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Trouble Ahead

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I find it very amusing that we are being bombarded with so many absurd election year “talking points” and none of them concern the risk of a 2012 economic recession.  The entire world seems in denial about a global problem which is about to hit everyone over the head.  I’m reminded of the odd brainstorming session in September of 2008, when Presidential candidates Obama and McCain were seated at the same table with a number of econ-honchos, all of whom were scratching their heads in confusion about the financial crisis.  Something similar is about to happen again.  You might expect our leaders to be smart enough to avoid being blindsided by an adverse economic situation – again – but this is not a perfect world.  It’s not even a mediocre world.

After two rounds of quantitative easing, the Kool-Aid drinkers are sipping away, in anticipation of the “2012 bull market”.  Even the usually-bearish Doug Kass recently enumerated ten reasons why he expects the stock market to rally “in the near term”.  I was more impressed by the reaction posted by a commenter – identified as “Skateman” at the Pragmatic Capitalism blog.  Kass’ reason #4 is particularly questionable:

Mispaced preoccupation with Europe:  The European situation has improved.   .  .  .

Skateman’s reaction to Kass’ reason #4 makes more sense:

The Europe situation has not improved.  There is no escape from ultimate disaster here no matter how the deck chairs are rearranged.  Market’s just whistling past the graveyard.

Of particular importance was this recent posting by Mike Shedlock (a/k/a Mish), wherein he emphasized that “without a doubt Europe is already in recession.”  After presenting his readers with the most recent data supporting his claim, Mish concluded with these thoughts:

Telling banks to lend in the midst of a deepening recession with numerous austerity measures yet to kick in is simply absurd.  If banks did increase loans, it would add to bank losses.  The smart thing for banks to do is exactly what they are doing, parking cash at the ECB.

Austerity measures in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and France combined with escalating trade wars ensures the recession will be long and nasty.

*   *   *

Don’t expect the US to be immune from a Eurozone recession and a Chinese slowdown.  Unlike 2011, it will not happen again.

Back on October 8, Jeff Sommer wrote an article for The New York Times, discussing the Economic Cycle Research Institute’s forecast of another recession:

“If the United States isn’t already in a recession now it’s about to enter one,” says Lakshman Achuthan, the institute’s chief operations officer.  It’s just a forecast.  But if it’s borne out, the timing will be brutal, and not just for portfolio managers and incumbent politicians.  Millions of people who lost their jobs in the 2008-9 recession are still out of work.  And the unemployment rate in the United States remained at 9.1 percent in September.  More pain is coming, says Mr. Achuthan.  He thinks the unemployment rate will certainly go higher.  “I wouldn’t be surprised if it goes back up into double digits,” he says.

Mr. Achuthan’s outlook was echoed by economist John Hussman of the Hussman Funds, who pointed out in his latest Weekly Market Comment that investors have been too easily influenced by recent positive economic data such as payroll reports and Purchasing Managers Indices:

I can understand this view in the sense that the data points are correct – economic data has come in above expectations for several weeks, the Chinese, European and U.S. PMI’s have all ticked higher in the latest reports, new unemployment claims have declined, and December payrolls grew by 200,000.

Unfortunately, in all of these cases, the inference being drawn from these data points is not supported by the data set of economic evidence that is presently available, which is instead historically associated with a much more difficult outcome.  Specifically, the data set continues to imply a nearly immediate global economic downturn.  Lakshman Achuthan of the Economic Cycle Research Institute (ECRI) has noted if the U.S. gets through the second quarter of this year without falling into recession, “then, we’re wrong.”  Frankly, I’ll be surprised if the U.S. gets through the first quarter without a downturn.

At the annual strategy seminar held by Société Générale, their head of strategy – Albert Edwards – attracted quite a bit of attention with his grim prognostications.  The Economist summarized his remarks this way:

The surprise message for investors is that he feels the US is on the brink of another recession, despite the recent signs of optimism in the data (the non-farm payrolls, for example).  The recent temporary boost to consumption is down to a fall in the household savings ratio, which he thinks is not sustainable.

Larry Elliott of The Guardian focused on what Albert Edwards had to say about China and he provided more detail concerning Edwards’ remarks about the United States:

“There is a likelihood of a China hard landing this year.  It is hard to think 2013 and onwards will be any worse than this year if China hard-lands.”

