WHAT DID WE EXPECT WITH LEADERS LIKE THIS?

by ilene - September 22nd, 2010 3:51 pm

Brief review of why it’s about time Summers says goodbye. – Ilene

WHAT DID WE EXPECT WITH LEADERS LIKE THIS?

It’s no secret that the economic recovery in the United States has been meager at best (and that’s assuming you believe this is not just one ongoing recession). While there is plenty of blame to go around for our current plight the buck ultimately stops with the most influential people in this economy – the leaders that help frame the regulations and policies that help to keep the U.S. economy running smoothly. I don’t think these men and women (mostly men) have been held accountable over the years. I personally believe many of these men have flawed models (Alan Greenspan has admitted as much and Ben Bernanke has essentially rehashed his flawed model) and continue to help promote and implement economic policy in the U.S. that is counterproductive, ineffective and at times downright destructive.

I’ve been highly critical of Obama’s economic team over the years because many of them were key players in helping cause the financial crisis. Tim Geithner was the head of the NY Fed when the banks were busy turning themselves into casinos. Ben Bernanke (who Obama should have never reconfirmed) failed to even acknowledge the potential existence of problems in the U.S. economy leading up to the financial crisis and then implemented his great monetarist gaffe which has now been proven to be what I called it from the very beginning – a bailout of Wall Street and a slap in the face for Main Street. He receives endless praise for helping to avoid a supposed second Great Depression. This is like the man who sees a fire in his front yard, ignores it, then when it’s finally becoming a widespread danger decides to save his own house from burning (the banks), lets all of the surroundings houses burn to the ground (Main Street) and then receives endless praise for his courage under fire.

But there have been few people in power over the last 25 years that have been more misguided and downright destructive than Larry Summers. This is a man who believes that women are intellectually inferior (I’ll tell you one thing – this economy wouldn’t be such a mess if it wasn’t run primarily by arrogant, narcissistic males) and has done more to help

…

Tags: Alan Greenspan, bailouts, Banks, Ben Bernanke, Deregulation, derivatives, economic recovery, financial models, Glass-Steagall, Larry Summers, Main Street, Obama Administration, regulations, Wall Street

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The Big Things That Matter

by ilene - August 13th, 2010 6:00 am

The Big Things That Matter

Courtesy of PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS writing at CounterPunch

I write about major problems: the collapsing US economy, wars based on lies and deception, the police state based on “the war on terror” and other fabrications such as those orchestrated by corrupt police and prosecutors, who boost their performance reports by convicting the innocent, and so on. America is a very distressing place. The fact that so many Americans are taken in by the lies told by “their” government makes America all the more depressing.

Often, however, it is small annoyances that waste Americans’ time and drive up blood pressures. One of the worst things that ever happened to Americans was the breakup of the AT&T telephone monopoly. As Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in 1981, if 150 per cent of my time and energy had not been required to cure stagflation in the face of opposition from Wall Street and Fed Chairman Paul Volcker, I might have been able to prevent the destruction of the best communications service in the world, and one that was very inexpensive to customers.

The assistant attorney general in charge of the “anti-trust case” against AT&T called me to ask if Treasury had an interest in how the case was resolved. I went to Treasury Secretary Don Regan and told him that although my conservative and libertarian friends thought that the breakup of At&T was a great idea, their opinion was based entirely in ideology and that the practical effect would not be good for widows and orphans who had a blue chip stock to see them through life or for communications customers as deregulated communications would give the multiple communications corporations different interests than those of the customers. Under the regulated regime, AT&T was allowed a reasonable rate of return on its investment, and to stay out of trouble with regulators AT&T provided excellent and inexpensive service.

Secretary Regan reminded me of my memo to him detailing that Treasury was going to have a hard time getting President Reagan’s economic program, directed at curing the stagflation that had wrecked President Carter’s presidency, out of the Reagan administration. The budget director, David Stockman, and his chief economist, Larry Kudlow, had lined up against it following the wishes of Wall Street, and the White House Chief of Staff James Baker and his deputy Richard Darman were representatives of VP…

Tags: Airlines, America, AT&T, Bush, capitalism, cell phones, Deregulation, Don Regan, greed, Lenin, Libertarians, Marx, profits, Ronald Reagan, STAGFLATION, truckers, US economy, Wall Street

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Wall Street’s Big Win

by ilene - August 6th, 2010 11:46 pm

Excellent article. I recommend reading the whole thing… Matt tells the story behind the sabotage of real financial reform as reflected in the final bill. – Ilene

