Not only is Obama assuring that he will go down as one of the worst Presidents in history, but for those who have any doubts, he is also making it clear that his only allegiance is to the capitalist classes and their knowledge worker arms and legs.
You don’t need to go further than the first page of today’s New York Times for proof.
Read more...By Marshall Auerback, a portfolio strategist and hedge fund manager. Cros posted from New Economic Perspectives.
Today’s unemployment data suggests that we are experiencing something far worse than a mere “bump in the road”, as our President described it last month. In fact, if last month was the time to panic, as Stephanie Kelton argued here, then today’s data should create real palpitations in the White House. This isn’t just a “bump,” but a fully-fledged New York City style pot hole.
Read more...I hate to seem to be beating up on Brad DeLong. Seriously.
As I’ve said before, he is one of the few economists willing to admit error and not try later to minimize or recant his admission (unlike, say, Greenspan). And he seems genuinely perplexed and remorseful. This puts his heads and shoulders above a lot of his colleagues, at least the sort whose opinion carries weight in policy circles.
Even with DeLong making an earnest effort to figure out why he went wrong, his latest musings, via a Bloomberg op-ed, “Sorrow and Pity of Another Liquidity Trap,” show how hard it is for economist to unlearn what they think they know. And as the great philosopher Will Rogers warned us, “It’s not what you know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know that ain’t so.”
So it’s important to regard DeLong as an unusually candid mainstream economist, and treat his exposition as reasonably representative if you could somehow get his peers to take a hard, jaundiced look at how wrong they have been of late.
DeLong’s mea culpa is about how he and his colleagues refused to take the idea that the US could fall into a liquidity trap seriously. As an aside, this is already a troubling admission, since many observers, including yours truly, though the Fed was in danger of creating precisely that sort of problem if if dropped the Fed funds rate below 2%. It would leave itself no wriggle room if the crisis continued and it had to lower rates further into the territory where further reductions would not motivate changes in behavior. That’s assuming we were in a “normal” environment. But the big abnormality is that we are in what Richard Koo calls a balance sheet recession. And as we will discuss below, Keynes (and Minsky) had a very keen appreciation of the resulting behavior changes, but those ideas were abandoned by Keynesians (it is key to remember that Keynesianism contains significant distortions and omissions from Keynes’ thinking.
But notice how he starts his piece:
Read more...William Rees is one of the pioneers of ecological economics and is the originator and co-developer of ‘ecological footprint analysis’. This video contains some basic facts about current consumption levels in advanced economies that are attention-grabbing. I’d normally say “Enjoy” but this is not that sort of video.
Read more...By L. Randall Wray, a Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from FireDogLake
Yves Smith set off a firestorm in her criticism of several progressive groups that have joined forces with Pete Peterson to whip up deficit hysteria. There are three issues that need to be addressed:
Read more...1. Can a progressive take tainted money and remain progressive?
2. Did the Roosevelt Institute (in particular) take tainted money and remain progressive?
3. What would a progressive approach to federal budgeting look like?
The only reason to think Republicans are serious about their threat to have the Federal government default rather than raise the debt ceiling is that they have an undue fondness for apocalyptic outcomes. I suppose I should actually favor this sort of thing; I’ve long thought the only hope for getting the US freed from rule by financiers was another financial crisis, provided it came soon enough and it was big enough. This one might fit the bill on those scores.
However, with the immediate trigger being pigheaded Congressmen, the banks might look like innocent victims, when the ballooning of public debt around the world was the direct result of their recklessness and the resultant global economy near-death experience. So a debt-ceiling-row-induced great big financial dislocation would probably not produce the opportunity to break the power of banks that yours truly and many others are looking for.
As the hour of reckoning approaches, more and more creative ideas to disarm the Republican weapon are being put forward, and an intriguing one comes from, of all places, a Republican, Ron Paul.
Read more...Readers new to this site may be unfamiliar with our summer reruns, in which we reprise vintage NC posts that we think have stood the test of time pretty well.
We’ve done these more or less in chronological order (our last one was our post on the unveiling of the TARP), but we decided to skip ahead to one in 2010 because it focuses on a crucial bit of history that is too often overlooked, and were were reminded of it by a very good Frank Rich piece in New York Magazine on Obama’s failure to bring bankers to account.
Even Rich’s solid piece treats Obama more kindly that he should be. He depicts the President as too easily won over by “the best and the brightest) in the guise of folks like Robert Rubin and his protege Timothy Geithner.
