FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘Guest Post’ Category

In support of Huffington Post’s call for people to move our money from the giant banks to community banks and credit unions:

• Here is a site which lets you find local credit unions

• Here is a site which rates the safety of banks, thrifts and credit unions

• And here is another site which rates the safety of credit unions

As USA Today pointed out in August 2008:

Credit unions are regulated by the National Credit Union Administration, or NCUA, or by state agencies. The NCUA oversees the safety and soundness of all credit unions.

If you want to check up on your credit union, make sure it’s federally insured by the NCUA and look at its finances, you can do that any time. Go to the NCUA’s website at www.ncua.gov, click on the “Credit Union Data” link on the left-hand side of the page below where it says Data and Services. Next, click on the Find a Credit Union link, type in the credit union’s name and click the Find button.You can then choose to view the Financial Performance Report or the official regulatory document, called the 5300 report. This report will tell you how well capitalized the credit union is and even let you see how many of the loans are going bad.

What about your asset protection? Credit unions are backed by the NCUA, through the NCU Share Insurance Fund, which is backed by the U.S. government. Individual accounts are backed up to $100,000, with additional coverage up to $250,000 for certain retirement accounts. Joint accounts may qualify for coverage of up to $200,000.

It is obvious that many republicans oppose the proposed health care bill. But many liberals and progressives oppose it as well.

For example, economist L. Randall Wray writes:

Here’s the opportunity, Wall Street’s newest and bestest gamble: there is a huge untapped market of some 50 million people who are not paying insurance premiums—and the number grows every year because employers drop coverage and people can’t afford premiums. Solution? Health insurance “reform” that requires everyone to turn over their pay to Wall Street. Can’t afford the premiums? That is OK—Uncle Sam will kick in a few hundred billion to help out the insurers. Of course, do not expect more health care or better health outcomes because that has nothing to do with “reform” … Wall Street’s insurers… see a missed opportunity. They’ll collect the extra premiums and deny the claims. This is just another bailout of the financial system, because the tens of trillions of dollars already committed are not nearly enough.

Wray points out that – with the repeal of Glass Steagall – the financial sector and the insurance businesses (the “f” and “i” in the “fire” sector) are somewhat merged.

Wray is no conservative. He is Ph.D. is Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Research Director with the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability and Senior Research Scholar at The Levy Economics Institute – which focuses on inequality in the distribution of earnings, income, and wealth.

Dr. Andrew Coates describes the bill as “a guarantee of insurance industry dominance and the continued privatization of health care in every arena.”

Dr. Coates is no conservative. He is a medical doctor, a member of the Public Employees Federation, AFL-CIO, secretary of the Capital District chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program, and teaches at Albany Medical College.

And – as I have previously pointed out – progressives such as law school professor Sheldon Laskin, anti-war activist David Swanson, and Miles Mogulescu are calling the bill authoritarian and unconstitutional because the government cannot legally force people to buy private health insurance.

Indeed, given Wray’s point that this is just another bailout in disguise, the bill should more properly be called a “wealth reform” bill than health reform legislation.

Submitted by James Bianco of Bianco Research

•    The Wall Street Journal – Fed Proposes Tool to Drain Extra Cash
The Federal Reserve on Monday proposed selling interest-bearing term deposits to banks, a move the U.S. central bank would make when it decides to drain some of the liquidity it pumped into the economy during the financial crisis. The new facility is intended to help ensure that the Fed can implement an exit strategy before a banking system awash with Fed money triggers inflation. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke has described term deposits as “roughly analogous to the certificates of deposit that banks offer to their customers.” Under the plan, the Fed would issue the term deposits to banks, potentially at several maturities up to one year. That would encourage banks to park reserves at the Fed rather than lending them out, taking money out of the lending stream.The central bank said the proposal “has no implications for monetary policy decisions in the near term.” “The Federal Reserve has addressed the financial market turmoil of the past two years in part by greatly expanding its balance sheet and by supplying an unprecedented volume of reserves to the banking system,” it said. “Term deposits could be part of the Federal Reserve’s tool kit to drain reserves, if necessary, and thus support the implementation of monetary policy.” Michael Feroli, an economist at J.P. Morgan Chase, said “it’s another step forward in the exit-strategy infrastructure, but it’s been well flagged in advance, so it’s not a surprise.” When Fed officials decide to tighten credit, they would likely use the term-deposits program ahead of — or in conjunction with — adjusting their traditional policy lever, the target for the federal funds interest rate at which banks lend to each other overnight. The Fed also said Monday that its balance sheet rose slightly to $2.2 trillion in the week ending Dec. 23. The Fed’s total portfolio of loans and securities has more than doubled since the beginning of the financial crisis. As part of its efforts to fight the downturn, the central bank is buying $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, a program it says will end in March. The Fed now holds $910.43 billion in mortgage-backed securities, it said Monday.

