The government's actions to forestall the debt crisis have gone from bad (shotgun marriage of Bear Stearns to Morgan), to worse (nationalization of Fannie and Freddie) and now dto ownright hilarious. Those Beltway Bozos are effectively planning to nationalize the entire US mortgage market (conservatively put at some $11 trillion) - hello!!? Pretty soon we'll all be saying "a trillion bucks just ain't what it used to be".
You said how much???
You said how much???I can truly understand the visceral revulsion of all politicians, Americans and others, to even a whiff of deflation. The Great Depression has left an indelible mark on everyone, including its most ardent student, Mr. Ben Bernanke the current Fed Chairman. But is throwing more money at everything that is gridlocked the proper way to resolve the current problem?
In a word, no. Our fiat money is nothing but debt, so issuing even more of it obviously does not deal with the root cause of the crisis, i.e. too much debt vs. earned income. In promoting the $700 billion plan Messrs. Bernanke and Paulson are merely reacting in knee-jerk fashion, instead of engaging in more thoughtful analysis and proper action. They are just furiously dancing the old-time Wall Street fandango: all flash, little substance. Keep the money moving around as fast as possible and hope most good citizens get dizzy and confused and finally decide to go home to watch I Love Lucy.
In a word, no. Our fiat money is nothing but debt, so issuing even more of it obviously does not deal with the root cause of the crisis, i.e. too much debt vs. earned income. In promoting the $700 billion plan Messrs. Bernanke and Paulson are merely reacting in knee-jerk fashion, instead of engaging in more thoughtful analysis and proper action. They are just furiously dancing the old-time Wall Street fandango: all flash, little substance. Keep the money moving around as fast as possible and hope most good citizens get dizzy and confused and finally decide to go home to watch I Love Lucy.
With enough money, the plan may just work. Warren Buffet certainly thinks so
ReplyDeleteBuffet got a sweet deal: “Berkshire Hathaway will receive perpetual preferred shares in Goldman, which will pay a 10% annual dividend, or $500 million a year. Those dividends take precedence over other payments to common shareholders.”
ReplyDeleteMoney (our current, fiat kind) is just debt. The plan tries to fight fire with fire. No good, we need "water", i.e. permanent debt reduction and higher wages.
ReplyDeletePaulson was the leader on Wall St when all of this toxic sludge was issued.
ReplyDeleteNow he is the leader of the treasury. There is absolutely no doubt: he stole trillions from America and the world on the way up, and now he is stealing the rest on the way down.
If you explained the financial crisis to an eight year old, what is the first thing he would ask? Why is Paulson, the head of Wall Street, in charge of the treasury? Of the 6 billion people on the earth, he is the absolute worst choice.
"knee-jerk"; is that a subtle allusion to the jerk who kneeled before the Empress Pelosi?
ReplyDeleteHellasious said...
ReplyDelete"Money (our current, fiat kind) is just debt. The plan tries to fight fire with fire. No good, we need "water", i.e. permanent debt reduction and higher wages"
But who takes the losses on the debt? And how can you have higher wages in a globalized world when there are 2 billion pople willing to work for a 10th or whatever of what the West pays?
Peter.
Peter,
ReplyDeleteGood luck getting an answer to the higher wage question, I'm just as curious as you are. Hel has advocated it consistently without ever presenting a realistic scenario for achieving it.
BTW, is there some way to prevent spam ads from landing on the posts, at least while they're still current?
Shawn:
ReplyDeleteI disagree. Angelo Mozzilo of Countrywide is the worst choice. Paulson is runner-up!
Talk about the fox guarding the chickens.
yoyomo, I agree with you having also spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out exactly what Hell means.
ReplyDeleteI am increasingly coming to the conclusion that he, you, many others (myself?), MAY all be saying the same thing, only from VERY different angles and in the end it still all comes down to a collective values discussion.
What are we willing to 'do without' in order to achieve our next goal? Do we invest in children or the elderly? Energy or poverty? The environment or lifestyle?
If we focus resources to improve energy productivity by building a new energy system (which I think would get broad agreement from most people), we must still do without something else in order to "free up" the resources to accomplish the task- and this is really where the tough decision is... we simply are unable to get collective agreement on rationing.
Notice Hell's choice of the word "lifestyle" to describe healthcare jobs- at one level his term is absolutely correct, at another it suggests someone who has likely never faced significant health issues before.
IA- Amen. Maybe if he were willing to give back the $500 million he made creating the problem in the first place might I trust his integrity a little more and accept a "mia culpa". Although even if he really is 'innocent', his lack of foresight seems a little much to ignore. Of course maybe his foresight is a little better on the next crisis? Remember, past performance is no guarantee of future success (I go round and round and round on this in my own mind)
;-)
How do you compete with people willing to work for one tenth the wages? Intelligence based technology, not competing in base metals and underwear making e.g.
