We have never experienced a Presidential campaign with more fact-checking than what we are seeing during the current cycle. The well-timed release of a popular new book by Janine Driver entitled, You Can’t Lie to Me might be one of the reasons why this is happening. Fact-checking websites such as PolitiFact and FactCheck have been overflowing with reports of exaggerations, half-truths and flat-out lies by the candidates and their surrogates.
PolitiFact’s roots at the Tampa Bay Times made it particularly well-situated to expose the false claims made during speeches at the Republican Convention. One good example was the “Pants on Fire” rating given to a remark by South Dakota Senator John Thune, who claimed that the Obama administration proposed banning farm kids from doing basic chores.
Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech drew instant criticism from a number of news outlets. I quickly felt vindicated for my last posting, which asserted that Romney made a mistake by selecting Ryan, rather than Ohio Senator Rob Portman, as his running mate. FactCheck provided this breakdown of the misrepresentations in Ryan’s speech:
Paul Ryan’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention contained several false claims and misleading statements. Delegates cheered as the vice presidential nominee:
Accused President Obama’s health care law of funneling money away from Medicare “at the expense of the elderly.” In fact, Medicare’s chief actuary says the law “substantially improves” the system’s finances, and Ryan himself has embraced the same savings.
Accused Obama of doing “exactly nothing” about recommendations of a bipartisan deficit commission — which Ryan himself helped scuttle.
Claimed the American people were “cut out” of stimulus spending. Actually, more than a quarter of all stimulus dollars went for tax relief for workers.
Faulted Obama for failing to deliver a 2008 campaign promise to keep a Wisconsin plant open. It closed less than a month before Obama took office.
Blamed Obama for the loss of a AAA credit rating for the U.S. Actually, Standard & Poor’s blamed the downgrade on the uncompromising stands of both Republicans and Democrats.
If the widespread criticism of the veracity of Ryan’s speech had not been bad enough, Runner’s World saw fit to bust Ryan for making a false claim that he once ran a marathon in less than three hours. In reality, it took him just over four hours.
At the conclusion of FoxNewsapalooza, the Media Matters website posted an analysis of how Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech was a smorgasbord of falsehoods concocted by bloviators from the right-wing media.
Ultimately, convention speeches are about making the argument for your team. We should fully expect politicians to make their case using facts and figures that either tilt positive about their accomplishment – or negative about their opponents. As the fact-checking business has blossomed in the news media, it has been increasingly hard for politicians to get away with such truth-shading without someone noticing.
Both political parties will stretch the truth if they believe it will advance their political interests. It’s been a rough campaign so far, but the GOP convention that just ended was strictly in the mainstream for such party celebrations.
As the Democratic Convention approaches, a good deal of attention has been focused on PolitiFact’s Obameter, which measures how well Obama has delivered on his campaign promises. PolitiFact’s most recent status report offered this analysis:
Our scorecard shows Obama kept 37 percent of his promises. He brought the war in Iraq to a close and finally achieved the Democratic dream of a universal health care program. When the United States had Osama bin Laden in its sights, Obama issued the order to kill.
Sixteen percent are rated Broken, often because they hit a brick wall in Congress. Global warming legislation passed the House but died in the Senate. He didn’t even push for comprehensive immigration reform. His program to help homeowners facing foreclosure didn’t even meet its own benchmarks. (PolitiFact rates campaign promises based on outcomes, not intentions.)
With four months left in Obama’s term, PolitiFact has rated Obama’s remaining promises Compromise (14 percent), Stalled (10 percent) or In the Works (22 percent).
One of the Obama campaign’s negative ads concerning Romney’s economic record as Governor of Massachusetts drew some criticism from FactCheck:
The ad claims that Romney raised taxes on the middle class. It’s true that Romney imposed a number of fees, but none of them targeted middle-income persons. Also, Romney proposed cutting the state income tax three times – a measure that would have resulted in tax cuts for all taxpayers – but he was rebuffed every time by the state’s Democratic Legislature.
I suspect that the Obama campaign has a secret plan in the works to avoid the scrutiny of fact-checkers during their convention. Their plan to have John Kerry speak is actually part of a plot to cause the fact-checkers to fall asleep. Once “Operation Snoozeboat” is complete, the speakers who follow Kerry will be able to make the wildest claims imaginable – and get away with it!
Comments Off on Wisconsin Bogeyman Will Help Obama
Mitt Romney’s choice of Paul Ryan as his running mate will do more so solve President Obama’s voter apathy problem than it will do to boost the enthusiasm of Republican voters. While the Tea Party branch of the Republican Party complains that “Massachusetts moderate” Romney is not a significant alternative to Barack Obama, the Democratic Party’s base complains the bank-centric Obama administration is indistinguishable from a Romney administration. Criticism of the Obama administration’s domestic surveillance program comes from across the political spectrum. One need look no further than the Business Insiderto find disappointment resulting from the Obama administration’s efforts to turn America into a police state.
As the Democratic Party struggled to resurrect a fraction of the voter enthusiasm seen during the 2008 campaign, Mitt Romney came along and gave the Democrats exactly what they needed: a bogeyman from the far-right wing of the Republican Party. The 2012 campaign suddenly changed from a battle against an outsourcing, horse ballet elitist to a battle against a blue-eyed devil who wants to take away Medicare. The Republican team of White and Whiter had suddenly solved the problem of Democratic voter apathy.
I recently expressed the opinion that the only logical candidate for Romney to select as his running mate would have been Ohio Senator Rob Portman. In the wake of Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan, a number of commentators have emphasized that Portman would have been a smarter choice. Polling wiz Nate Silver recently voiced a similar opinion:
Politics 101 suggests that you play toward the center of the electorate. Although this rule has more frequently been violated when it comes to vice-presidential picks, there is evidence that presidential candidates who have more “extreme” ideologies (closer to the left wing or the right wing than the electoral center) underperform relative to the economic fundamentals.
Various statistical measures of Mr. Ryan peg him as being quite conservative. Based on his Congressional voting record, for instance, the statistical system DW-Nominate evaluates him as being roughly as conservative as Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota.
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Because of these factors, a recent analysis I performed placed Mr. Ryan 10th from among 14 potential vice-presidential picks in terms of his immediate impact on the Electoral College. If Mr. Romney wanted to make the best pick by this criterion, he would have been better off to choose an alternative like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, or Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia.
Nate Silver was not alone with his premise that Romney’s choice of Ryan was made out of desperation. At the Right Condition blog, Arkady Kamenetsky not only emphasized that the Ryan candidacy will help galvanize Obama’s liberal base – he went a step further to demonstrate that the Ryan budget is a “smoke and mirrors” pretext for preserving the status quo. After highlighting Ryan’s support of TARP, Medicare Part D and No Child Left Behind, Arkady Kamenetsky performed a detailed comparison of the Ryan budget with the Obama budget to demonstrate a relatively insignificant difference between the two. Kamenetsky concluded the piece with these observations:
So this of course begs the question, why did Romney do this? Why select a VP that will provide such easy ammunition for the Left with virtually no reward? The answer is quite simple. Romney and Ryan represent exactly the same problem even if one appears to be a moderate and the other appears to be an epic fiscal warrior. The Republican party fights for and pushes through the status-quo. The images you see up above and the Ryan record is the status-quo. No doubt about it.