•    Bloomberg.com – Fed Proposes Term-Deposit Program to Drain Reserves
The Federal Reserve today proposed a program to sell term deposits to banks to help mop up some of the $1 trillion in excess reserves in the U.S. banking system.  The plan, subject to a 30-day comment period, “has no implications for monetary policy decisions in the near term,” the central bank said in a statement released in Washington. Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke is preparing tools and strategies to shrink or neutralize the inflationary impact from the biggest monetary expansion in U.S. history. Central bankers are also conducting tests of reverse repurchase agreements and discussing the possibility of asset sales. Term deposits may help the central bank “assert operational control over the federal funds rate” once officials decide to lift the overnight bank lending rate from the current range of zero to 0.25 percent, said Lou Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson ICAP LLC in Jersey City, New Jersey. Excess cash “would be locked up” rather than put downward pressure on the federal funds rate, he said.The Fed won’t begin raising interest rates until the third quarter of 2010, according to the median estimate of 62 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News in the first week of December.

•    The Financial Times – Fed to offer term deposits to banks
The US Federal Reserve plans to offer term deposits to banks as part of its “exit strategy” from the exceptionally loose monetary policy used to fight the recession. In a consultation paper released on Monday the Fed said it planned to change its rules so that it could pay interest on money locked up at the central bank for a defined period. The Fed added that the well-flagged rule change – designed to allow it more influence over the $1,100bn in excess reserves held by banks – was part of “prudent planning. . . and has no implications for monetary policy decisions in the near term”. It is one of a number of measures that has been outlined over the past few months by Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed, as an option to drain liquidity from the financial system in a manner that protects the economic recovery while heading off the threat of inflation.

•    The Federal Reserve – Notice of proposed rulemaking; request for public comment.
The Board is requesting public comment on proposed amendments to Regulation D, Reserve Requirements of Depository Institutions, to authorize the establishment of term deposits. Term deposits are intended to facilitate the conduct of monetary policy by providing a tool for managing the aggregate quantity of reserve balances. Institutions eligible to receive earnings on their balances in accounts at Federal Reserve Banks (”eligible institutions”) could hold term deposits and receive earnings at a rate that would not exceed the general level of short-term interest rates. Term deposits would be separate and distinct from those maintained in an institution’s master account at a Reserve Bank (”master account”) as well as from those maintained in an excess balance account. Term deposits would not satisfy required reserve balances or contractual clearing balances and would not be available to clear payments or to cover daylight or overnight overdrafts. The proposal also would make minor amendments to the posting rules for intraday debits and credits to master accounts as set forth in the Board’s Policy on Payment System Risk to address transactions associated with term deposits.

Comment

We believe the proposal of this new tool signals the Federal Reserve is still flailing around trying to look busy so everyone is assured they have a plan.  The fact is they have no plan and are still throwing everything on the wall to see what sticks. From the November 4 FOMC minutes:

Participants expressed a range of views about how the Committee might use its various tools in combination to foster most effectively its dual objectives of maximum employment and price stability. As part of the Committee’s strategy for eventual exit from the period of extraordinary policy accommodation, several participants thought that asset sales could be a useful tool to reduce the size of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet and lower the level of reserve balances, either prior to or concurrently with increasing the policy rate. In their view, such sales would help reinforce the effectiveness of paying interest on excess reserves as an instrument for firming policy at the appropriate time and would help quicken the restoration of a balance sheet composition in which Treasury securities were the predominant asset. Other participants had reservations about asset sales–especially in advance of a decision to raise policy interest rates–and noted that such sales might elicit sharp increases in longer-term interest rates that could undermine attainment of the Committee’s goals. Furthermore, they believed that other reserve management tools such as reverse RPs and term deposits would likely be sufficient to implement an appropriate exit strategy and that assets could be allowed to run off over time, reflecting prepayments and the maturation of issues. Participants agreed to continue to evaluate various potential policy-implementation tools and the possible combinations and sequences in which they might be used. They also agreed that it would be important to develop communication approaches for clearly explaining to the public the use of these tools and the Committee’s exit strategy more broadly.

The Federal Reserve first hinted at term deposits almost two months ago, although exactly what they were talking about was left vague until now.

Remember that the Federal Reserve has to withdraw over a trillion dollars of excess liquidity.  The easiest way to do this is to sell hundreds of billions of MBS, Treasuries and agencies.   As the bold highlighted passage above implies, they are scared to death of doing this, so they propose complicated schemes to withdraw liquidity like reverse repos and now term deposits.

We have argued that these schemes will not work.  They cannot be done in the sizes necessary or enough to even matter.  The Federal Reserve could possibly drain tens of billions of dollars via these schemes, but collectively that will amount to a rounding error when the goal is to withdraw over a trillion in excess reserves.