*   *   *

He added that despite the recent run of more upbeat economic news from the United States, the risk of another recession in the world’s biggest economy was “very high”.  Growth had slowed to an annual rate of 1.5% in the second and third quarters of 2011, below the “stall speed” that historically led to recession.  It was unlikely that the economy would muddle through, Edwards said.

So there you have it.  The handwriting is on the wall.  Ignore it at your peril.


 

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Cairo In America

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We have seen quite a bit of hand-wringing by those in the mainstream news media about the repression against protests in Cairo during the past few weeks.  What we don’t see on television are the oppressive tactics used against protesters and journalists here in the United States.  Never mind the fact that the Obama administration refuses to prosecute any of the crimes which led to the financial crisis.  Simply protesting against the refusal of Attorney General Eric Hold-harmless to do his job can result in arrests and beatings administered by police.  At The eXiled blog,Yasha Levine discussed the targeting of journalists by police, hell-bent on squelching coverage of the Occupy movement:

Remember how in November, Bloomberg and the NYPD got a lot of heat from the city’s media establishment for the arrest rampage they unleashed on journalists covering the eviction raid on Liberty Plaza?  Cops arrested more than two dozen accredited journalists from major news outlets, including the New York Post, NPR, AFP and The Associated Press.  Hell, cops even clubbed a couple of reporters for the baggertarian rag The Daily Caller.  As a result, New York’s police commissioner made a big show of issuing an order that instructed police officers not to interfere with journalists covering OWS.

But clearly that was just for show.

Because this month the NYPD has gone out of its way to harass and arrest journalists covering OWS, especially targeting live streamers and indie journalists who can’t be counted on for propaganda support like the mainstream folks.  According to Free Press’ Josh Stearns, who has been maintaining a list of journalists arrested while covering the Occupy Movement across the country, at least five journalists and seven live streamers were arrested by the NYPD in the first half of December.

*   *   *

The NYPD continued harassing indie journalists five days later during the D17 protests.  Some were bashed with batons, others were threatened with having their official press passes revoked. By the end of the day, at least two journalists were arrested, including photojournalist Zach Roberts and Jennifer Dworkin, an independent filmmaker who had worked for PBS.

It will be interesting to see whether a new piece of technology, called the “Occucopter” will enable those reporters to obtain valuable images of abusive police tactics – without getting their own skulls crushed in the process.  The Guardian provided this report:

This week in New York, Occupy Wall Street protesters have a new toy to help them expose potentially dubious actions of the New York police department.  In response to constant police surveillance, police violence and thousands of arrests, Occupy Wall Street protesters and legal observers have been turning their cameras back on the police.  But police have sometimes made filming difficult through physical obstruction and “frozen zones”.  This occurred most notably during the eviction of protesters from Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where police prevented even credentialed journalists from entering.

Now the protesters are fighting back with their own surveillance drone.  Tim Pool, an Occupy Wall Street protester, has acquired a Parrot AR drone he amusingly calls the “occucopter”.  It is a lightweight four-rotor helicopter that you can buy cheaply on Amazon and control with your iPhone.  It has an onboard camera so that you can view everything on your phone that it points at.  Pool has modified the software to stream live video to the internet so that we can watch the action as it unfolds.  You can see video clips of his first experiments here.  He told us that the reason he is doing this “comes back to giving ordinary people the same tools that these multimillion-dollar news corporations have.  It provides a clever loophole around certain restrictions such as when the police block press from taking shots of an incident.”

The American public is no longer content to sit back and do nothing while the Obama administration sits back and does nothing to prosecute those criminals whose fraudulent conduct devastated the American economy.  In my last posting, I discussed the intensifying wave of criticism directed against the President by his former supporters as well as those disgusted by Obama’s subservience to his benefactors on Wall Street.  Since that time, Scot Paltrow wrote a great piece for Reuters, concerning the Justice Department’s failure to intervene against improper foreclosure procedures.  Paltrow’s widely-acclaimed essay inspired several commentators to express their disgust about government permissiveness toward such egregious conduct.  At The Big Picture, Barry Ritholtz shared his reaction to the Reuters article:

The fraud is rampant, self-evident, easy to prosecute.  The only reason it hasn’t been done so far is that this nation is led by corrupt cowards and suffers from a ruinous two-party system.