Yet Romney is counting on the ignorance of Republican base to run with the facade of Ryan’s conservatism. If that illusion holds then Ryan’s image will invariably boost Romney’s own image as many will view Romney’s decision as courageous and bold despite Obama’s willingness to distort Ryan’s budget. In other words, you are witnessing a most fantastic and glamorous circus. A bad Hollywood movie, except that ending will be quite real and not something you can pause or turn off.
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Romney and Ryan will lose in November and the image of the heartless Conservative killing granny will resonate with America, the tragedy of course is that neither Ryan or Romney are willing to actually cut anything! The tragedy will become even more amusing as we will witness a nasty and partisan fight further dividing Americans as they fight and defend differing policies with the exact same results.
During the coming weeks, watch for efforts by the mainstream news media to portray this election as a close contest – in their own desperate attempts to retain an audience for what will probably turn out to be the least exciting Presidential campaign since Reagan vs. Carter.
Much has been written about “Turbo” Tim Geithner since he first became Treasury Secretary on January 26, 2009. In his book, Too Big to Fail, Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote adoringly about Geithner’s athletic expertise. On the other hand, typing “Turbo Tim Geithner” into the space on the upper-right corner of this page and clicking on the little magnifying glass will lead you to no less than 61 essays wherein I saw fit to criticize the Treasury Secretary. I first coined the “Turbo” nickname on February 9, 2009 and on February 16 of that year I began linking “Turbo” to an explanatory article, for those who did not understand the reference.
Geithner has never lacked defenders. The March 10, 2010 issue of The New Yorker ran an article by John Cassidy entitled, “No Credit”. The title was meant to imply that Getithner’s efforts to save America’s financial system were working, although he was not getting any credit for this achievement. From the very outset, the New Yorker piece was obviously an attempt to reconstruct Geithner’s controversial public image – because he had been widely criticized as a tool of Wall Street.
Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns dismissed the New Yorker article as “an out and out puff piece” that Geithner himself could have written:
Don’t be fooled; this is a clear plant to help bolster public opinion for a bailout and transfer of wealth, which was both unnecessary and politically damaging.
Another article on Geithner, appearing in the April 2010 issue of The Atlantic, was described by Edward Harrison as “fairly even-handed” although worthy of extensive criticism. Nevertheless, after reading the following passage from the first page of the essay, I found it difficult to avoid using the terms “fawning and sycophantic” to describe it:
In the course of many interviews about Geithner, two qualities came up again and again. The first was his extraordinary quickness of mind and talent for elucidating whatever issue was the preoccupying concern of the moment. Second was his athleticism. Unprompted by me, friends and colleagues extolled his skill and grace at windsurfing, tennis, basketball, running, snowboarding, and softball (specifying his prowess at shortstop and in center field, as well as at the plate). He inspires an adolescent awe in male colleagues.
Gawd! Yeech!
In November of 2008, President George W. Bush appointed Neil M. Barofsky to the newly-established position, Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP). Barofsky was responsible for preventing fraud, waste and abuse involving TARP operations and funds. From his first days on that job, Neil Barofsky found Timothy Geithner to be his main opponent. On March 31 of 2009, the Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on the oversight of TARP. The hearing included testimony by Neil Barofsky, who explained how the Treasury Department had been interfering with his efforts to ascertain what was being done with TARP funds which had been distributed to the banks. Matthew Jaffe of ABC News described Barofsky’s frustration in attempting to get past the Treasury Department’s roadblocks.
On the eve of his retirement from the position of Special Inspector General for TARP (SIGTARP), Neil Barofsky wrote an op-ed piece for the March 30, 2011 edition of The New York Times entitled, “Where the Bailout Went Wrong”. Barofsky devoted a good portion of the essay to a discussion of the Obama administration’s failure to make good on its promises of “financial reform”, with a particular focus on the Treasury Department:
Worse, Treasury apparently has chosen to ignore rather than support real efforts at reform, such as those advocated by Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, to simplify or shrink the most complex financial institutions.
In the final analysis, it has been Treasury’s broken promises that have turned TARP — which was instrumental in saving the financial system at a relatively modest cost to taxpayers — into a program commonly viewed as little more than a giveaway to Wall Street executives.
It wasn’t meant to be that. Indeed, Treasury’s mismanagement of TARP and its disregard for TARP’s Main Street goals — whether born of incompetence, timidity in the face of a crisis or a mindset too closely aligned with the banks it was supposed to rein in — may have so damaged the credibility of the government as a whole that future policy makers may be politically unable to take the necessary steps to save the system the next time a crisis arises. This avoidable political reality might just be TARP’s most lasting, and unfortunate, legacy.
It should come as no surprise that in Neil Barofsky’s new book, Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, the author pulls no punches in his criticism of Timothy Geithner. Barofsky has been feeding us some morsels of what to expect from the book by way of some recent articles in Bloomberg News. Here is some of what Barofsky wrote for Bloombergon July 22:
More important, the financial markets continue to bet that the government will once again come to the big banks’ rescue. Creditors still give the largest banks more favorable terms than their smaller counterparts — a direct subsidy to those that are already deemed too big to fail, and an incentive for others to try to join the club. Similarly, the major banks are given better credit ratings based on the assumption that they will be bailed out.
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The missteps by Treasury have produced a valuable byproduct: the widespread anger that may contain the only hope for meaningful reform. Americans should lose faith in their government. They should deplore the captured politicians and regulators who distributed tax dollars to the banks without insisting that they be accountable. The American people should be revolted by a financial system that rewards failure and protects those who drove it to the point of collapse and will undoubtedly do so again.
Only with this appropriate and justified rage can we hope for the type of reform that will one day break our system free from the corrupting grasp of the megabanks.
Barofsky may have an axe to grind, but he grinds it well, portraying Geithner as a dissembling bureaucrat in thrall to the banks and reminding us all that President Barack Obama’s selection of Geithner as his top economic official may have been one of his biggest mistakes, and a major reason the White House incumbent has to fight so hard for re-election.
From his willingness to bail out the banks with virtually no accountability, to his failure to make holders of credit default swaps on AIG take a haircut, to his inability to mount any effective program for mortgage relief, Geithner systematically favored Wall Street over Main Street and created much of the public’s malaise in the aftermath of the crisis.
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Barofsky, a former prosecutor, relates that he rooted for Geithner to get the Treasury appointment and was initially willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when it emerged that he had misreported his taxes while he worked at the International Monetary Fund.
But as more details on those unpaid taxes came out and Geithner’s explanations seemed increasingly disingenuous, Barofsky had his first doubts about the secretary-designate.