The Federal Reserve does not want to admit defeat, so they continue pursuing these strategies that will not make a difference.  We believe they also do it to “look busy” as they are taking measurements and notes as to how to withdraw all the liquidity they have pumped in.  They think this will give the market comfort that someone is on the case and that inflation expectations will not get out of control.  The market is not buying this.  Inflation expectations, s measured by TIPS inflation breakeven rates, are going vertical.

Reinvestment Risk

As to term deposits, the Federal Reserve is proposing an illiquid short term instrument for banks to invest in.  Banks would buy these instruments and “lock up” the excess reserves they now have.  This would have the same effect as draining excess reverses.  The maturities of these instruments would be as long as one year.

It is unclear if there will be a secondary market for these instruments, and if so, how liquid it will be.
Without a secondary market, buyers of these instruments face huge reinvestment risk.  The future course of short term interest rates is arguably to the most uncertain it has been in decades.  Will the Federal Reserve stay near zero until 2012 or will they be forced to raise rates in the first half of 2010?  Given all this uncertainty, who wants to lock up money in something that cannot be sold before maturity?  This is especially true given the Federal Reserve’s statement that the “maximum-allowable rate for each auction of term deposits would be no higher than the general level of short- term interest rates.”

The general level of short-term interest rates is set on known instruments that have generations of history and active secondary markets.  If the Federal Reserve wants to introduce a new, and wholly unknown instrument with an uncertain secondary market and offer no interest rate premium, then we cannot see how this will work beyond a token amount after some arm twisting to get them sold.  The Federal Reserve will have to offer a premium for uncertainty and illiquidy to make this fly in any major way, something they said they will not do.

Complicated Is Simple

The Federal Reserve owns 80% of AIG.  With each passing day it looks like the Federal Reserve is adopting AIG Financial Product’s business practices.  That is, when faced with a financial problem, they create complicated tools (like CDS).  When critics says these new products will not work, tell them they do not know what they are talking about and create even more complicated tools to dazzle everyone.  Once the tools are so complicated that no one understands them, you will be hailed as an expert with no peer.  You might even be named TIME’s Person of the Year.

By Edward Harrison

As we head into the New Year, I am trying to look back at the last one with some semblance of a coherent interpretation of events that leads to a strategic vision of the future.  I have already touched on stimulus, kleptocracy and crony capitalism as dominant themes for the year 2009. 

These posts have been critical of the economic vision presented by the Bush and Obama Administrations. I would stress that I see a lot of overlap in the two Administrations’ economic policies, which is why I use the phrase “the Bush and Obama Administrations” instead of focusing just on Obama.

But, now is the time to offer a review of alternative policy solutions. Bashing policy without pointing to an alternative doesn’t add value. I also believe quite strongly that this exercise will demonstrate that alternative policy solutions did exist – and that they were pointed out at the time. One can only assume that alternative policy solutions were rejected because the Bush and Obama Administrations preferred the solutions they crafted to these. And while, I am most concerned with outcomes, this juxtaposition between what could have been and what is points to the kleptocracy and crony capitalism I mentioned in my last two review posts.

Before I go into my spiel, I want to stress a point I made at the outset of a November post “The less optimistic view of Treasury’s handling of the crisis”:

one doesn’t have to take the view that its efforts to save the banking industry were a deliberate attempt to line bankers’ pockets by transferring money from taxpayers to the banking industry.

I will probably end up flexing my confabulatory muscles like every other pundit out there – making direct or unconscious assumptions about motives, agendas or intent. This is all just speculation – much of it false. It is outcomes that matter, not intentions. And it is the outcomes that leave me unsatisfied with the present policy course.

Change you can believe in

The key issue, in my view, is the desire for change in 2008.

For years, the U.S. had been lecturing others how to run a successful economy. The Mexicans needed to sell their banks to foreign behemoths to succeed. The Asians and the Argentines needed to take their depressionary medicine and eliminate crony capitalism. The Russians also needed to eliminate gangsterism and crony capitalism or no one would invest there. The Europeans were overly regulated and the state was too big.  And so on.

Then, after a quarter-century of apparent economic success (1982-2007), the U.S. economic and financial system was close to collapse. The masters of the universe were seen to have brought the economy to its knees because there were vulnerabilities at the core of American-style capitalism.  This was an ugly surprise for many – and it was humiliating, just as 9/11 had been on national defense. Change was the watch word.

What kind of change? Last month, I said:

If you asked 1000 people in those exit polls from November 2008 – or even last week, “what would make you know America was headed in the right direction,” you probably would have gotten 700 different answers.

But, one thing is clear: Since January 20th, a lot of people are saying to themselves, “I know change when I see it and this is not it.” That’s what all polls are saying. So, whatever Obama and the Democratically-controlled Congress are doing, it’s not working.

So, people wanted fundamental change and they felt Obama could deliver it. What the specifics were was less important. The key was that whatever changes were made, it reflected a more proportional connection between economic contribution and financial gains as well as elimination of the core vulnerabilities of our system.