We think this characterization is far too charitable. Obama had a window in time in which he could have acted, decisively, to rein the financial services in, and he and his aides chose to let it pass and throw their lot in with the banksters. That fatal decision has severely constrained their freedom of action, as we explain below.
Read more...Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns Since the recession in 1990-91, the recovery of employment in the US has had a U-shape that is nothing like the previous post-World War II employment recoveries. This one will be the worst. Source: The Changing Shape of Unemployment
Read more...Andrew Sheng, Chief Adviser to the China Banking Regulatory Commission, is wonderfully straightforward and realistic for an economist. He is willing to say, as he does in this video, things that are obvious yet somehow unacceptable to ‘fess up to in policy circles, like the planet simply cannot support 3 billion people in Asia living European lifestyles. He warns of the danger of creating the mother of all crises if governments cannot stem the tide of leveraged capital flows, and also discusses the role of China on the global stage.
Read more...Cross-posted from Credit Writedowns “Slovenia becomes the new problem child of the EU”. This is the headline today in Handelsblatt, a leading German financial newspaper. Below is a translation of that article and a few comments: Slovenia was long regarded as a model country. But now it is becoming a new problem case for the […]
Read more...By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland
Watch out, I have a large, very large fur, with which I could cover you up entirely, and I have a mind to catch you in it as in a net.
– Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Many aspects of contemporary economic theory certainly seem to have their origins in the mythic and the moral rather than in the realm of the rational. But while this seems to be an accurate description of the system as a whole, it does not seem quite able to account for certain aspects of this system which appear to be rather obsessive in the minds of its adherents.
These obsessions, or ‘fetishes’, can be explained in like terms, that is: compared to certain primitive rituals and superstitions. To do so we will first have to form a better understanding of the fetish itself; an Enlightenment concept that has a long and interesting history.
The specific fetishes we will explore will be the most important today: the government, inflation and gold. All these phenomena are interconnected in neoclassical economic theory (yes, even gold, or at least the ghost thereof), however, they tend to lead their own individual existence outside of the Grand Neoclassical System itself. In and of themselves they are, for economists and economic commentators, fetishes that can be worshipped in dark rooms away from the great hall. They are like fragments of the main theory that adherents smuggle out of the temple and obsess over in their own private shrines.
Read more...Several readers sent me links to a Brad DeLong post which they took to be a rebuttal to a takedown I did of a recent Ezra Klein piece.
Since DeLong did not link to or mention my post, I doubt his piece had anything to do with mine. But his post is noteworthy for a completely different reason: it illustrates how economists have refused to learn much, if anything, from the crisis.
Read more...By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive
Barron’s published a detailed take down of the mortgage insurance industry weekend that highlights how Treasury’s approach to the mortgage mess will ultimately make matters worse. As the article points out, in the fairly likely scenario that mortgage claims exceed the amount of capital the insurers have available to pay them, the parties taking the biggest hit will be Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That means taxpayers are probably on the hook for more bailouts.
Despite having questionable capital reserves for the future claims they face, mortgage insurers are still continuing to write significant insurance business. Why would anybody want to continue to buy insurance from such shaky companies?
The continuing business of the mortgage insurers help shed light on the fact that virtually the entire mortgage industry is run through zombie companies that ought to have expired years ago.
Read more...As much as the rest of the world has chosen to look down on Japan in its post bubble era for its failure to clean up its banking mess and resultant stagnant economy, it has managed its relative decline in status with considerable aplomb. It still has the longest life expectancy in the world, universal health care, not bad unemployment (3% to 5%) and ranks well on other social indicators And now that the US is going down the Japan path, it might behoove us to take heed of their example.
One of the striking difference between the cultures is importance ascribed to job creation.
Read more...Big Bad Bank, via Richard Smith, pointed out a post last fall that didn’t seem to get the traction it deserved (when market sentiment about Greece was peculiarly less pessimistic than now) that Greek tax administration is world class wretched. This matters because even if you operate under the fantasy that austerity works, you still have to be able to cut expenditures and raise taxes. But the logic of “raising taxes” is that if you increase tax rates, you’ll increase tax receipts. If you are already really terrible at collecting taxes, the odds are high that rate increase will not translate fully into higher tax revenues. And even if Greece were to decide to improve its tax apparatus, the machinery is in such wretched shape that it would take years of investment (and changes in laws) to make a dent.
The worst is that when your read this description (which I am excerpting at length, the details are intriguing and damning), although corruption plays a significant role, terrible institutional and systems design is an even bigger culprit.
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