We were once a great nation that set a shining example for the rest of the world as to what the Rule of Law meant.  That is no more, as we have become a corrupt plutocracy.  Why our prosecutors cower in front of the almighty banking industry is beyond my limited ability to comprehend.

Without any sort of legal denouement, we should expect an angry electorate and an unhappy nation.

Is there any hope for America or will we continue on our course of devolution toward becoming a banana republic?  At his Pragmatic Capitalism blog, Cullen Roche brought a glimmer of hope to some of us when he published Saxo Bank’s list of 10 outrageous predictions for 2012.  I was particularly encouraged by the third item on the list:

3. A yet unannounced candidate takes the White House

In 1992, Texas billionaire Ross Perot managed to take advantage of a recessionary economy and popular disgust with US politics and reap 18.9 per cent of the popular vote.  Three years of Obama has brought too little change and only additional widespread disillusionment with the entire US political system, and conditions for a third party candidate have never been riper.  Someone with a strong programme for real change throws his or her hat in the ring early in 2012 and snatches the presidency in November in one of the most pivotal elections in US history, taking 38 per cent of the popular vote.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.


 

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Nasty Cover-Up Gets Exposed

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Ever since the Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster occurred on that horrible, twentieth day of April 2010, I have been criticizing the cover-up concerning the true extent of this tragedy.  Sitting here in my tinfoil hat, I felt frustrated that the mainstream media had been facilitating the obfuscation by British Petroleum and the Obama administration in their joint efforts to conceal an ongoing environmental disaster in the Gulf of Corexit.  On July 22 of that year, I wrote a piece entitled, “BP Buys Silence of Expert Witnesses”.  On August 26 of 2010, I expressed my cynicism in a piece entitled “Keeping Americans Dumb”:

As time drags on, it is becoming more apparent that both BP and the federal government are deliberately trying to conceal the extent of the damage caused by the Deepwater Horizon blowout.

I got some good news this week when I learned that the mainstream media are finally beginning to acknowledge the extent of this cover-up.  While reading an essay by Gerri Miller for Forbes, I learned about a new documentary concerning the untold story of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster:  The Big Fix.

Once my enthusiasm was sparked, I began reading all I could find about this new documentary, which was co-produced by Peter Fonda.  The Guardian (at its Environment Blog) provided this useful analysis of the movie:

The Big Fix, by Josh and Rebecca Tickell, re-opens some of the most persistent questions about last year’s oil spill.  How BP was able to exert so much control over the crisis as it unfolded?  What were the long-term health consequences of using a toxic chemical, Corexit, to break up the oil and drive it underwater?

Rebecca Tickell herself had a serious reaction to the chemical after being out on the open water – and as it turned out so did the doctor she consulted in an Alabama beach town.  She still has health problems.

Josh Tickell, who grew up in Louisiana, said the Obama administration’s decision to allow the use of Corexit, which is banned in Britain, was the biggest surprise in the making of the film.

“The most shocking thing to me was the disregard with which the people of the Gulf region were dealt,” Tickell said.

“Specifically I think that there was sort of a turn-a-blind-eye attitude towards the spraying of dispersants to clean up the spill. I don’t think anyone wanted to look too deeply at the consequences.”

Gerri Miller’s article for Forbes provided more insight on what the film revealed about the injuries sustained by people in the local shrimping communities:

Dean Blanchard, whose shrimp processing company was once the largest in the U.S., has seen his supply dwindle to “less than 1 percent of the shrimp we produced before.  We get shrimp with oil in the gills and shrimp with no eyes.  The fish are dead and there are no dolphins swimming around my house.”  He knows five people who worked on cleanup crews who have died, and he suffers from sinus and throat problems.  Former shrimper Margaret Curole‘s healthy 31-year-old son worked two months on the cleanup and became so sick from dispersant exposure that he lost 52 pounds and is now unable to walk without a cane. “Most of the seafood is dead or toxic.  I wouldn’t feed it to my cat,” said her husband Kevin Curole, a fifth-generation shrimper who, like Blanchard, had friends who died from Corexit exposure.  “I used to be a surfer but I won’t go in the water anymore,” he said.  “The last time I did my eyes and lips were burning.”