More of the same

So, when Tim Geithner says:

I spent most of my professional life in this building. Watching the politics of the things we did in the past financial crises in Mexico and Asia had a powerful effect on me. The surveys were 9-to-1 against almost everything that helped contain the damage. And I watched exceptionally capable people just get killed in the court of public opinion as they defended those policies on the Hill. This is a necessary part of the office, certainly in financial crises. I think this really says something important about the president, not about me. The test is whether you have people willing to do the things that are deeply unpopular, deeply hard to understand, knowing that they’re necessary to do and better than the alternatives.

this is either cynical propaganda or self-delusion. People did not elect your President to do deeply unpopular things. They elected Obama to make the fundamental change that he is not delivering. You may think this is change we can believe in, but polls show Americans do not. This quote encapsulates why you can’t have people who created the mess clean up after it. They are prone to defend their prior policies tooth and nail to vindicate their actions. As I said when reviewing a recent Matt Taibbi piece:

What happens when a company is nationalized or declared bankrupt is instructive; here, new management must be installed to prevent the old management from covering up past mistakes or perpetuating errors that led to the firms demise. The same is true in government.

And Geithner and Summers do not represent change in the least. They were at the center of many of the past decade’s policy mistakes: Lehman, OTC derivatives, and anti-regulation of money center banks.

It’s not difficult to see what’s going on. For Obama, it’s kind of hard to get change when you surround yourself with insiders who have vested interests in the status quo.

Credit Crisis Options

A quote from “America needs a pre-privatization plan” is my jumping off point because it does a good job of framing the policy choices at the time.

To my mind, there are three ways to deal with an insolvent financial institution:

• Bankruptcy. Allow the  institution to collapse (like Lehman Brothers)
• Nationalization. Seize the assets of that institution and nationalize it (like Northern Rock, AIG, or Fannie Mae)
• Bailout. Inject capital into the institution in order to allow it breathing room until it can meet capital adequacy levels.

As you can see, governments have tried all three solutions.  However, there are vast differences between the three.

The bailout solution is the most ‘anti-free market’ choice and seems to be the favored solution of governments everywhere.  It props up organizations, giving them an unfair advantage at the expense of other more prudent institutions.  It also acts as a subsidy, which favors domestic institutions over foreign rivals.  Bailouts increase moral hazard by rewarding risky and reckless lending practices.  And they are often the result of crony capitalism due to the power of the financial services lobby. There are many other problems with bailouts. All around, bailouts are a poor solution.

As you know, the Bush and Obama Administrations chose the third option. Here are a few posts from the crisis detailing the Bush response (for which Geithner as New York Fed Chair shares responsibility). Paulson wanted to allow failed firms to fail. But, he quickly learned the same lesson that the Brits learned during the run on Northern Rock, namely this is a very risky strategy unless you have a well-thought out process to limit contagion (see the first post below).

After the post-Lehman panic, I see the policy as bailouts that are “a naked attempt to preserve status quo” as I say in the Dead on Arrival post below (and I present a coherent policy alternative there). Congress was asleep at the wheel, as usual.

• Lehman’s bankruptcy: putting the cart before the horse? – Sep 2008
• The $700 billion Paulson Plan is dead on arrival – Sep 2008
• The Paulson Bailout Plan is unconstitutional crony capitalism – Sep 2008
• The Paulson plan is not going to make it – Sep 2008
• Congress does need to act on the Economic Patriot Act – Sep 2008

So, when Obama was elected, there was an enormous opportunity to change course. I had pointed to Paul Volcker’s presence in Team Obama as encouraging in October 2008 (Paul Volcker: Obama’s other economic advisor) and November 2008 (Volcker warns how serious things have become).

However, after the election, Obama immediately put Geithner and Summers in charge despite their complicity in the policies that led to crisis. I will sheepishly admit to putting a positive spin on things pre-inauguration (see Crony capitalism in U.S. banking bailout should end from January). But, Geithner and Summers consolidated power over time as infighting begins within Obama’s team forced Obama to cast his lot with Geithner-Summers or Volcker. By March, Marshall Auerback was asking Where’s Volcker? as it became obvious he was being shunted aside.

The path not chosen

So, to sum up, we had an economic and financial crisis of a lifetime. The Bush Administration and the Fed were in disbelief and failed to make enough preparations for the obvious coming failures. An almost religious belief in market mechanisms and an incoherent policy led to disaster with Lehman – after which the Bush Administration got religion about bailouts and crony capitalism.

When Obama came to town, you might have thought his policies would be substantively different. But they were not – not on regulatory reform, auto bailouts or bank bailouts. His was the neo-liberal prescription of the Clinton era – substantively the same as the Bush policies. When I wrote Seven reasons to be skeptical of Obama’s economic plans already in January, this was why.

That’s how things panned out.

Since I detailed some of the policy choices in my review post on crony capitalism, I won’t cover that ground here. I will point out just a few March 2009 posts from Credit Writedowns which I did not mention in the last review posts. They all point to problem’s with Team Obama’s solution in terms of wealth transfers and sustainable outcomes as pointed out by leading economists.