Barofsky, of course, was not alone in his skepticism, and Geithner’s credibility was damaged from the very beginning by the disclosures about his unpaid taxes.
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Barofsky concludes his scathing condemnation of Geithner’s “bank-centric policies” by finding some silver lining in the cloud – that the very scale of the government’s failure will make people angry enough to demand reform.
Once Geithner steps down from his position at the end of the year, we may find that his legacy is defined by Neil Barofsky’s book, rather than any claimed rescue of the financial system.
Matt Taibbi has done it again. His latest article in Rolling Stone focused on the case of United States of America v. Carollo, Goldberg and Grimm, in which the Obama Justice Department actually prosecuted some financial crimes. The three defendants worked for GE Capital (the finance arm of General Electric) and were involved in a bid-rigging conspiracy wherein the prices paid by banks to bond issuers were reduced (to the detriment of the local governments who issued those bonds).
The broker at the center of this case was a firm known as CDR. CDR would be hired by a state or local government which was planning a bond issue. Banks would then submit bids which are interest rates paid to the issuer for holding the money until payments became due to the various contractors involved in the project which was the subject of the particular bond. The brokers would tip off a favored bank about the amounts of competing bids in return for a kickback based on the savings made by avoiding an unnecessarily high bid. In the Carollo case, the GE Capital employees were supposed to be competing with other banks who would submit bids to CDR. CDR would then inform the bidders on how to coordinate their bids so that the bid prices could be kept low and the various banks could agree among themselves as to which entity would receive a particular bond issue. Four of the banks which “competed” against GE Capital in the bidding were UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Those four banks paid a total of $673 million in restitution after agreeing to cooperate in the government’s case.
The brokers would also pay-off politicians who selected their firm to handle a bond issue. Matt Taibbi gave one example of how former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson received $100,000 in campaign contributions from CDR. In return, CDR received $1.5 million in public money for services which were actually performed by another broker – at an additional cost.
Needless to say, the mainstream news media had no interest in covering this case. Matt Taibbi quoted a remark made to the jury at the outset of the case by the trial judge, Harold Baer: “It is unlikely, I think, that this will generate a lot of media publicity”. Although the judge’s remark was intended to imply that the subject matter of the case was too technical and lacking in the “sex appeal” of the usual evening news subject, it also underscored the aversion of mainstream news outlets to expose the wrongdoing of their best sponsors: the big banks.
Beyond that, this case exploded a myth – often used by the Justice Department as an excuse for not prosecuting financial crimes. As Taibbi explained at the close of the piece:
There are some who think that the government is limited in how many corruption cases it can bring against Wall Street, because juries can’t understand the complexity of the financial schemes involved. But in USA v. Carollo, that turned out not to be true. “This verdict is proof of that,” says Hausfeld, the antitrust attorney. “Juries can and do understand this material.”
One important lesson to be learned from the Carollo case is a simple fact that the mainstream news media would prefer to ignore: This is but one tiny example of the manner in which business is conducted by the big banks. As Matt Taibbi explained:
The men and women who run these corrupt banks and brokerages genuinely believe that their relentless lying and cheating, and even their anti-competitive cartelstyle scheming, are all legitimate market processes that lead to legitimate price discovery. In this lunatic worldview, the bidrigging scheme was a system that created fair returns for everyone.
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That, ultimately, is what this case was about. Capitalism is a system for determining objective value. What these Wall Street criminals have created is an opposite system of value by fiat. Prices are not objectively determined by collisions of price information from all over the market, but instead are collectively negotiated in secret, then dictated from above
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Last year, the two leading recipients of public bond business, clocking in with more than $35 billion in bond issues apiece, were Chase and Bank of America – who combined had just paid more than $365 million in fines for their role in the mass bid rigging. Get busted for welfare fraud even once in America, and good luck getting so much as a food stamp ever again. Get caught rigging interest rates in 50 states, and the government goes right on handing you billions of dollars in public contracts.
By now we are all familiar with the “revolving door” principle, wherein prosecutors eventually find themselves working for the law firms which represent the same financial institutions which those prosecutors should have dragged into court. At the Securities and Exchange Commission, the same system is in place. Worst of all is the fact that our politicians – who are responsible for enacting laws to protect the public from such criminal enterprises as what was exposed in the Carollo case – are in the business of lining their pockets with “campaign contributions” from those entities. You may have seen Jon Stewart’s coverage of Jamie Dimon’s testimony before the Senate Banking Committee. How dumb do the voters have to be to reelect those fawning sycophants?
Yet it happens . . . over and over again. From the Great Depression to the Savings and Loan scandal to the financial crisis and now this bid-rigging scheme. The culprits never do the “perp walk”. Worse yet, they continue on with “business as usual” partly because the voting public is too brain-dead to care and partly because the mainstream news media avoid these stories. Our political system is incapable of confronting this level of corruption because the politicians from both parties are bought and paid for by the banking cabal. As Paul Farrell of MarketWatch explained:
Seriously, folks, the elections are relevant. Totally. Oh, both sides pretend it matters. But it no longer matters who’s president. Or who’s in Congress. Money runs America. And when it comes to the public interest, money is not just greedy, but myopic, narcissistic and deaf. Money from Wall Street bankers, Corporate CEOs, the Super Rich and their army of 261,000 highly paid mercenary lobbyists. They hedge, place bets on both sides. Democracy is dead.
Why would anyone expect America to solve any of its most pressing problems when the officials responsible for addressing those issues have been compromised by the villains who caused those situations?
On May 22, the Congressional Budget Office released its report on how the United States can avoid going off the “fiscal cliff” on January 1, 2013. The report is entitled, “Economic Effects of Reducing the Fiscal Restraint That Is Scheduled to Occur in 2013”. Forget about the Mayan calendar and December 21, 2012. The real disaster is scheduled for eleven days later. The CBO provided a brief summary of the 10-page report – what you might call the Cliff Notes version. Here are some highlights:
In fact, under current law, increases in taxes and, to a lesser extent, reductions in spending will reduce the federal budget deficit dramatically between 2012 and 2013 – a development that some observers have referred to as a “fiscal cliff” – and will dampen economic growth in the short term.
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Under those fiscal conditions, which will occur under current law, growth in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP in calendar year 2013 will be just 0.5 percent, CBO expects – with the economy projected to contract at an annual rate of 1.3 percent in the first half of the year and expand at an annual rate of 2.3 percent in the second half. Given the pattern of past recessions as identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research, such a contraction in output in the first half of 2013 would probably be judged to be a recession.
As the complete version of the report explained, the consequences of abruptly-imposed, draconian austerity measures while the economy is in a state of anemic growth in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, could have a devastating impact because incomes will drop, shrinking the tax base and available revenue – the life blood of the United States government:
The weakening of the economy that will result from that fiscal restraint will lower taxable incomes and, therefore, revenues, and it will increase spending in some categories – for unemployment insurance, for instance.