EcoWatch warned us that the movie can be emotionally upsetting:

When you watch how the the Gulf residents captured in The Big Fix have been affected by Corexit and the spill, beware, it is both heart wrenching and frightening.  When you see Gulf residents driven to tears by this environmental tragedy, you want to cry with them. Rebecca, herself, was seriously sickened by Corexit during their filming in the Gulf.

When you listen to eco-activist, Jean-Michel Cousteau, son of champion of the seas Jacques-Yves Cousteau, state so emotionally in the film, “We’re being lied to,” you realize the truth about the Gulf oil spill is being covered up.

The most informative essay about The Big Fix was written by Jerry Cope for The Huffington Post.  The “official trailer” for the film can be seen here.

Ernest Hardy of LA Weekly emphasized how the film hammered away at the mainstream media complicity in the cover-up:

Josh Tickell, a Louisiana native, had two questions he wanted answered when he set out to make his documentary:  What were we not told by the media in the days and weeks immediately following the April 2010 British Petroleum oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and what haven’t we been told since the story faded from the news cycle?  If The Big Fix had simply tackled those questions, the story uncovered would be maddening:  BP’s repeated flaunting of safety codes; their blatant disregard for the lives of individuals and communities devastated by the spill; collusion among the U.S. government (from local to the White House), the media, and BP to hide the damage and avoid holding anyone accountable.  The film’s scope is staggering, including its detailed outlining of BP’s origins and fingerprints across decades of unrest in Iran.  By doing smart, covert reporting that shames our news media, by interviewing uncensored journalists, by speaking with locals whose health has been destroyed, and by interviewing scientists who haven’t been bought by BP (many have, as the film illustrates), Fix stretches into a mandatory-viewing critique of widespread government corruption, with one of the film’s talking heads remarking, “I don’t have any long-term hope for us [as a country] unless we find a way to control campaign financing.”  And yes, the Koch brothers are major players in the fuckery.

The theme of regulatory capture played a role in Anthony Kaufman’s critique of The Big Fix for The Wall Street Journal’s “online magazine” – Speakeasy:

Tickell says that U.S. politicians, both in the Democratic and Republican parties, are too closely tied to the oil and gas industries to regulate them effectively.  “Even if these people come in with good intentions, and what to do good for their community, in order to achieve that level of leadership, they have to seek money from oil and gas,” he says.

While the film promises to take a crack at BP, Tickell says the company is more held up as a “universal example, in the way that resource extraction companies have a certain set of operating paradigms which have lead us to a situation where we have Gulf oil spills and tar sands.”

I felt that my conspiracy theory concerning this tragedy was validated after reading a review of the movie in AZGreen Magazine:

The Big Fix makes clear that the Deepwater Horizon disaster is far from over.  Filmmakers Josh and Rebecca Tickell (makers of groundbreaking films Fuel and Freedom) courageously shine the spotlight on serious aspects of the BP oil spill that were never addressed by mainstream media.  Central to the story is the corporate deception that guided both media coverage and political action on the environmental damage (and ongoing human health consequences) caused by long-term exposure to Corexit, the highly toxic dispersant that was spewed into the Gulf of Mexico by millions of gallons.   The Big Fix drills deeply beyond media reports to demystify the massive corporate cover-up surrounding the Gulf oil spill, and BP’s egregious disregard for human and environmental health.  The film exposes collusion of oil producers, chemical manufacturers, politicians and their campaign funders that resulted in excessive use of Corexit to mask the significance of the oil, and thereby reduce the penalties paid by BP.

Reading all of this makes me wonder what happened to the people, who were discussed in my July 2010 posting, “NOAA Uses Human Canaries to Test Gulf Fish”.

The movie received a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival, as it did in its initial screenings in the United States.  Once audiences have a deeper look at the venal nature of the Obama Administration, it will be interesting to watch for any impact on the President’s approval ratings.


 

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Political Correctness And The Death Of Bin Laden

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It was bound to happen.  In the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s death, an incomprehensible number of debates have begun, concerning alleged violations of that cherished doctrine known as, “Political Correctness” or “PC” (to the amusement of Mac users).