• Is Obama considering nationalisation? – Mar 2009
• Geithner’s Plan: one of the most regressive wealth transfers of all time – Mar 2009
• Roubini: Nationalization “fully on the table” in Geithner’s Plan – Mar 2009
• Krugman: Geithner Plan “won’t work” – Mar 2009

I will use this as a natural place to stress how motives and intent are irrelevant.  Think Obama is a bad guy all you want. Think Larry Summers has an alternative agenda all you want. Think the perennial public servant Tim Geithner doesn’t want to do good all you want.  Motives and intent don’t matter; outcomes matter.

And here are the posts I feel best represent a number of potential alternative solutions to what we have witnessed from pre-Lehman through March.

• The Swedish banking crisis response – a model for the future? – Aug 2008
• How to tackle systemic malaise – Sep 2008
• The global economy has crashed: we need a comprehensive credit crisis plan – Sep 2008
• The problem with comprehensive banking crisis solutions – Nov 2008
• Seven reasons to be skeptical of Obama’s economic plans – Jan 2009
• What is an economic depression? – Feb 2009
• A conversation with Bridgewater Associates’ Ray Dalio – Feb 2009
• Yves Smith: Nationalization is what the FDIC is doing every week – Feb 2009
• America needs a pre-privatization plan – Feb 2009
• Did Sweden really nationalize its banks? – Feb 2009
• Lessons from Swedish bank resolution policy – Mar 2009
• A few thoughts about the banking crisis response in the United States – Mar 2009
• What would an alternative to bailouts have looked like? – Nov 2009

Likely outcome

I’ll finish this off by quoting from my third post “The US Economy 2008” which points to over-indebtedness and a purge of malinvestment as the problem which politicians will refuse to tackle:

The global economy, now supported in the main only by the overextended U.S. consumer, finds itself at stall speed, susceptible to any number of potential exogenous shocks. Ultimately, the economic malaise created by this confluence of events will take years to unwind. A positive outcome to this process is dependent wholly on liquidation of excess credit and consumption.

This process will be extremely painful in the short term, but will lead to a healthy economy long-term. Unfortunately, experience shows that these painful steps will only be taken as a last resort. Moreover, geopolitical events become volatile in a world of economic insecurity, leading to political upheaval and protectionism. Protectionism is a natural outgrowth of nationalist economic policy as it transfers wealth from foreign producers to domestic producers by cutting off access to lower cost excess capacity in the goods in service sectors. However, this also serves to transfer wealth from domestic consumers to domestic producers by increasing the price of goods in the protected sectors, ultimately reducing consumption demand.

For these reasons, I am cautious about the long-term outlook for the global economy and the U.S. economy in particular. The likely outcome for the next decade is one of sub-par global growth with short business cycles punctuated by fits of recession.

Could it be any different?

By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns

Yesterday, I indicated I would write a few thematic posts as a look back at some of the more important economic topics that this credit crisis has uncovered. Tying posts together in a theme definitely gives a better holistic view of a the themes than the posts do in isolation. But I also enjoy writing this because the review process gives me a better perspective of where we have come from and helps judge where we are headed.

Yesterday, I wrote about economic stimulus. My conclusion was that while stimulus may have helped avert crisis, the process made clear that crony capitalism is alive and well. So, the second topic I wanted to address today was crony capitalism. However, in writing this post, the lead in describing kleptocracy became so long that I decided to cut this into two bits; this first one is on kleptocracy and a later one will be on crony capitalism.

The first post I wrote related to kleptocracy was in March of 2008 called “A populist interpretation of the latest Boom-Bust cycle.” At the time, I wasn’t really blogging very seriously. I had just started two weeks earlier and wanted to flesh out some ideas that I had long considered germane to the understanding of the credit crisis. But, in retrospect, the thesis I developed in this post has become central to my thinking about how the American and global economy have evolved in the fiat currency era.

Kleptocracy defined as the status quo

The thesis was this:

[Jared] Diamond postulates that more stratified societies are by definition less egalitarian, but more efficient and are, thus, able to eradicate or conquer more egalitarian, less stratified societies. Thus, all ‘advanced’ societies with high levels of GDP are complex and hierarchical.

The problem is: these more stratified, more complex societies are in essence Kleptocracies, where those in power re-distribute societal wealth to themselves. Those at the bottom of the society’s pyramid accept this unequal, non-egalitarian state of affairs because they too benefit from their society’s relative advancement. It’s a case of a rising tide lifting all boats.

In short, the playing field in all modern day nation states is by definition unequal. The question is whether this should be tolerated, mitigated or eliminated. An unwritten assumption I made when I wrote the post is that humans are genetically programmed for fairness. My understanding is that scientific studies have convincingly demonstrated that human beings will actually consciously disadvantage themselves to seek revenge as a means of restoring justice and fairness.