An interesting analysis of the CBO report was provided by Robert Oak of the Economic Populist website. He began with a description of the cliff itself:
What the CBO is referring to is the fiscal cliff. Remember when the budget crisis happened, resulting in the United States losing it’s AAA credit rating? Then, Congress and this administration just punted, didn’t compromise, or better yet, base recommendations on actual economic theory, and allowed automatic spending cuts of $1.2 trillion across the board, to take place instead. These budget cuts will be dramatic and happen in 2012 and 2013.
Spending cuts, especially sudden ones, actually weaken economic growth. This is why austerity has caused a disaster in Europe. Draconian cuts have pushed their economies into not just recessions, but depressions.
The conclusion reached by Robert Oak was particularly insightful:
This report should infuriate Republicans, who earlier wanted to silence the CBO because they were telling the GOP their policies would hurt the economy in so many words. But maybe not. Unfortunately the CBO is not breaking down tax cuts, when there is ample evidence tax cuts for rich individuals do nothing for economic growth. Bottom line though, the CBO is right on in their forecast, draconian government spending cuts will cause an anemic economy to contract.
Although the CBO did offer a good solution for avoiding a drive off the fiscal cliff, it remains difficult to imagine how our dysfunctional government could ever implement these measures:
Or, if policymakers wanted to minimize the short-run costs of narrowing the deficit very quickly while also minimizing the longer-run costs of allowing large deficits to persist, they could enact a combination of policies: changes in taxes and spending that would widen the deficit in 2013 relative to what would occur under current law but that would reduce deficits later in the decade relative to what would occur if current policies were extended for a prolonged period.
The foregoing passage was obviously part of what Robert Oak had in mind when he mentioned that the CBO report would “infuriate Republicans”. Any plans to “widen the deficit” would be subject to the same righteous indignation as an abortion festival or a national holiday for gay weddings. Nevertheless, Mitt Romney accidentally acknowledged the validity of the logic underlying the CBO’s concern. Bill Black had some fun with Romney’s admission by writing a fantastic essay on the subject:
Romney has periodic breakdowns when asked questions about the economy because he sometimes forgets the need to lie. He forgets that he is supposed to treat austerity as the epitome of economic wisdom. When he responds quickly to questions about austerity he slips into default mode and speaks the truth – adopting austerity during the recovery from a Great Recession would (as in Europe) throw the nation back into recession or depression. The latest example is his May 23, 2012 interview with Mark Halperin in Time magazine.
“Halperin: Why not in the first year, if you’re elected — why not in 2013, go all the way and propose the kind of budget with spending restraints, that you’d like to see after four years in office? Why not do it more quickly?
Romney: Well because, if you take a trillion dollars for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5%. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.”
Romney explains that austerity, during the recovery from a Great Recession, would cause catastrophic damage to our nation. The problem, of course, is that the Republican congressional leadership is committed to imposing austerity on the nation and Speaker Boehner has just threatened that Republicans will block the renewal of the debt ceiling in order to extort Democrats to agree to austerity – severe cuts to social programs. Romney knows this could “throw us into recession or depression” and says he would never follow such a policy.
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Later in the interview, Romney claims that federal budgetary deficits are “immoral.” But he has just explained that using austerity for the purported purpose of ending a deficit would cause a recession or depression. A recession or depression would make the deficit far larger. That means that Romney should be denouncing austerity as “immoral” (as well as suicidal) because it will not simply increase the deficit (which he claims to find “immoral” because of its impact on children) but also dramatically increase unemployment, poverty, child poverty and hunger, and harm their education by causing more teachers to lose their jobs and more school programs to be cut.
Mitt Romney is beginning to sound as though he has his own inner Biden, who spontaneously speaks out in an unrestrained manner, sending party officials into “damage control” mode.
This could turn out to be an interesting Presidential campaign, after all.
Comments Off on Get Ready for the Next Financial Crisis
It was almost one year ago when Bloomberg News reported on these remarks by Mark Mobius, executive chairman of Templeton Asset Management’s emerging markets group:
“There is definitely going to be another financial crisis around the corner because we haven’t solved any of the things that caused the previous crisis,” Mobius said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan inTokyotoday in response to a question about price swings. “Are the derivatives regulated? No. Are you still getting growth in derivatives? Yes.”
I have frequently complained about the failed attempt at financial reform, known as the Dodd-Frank Act. Two years ago, I wrote a piece entitled, “Financial Reform Bill Exposed As Hoax” wherein I expressed my outrage that the financial reform effort had become a charade. The final product resulting from all of the grandstanding and backroom deals – the Dodd–Frank Act – had become nothing more than a hoax on the American public. My essay included the reactions of five commentators, who were similarly dismayed. I concluded the posting with this remark:
The bill that is supposed to save us from another financial crisis does nothing to accomplish that objective. Once this 2,000-page farce is signed into law, watch for the reactions. It will be interesting to sort out the clear-thinkers from the Kool-Aid drinkers.
During the past few days, there has been a chorus of commentary calling for a renewed effort toward financial reform. We have seen a torrent of reports on the misadventures of The London Whale at JP Morgan Chase, whose outrageous derivatives wager has cost the firm uncounted billions. By the time this deal is unwound, the originally-reported loss of $2 billion will likely be dwarfed.
Former Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, has made a hobby of writing blog postings about “what President Obama needs to do”. Of course, President Obama never follows Professor Reich’s recommendations, which might explain why Mitt Romney has been overtaking Obama in the opinion polls. On May 16, Professor Reich was downright critical of the President, comparing him to the dog in a short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle involving Sherlock Holmes, Silver Blaze. The President’s feeble remarks about JPMorgan’s latest derivatives fiasco overlooked the responsibility of Jamie Dimon – obviously annoying Professor Reich, who shared this reaction:
Not a word about Jamie Dimon’s tireless campaign to eviscerate the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill; his loud and repeated charge that the Street’s near meltdown in 2008 didn’t warrant more financial regulation; his leadership of Wall Street’s brazen lobbying campaign to delay the Volcker Rule under Dodd-Frank, which is still delayed; and his efforts to make that rule meaningless by widening a loophole allowing banks to use commercial deposits to “hedge” (that is, make offsetting bets) their derivative trades.
Nor any mention Dimon’s outrageous flaunting of Dodd-Frank and of the Volcker Rule by setting up a special division in the bank to make huge (and hugely profitable, when the bets paid off) derivative trades disguised as hedges.
Nor Dimon’s dual role as both chairman and CEO of JPMorgan (frowned on my experts in corporate governance) for which he collected a whopping $23 million this year, and $23 million in 2010 and 2011 in addition to a $17 million bonus.
Even if Obama didn’t want to criticize Dimon, at the very least he could have used the occasion to come out squarely in favor of tougher financial regulation. It’s the perfect time for him to call for resurrecting the Glass-Steagall Act, of which the Volcker Rule – with its giant loophole for hedges – is a pale and inadequate substitute.
