Category Archives: Economic fundamentals

Philip Pilkington: Debt, public or private?: The necessity of debt for economic growth

By Philip Pilkington. Journalist, writer, economic anti-moralist and aficionado of political theatre

‘Tis not due yet; I would be loath to pay him before
his day. What need I be so forward with him that
calls not on me? – Falstaff, ‘Henry VII’

The Anxieties of Government and Debt

Apart from debt, there is perhaps one other economic phenomenon that generates exceptionally large amounts of emotive nonsense both on the internet and in real life – and that is government. So it’s quite unsurprising that when government debt is the discussion of the day, passions flare, accusations are hurled and the coming apocalypse is invoked.

It would be interesting to undertake a psychological study of modern man’s aversion to government and to debt. If I were to guess I would say that many people tend to associate government with authority and debt with obligation. Authority and obligation – surely in our era of selfish hedonism no other potential restraints are so terrifying to so many. These phenomena intrude rudely on one of our most cherished contemporary ideological myths: individualism. More specifically, that outlandish individualism conjured up by marketing men to flog their wares and crystallised in novels and narratives written by lonely and isolated individuals like Ayn Rand. It is, of course, a fantasy individualism; one that few truly adhere to in their day-to-day lives – but it is, like the religions of days gone by, an important determinate in the messages people choose to accept and those they choose to reject.

To put the questions of individualism and of liberty aside though, from an economic point-of-view debt is inevitable.

Bribes Work: How Peterson, the Enemy of Social Security, Bought the Roosevelt Name

Bribes work. AT&T gave money to GLAAD, and now the gay rights organization is supporting the AT&T-T-Mobile merger. La Raza is mouthing the talking points of the Mortgage Bankers Association on down payments. The NAACP is fighting on debit card rules. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute supported the extension of the Bush tax cuts back in December. While it seems counter-intuitive that a left-leaning organization would support illiberal extensions of corporate power, in fact, that is the role of the DC pet liberal. This dynamic of rent-a-reputation is greased with corporate cash and/or political access. As the entitlement fight comes to a head, it’s worth looking under the hood of the DC think tank scene to see how the Obama administration and the GOP are working to lock down their cuts to social programs.

And so it is that the arch-enemy of Social Security, Pete Peterson, rented out the good name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the reputation of the Center for American Progress, and EPI. All three groups submitted budget proposals to close the deficit and had their teams share the stage with Republican con artist du jour Paul Ryan. The goal of Peterson’s conference was to legitimize the fiscal crisis narrative, and to make sure that “all sides” were represented.

Now this tidy fact is not obvious if you check the Peterson Foundation publicity for its “Fiscal Summit:”

Michael Hudson: Replacing Economic Democracy with Financial Oligarchy

By Michael Hudson, a research professor of Economics at University of Missouri, Kansas City and a research associate at the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College. Cross posted from CounterPunch.

Soon after the Socialist Party won Greece’s national elections in autumn 2009, it became apparent that the government’s finances were in a shambles. In May 2010, French President Nicolas Sarkozy took the lead in rounding up €120bn ($180 billion) from European governments to subsidize Greece’s unprogressive tax system that had led its government into debt – which Wall Street banks had helped conceal with Enron-style accounting.

The tax system operated as a siphon collecting revenue to pay the German and French banks that were buying government bonds (at rising interest risk premiums). The bankers are now moving to make this role formal, an official condition for rolling over Greek bonds as they come due, and extend maturities on the short-term financial string that Greece is now operating under. Existing bondholders are to reap a windfall if this plan succeeds. Moody’s lowered Greece’s credit rating to junk status on June 1 (to Caa1, down from B1, which was already pretty low), estimating a 50/50 likelihood of default. The downgrade serves to tighten the screws yet further on the Greek government. Regardless of what European officials do, Moody’s noted, “The increased likelihood that Greece’s supporters (the IMF, ECB and the EU Commission, together known as the “Troika”) will, at some point in the future, require the participation of private creditors in a debt restructuring as a precondition for funding support.”

The conditionality for the new “reformed” loan package is that Greece must initiate a class war by raising its taxes, lowering its social spending – and even private-sector pensions – and sell off public land, tourist sites, islands, ports, water and sewer facilities. This will raise the cost of living and doing business, eroding the nation’s already limited export competitiveness. The bankers sanctimoniously depict this as a “rescue” of Greek finances.

Will China’s bad debt problem affect employment?

The major talking point this morning has been the Chinese bad debt cleanup. Following Yves’ post on China, this post is the second of three on China from Credit Writedowns this morning. Read Michael Pettis’ take and my take on that action here. This post is going to be more about where China and the […]

Bill Black: Bad Cop; Crazed Cop – the IMF and the ECB

By Bill Black, an Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He is a white-collar criminologist, a former senior financial regulator, and the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Cross posted from http://neweconomicperspectives.blogspot.com/2011/05/in-praise-of-sorkins-praise-of.html“>New Economic Perspectives

Greetings again from Ireland. One of the many mysteries about the current crisis is why anyone listens to the IMF or anyone that supported its anti-regulatory policies. Prior to the crisis, even the IMF had begun to confess that its austerity programs made poor nations’ financial crises worse. In the lead up to the crisis the IMF was blind to the developing crises. It even praised nations like Ireland during the run up to the crisis, missing the largest bubble (relative to GDP) of any nation, an epidemic of banking control fraud, and the destruction of any pretense to effective Irish banking regulation.