One of the first PC controversies arose as a result of the front page of the New York Daily News on May 2, which featured bin Laden’s photo with the following headline:  “Rot In Hell!”  Here at TheCenterLane.com , the headline I wrote, just after midnight, was:  “Bin Laden Dies – Goes To Hell”.  Accordingly, I was pleased to learn that the New York Daily News has been absolved of any PC violation.  CNN’s Deputy Political Director, Paul Steinhauser, reported on the results of a poll conducted by CNN Polling Director, Keating Holland:

“This is one question on which there is little partisan division – at least six in ten Democrats, independents and Republicans all believe bin Laden is in hell,” adds Holland.

On the other hand, I was disappointed to learn that bin Laden’s code name during the Navy SEAL raid was “Geronimo”.  The choice of that code name was (apparently) the only stupid decision made in the planning of this operation.  It should have been obvious to those planning this raid that the use of Geronimo’s name would offend Native Americans.  Most of the commentary dismissing criticism of the code name “Geronimo” is laced with very transparent bigotry.  To get an objective opinion on this issue, one need only look across the pond to The Guardian, where Steven Newcomb wrote this:

In my book Pagans in the Promised Land, I use the theory of the human mind (cognitive theory) to explain the “cognitive unconscious” of the United States.  Certain ingrained traditions of thought, both conscious and unconscious, have been used for generations by US government officials. Such thinking has resulted in the development of predominantly anti-Indian US federal Indian laws and policies.  The result has been laws and policies that have proven detrimental to Indian nations and peoples.

*   *   *

In the reported stories of Osama bin Laden being killed by US military forces, Bin Laden was codenamed “Geronimo”.  According to a CBS News report, those who came up with that “inappropriate code name” apparently “thought of Bin Laden as a 21st-century equivalent” of Geronimo.  In other words, the codename was based on an extension of the metaphor “Indians are enemies” to “Geronimo was a terrorist”, thus perpetuating the US tradition of treating Indian nations and peoples as enemies.

In my humble opinion, bin Laden’s code name should have been, “Lindsay Lohan”.  To anyone intercepting communications about the raid, the discussion would have seemed like typical, shallow, American gossip about a Hollywood Snow Queen.  A likely reaction by someone overhearing the historic communiqué might have been:

Lindsay Lohan EKIA?

Allah be praised!

I thought she was just a D-cup!

A more far-reaching Political Correctness debate has focused on the handling of bin Laden’s corpse and the suggested publication of the reportedly gruesome photos of his face.  Since the days of the Bush Administration, great pains have been taken to demonstrate that America is not waging a war against Islam – we are at war with terrorists.  Since we clarified that almost ten years ago, there should be nothing wrong with warning those who attempt to wage jihad against us that we will do everything in our power to make sure that terrorists are disqualified from becoming “martyrs” with an eternal harem of 72 virgins.  Accordingly, I believe that immediately before a terrorist is executed, he should be baptized as a Christian to die as an “infidel” and suffer the damnation Allah bestows on such individuals.  If bin Laden had been restrained and baptized just before he was shot, Islamic funeral tradition would have become irrelevant.  Baptizing condemned terrorists would also serve as an effective deterrent to aspiring jihadists.  Such a practice should not be offensive to legitimate Muslims, because there are many serious, respected Islamic authorities, who have repeatedly emphasized that terrorism is abhorrent to the Islamic faith.  What better way to distance the Islamic religion from such deviates, than to disconnect them from Islam just before they are dispatched to the hereafter?

Although some PC purists have objected to the execution of bin Laden, they constitute a fringe minority among even the most orthodox devotees of Political Correctness.  Any attempt to transition bin Laden from waterbed to waterboard would have been logistically impossible, serving no valid purpose.

As for the question of whether to publish the bin Laden photos, it is important to be mindful of recent reports that the Taliban has demanded release of the photos as proof that Osama is dead.  It is generally a good idea to do the opposite of what the Taliban demands.  Accordingly, the photos should be suppressed.