And for breaking up the biggest banks and setting a cap on their size, as the Dallas branch of the Federal Reserve recommended several weeks ago.
This was Professor Reich’s second consecutive reference within a week to The Dallas Fed’s Annual Report, which featured an essay by Harvey Rosenblum, the head of the Dallas Fed’s Research Department and the former president of the National Association for Business Economics. Rosenblum’s essay provided an historical analysis of the events leading up to the 2008 financial crisis and the regulatory efforts which resulted from that catastrophe – particularly the Dodd-Frank Act. Beyond that, Rosenblum emphasized why those “too-big-to-fail” (TBTF) banks have actually grown since the enactment of Dodd-Frank:
The TBTF survivors of the financial crisis look a lot like they did in 2008. They maintain corporate cultures based on the short-term incentives of fees and bonuses derived from increased oligopoly power. They remain difficult to control because they have the lawyers and the money to resist the pressures of federal regulation. Just as important, their significant presence in dozens of states confers enormous political clout in their quest to refocus banking statutes and regulatory enforcement to their advantage.
Last year, former Kansas City Fed-head, Thomas Hoenig discussed the problems created by the TBTFs, which he characterized as “systemically important financial institutions” – or “SIFIs”:
… I suggest that the problem with SIFIs is they are fundamentally inconsistent with capitalism. They are inherently destabilizing to global markets and detrimental to world growth. So long as the concept of a SIFI exists, and there are institutions so powerful and considered so important that they require special support and different rules, the future of capitalism is at risk and our market economy is in peril.
Although the huge derivatives loss by JPMorgan Chase has motivated a number of commentators to issue warnings about the risk of another financial crisis, there had been plenty of admonitions emphasizing the risks of the next financial meltdown, which were published long before the London Whale was beached. Back in January, G. Timothy Haight wrote an inspiring piece for the pro-Republican Orange County Register, criticizing the failure of our government to address the systemic risk which brought about the catastrophe of 2008:
In response to widespread criticism associated with the financial collapse, Congress has enacted a number of reforms aimed at curbing abuses at financial institutions. Legislation, such as the Dodd-Frank and Consumer Protection Act, was trumpeted as ensuring that another financial meltdown would be avoided. Such reactionary regulation was certain to pacify U.S. taxpayers.
Unfortunately, legislation enacted does not solve the fundamental problem. It simply provides cover for those who were asleep at the wheel, while ignoring the underlying cause of the crisis.
More than three years after the calamity, have we solved the dilemma we found ourselves in late 2008? Can we rest assured that a future bailout will not occur? Are financial institutions no longer “too big to fail?”
Regrettably, the answer, in each case, is a resounding no.
The 9 largest U.S. banks have a total of 228.72 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives. That is approximately 3 times the size of the entire global economy. It is a financial bubble so immense in size that it is nearly impossible to fully comprehend how large it is.
The multi-billion dollar derivatives loss by JPMorgan Chase demonstrates that the sham “financial reform” cannot prevent another financial crisis. The banks assume that there will be more taxpayer-funded bailouts available, when the inevitable train wreck occurs. The Federal Reserve will be expected to provide another round of quantitative easing to keep everyone happy. As a result, nothing will be done to strengthen financial reform as a result of this episode. The megabanks were able to survive the storm of indignation in the wake of the 2008 crisis and they will be able ride-out the current wave of public outrage.
As Election Day approaches, Team Obama is afraid that the voters will wake up to the fact that the administration itself is to blame for sabotaging financial reform. They are hoping that the public won’t be reminded that two years ago, Simon Johnson (former chief economist of the IMF) wrote an essay entitled, “Creating the Next Crisis” in which he provided this warning:
On the critical dimension of excessive bank size and what it implies for systemic risk, there was a concerted effort by Senators Ted Kaufman and Sherrod Brown to impose a size cap on the largest banks – very much in accordance with the spirit of the original “Volcker Rule” proposed in January 2010 by Obama himself.
In an almost unbelievable volte face, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious, Obama’s administration itself shot down this approach. “If enacted, Brown-Kaufman would have broken up the six biggest banks inAmerica,” a senior Treasury official said. “If we’d been for it, it probably would have happened. But we weren’t, so it didn’t.”
Whether the world economy grows now at 4% or 5% matters, but it does not much affect our medium-term prospects. The US financial sector received an unconditional bailout – and is not now facing any kind of meaningful re-regulation. We are setting ourselves up, without question, for another boom based on excessive and reckless risk-taking at the heart of the world’s financial system. This can end only one way: badly.
The public can forget a good deal of information in two years. They need to be reminded about those early reactions to the Obama administration’s subversion of financial reform. At her Naked Capitalism website, Yves Smith served up some negative opinions concerning the bill, along with her own cutting commentary in June of 2010:
I want the word “reform” back. Between health care “reform” and financial services “reform,” Obama, his operatives, and media cheerleaders are trying to depict both initiatives as being far more salutary and far-reaching than they are. This abuse of language is yet another case of the Obama Administration using branding to cover up substantive shortcomings. In the short run it might fool quite a few people, just as BP’s efforts to position itself as an environmentally responsible company did.
* * *
So what does the bill accomplish? It inconveniences banks around the margin while failing to reduce the odds of a recurrence of a major financial crisis.
In particular, the transaction appears to have been a type of proprietary trade – which is to say, a trade that a bank undertakes to make money for itself, not its clients. And these trades were supposed to have been outlawed by the “Volcker Rule” provision of Obama’s financial reform law, at least at federally-backed banks like JP Morgan. The administration is naturally worried that, having touted the law as an end to the financial shenanigans that brought us the 2008 crisis, it will look feckless instead.
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But it turns out that there’s an additional twist here. The concern for the White House isn’t just that the law could look weak, making it a less than compelling selling point for Obama’s re-election campaign. It’s that the administration could be blamed for the weakness. It’s one thing if you fought for a tough law and didn’t entirely succeed. It’s quite another thing if it starts to look like you undermined the law behind the scenes. In that case, the administration could look duplicitous, not merely ineffectual. And that’s the narrative you see the administration trying to preempt . . .
When the next financial crisis begins, be sure to credit President Obama as the Facilitator-In-Chief.
Now that Mitt Romney has secured the Republican presidential nomination, commentators are focusing on the question of whether the candidate can motivate the conservative Republican base to vote for the “Massachusetts moderate” in November.
Meanwhile, it is becoming obvious that after three years in the White House, Barack Obama has managed to alienate the liberal base of the Democratic Party. The Firedog Lake website has been among the most vocal, left-leaning blogs to regularly criticize the President. The site’s publisher, Jane Hamsher, has picked up on Public Citizen’s campaign against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Obama is attempting to sneak past the public before November. On April 27, Ms. Hamsher provided us with this warning:
The White House wants to fast track the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) “free trade” agreement with Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam. Japan is waiting in the wings, Canada and Mexico want in, Taiwan has announced its intention to meet membership requirements and China says it will “earnestly study” whether to seek entry into the agreement.