Wall Street’s Big Win

Finance reform won’t stop the high-risk gambling that wrecked the economy – and Republicans aren’t the only ones to blame

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

Excerpts:

But Dodd-Frank was neither an FDR-style, paradigm-shifting reform, nor a historic assault on free enterprise. What it was, ultimately, was a cop-out, a Band-Aid on a severed artery. If it marks the end of anything at all, it represents the end of the best opportunity we had to do something real about the criminal hijacking of America’s financial-services industry. During the yearlong legislative battle that forged this bill, Congress took a long, hard look at the shape of the modern American economy – and then decided that it didn’t have the stones to wipe out our country’s one dependably thriving profit center: theft.

[...]

All of this is great, but taken together, these reforms fail to address even a tenth of the real problem. Worse: They fail to even define what the real problem is. Over a long year of feverish lobbying and brutally intense backroom negotiations, a group of D.C. insiders fought over a single question: Just how much of the truth about the financial crisis should we share with the public? Do we admit that control over the economy in the past decade was ceded to a small group of rapacious criminals who to this day are engaged in a mind-numbing campaign of theft on a global scale? Or do we pretend that, minus a few bumps in the road that have mostly been smoothed out, the clean-hands capitalism of Adam Smith still rules the day in America? In other words, do people need to know the real version, in all its majestic whorebotchery, or can we get away with some bullshit cover story?

In passing Dodd-Frank, they went with the cover story.

[...]

Both of these takes were engineered to avoid an uncomfortable political truth: The huge profits that Wall Street earned in the past decade were driven in large part by a single, far-reaching scheme, one in which bankers, home lenders and other players exploited loopholes in the system to magically transform subprime home borrowers into AAA investments, sell them off to unsuspecting pension funds and foreign trade unions…

Tags: AIG, bailouts, bankers, Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, Deregulation, Dodd-Frank bill, financial companies, financial reform, Financial System, Gambling, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999, Lobbying, Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, Wall Street's Big Win

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Chris Whalen Calls for Reforms, But Gives Crony Capitalism and the Neo-Liberals a Rewrite

by ilene - July 13th, 2010 2:24 pm

"ALL THE GREAT THINGS ARE SIMPLE, AND MANY CAN BE EXPRESSED IN A SINGLE WORD: FREEDOM, JUSTICE, HONOR, DUTY, MERCY, HOPE." WINSTON CHURCHILL

Chris Whalen Calls for Reforms, But Gives Crony Capitalism and the Neo-Liberals a Rewrite

Courtesy of JESSE’S CAFÉ AMÉRICAIN

I enjoy Chris Whalen of the Institutional Risk Analyst. His outlook and perspective are generally well-informed and well to the point, fresh and practical.

In his most recent essay titled Building a New American Political Economy, excerpted below, he spends quite a few words in taking Paul Krugman and the stimulus crowd to task, or more accurately, out to the woodshed for what we used to call a ‘proper thrashing.’

I like his conclusion, which strikes a similar chord to the tag line which I have been promoting since 2002.

"The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained recovery."

There must be a fundamental restructuring of the US economy, a reconsideration of globalization and its scope and impact on domestic policy, and a significant reform of the role of the financial system before there can be any sustained recovery.

The housing bubble was not only noticeable well in advance of its collapse, but it was predictable in my view, because of what Greenspan’s policies had been coupled with the fiscal irresponsibility of the government.

What I do not like, at all, is the revisionism that imputes the problems facing the US today to ‘the Keynesians,’ seemingly alone.

Deficits Don’t Matter, Until They Do

Who was it who proved, according to Dick Cheney, that ‘deficits don’t matter?’ Not some wild eyed liberal, but Ronald Reagan. And if Reagan was a Keynesian, then Tim Geithner is Leonardo da Vinci.

The greatest deficit growth in the US came from a belief that cutting taxes for the wealthy, without cutting spending, and even increasing spending by enormous amounts on military projects, even in peacetime, in the pursuit of empire and the New American Century, was viable because this would stimulate growth from the top down, trickle down as it were, and negate the deficits.