ReplyDeleteHel, the thieves have the debt right where it'll do the most good--in the productive sector (taxpayers)--who actually have the ability to create products and services people demand, instead of Ponzi schemes.
I don't see your problem with this. Who would you rather have you owing you money, Mozzila, Paulson, or the machinist at Boeing producing airplanes for the Chinese?
Visceral revulsion to deflation eh? So if a ~10 trillion bubble (with a tR!) can't be deflated what else is there than inflate everything else. How to inflate wages in this "globalized" world? Well, easy, "free" (haha) trade agreements. Only production workers have to compete, haven't you noticed? I'm goin to be rude, I say: deflate!
ReplyDeletePeter: clearly future productivity is not based on cheap labor but manufacturing automation.
ReplyDeleteThe RE bust in the late 80's was a signal that hold for investment was dead and now the latest RE bust
ReplyDeleteis a clue that secretization model at least on the scale during the past 10 years is not workable since their is no lender of last resort capable of backing up the large amount of leverage required with adequate capital reserves. Growth in the future will have to be created by productive enterprise rather then speculation and financial engineering.
Marcus
ReplyDeleteThe dollar is overvalued by 70%, based on our balance of payments deficit.
The question is how do we compete with someone who earns one third as much as we do.
The situation is;
ReplyDeleteWe've been robbed!
Watching these dickweeds try to spin it and sell to the american sappy people is a tragic event.
THey lie more everyday. WOW! It has become insane for anyone that has watched the demise of the empire, for the last few years.
Guess what. Same call.
Partys over.......
wkwillis
ReplyDeleteCompete the way Germany and japan compete. What is the difficulty in understanding this?
The dollar is valued at what the market says it is valued.
the $700 billion is to be used to finance this year’s annual bonuses, this year’s million-dollar salaries and sales commission, and to contribute yet more to the retirement funds for the golden parachutes that financial managers have siphoned off to provide a safety net for themselves. So we are back to the basic motto these days: “You only have to make a fortune once in a lifetime.” Now is the time to make these fortunes as big as they’re going to get. Because it’s all down hill from here.
ReplyDelete[This is now dominating our lives in America. -Avl Dao]
ReplyDeleteThe Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle
Elizabeth Kübler-Ross was a swiss doctor who spent much time with dying people, both comforting and studying them. Her book, 'On Death and Dying' included a cycle of emotional states, the Grief Cycle.
Later, the universatality of this emotional cycle was observed in life experiences including how people were affected by bad news such as losing their jobs. The important factor is not that the change is good or bad, but that they perceive it as a significantly negative event.
Shock stage: Initial paralysis at hearing the bad news.
Denial stage: Trying to avoid the inevitable.
Anger stage: Frustrated outpouring of bottled-up emotion.
Bargaining stage: Seeking in vain for a way out.
Depression stage: Final realization of the inevitable.
Testing stage: Seeking realistic solutions.
Acceptance stage: Finally finding the way forward
http://changingminds.org/disciplines/change_management/kubler_ross/kubler_ross.htm
How A Clinton-Era Rule Rewrite Made Subprime Crisis Inevitable
ReplyDeleteTerry Jones
Wed Sep 24, 7:19 PM ET
One of the most frequently asked questions about the subprime market meltdown and housing crisis is: How did the government get so deeply involved in the housing market?
The answer is: President Clinton wanted it that way.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even into the early 1990s, weren't the juggernauts they'd later be.
While President Carter in 1977 signed the Community Reinvestment Act, which pushed Fannie and Freddie to aggressively lend to minority communities, it was Clinton who supercharged the process. After entering office in 1993, he extensively rewrote Fannie's and Freddie's rules.
In so doing, he turned the two quasi-private, mortgage-funding firms into a semi-nationalized monopoly that dispensed cash to markets, made loans to large Democratic voting blocs and handed favors, jobs and money to political allies. This potent mix led inevitably to corruption and the Fannie-Freddie collapse.
Despite warnings of trouble at Fannie and Freddie, in 1994 Clinton unveiled his National Homeownership Strategy, which broadened the CRA in ways Congress never intended.
Addressing the National Association of Realtors that year, Clinton bluntly told the group that "more Americans should own their own homes." He meant it.
Clinton saw homeownership as a way to open the door for blacks and other minorities to enter the middle class.
Though well-intended, the problem was that Congress was about to change hands, from the Democrats to the Republicans. Rather than submit legislation that the GOP-led Congress was almost sure to reject, Clinton ordered Robert Rubin's Treasury Department to rewrite the rules in 1995.