This would suggest that a major flaw in neoclassical economic models, especially as regards a self-equilibrating economy, is the focus on rational expectations and efficiency at the expense or fairness and/or irrationality. A neoclassical economist might tell you that a rising tide lifts all boats and it is rational self-protection for economic agents (aka real human beings) to accept inequality for this very reason. But, in the real world, fairness and justice are important as well. And when an economic system is deemed unfair, people will go so far as to hurt themselves economically in order to level the playing field.

Stability of status quo leads to overreach and instability

So, my thinking is this: because of the natural state of inequality endogenous to any stratified society, over time the natural tendency of any ruling elite is to deploy the state’s coercive power for greater and greater self-benefit. I liken this to Hyman Minsky’s instability of economic stability theorem. The stability of power leads to overreach and overthrow. This is a view largely consistent with Paul Kennedy’s themes of imperial overstretch in his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.

In the post I expressed these sentiments saying:

Diamond says the Kleptocrats maintain power using 4 different methods:

“1. Disarm the populace, and arm the elite.”

“2. Make the masses happy by redistributing much of the tribute received, in popular ways.”

“3. Use the monopoly of force to promote happiness, by maintaining public order and curbing violence. This is potentially a big and underappreciated advantage of centralized societies over noncentralized ones.”

“4. The remaining way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy.”

Kleptocracy in America?

The obvious corollary of this theory is that most successful modern societies are, in fact, kleptocracies. The key is to use the four methods to gain popular support in order to re-distribute as much wealth to the ruling class as the populace will support. If the ruling class takes too much, it will be overthrown and replaced by a new ruling class (which in turn will re-distribute wealth to itself using the same four methods).

How the status quo maintains the status quo

Let me take these points one by one. I will preface this by saying that, as the stability of the economic status quo disintegrates into instability via economic depression, you should expect the ruling elite to step up uses of these methods of retaining power.  So when I wrote in my Depression piece about “more muscular forms of government,” this is part of what I was referring to.

As Libertarians see it, the right to bear arms is an essential in stopping the elite from maintaining power unjustifiably. Obviously, which arms, when they can be borne and how is a constitutional issue that goes to the heart of American democracy.

The second issue is about “bread and circuses” or what I call the anesthetizing of the populace as ironically demonstrated in this Star Trek “Bread and Circuses” from TV, our own modern-day agent of mental anesthesia.

The third issue is about totalitarianism.  Civil libertarians like myself see the permanent war state as promulgated by the Bush administration post 9/11 – and now maintained by the Obama Administration – as a clear sign that the state’s use of the monopoly of force to promote order is rising and will continue to do so. Eisenhower’s military industrial state warnings were warranted. You can see some of the articles on that very topic here in my bookmarks. And you should note Obama’s poor record on civil liberties.

The last (and perhaps most important) issue, in my view, has to do with the unabiding faith in free markets that many now have. It is with religious zeal that these so-called Libertarians defend the primacy of markets over all else when in reality common sense would tell you that those with the greatest influence and money will always be at an advantage without some check on that influence and power.

How ideology is central to retaining the status quo ante

I think this last point is important. Think of how Diamond phrased this:

The remaining way for kleptocrats to gain public support is to construct an ideology or religion justifying kleptocracy.

The important thing to realize here is that ideology is a tool used to control the masses while those in power re-distribute to themselves. Diamond was probably talking here about ancient societies: the Mayans, Incas, the Greeks, the Romans, Easter Island. But, it does apply quite well to the modern-day. After all, in the U.S. average hourly earnings peaked more than 35 years ago. And we can see that most of the economic gains of the last two decades has been an illusion masked by gobs of debt.

But freshwater economists have this view that the economy is always self-equilibrating and this means government must be held at bay any- and everywhere lest it reduce the efficiency of the free market. This is an extreme ideological position which gained sway in the aftermath of the disaster of the 1970s. Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was an adherent of this ideology despite holding a central planning position as Federal Reserve Chairman which was antithetical to the views he espoused.

Markets are wonderful. A largely market-based economy is certainly more ‘efficient’ than a non-market based one (ask the Soviets). But, markets are not self-regulating. They fail – and catastrophically so. But no manner of real world experience seems to shake ideologues’ free-market zeal. To give you an example of the mindset, Alan Greenspan is reported to have thought that markets could even self-regulate fraud – no regulatory oversight necessary. 

See the video in Frontline – The Warning: Who Knew About the Looming Financial Crisis for this particular revelation and Ms. Watkins, why does Charlie have lit dynamite? for why this is absurd. Even when you think Greenspan has learned something, he proves time and again that he just doesn’t get it. And don’t think he is alone in officialdom. Former Fed official Frederic Mishkin has shown he doesn’t get it either.