Basically, the TPP is NAFTA on steroids. The White House wants to reach a deal prior to the election because they know all the apparatchiks feeding on the $1 billion in Obama campaign money flowing through the system will launch tribalistic attacks on anyone organizing against it (activists, labor unions, workers) for “helping Mitt Romney win” – thus facilitating its easy passage.
At her Naked Capitalism blog, Yves Smith introduced a video clip of Matt Stoller’s appearance on Cenk Uygur’s television program with the following anecdote:
Matt Stoller, in this video clip from an interview last week with Cenk Uygur (hat tip Doug Smith), sets forth what should be widely accepted truths about Obama: that he’s an aggressive proponent of policies that favor the 1%. Yet soi disant progressives continue to regard him as an advocate of their interests, when at best, all he does is pander to them.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with a black woman after an Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Group meeting. She was clearly active in New York City housing politics and knowledgeable about policy generally. I started criticizing Obama’s role in the mortgage settlement. She said:
I have trouble with members of my community. I think Obama needs not to be President. I think he needs to be impeached. But no one in my community wants to hear that. I tell them it’s like when your mother sees you going out with someone who is no good for you.
“Why don’t you leave him? What does he do for you?”
“But Momma, I love him.”
“He knocked you down the stairs, took your keys, drove your car to Florida, ran up big bills on your credit card, and Lord only knows what else he did when he was hiding from you.”
“But Momma, I still love him.”
Her story applies equally well to the oxymoron of the Establishment Left in America. Obama is not only not their friend, but he abuses them, yet they manage to forgive all and come back for more.
After nine months in office, Obama has a clear track record as a global player. Again and again, US negotiators have chosen not to strengthen international laws and protocols but rather to weaken them, often leading other rich countries in a race to the bottom.
After discussing Obama’s failure to take a leading role to promote global efforts to combat pollution, or to promote human rights, Ms. Klein moved on to highlight Obama’s subservience to the financial oligarchy:
And then there are the G-20 summits, Obama’s highest-profile multilateral engagements. When one was held in London in April, it seemed for a moment that there might be some kind of coordinated attempt to rein in transnational financial speculators and tax dodgers. Sarkozy even pledged to walk out of the summit if it failed to produce serious regulatory commitments. But the Obama administration had no interest in genuine multilateralism, advocating instead for countries to come up with their own plans (or not) and hope for the best – much like its reckless climate-change plan. Sarkozy, needless to say, did not walk anywhere but to the photo session to have his picture taken with Obama.
Of course, Obama has made some good moves on the world stage – not siding with the coup government in Honduras, supporting a UN Women’s Agency… But a clear pattern has emerged: in areas where other wealthy nations were teetering between principled action and negligence, US interventions have tilted them toward negligence. If this is the new era of multilateralism, it is no prize.
While watching Saturday evening’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, I was particularly impressed by Jimmy Kimmel’s face-to-face confrontation with President Obama concerning the administration’s crackdown on medical marijuana clinics. One of Obama’s most outspoken critics from the left – Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald – pulled no punches while upbraiding the President for yet another broken campaign promise:
President Obama gave an interview to Rolling Stone‘s Jann Wenner this week and was asked about his administration’s aggressive crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries, including ones located in states where medical marijuana is legal and which are licensed by the state; this policy is directly contrary to Obama’s campaign pledge to not “use Justice Department resources to try and circumvent state laws about medical marijuana.” Here’s part of the President’s answer:
I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana – and the reason is, because it’s against federal law. I can’t nullify congressional law. I can’t ask the Justice Department to say, “Ignore completely a federal law that’s on the books” . . . .
The only tension that’s come up – and this gets hyped up a lot – is a murky area where you have large-scale, commercial operations that may supply medical marijuana users, but in some cases may also be supplying recreational users. In that situation, we put the Justice Department in a very difficult place if we’re telling them, “This is supposed to be against the law, but we want you to turn the other way.” That’s not something we’re going to do.
Aside from the fact that Obama’s claim about the law is outright false – as Jon Walker conclusively documents, the law vests the Executive Branch with precisely the discretion he falsely claims he does not have to decide how drugs are classified – it’s just extraordinary that Obama is affirming the “principle” that he can’t have the DOJ “turn the other way” in the face of lawbreaking.
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The same person who directed the DOJ to shield torturers and illegal government eavesdroppers from criminal investigation, and who voted to retroactively immunize the nation’s largest telecom giants when they got caught enabling criminal spying on Americans, and whose DOJ has failed to indict a single Wall Street executive in connection with the 2008 financial crisis or mortgage fraud scandal, suddenly discovers the imperatives of The Rule of Law when it comes to those, in accordance with state law, providing medical marijuana to sick people with a prescription.
It’s becoming obvious that Mitt Romney is not the only candidate who will have to worry about whether his party’s “base” will bother to stand in line at the polls in November, to vote for a candidate who does not find it necessary to accommodate the will of the voters who elect him.
Comments Off on Geithner Redeems Himself – For Now
I’ve never been a fan of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner. Nevertheless, I have to give the guy credit for delivering a great speech at the Economic Club of Chicago on April 4. The event took place in a building which was formerly home to an off-track betting parlor, with an “upscale” section called The Derby Club (where Gene Siskel spent lots of time and money) – in an era before discretionary income became an obsolete concept.
At a time when the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is suffering from “buyer’s remorse” after bankrolling the election of ideologues opposed to infrastructure spending, Geithner spoke out in favor of common sense. We have come a long, painful way from the days when the Chamber of Commerce aligned itself against the interests of the “little people”. As Keith Laing reported for The Hill, the Chamber no longer considers “stimulus” to be such a dirty word. Laing discussed the joint efforts by the Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO executive Edward Wytkind to advance the transportation bill through a Congressional roadblock:
“We’re going to be pounding away during the recess to get House members to know they’ve got to check their party at the door,” Wytkind said of Republicans in the House who opposed accepting the Senate’s transportation bill.
Other transportation supporters were similarly pessimistic. U.S. Chamber of Commerce executive director of transportation and infrastructure Janet Kavinoky said the 90-day extension could lead to a longer agreement, but only if lawmakers get right back to work after the two-week recess.
“No length of time is going to be good for construction or business, but at least 90 days provides a length of time Congress could get a long-term bill done,” Kavinoky said. “But the House in particular is going to have their nose to the grindstone, or whatever metaphor you want to use, to get a bill off the House floor and into a conference.”
The timing could not have been better for someone in a position of national leadership to deliver a warning that premature austerity policies (implemented before economic recovery gains traction) can have the same destructive consequences as we are witnessing in Europe. To his credit, Tim Geithner stepped up to the plate and hit a home run. Here are his most important remarks, delivered in Chicago on Wednesday:
Much of the political debate and the critiques of business lobbyists misread the underlying dynamics of the economy today. Many have claimed that the basic foundations of American business are in crisis, critically undermined by taxes and regulation.