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Screw The People And Save The Banks

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The economic crisis in Ireland (and the rest of Europe) has resulted in a morass of published commentaries, some of which make sense and most of which don’t.  Sometimes it appears as though the writer hasn’t really formed an opinion on the issue, even though the tone of the article seems to be expressing one.  The problem experienced in Ireland is the same as it is everywhere else:  During tough economic times, governments always choose to bail out the banks regardless of the expense and suffering to be endured by the citizens.  The Pragmatic Capitalist recently upbraided the writer of one of the more poorly-thought-out essays dealing with the Irish predicament:

Sheila Bair, the head of the FDIC, has remained one of the more levelheaded and helpful leaders during the financial crisis.  But in an op-ed in the Washington Post this morning she took a decisive turn for the worse when she waded into waters that were certain to drown her.  Bair is now echoing the cries that have been heard across Ireland for the last 2 years – cries of fiscal austerity.  Of course, the USA is nothing like Ireland and has an entirely different monetary system, but Bair ignores all of this (in fact proves she is entirely ignorant of this).  What’s sad is that Bair clearly understands that this crisis is still largely hurting Main Street America   .   .   .

To the extent that the Irish situation bears any resemblance to what we are experiencing (or may soon experience) in the United States, economist John Hussman has written the best essay on this issue.  Hussman began with this point, made by another economist:

“If you have bad banks then you very urgently want to clean up your banks because bad banks go only one way:  they get worse. In the end every bank is a fiscal problem.  When you have bad banks, it is in a political environment where it is totally understood that the government is going to bail them out in the end.  And that’s why they are so bad, and that’s why they get worse.  So cleaning up the banks is an essential counterpart of any attempt to have a well functioning economy.  It is a counterpart of any attempt to have a dull, uninteresting macroeconomy.  And there is no excuse to do it slowly because it is very expensive to postpone the cleanup.  There is no technical issue in doing the cleanup.  It’s mostly to decide to start to grow up and stop the mess.”

MIT Economist Rudiger Dornbusch, November 1998

The TARP bailout was not the only time when our government chose a temporary fix (as in cure or heroin injection) at great taxpayer expense.  I’ve complained many times about President Obama’s decision to scoff at using the so-called “Swedish solution” of putting the zombie banks through temporary receivership.  John Hussman discussed the consequences:

If our policy makers had made proper decisions over the past two years to clean up banks, restructure debt, and allow irresponsible lenders to take losses on bad loans, there is no doubt in my mind that we would be quickly on the course to a sustained recovery, regardless of the extent of the downturn we have experienced.  Unfortunately, we have built our house on a ledge of ice.

*   *   *

As I’ve frequently noted, even if a bank “fails,” it doesn’t mean that depositors lose money.  It means that the stockholders and bondholders do.  So if it turns out, after all is said and done, that the bank is insolvent, the government should get its money back and the remaining entity should be taken into receivership, cut away from the stockholder liabilities, restructured as to bondholder liabilities, recapitalized, and reissued.  We did this with GM, and we can do it with banks.  I suspect that these issues will again become relevant within the next few years.

The present situation

Europe will clearly be in the spotlight early this week, as a run on Irish banks coupled with large fiscal deficits has created a solvency crisis for the Irish government itself and has been (temporarily) concluded with a bailout agreement.  Ireland’s difficulties are the result of a post-Lehman guarantee that the Irish government gave to its banking system in 2008.  The resulting strains will now result in a bailout, in return for Ireland’s agreement to slash welfare payments and other forms of spending to recipients that are evidently less valuable to society than bankers.

*   *   *

Over the short run, Ireland will promise “austerity” measures like Greece did – large cuts in government spending aimed at reducing the deficit.  Unfortunately, imposing austerity on a weak economy typically results in further economic weakness and a shortfall on the revenue side, meaning that Ireland will most probably face additional problems shortly anyway.

The “austerity” approach is more frequently being used as a dividing line to distinguish “liberal” economists from “conservative” economists.  The irony here is that many so-called liberal politicians are as deeply in the pocket of the banking lobby as their conservative counterparts.  Economist Dean Baker recently wrote an article for The Guardian, urging Ireland to follow the example of Argentina and simply default on its debt:

The failure of the ECB or IMF to take steps to rein in the bubble before the crisis has not made these international financial institutions shy about using a heavy hand in imposing conditions now.  The plan is to impose stiff austerity, requiring much of Ireland’s workforce to suffer unemployment for years to come as a result of the failure of their bankers and the ECB.

