewarded handsomely  . . .  at the expense of the taxpayers.  Here’s how Matt wrapped it up:

But this is it.  This is the world we live in now.  And in this world, some of us have to play by the rules, while others get a note from the principal, excusing them from homework until the end of time, plus 10 billion free dollars in a paper bag to buy lunch.  It’s a gangster state, running on gangster economics, and even prices can’t be trusted anymore; there are hidden taxes in every buck you pay.  And maybe we can’t stop it, but we should at least know where it’s all going.

Amen.