The rewrite, as City Journal noted back in 2000, "made getting a satisfactory CRA rating harder." Banks were given strict new numerical quotas and measures for the level of "diversity" in their loan portfolios. Getting a good CRA rating was key for a bank that wanted to expand or merge with another.
Loans started being made on the basis of race, and often little else.
"Bank examiners would use federal home-loan data, broken down by neighborhood, income group and race, to rate banks on performance," wrote Howard Husock, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute.
But those rules weren't enough.
Clinton got the Department of Housing and Urban Development to double-team the issue. That would later prove disastrous.
Clinton's HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, "made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis," the liberal Village Voice noted. Among those decisions were changes that let Fannie and Freddie get into subprime loan markets in a big way.
Other rule changes gave Fannie and Freddie extraordinary leverage, allowing them to hold just 2.5% of capital to back their investments, vs. 10% for banks.
Since they could borrow at lower rates than banks due to implicit government guarantees for their debt, the government-sponsored enterprises boomed.
With incentives in place, banks poured billions of dollars of loans into poor communities, often "no doc" and "no income" loans that required no money down and no verification of income.
By 2007, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed nearly half of the $12 trillion U.S. mortgage market -- a staggering exposure.
Worse still was the cronyism.
Fannie and Freddie became home to out-of-work politicians, mostly Clinton Democrats. An informal survey of their top officials shows a roughly 2-to-1 dominance of Democrats over Republicans.
Then there were the campaign donations. From 1989 to 2008, some 384 politicians got their tip jars filled by Fannie and Freddie.
Over that time, the two GSEs spent $200 million on lobbying and political activities. Their charitable foundations dropped millions more on think tanks and radical community groups.
Did it work? Well, if measured by the goal of putting more poor people into homes, the answer would have to be yes.
From 1995 to 2005, a Harvard study shows, minorities made up 49% of the 12.5 million new homeowners.
The problem is that many of those loans have now gone bad, and minority homeownership rates are shrinking fast.
Fannie and Freddie, with their massive loan portfolios stuffed with securitized mortgage-backed paper created from subprime loans, are a failed legacy of the Clinton era.
Perhaps it might be amazing to more than just me, that none of the real schooled financial experts (such as say a Paul Krugman of Princeton or a Nouriel Roubini) have been called to Washington to work on this bail out? Our country has many many such true experts and men with old school ethics - and they should be the ones formulating a plan - and then it seems to me that the voters should be given a few choices here, all things considered. Listening to C-span since this started, I'm nauseated.
ReplyDeleteMarcus
ReplyDeleteThat's good, so far. You understand the principle.
America can compete with lower wage countries just as high wage countries like Japan and Germany compete with medium wage countries like America
The next step is letting the market set the dollar/renminbi rate instead of letting the central banks subsidize the dollar over the renminbi. This is probably going to happen if we don't bail out the world financial system.
Speed the day.
Anonymous
ReplyDeleteI thought most houses in default were high income condos in urban areas and medium income new houses in outer suburban areas.
I thought that inner city black areas were not having high default rates.
Anybody here have cites on where the defaults are and by whom? I would like to know in a casual way. I have no skin in the game so I am not bothering to find out more. If your money is at stake, you probably have found actual data. Share?
A few comments :
ReplyDeleteIn order for the U.S. to compete in world markets, a few things need to be insured (ha!) :
That the educational system is capable of training people at all levels who will compete in a global market.
That U.S. infrastructures are still attractive, and make real work (not financial speculation...) possible.
Are we sure that this is still the case ? I'm not.
And since, like Hell, I'm a philosopher with a literary bent, I would like to share a quote with you from the Merchant of Venise, which in its own breathtaking way deals with the economic system in all its aspects :
Bassanio :
So may the outward shows be least themselves ;
The world is still deceived with ornament
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt
But being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil ? In religion,
What damnèd error but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament ?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.
How many cowards whose hearts are all as false
As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules and frowning Mars,
Who inward searched, have livers white as milk !
And these assume but valor's excrement
To render them redoubted. Look on beauty,
And you shall see 'tis purchased by the weight,
Which therein works a miracle in nature,
Making them lightest that wear most of it :
So are those crispèd snaky golden locks,
Which maketh such wanton gambols with the wind
Upon supposèd fairness, often known
To be the dowry of a second head,
The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.
Thus ornament is but the guilèd shore
To a most dangerous sea, the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian beauty ; in a word,
The seeming truth which cunning times put on
To entrap the wisest.Therefore then, thou gaudy gold,
Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee ;
Nor none of thee, thou pale and common drudge
'Tween man and man. But thou, thou meagre lead
Which rather threaten'st than dost promise aught,
Thy paleness moves me more than eloquence --
And here choose I. Joy be the consequence.