While it is often claimed that these institutions are not political, only the braindead could still believe this.  The decision to make Ireland’s workers, along with workers in Spain, Portugal, Latvia and elsewhere, pay for the recklessness of their country’s bankers is entirely a political one.  There is no economic imperative that says that workers must pay; this is a political decision being imposed by the ECB and IMF.

Bloomberg News columnist, Matthew Lynn wrote a great article for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, setting out five reasons why Ireland should refuse a bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund to opt for default as the logical approach.

Pay close attention to how your favorite politicians weigh-in on the Irish situation.  It should give you a fairly good tip as to what actions those pols can be expected to take when the Wall Street bankers dash back to Capitol Hill for TARP 2 The Sequel.


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Ron Paul Struts His Stuff

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August 17, 2009

Republican Congressman Ron Paul of Texas has become quite a popular guy, lately.  Back on February 26, he sponsored his own bill, the Federal Reserve Transparency Act, (HR 1207) which would give the Government Accountability Office authority to audit the Federal Reserve and its member components, requiring a report to Congress by the end of 2010.  On July 29, a Rasmussen poll revealed that 75 percent of those surveyed were in favor of auditing the Federal Reserve, with only 9 percent opposed to such a measure.  Lew Rockwell’s website recently featured an article by Anthony Gregory, discussing the Rasmussen poll results and the popularity of Ron Paul’s proposed legislation:

While much of the hostility toward Obama’s domestic policy might be seen in partisan terms, distrust of the Fed completely transcends typical ideological or partisan lines.  While all Congressional Republicans support Ron Paul’s bill to audit the Fed, so do more than a hundred Democrats, demonstrating the impact of the wide public outrage over the Washington-Wall Street shenanigans since the financial downturn.

The Federal Reserve, a centerpiece in the bipartisan establishment, an essential component in both war finance and economic management, is now the least trusted government agency.  More than two thirds of Americans do not believe the Fed is doing a good job.  Two years ago, virtually no one even talked about the Fed; it was an obscure institution assumed to be necessary, wise and uninteresting.  Anyone who brought it up was accused of being outside the sphere of respectable opinion.  Now its champions are on the defensive, and they are desperately scrambling to restore public awe for the central bank behind the curtain.

But the opposition to Obama’s economic policies, both on the right and on the anti-corporate left who view his ties to the banking industry with suspicion, along with a growing disappointment on the left as it concerns civil liberties and war, may eventually constrain Obama.

The mistrust of the Fed, discussed by Mr. Gregory, was based on a Gallup Poll, also conducted during July, which revealed that the Federal Reserve is now “the least trusted” of all government-related entities.

Despite protests from the academic world and an unsupportive editorial from The Washington Post, support for Ron Paul’s bill continues to gain momentum.  Howard Rich, Chairman of Americans for Limited Government, wrote a favorable commentary on this proposal, pointing out that he initially thought it was a rather strange idea.  He eventually looked at the situation with this rationale:

From its founding in 1913, the Fed has existed as an island of almost total independence — setting interest rates, managing inflation and regulating banks according to the will of its Chairman and seven-member Board of Directors.

It cannot be audited. Its ledger is not disclosed. Its meetings are private. Its decisions are not up for debate.

Of course, this ongoing shroud of secrecy ignores the fact that the Fed — as it exists today — is a completely different animal than it was even two years ago.

No longer merely a “regulatory” agency, the Fed has used the current economic crisis as an excuse to dramatically expand its role.  With zero transparency, accountability and effectiveness, it has printed and loaned trillions of dollars since mid-2007 in a costly and unsuccessful effort to mitigate fallout from the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

The question of where those trillions of dollars went is exactly what is on the minds of most people demanding more accountability from the Fed.  Was any favoritism involved in determining what banks received how much money?  Dean Baker wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian, arguing against the re-appointment of Ben Bernanke for another term as the Fed chairman.  The subject of favoritism in the Fed’s response to last fall’s financial meltdown was apparently a matter of concern to Mr. Baker:

By this measure, Bernanke’s performance is very poor.  He has refused to provide the public, or even the relevant congressional committees, with information on the trillions of dollars in loans that were made through the Fed’s special lending facilities.  While anyone can go to the Treasury’s website and see how much each bank received through Tarp and under what terms, Bernanke refuses to share any information on the loans that banks and other institutions received from the Fed.