Not only is the freshwater view of rational economic agents and efficiency completely ignorant of the role of fairness, it also disregards the very real tendency for power to consolidate over time and to lead to crony capitalism. This is what I refer to as “deregulation as crony capitalism.” I see it as central to the causes of the crisis.

I will pick up on this theme in a later post. Next up on my year in review is a post on crony capitalism in action and how the credit crisis solutions reveal that the ruling elite want to return to the status quo ante. Overreach has been the order of the day and will ultimately invite an opposing response.

By Edward Harrison of Credit Writedowns. As Yves is in light posting mode, I wanted to run these thoughts by you here at Naked Capitalism regarding stimulus and the role of government in a debt-deflationary environment.

As we approach the new year, I have decided to write a few thematic posts as a look back at some of the more important economic topics that this credit crisis has uncovered. The thinking is that tying posts together in a theme might give a better holistic view of a few themes than the posts do in isolation.

The first topic is this: does fiscal or monetary stimulus work? That has been a consistent theme at Credit Writedowns.  And given my recent post backing away from fiscal stimulus as a policy tool, I thought it an opportune moment to explore the subject a bit via a full scale review of previous posts at Credit Writedowns.

Broadly speaking, the policy choices in a deep downturn are the ones I outlined last month in “Stop the madness now!.”

You have four options:

1. No stimulus. Let the chips fall where they may. Yves Smith calls this the ‘Mellonite liquidationist mode.’ The thinking here is that trying to avoid the inevitable bust only makes it that much larger. And the economic policies during recessions in 1991 and 2001 seem to bear that out. The Harding Recession of 1921 is commonly seen as gold standard response.
2. Monetary stimulus only. Quantitative easing mania. My understanding is this is what Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has been advocating.   The thinking here is that the flood of money and the low rates will eventually jump start the economy. No deficit spending needed.
3. Monetary and fiscal stimulus.  Full tilt Keynesian. This is the Krugman view. The thinking here is that one needs to credibly commit to higher inflation and close the output gap to avoid a deflationary spiral. If that is insufficient, then one needs to go full bore on fiscal stimulus aka deficit spending. And if that doesn’t work, subsidize jobs. The New Deal is commonly seen as the gold standard response.
4. Fiscal stimulus only. Deficit spending. I have been talking up this view. The thinking here is that we need to both close the output gap to prevent a deflationary spiral and revive private sector savings in order to promote deleveraging.

There is no magic bullet here.  We are living through a situation unique in time with few historical precedents. And there are a lot of competing ideas being tossed about. So policy makers are groping around, desperately seeking the holy grail of depression-busting economic policy.  In that regard, I don’t envy them. They are certainly going to make a lot of mistakes. It may seem at times that I don’t realize this given the harshness of my critiques, but I do.

When I started writing about the financial crisis, I took the first view, best exemplified in my pre-Lehman posts on the origins of the credit crisis and precedents in Japan and the Great Depression. My thinking at the time was that if policy makers recognized the full extent of the crisis and stayed ahead of the curve, we could get through this with a short but very sharp downturn.

• The US Economy 2008 – Mar 2008
• Credit deflation and the Japanese problem – Jun 2008
• The Japanese Problem is now ours – Jun 2008

However, policy makers were woefully behind the curve.  A recent article in the Washington Post highlights how Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve were blindsided by the crisis. So, when the panic that resulted from the Lehman crisis struck, I felt that the jig was up. We had been catapulted overnight into a seriously debt-deflationary economic environment in which monetary policy was ineffective. Option number two was out as a policy tool. Quantitative easing was not going to work.

The following posts outlining our thinking on these topics.

• Quantitative easing: printing money like mad to ward off deflation – Nov 2008
• Nouriel Roubini: Will massive stimulus ward off stag-deflation?  – Dec 2008
• Quantitative easing and inflation expectations – Dec 2009

As I saw it, the Lehman failure marked a clear change in possible policy paths. As I outlined yesterday:

when Lehman Brothers collapsed in a heap, it was clear to me that we faced a stark choice.  One choice was a deflationary spiral and the associated economic dead weight loss of a non-equilibrating global economy in Depression.  The other choice was a soft depression cushioned by fiscal (and monetary stimulus). About a year ago I wrote an ode to Keynesian economics called Confessions of an Austrian economist in which I said that I choose fiscal stimulus to cushion the downturn and prevent a depressionary spiral.

And this is the line I stuck to. I think the real debate about whether or not to try fiscal stimulus revolves around the role of government and its limitations. Ideologues on one side see government as a parasite which interferes with the free market.  On the other side, ideologues see government as the only way out of a crisis of this magnitude.  The key sticking point is not just the size of government, but also its effectiveness – the political will to effect change rather than to favor constituents as recent research suggests bailout money was used.

I have tried to outline this debate with a few posts that point to both sides of the issue.