And yet, business profits are higher than before the crisis and have recovered much more quickly than overall growth and employment. Business investment in equipment and software is up by 33 percent over the past 2 ½ years. Exports have grown 24 percent in real terms over the same period. And manufacturing is coming back, with factory payrolls up by more than 400,000 since the start of 2010.
The business environment in the United States is in numerous ways better than that of many of our major competitors, as measured by international comparisons of regulatory burden, the tax burden on workers, the quality of legal protections of property rights, the ease of starting a business, the availability of capital, and the broader flexibility of the economy.
The challenges facing the American economy today are not primarily about the vibrancy or efficiency of the business community. They are about the barriers to economic opportunity and economic security for many Americans and the political constraints that now stand in the way of better economic outcomes.
These challenges can only be addressed by government action to help speed the recovery and repair the remaining damage from the crisis and reforms and investments to lay the foundation for stronger future growth.
This means taking action to support growth in the short-term – such as helping Americans refinance their mortgages and investing in infrastructure projects – so that we don’t jeopardize the gains our economy has made over the last three years.
And it means making the investments and reforms necessary for a stronger economy in the future. Investments in things like education, to help Americans compete in the global economy. Investments in innovation, so that our economy can offer the best jobs possible. Investments in infrastructure, to reduce costs and increase productivity. Policies to expand exports. And reforms to improve incentives for investing in the United States – including reform of our business tax system.
A growth strategy for the American economy requires more than promises to cut taxes and spending.
We have to be willing to do things, not just cut things.
To expand exports, we have to support programs like the Export-Import Bank, which provides financing at no cost to the government for American businesses trying to compete in foreign markets.
To make us more competitive, we have to be willing to make larger long-term investments in infrastructure, not just limp forward with temporary extensions.
Any credible growth agenda has to recognize that there are parts of the economy, like the financial system, that need reform and regulation. Businesses need to be able to rely on a more stable source of capital, with a financial system that allocates resources to their most productive uses, not misallocating them to an unsustainable real estate boom.
Cutting government investments in education and infrastructure and basic science is not a growth strategy. Cutting deeply into the safety net for low-income Americans is not financially necessary and cannot plausibly help strengthen economic growth. Repealing Wall Street Reform will not make the economy grow faster – it would just make us more vulnerable to another crisis.
This strategy is a recipe to make us a declining power – a less exceptional nation. It is a dark and pessimistic vision of America.
Is this simply another example of the Obama administration’s habit of “doing the talk” without “doing the walk”? Time will tell.
As the 2012 Presidential election campaign heats up, there is plenty of historical revisionism taking place with respect to the 2008 financial / economic crisis. Economist Dean Baker wrote an article for The Guardian, wherein he debunked the Obama administration’s oft-repeated claim that the newly-elected President saved us from a “Second Great Depression”:
While the Obama administration, working alongside Ben Bernanke at the Fed, deserves credit for preventing a financial meltdown, a second great depression was never in the cards.
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The attack on the second Great Depression myth is not simply an exercise in semantics. The Obama Administration and the political establishment more generally want the public to be grateful that we managed to avoid a second Great Depression. People should realize that this claim is sort of like keeping our kids safe from tiger attacks. It’s true that almost no kids in the United States are ever attacked by tigers, but we don’t typically give out political praise for this fact, since there is no reason to expect our kids to be attacked by tigers.
In the same vein, we all should be very happy we aren’t in the middle of a second Great Depression; however, there was never any good reason for us to fear a second Great Depression. What we most had to fear was a prolonged period of weak growth and high unemployment. Unfortunately, this is exactly what we are seeing. The only question is how long it will drag on.
Joe Weisenthal of The Business Insider directed our attention to the interview with economist Paul Krugman appearing in the current issue of Playboy. Krugman, long considered a standard bearer for the Democratic Party’s economic agenda, was immediately thrown under the bus as soon as Obama took office. I’ll never forget reading about the “booby prize” roast beef dinner Obama held for Krugman and his fellow Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz – when the two economists were informed that their free advice would be ignored. Fortunately, former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel was able to make sure that pork wasn’t the main course for that dinner. Throughout the Playboy interview, Krugman recalled his disappointment with the new President. Here’s what Joe Weisenthal had to say about the piece:
We tend to write a lot about his economic commentary here, but he probably doesn’t get enough credit for his commentary on politics, and his assessment of how things will play out.
Go back and read this column, from March 2009, and you’ll see that he basically called things correctly, that the stimulus would be too small, and that the GOP would be emboldened and gain success arguing that the problem was that we had stimulus at all.
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At least as Krugman sees it, the times called for a major boost in spending and so on, and Obama never had any intention to deliver.
The broader public, by contrast, favors strong action. According to a recent Newsweek poll, a majority of voters supports the stimulus, and, more surprising, a plurality believes that additional spending will be necessary. But will that support still be there, say, six months from now?
Also, an overwhelming majority believes that the government is spending too much to help large financial institutions. This suggests that the administration’s money-for-nothing financial policy will eventually deplete its political capital.
So here’s the picture that scares me: It’s September 2009, the unemployment rate has passed 9 percent, and despite the early round of stimulus spending it’s still headed up. Obama finally concedes that a bigger stimulus is needed. But he can’t get his new plan through Congress because approval for his economic policies has plummeted, partly because his policies are seen to have failed, partly because job-creation policies are conflated in the public mind with deeply unpopular bank bailouts. And as a result, the recession rages on, unchecked.
In early July of 2009, I wrote a piece entitled, “The Second Stimulus”, in which I observed that President Obama had already reached the milestone anticipated by Krugman for September of that year. I made a point of including a list of ignored warnings about the inadequacy of the stimulus program. Most notable among them was the point that there were fifty economists who shared the concerns voiced by Krugman, Stiglitz and Jamie Galbraith:
Despite all these warnings, as well as a Bloombergsurvey conducted in early February, revealing the opinions of economists that the stimulus would be inadequate to avert a two-percent economic contraction in 2009, the President stuck with the $787 billion plan.
Mike Grabell of ProPublica has written a new book entitled, Money Well Spent? which provided an even-handed analysis of what the stimulus did – and did not – accomplish. As I pointed out on February 13, some of the criticisms voiced by Mike Grabell concerning the programs funded by the Economic Recovery Act had been previously expressed by Keith Hennessey (former director of the National Economic Council under President George W. Bush) in a June 3, 2009 posting at Hennessey’s blog. I was particularly intrigued by this suggestion by Keith Hennessey from back in 2009:
Had the President instead insisted that a $787 B stimulus go directly into people’s hands, where “people” includes those who pay income taxes and those who don’t, we would now be seeing a stimulus that would be:
partially effective but still quite large – Because it would be a temporary change in people’s incomes, only a fraction of the $787 B would be spent. But even 1/4 or 1/3 of $787 B is still a lot of money to dump out the door. The relative ineffectiveness of a temporary income change would be offset by the enormous amount of cash flowing.
efficient – People would be spending money on themselves. Some of them would be spending other people’s money on themselves, but at least they would be spending on their own needs, rather than on multi-year water projects in the districts of powerful Members of Congress. You would have much less waste.
fast – The GDP boost would be concentrated in Q3 and Q4 of 2009, tapering off heavily in Q1 of 2010.