Where we do have information, it is not encouraging.  At the peak of the financial crisis in October, Goldman Sachs converted itself from an investment bank into a bank holding company, in part so that it could tap an FDIC loan guarantee programme.  Remarkably, Bernanke allowed Goldman to continue to act as an investment bank, taking highly speculative positions even after it had borrowed $28bn with the FDIC’s guarantee.

The idea that the Federal Reserve could loan trillions of dollars to unidentified beneficiaries on secret terms has resulted in outrage from across the political spectrum.  In his rebuttal to The Washington Post‘s editorial criticizing Ron Paul’s Fed transparency initiative, Independent (and self-avowed socialist) Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont had this to say:

This legislation wouldn’t undermine the Fed’s independence, and it wouldn’t put Congress in charge of monetary policy.  An audit is simply an examination of records or financial accounts to check their accuracy.

We must not equate “independence” with secrecy.  No matter how intelligent or well-intentioned the Fed chairman and his staff may be, it isn’t appropriate to give a handful of people the power to lend an unlimited supply of money to anyone it wants without sufficient oversight.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  The American people have a right to know what is being done with their hard-earned taxpayer dollars.  This money does not belong to the Fed; it belongs to the American people.

The tremendous upsurge in support for the Federal Reserve Transparency Act was obviously what motivated Ron Paul to write an essay on the matter for Sunday’s edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer.  With such a strong wind at his back, he confidently trashed the arguments of his opponents and began the piece with this assertion:

The Federal Reserve’s unprecedented intervention into the U.S. economy has inflamed more Americans than almost any other issue in recent memory.

Congressman Paul then proceeded to pound away at the criticism of his bill, reminding me of a boxer, who sees blood flowing down into his opponent’s eyes:

The most conservative estimates place the potential cost of the Federal Reserve’s bailouts and guarantees at about $9 trillion. That is equivalent to more than 60 percent of the U.S.economy, all undertaken by one organization, and almost all of those transactions are exempt from congressional oversight and public scrutiny.

The Fed and its apologists are using bogeymen to deflect criticism.  If the Fed were audited, they argue, monetary policy would be compromised as Congress tries to direct the Fed’s actions, and the Fed’s record of economic stability and low inflation would come to an end.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

*   *   *

The Fed’s mismanagement created the Great Depression, the stagflation of the 1970s, and now our current economic crisis. Over the nearly100 years of the Fed’s existence, the dollar has lost nearly 95 percent of its purchasing power.  A “mild” rate of inflation of 2 percent per year means that a baby born today will see the dollar’s purchasing power erode by a further 75 percent over his lifetime.  If this boondoggle is the Fed’s definition of stability and sound management of the dollar, I would hate to see what instability looks like.

Yet that is exactly what we face today and in the near future with a federal government and a Federal Reserve working hand in hand to bail out favored Wall Street firms with sums of money that have quickly reached absurd proportions.

*   *   *

The fact that a single entity, the Federal Reserve, has dominated monetary policy for so long has been detrimental to the economy.  As long as we try to keep up the fictions that the Federal Reserve works to benefit the American people, that attempting to fix interest rates will not distort the economy, and that the Fed can end a recession by injecting liquidity, we will never free ourselves from the boom and bust of the business cycle.

A necessary first step to restoring economic stability in this country is to audit the Fed, to find out the multitude of sectors in which it has involved itself, and, once the audit has been completed, to analyze the results and determine how the Fed should be reined in.

When one sees a former Republican Presidential primary contender enjoy this type of momentum, the inevitable question is whether Ron Paul might make another run for the White House.  Justin Miller had this on his mind last month when he discussed this subject for The Atlantic:

Paul is just as plausible a candidate to run for the Republican nomination as are Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, or Mike Huckabee who were tested in polls this month.  Like them, Paul’s run for the White House (twice) before and has said he isn’t opposed to doing it again, albeit he said it’s “unlikely.”  What’s more likely, based on the circumstantial evidence, is that the Republican voters would receive Paul better than they did last year.  Feature him in polls from now on and we can test this hypothesis.

As President Obama continues to alienate the liberal base of the Democratic Party, Ron Paul might be just the person the Republicans would want to nominate in 2012.  He’ll be 77 years old at that point — just in time for a single term.