Crises reveal many deficiencies and one of the most glaring was the European Central Bank (ECB).

China to Clean Up Toxic Local Government Debt?

This report by Reuters, suggesting that China was about to Do Something about its local government dud loans created a lot of chatter among investors:

China’s regulators plan to shift 2-3 trillion yuan ($308-463 billion) of debt off local governments, sources said, reducing the risk of a wave of defaults that would threaten the stability of the world’s second-biggest economy.

Jean Pisani-Ferry on Europe’s Tiger and German Nightmares

This INET interview with Jean Pisani-Ferry gives a useful overview of how Greece and Ireland came to have sovereign debt woes and the viability of the remedies proposed for each. Pisani-Ferry argues, as many other economists do, that austerity measures will not succeed in Greece because they will prove to be politically unsustainable.

Quelle Surprise! Consumer Confidence Falls on Oil Prices, Housing, Job Outlook

Is the latest consumer confidence release yet another example of elite disconnect? One of the things that has become striking is the degree to which the chattering classes in New York and Washington DC seem utterly unaware of what is happening in the rest of the country. New York City is doing reasonably well based on the heroic efforts by the officialdom to prop up the major capital markets firm; DC is recession immune and more recently awash in lobbying funds. The influences range from visual signals (I had a friend visiting from Boston remark how striking it was that there were so few shuttered storefronts here in NYC) to continued Administration cheerleading (a constant since the 2009 bank stress tests). And since major media stories about the economy are driven by sources in these two cities, it feeds into business reporting.

Are Fissures in Europe Worse Than Media Reports Suggest?

Thanks to an alert NC reader, we featured in Links more than a month ago the fact that Denmark, contrary to the spirit of the Eurozone, was implementing border controls. Today, a hand-wringing comment by Peter Spiegel, the Financial Times’ bureau chief in Brussels, describes how sentiment against Eurozone integration has risen among the locals. The near-victory of the nationalist True Finns, regime change in Ireland and Portugal, and demonstrations in Spain, Greece, and Portugal suggest that the citizenry is increasingly unhappy. Spiegel describes the Netherlands as “the California of Europe” and describes in some detail how it opposed the recent €440 billion rescue fund, opposed recent efforts to ntegrate the western Balkans into the EU to i, and demanded reform of immigration policies.

Perhaps I am projecting US tendencies onto the EU, but I see the same signs of elite isolation ther as we have here (in the US, it’s a New York-Washington bubble that includes finance, government officials, and major media).

Stephanie Kelton: What Happens When the Government Tightens its Belt?

Yves here. This post is certain to annoy some readers. Note that Kelton does not address under what circumstances it is desirable to have the government run a surplus versus a deficit, merely what the implications are. Bill MItchell is rather forceful on this matter:

The US press was awash with claims over the weekend that the US was “living beyond” its “means” and that “will not be viable for a whole lot longer”. One senior US central banker claimed that the way to resolve the sluggish growth was to increase interest rates to ensure people would save. Funny, the same person also wants fiscal policy to contract. Another fiscal contraction expansion zealot. Pity it only kills growth. Another commentator – chose, lazily – to be the mouthpiece for the conservative lobby and wrote a book review that focused on the scary and exploding public debt levels. Apparently, this public debt tells us that the US is living beyond its means. Well, when I look at the data I see around 16 per cent of available labour idle in the US and capacity utilisation rates that are still very low. That tells me that there is a lot of “means” available to be called into production to generate incomes and prosperity. A national government doesn’t really have any “means”. It needs to spend to get hold off the means (production resources). Given the idle labour and low capacity utilisation rates the government in the US is clearly not spending enough. The US is currently living well below its means. But the US government can always buy any “means” that are available for sale in US dollars and if there is insufficient demand for these resources emanating from the non-government sector then the US government can bring those idle “means” into productive use any time it chooses.

Will Greeks Defy Rape and Pillage By Barbarians Bankers? An E-Mail from Athens

Wow, this is what debt slavery looks like on a national level.

The Financial Times reports that a new austerity package is about to be foisted on Greece. It amounts to asset stripping and a serious curtailment of national sovereignity:

Morgenson Runs Peterson Institute Propaganda Against “Entitlements” Meaning Medicare and Social Security

I’m generally a Gretchen Morgenson fan, since she’s one of the few writers with a decent bully pulpit who regularly ferrets out misconduct in the corporate and finance arenas. But when she wanders off her regular terrain, the results are mixed, and her current piece is a prime example. She also sometimes pens articles based on a single source, which creates the risk of serving as a mouthpiece for a particular point of view. And the one she chose to represent tonight is one that is in no need of amplification, that of the Peterson Foundation’s well-funded campaign to gut Social Security and Medicare.

We Speak on BNN About the US Housing Market

This was the weirdest little booth at NASDAQ. The seat was at an off angle to the camera, and I couldn’t sit up straight without bumping my head against the glass behind me, which is curved. So I look a bit whopperjawed and uncomfortable at the top but I think it came out fine in the end.