Why did the President not do this? Discussions with the Congress began in January before he took office, and he faced a strong Speaker who took control and gave a huge chuck of funding to House Appropriations Chairman Obey (D-WI). I can think of three plausible explanations:
The President and his team did not realize the analytical point that infrastructure spending has too slow of a GDP effect.
They were disorganized.
They did not want a confrontation with their new Congressional allies in their first few days.
Given the fact that the American economy is 70% consumer-driven, Keith Hennessey’s proposed stimulus would have boosted that sorely-missing consumer demand as far back as two years ago. We can only wonder where our unemployment level and our Gross Domestic Product would be now if Hennessey’s plan had been implemented – despite the fact that it would have been limited to the $787 billion amount.
Comments Off on Government Should Listen To These Wealth Managers
A good deal of Mitt Romney’s appeal as a Presidential candidate is based on his experience as a private equity fund manager – despite the “vulture capitalist” moniker, favored by some of his critics. Many voters believe that America needs someone with more “business sense” in the White House. Listening to Mitt Romney would lead one to believe that America’s economic and unemployment problems will not be solved until “government gets out of the way”, allowing those sanctified “job creators” to bring salvation to the unemployed masses. Those who complained about how the system has been rigged against the American middle class during the past few decades have found themselves accused of waging “class warfare”. We are supposed to believe that Romney speaks on behalf of “business” when he lashes out against “troublesome” government regulations which hurt the corporate bottom line and therefore – all of America.
Nevertheless, the real world happens to be the home of many wealth managers – entrusted with enormous amounts of money by a good number of rich people and institutional investors – who envision quite a different role of government than the mere nuisance described by Romney and like-minded individuals. If only our elected officials – and more of the voting public – would pay close attention to the sage advice offered by these wealth managers, we might be able to solve our nation’s economic and unemployment problems.
Last summer, bond guru Bill Gross of PIMCO lamented the Obama administration’s obliviousness to the need for government involvement in short-term job creation:
Additionally and immediately, however, government must take a leading role in job creation. Conservative or even liberal agendas that cede responsibility for job creation to the private sector over the next few years are simply dazed or perhaps crazed. The private sector is the source of long-term job creation but in the short term, no rational observer can believe that global or even small businesses will invest here when the labor over there is so much cheaper. That is why trillions of dollars of corporate cash rest impotently on balance sheets awaiting global – non-U.S. – investment opportunities. Our labor force is too expensive and poorly educated for today’s marketplace.
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In the near term, then, we should not rely solely on job or corporate-directed payroll tax credits because corporations may not take enough of that bait, and they’re sitting pretty as it is. Government must step up to the plate, as it should have in early 2009.
In my last posting, I discussed a February 2 Washington Post commentary by Mohamed El-Erian (co-CEO of PIMCO). El-Erian emphasized that – despite the slight progress achieved in reducing unemployment – the situation remains at a crisis level, demanding immediate efforts toward resolution:
Have no doubt, this is a complex, multiyear effort that involves several government agencies acting in a delicate, coordinated effort. It will not happen unless our political leaders come together to address what constitutes America’s biggest national challenge. And sustained implementation will not be possible nor effective without much clearer personal accountability.
One would think that, given all this, it has become more than paramount for Washington to elevate – not just in rhetoric but, critically, through sustained actions – the urgency of today’s unemployment crisis to the same level that it placed the financial crisis three years ago. But watching the actions in the nation’s capital, I and many others are worried that our politicians will wait at least until the November elections before dealing more seriously with the unemployment crisis.
On October 31, I focused on the propaganda war waged against the Occupy Wall Street movement, concluding the piece with my expectation that Jeremy Grantham’s upcoming third quarter newsletter would provide some sorely-needed, astute commentary on the situation. Jeremy Grantham, rated by Bloomberg BusinessWeek as one of the Fifty Most Influential Money Managers, released an abbreviated edition of that newsletter one month later than usual, due to a busy schedule. In addition to expressing some supportive comments about the OWS movement, Grantham noted that he would provide a special supplement, based specifically on that subject. Finally, on February 5, Mr. Grantham made good on his promise with an opinion piece in the Financial Times entitled, “People now see it as a system for the rich only”:
For the time being, in the US our corporate and governmental system backed surprisingly by the Supreme Court has become a plutocracy, designed to prolong, protect and intensify the wealth and influence of those who already have the wealth and influence. What the Occupy movement indicates is that a growing number of people have begun to recognise this in spite of the efficiency of capital’s propaganda machines. Forty years of no pay increase in the US after inflation for the average hour worked should, after all, have that effect. The propaganda is good but not that good.
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In 50 years economic mobility in the US has gone from the best to one of the worst. The benefits of the past 40 years of quite normal productivity have been abnormally divided between the very rich (and corporations) and the workers.
Indeed “divide” is not the right word, for, remarkably, the workers received no benefit at all, while the top 0.1 per cent has increased its share nearly fourfold in 35 years to a record equal to 1929 and the gilded age.
But the best propaganda of all is that the richest 400 people now have assets equal to the poorest 140m. If that doesn’t disturb you, you have a wallet for a heart. The Occupiers’ theme should be simple: “More sensible assistance for the working poor, more taxes for the rich.”
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. Back in November of 2010, economist John Hussman of the Hussman Funds discussed the consequences of the administration’s failure to do what was necessary:
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.
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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 plutocratic tools in control of our government would never allow the stockholders and bondholders of those “too-big-to-fail” banks to suffer losses as do normal people after making bad investments. It’s hard to imagine that Mitt Romney would take a tougher stance against those zombie banks than what we have seen from the Obama administration.
Our government officials – from across the political spectrum – would be wise to follow the advice offered by these fund managers. A political hack whose livelihood is based entirely on passive income has little to offer in the way of “business sense” when compared to a handful of fund managers, entrusted to use their business and financial acumen to preserve so many billions of dollars. Who speaks for business? It should be those business leaders who demonstrate concern for the welfare of all human beings in America.
TheCenterLane.com offers opinion, news and commentary on politics, the economy, finance and other random events that either find their way into the news or are ignored by the news reporting business. As the name suggests, our focus will be on what seems to be happening in The Center Lane of American politics and what the view from the Center reveals about the events in the left and right lanes. Your Host, John T. Burke, Jr., earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College with a double major in Speech Communications and Philosophy. He earned his law degree (Juris Doctor) from the Illinois Institute of Technology / Chicago-Kent College of Law.