• What does Mises say about trying to stimulate the economy out of recession – Dec 2008
• A brief philosophical argument about the role of government, stimulus and recession – Dec 2008
• Peter Schiff: “Government is a burden on the economy” – Jan 2009
• Marc Faber: The economic crisis is a consequence of U.S. government intervention – Feb 2009
• The choice is between increasing or decreasing aggregate demand – Oct 2009
• A few thoughts about the limitations of government – Nov 2009

The majority of Americans fall in neither of the two ideological camps.  I would argue that the reason Barack Obama was elected was his message of hope and the promise of “change you can believe in". That had many of us – including me – thinking government can add stimulus while simultaneously encouraging saving and deleveraging, reducing dependence on asset prices, and allowing zombie companies to fail.  This is government dispensing with crony capitalism. The posts below are an ode to that reasoning. You can see Buffett, Kasriel, Gross and Galbraith all taking this line.

• Congress ready with second stimulus package – Sep 2008
• Bill Gross: This economy requires a check from the government – Feb 2009
• Some tidbits about stimulus, recovery, and the Great Depression – Feb 2009
• Jamie Galbraith: Stimulus not enough – Feb 2009
• Galbraith and Buffett think a second stimulus is necessary – Jul 2009
• Does the US need a second stimulus package? – Jul 2009
• Japan does not demonstrate the failure of stimulus – Nov 2009
• Are we pushing on a string or crowding out? – Dec 2009

So, how has this worked out in practice? Not so well. From the very start, Obama’s lead by negotiating with oneself approach led to a weak and poorly crafted stimulus package.  My comments in “Obama takes middle road on stimulus and taxes that leads nowhere” from February sum up what was likely to happen (emphasis added):

In my view, it has become ever more apparent that the Obama administration is caught in some sort of muddle, trying to fudge between the calls for fiscal discipline from conservatives and the calls for stimulus from liberals.  Obviously, it is in Obama’s nature to lead by consensus, and he has looked for an inclusive political and economic strategy since he came to office.  However admirable these intentions may be, this middle path is unfortunate because it will leave no one satisfied.  Moreover, taking this middle path on the economic front — some stimulus but not massive stimulus, some tax cuts but also some increased spending, increased spending now but tax increases or budget cuts in a few years – is the worst of all outcomes; the economy will not gain enough traction to get the desired ‘jump-start’ and stimulus will ultimately be seen as ineffective.  If the Obama Administration later attempts to return to Congress for more of the same after a failed stimulus bill, it will find a more skeptical response…

My view here is that Obama is forging a middle path that leads to a dead-end. The stimulus is not nearly enough by half to get the job done. The proposed deficit reduction measures for 2013 are outright scary as they risk repeating a mistake from the 1930s. And the banking sector and mortgage plans, both of which I failed to mention, are dubious half-measures as well. One needs to act aggressively and proactively or not at all.

This is exactly what has transpired.  To make matters worse, his team’s lack of accurate economic forecasting has led to an Armageddon scenario at the state and local level, where even unemployment benefits are not adequately funded. All of this was predictable as evidenced by these two posts from early in the year.

• Obama’s stimulus bill is a tough sell so far – Jan 2009
• Will federal largesse be countered by state and local cutbacks? – Jan 2009

The President has effectively discredited fiscal stimulus as a policy tool. What’s more is the bailout of the too-big-to-fail institutions without strings, the apparent cronyism in how these bailouts were done, and the gutting of financial reforms by the financial lobby has also discredited government as an agent to level the playing field for struggling households and taxpayers. See Blodget: Obama suffers because “taxpayer always finishes last” for now, but I will take this subject up in another thematic post.

I certainly underestimated the degree to which cronyism and special interests ruled the roost in Washington. I no longer believe government can be an effective agent of change in the U.S any more than it has been in Japan (see “Japan: stimulus without reform leads to a policy cul de sac”).   As I wrote in “Stop the madness now!

If you are going to deficit spend you need to do it in a big way. You need to stop the deflationary spiral.  That means hitting the reset button by promoting private sector savings and deleveraging and purging all built-up malinvestments. The risk in addressing the situation this way, of course, is replacing the imperfect invisible hand of markets with the imperfect hand of politicians and legislative fiat.

This is a risk I no longer see as worth taking. I have bailout and deficit fatigue just like most Americans. It is abundantly clear that this Administration has absolutely zero intention of purging any malinvestment or promoting any deleveraging. All they want to do is continue business as usual and go back to the asset-based economy that caused this mess. This is why we have seen bailout after bailout coupled with easy money. It makes for record profits on Wall Street but it does nothing for the unemployed.

Moreover, the political process in the U.S. is such that any stimulus money will be diverted to pet projects and used to pay off political constituents. While this may increase aggregate demand, it does so at the risk of serious social unrest as the outrage will certainly spill over into populism.

So, I have developed a case of big government revulsion as I suspect many Americans have done. I will let Marshall Auerback argue the case for fiscal stimulus and its role leading to a sustainable recovery.  I am moving away from stimulus happy talk to focus on malinvestment.

Comments are appreciated.