It was from the anti-government Republicans and faux Democrat elites like Bill Clinton and his economic advisor Robert Rubin, and the billionaire boys club’s think tanks, that the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’…

Tags: Ben Bernanke, CHINA, Chris Whalen, Crony capitalism, Deregulation, Economy, efficient markets hypothesis, Glass-Steagall, Globalization, IMF, Paul Krugman, Reagan, spending, trading, trickle down economics, Wall Street

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Criminal Geithner & AIG: will the truth come out?

by ilene - January 16th, 2010 6:51 pm

Criminal Geithner & AIG: will the truth come out? (Video)

H/tip to The Daily Bail

Video: Max Keiser

Tags: AIG, Credit Default Swaps, Deregulation, derivatives, Max Keiser, Scandal, Tim Geithner

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Deregulation as crony capitalism

by ilene - August 20th, 2009 10:07 pm

Edward at Credit Writedowns had some interesting comments on the earlier post by Jesse at the Le Cafe.

Deregulation as crony capitalism

kleptocracy Courtesy of Edward Harrison at Credit Writedowns

Jesse of Jesse’s Café Américain posted on the important subject of deregulation in his last post, “Why the Austrian, Keynesian, Marxist, Monetarist, and Neo-Liberal Economists Are All Wrong.” In it, he opined that it is entirely wrong-headed to assume everything will be alright if we just let free markets work their magic. I want to take his thoughts one step further because I think there is a misperception about what the free market entails and why the deregulation movement went astray.

Kleptocracy defined

First, a framework.

Last March, I posted an article called “A populist interpretation of the latest Boom-Bust cycle” in which I used Jared’ Diamond’s viewpoint of stratified societies as Kleptocracies as a lens through which to understand the secular trends which have characterized the last generation of western economic history.

To review, Diamond won a Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for his book Guns, Germ and Steel, which is a narrative of how Eurasian societies as a whole have dominated others throughout the last 10,000-odd years. One of his basic premises is that Eurasian societies are stratified, and hence less egalitarian, allowing individuals to specialize. The hierarchy and specialization have combined to give these societies advantages that less stratified (and less resource-rich) societies do not have.

The corollary of this – and where I want to concentrate – is that advanced societies are not egalitarian. Some will de facto have more, and others will have less. Moreover, as Diamond asserts, this lack of equality becomes, in essence, a kleptocracy i.e. a reverse Robin Hood organization where the elites enrich themselves at the expense of the others.

This has been the reality in all advanced societies based on agriculture, manufacturing and services for the last 10,000-odd years. This social structure has been net beneficial to the societies employing it in comparison to more simple societies – a case of a rising tide lifting all boats. So, on some level, kleptocracy is nothing about which to get irate.

kleptocracy The problem is that not all kleptocracies are created equal. At some point, the ruling class overreaches in a way that subtracts from rather than adds to the overall…

Tags: Crony capitalism, Deregulation, kleptocracy, regulatory oversight

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Making Financial Regulation Work

by ilene - June 15th, 2009 10:24 am

"Making Financial Regulation Work"

Courtesy of Mark Thoma at Economist’s View

This is something I did for the The Hearing blog at the Washington Post:

Making Financial Regulation Work: 50 More Years, by Mark Thoma: Banking regulation imposed in response to the Great Depression and the recurrent panics of the 1800s and early 1900s gave us 50 years of stability in the financial system without impeding economic growth. That’s quite a record to overcome for those who say regulation does not work.

But the stability began to break down with the savings and loan problems in the 1980s, and the growing instability since that time is evident in the severe meltdown we are experiencing today.

What happened? Deregulation beginning with the Reagan administration combined with financial innovation and digital technology led to the emergence of what is known as the shadow banking system. These are financial institutions that, for all intents and purposes, function just like banks but are not subject to the same rules and regulations and, in some cases, are hardly regulated at all.

The development of the shadow banking system is important because the troubles we are seeing today are not the result of problems in the traditional, regulated sector of the financial industry. The problems began in the unregulated shadow banking system.

We need to bring the shadow banking system – essentially any institution that takes deposits and makes loans either directly or indirectly – under the same regulatory umbrella as the traditional banking system.

What type of regulation should we impose to give us the best chance of achieving another 50 years or more of relative calm?

Initially my concerns were with the economic issues, and the focus was on designing a regulatory system that would overcome the market failures that led to excess risk-taking and to institutions that were too big and too interconnected to fail.

But large financial firms exert more than their share of political power, and this adds another dimension to the problem. Banks that are too big and too interconnected to fail pose an economic risk to the overall economy. However, firms can also be "too big for politicians to ignore." When this happens, they can exert undue influence on legislation or capture

…

Tags: Banking, Deregulation, Financial Regulation, Great Depression, Panics

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