I particularly like the passage "thou pale and common drudge 'tween man and man."
I don't hear anyone harping about the insurance edifice. It is an enormous problem.
Salaried work is a problem too, as it corresponds to an unrealistic organisation of work.
Sounds utopic doesn't it ?
Well, when you get thrown into the water, you either learn how to swim, or you sink, don't you ?
I'm no fan of Clinton but whatever screwups he made didn't start to lead to disaster until after Bozo stole the election. It wasn't Clinton who sued the state AG's to prevent them from enforcing state laws against fraudulent/predatory lending. Spitzer got screwed because he was leading the effort to expose Bozo's criminal complicity in all the fraud and corruption in the financial markets.
ReplyDeleteSpitzer got screwed because he paid Ashley Duprey
ReplyDeleteOkie, Thai
ReplyDeleteVery interesting article about development of legal history in early America, the parallels are depressing:
http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson09232008.html
Anon above,
In the words of Joan Rivers:
Oh, grow up Johnny!
wkwillis, if you find out the answer, would you share it with me as well?
ReplyDeleteThanks
yoyomo- I can't get your link to open. What is the title of the article and I will find it myself at counterpunch.
Thai,
ReplyDeleteSept 23, Henry Paulson and the New Yazoo Land Scandal
@Hel
ReplyDeletecould you be kind enough to repost your chart on average family income/average houseprices over time!!! Or just give â hint where in your archive it can be found. For me it still is one of the most informative charts I have seen sofar regarding the financial crisis. The way I understand it a bailout of whatever size is not going to restore house prices as long as the relation between earned income and cost of housing is not "normalised". Each and every bailout is doing nothing but postponing and possible aggravating the pain.(This statement does not apply to any measures Government is taking to diversify the losses globaly. Any such measure would put the USA in a relativly better position than say China or Europe. At the moment the "us and them"- line is placed between Mainstreet and Wallstreet. It is likly to be reset though...).
Best BHM
Some thoughts on the bailout.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.disasterporn.blogspot.com
"Some thoughts on the bailout."
ReplyDeleteEdwardo, that picture is ghastly. Either they don't understand that hyperinflation will literally kill people or they don't care.
It's an open question if we can attribute their monumental mistake to stupidity or corruption.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of some it is relatively easy to choose one over the other. Senators Dodd and Shumer (who is not pictured) are banking industry stooges. Congressman Frank is an arrogant, posturing and vain fool, while Pelosi is only good at beltway maneuverings and, as near as I can tell, knows next to nothing worth knowing about economics or finance.
You may have noticed that the parade of laughing legislative idiots were all Democrats. And that photo was their high water mark. In the days and weeks and months ahead it will be clear that this bailout in particular was the tipping point towards a very dark future in the U.S.
Peter,
ReplyDeleteYou asked: "And how can you have higher wages in a globalized world when there are 2 billion pople willing to work for a 10th or whatever of what the West pays?"
The answer is: Salaries/profits have to be spread more equitably in companies. It does no good to have a CEO making $90 million a year while the janitor makes $6 an hour.
I happen to possess a "confidential" salary printout for one of the top 10 employers in the USA in the 1960s. It includes the salaries of the very top people. The gap between the highest and the lowest salaries then was nothing like it is today. I don't have the actual report in front of me but top people then made something like $150,000 a year (less than $200,000 for sure). The lowest people made $2,000 a year. A lot of skilled people made $10K to $20K a year.
The gaps were nothing like they are today where you have CEOs making $20 million and janitors making $10K.
Personally, I think if companies can't figure out compensation themselves, it needs to be legislated. There is such an inequity anymore that we are turning into a Banana Republic.
Under Clinton, there were also tax code changes on house sales. (Don't blame me -- I'm a Democrat and I voted for Clinton!)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, there was some sort of a tax code change that allowed you to collect either $250K in profit or $500K in profit tax free with each house you sold that you lived in for two years -- and that encouraged flippers!
Prior to that, you could only rollover into a higher priced residence and you could only claim something (? can't remember what) once if you were 55 or older or maybe once if you were under 55. I honestly don't remember because I've never owned a house.
I just know that these tax code changes were part of what drove the housing bubble -- and these happened under Clinton. In 1998, I believe.
Anon,
ReplyDeleteThe tax changes you cite made flipping houses attractive but the fraudulent lending made it possible. Even w/o tax-free status, the easy money would have fueled a bubble; easy profits will draw speculators even if there is a tax to pay.