Shift to new site

The past here is now 11 meg, and the challenge of the times both suggest the value of a new beginning for the blog. I have also posted GardenWorld politics at the home page, where the bog is also.

Book at

http://dougcarmichael.com/GWP.html

and the blog

http://doucarmichael.com/blog

and the home page,which is easiest is

http://dougcarmichael.com

The archive of the lastcouple of years will remain here.

I hope the trip over is easy. Any problems email me at

doug@dougcarmichael.com

notes oct 17

10:09 pm 18th

Krugman

While the manic-depressive stock market is dominating the headlines, the more important story is the grim news coming in about the real economy. It’s now clear that rescuing the banks is just the beginning: the nonfinancial economy is also in desperate need of help.

an it be helped if old level profits keep going to the financial industry?

On the other hand, there’s a lot the federal government can do for the economy. It can provide extended benefits to the unemployed, which will both help distressed families cope and put money in the hands of people likely to spend it. It can provide emergency aid to state and local governments, so that they aren’t forced into steep spending cuts that both degrade public services and destroy jobs. It can buy up mortgages (but not at face value, as John McCain has proposed) and restructure the terms to help families stay in their homes.

And this is also a good time to engage in some serious infrastructure spending, which the country badly needs in any case. The usual argument against public works as economic stimulus is that they take too long: by the time you get around to repairing that bridge and upgrading that rail line, the slump is over and the stimulus isn’t needed. Well, that argument has no force now, since the chances that this slump will be over anytime soon are virtually nil. So let’s get those projects rolling.

9:48 am Asian Times

Pakistan does some US dirty work

The United States has commissioned Pakistan to build 1,000 Humvees for use by troops in Afghanistan against the Taliban-led insurgency. The order has quietly gone to Pakistan’s premier arms manufacturer, Heavy Industries Taxila, with other armament deals expected to follow. That Pakistan is now providing hardware for the “war on terror” can only deepen its fight against militancy.

10:00 am also AT

Ba’ath seeks showdown with Baghdad
A coalition in Iraq of at least 22 Ba’athist insurgent groups has announced a switch from guerrilla tactics using small arms in hit-and-run attacks to a more conventional approach with a regular army capable of launching a large-scale attack for the final “liberation” of Baghdad. At this stage the move might contain more rhetoric than reality, but it is a clear indication of what lies ahead.

Notes oct 16

DeLong from the gaurdian via Ecoomist’s view

Hence Ben Bernanke and his Fed loaned extraordinarily freely to banks and near-banks and non-banks in order to avoid what Milton Friedman said was the key mistake that made the Depression Great:… a liquidity squeeze that made cash hard to get. Call this Plan A.

So Bernanke and his Fed lowered interest rates to what they thought were levels that might trigger inflation, as a way of making sure that no business anywhere would even begin to suspect that a deflationary spiral was in the making. That was Plan B.

So it was time for Plan C: mail out a bunch of extra tax-rebate cheques, hoping that … consumer spending … would recover with at worst a small recession.

They had to move to Plan D: case-by-case forced mergers, liquidations and nationalisations of banks and other financial institutions in order to prevent the course of events that the third theory of the Depression said had made it Great.

The failure of Lehman Brothers triggered or uncovered or brought on financial catastrophe…. It was time for Plan E: the Paulson plan, a $700bn programme by which the Treasury would buy up troubled mortgages, mortgage-backed securities and derivatives..

.The financial markets swallowed the passage of Plan E without a burp and continued on their downward spiral… It was time for Plan F…, governments could invest public money in the banks whether they liked it or not, thus making them so well-capitalised that their failure would be inconceivable…

If Plan F fails, we move to Plan G: we pull the Keynesian fire alarm and begin an enormous government infrastructure building programme in the whole North Atlantic to keep away depression.

Brad says “But as of now there is every reason to hope that it will work – that this time, for sure, what our magicians pull out of the hat will be the desired rabbit.” But the plan g scenario sounds attractive, and is the only one that is an alternative to the large earnings of the financial industry.

stiglitz on the economy.

“There’s More to the Economy than the Stock Market”

notes oct 16

From asian times..

There’s no enforcement mechanism or sanction to make sure the banks lend out what they have just taken in. If the US banks, arguing that they have a greater fiduciary responsibility to their common, voting shareholders over their silent partners in the US government, continue to hoard, not lend, their new riches, or maybe just invest them in short-term US Treasury Bills (essentially the same thing), this will all be for naught, and then we’ll be seeing what bright boy or girl has the next big idea to deal with this current catastrophe…..The predicament is not a static problem, in that the banks haven’t suddenly come up $250 billion short. It’s the dynamic problem of the deleveraging monster that only gets stronger with each institution it destroys. That $250 billion is nothing to this beast; the world’s central banks have tried to provide the system with about four times that amount in recent weeks, with the money disappearing into deleveraging’s black hole to emerge out the other side as Treasury bill purchases.

If the enhanced FDIC guarantees, along with the MBS buyout and the equity buy-ins don’t work, it’s hard to see what will. Just about the only arrow left in the quiver then would be a full nationalization of the financial system, making it a public utility, like the US Post Office or European and Asian railroads.

So why was it unlikely that Fama would get the Nobel? Well, if you can provide a wholly rational reason why world stock prices would be worth about 30% less than they were just four weeks ago, I strongly suggest that you should get on the first plane to Stockholm to have a chat with the committe for the Nobel Prize in economics.
The current events in the financial markets are much better explained by the next great paradigm shift in economics, behavioral finance. Here, it is not assumed that human economic actors operate with computer-like logic and dispassion, but are subject to the same wide emotional swings from euphoria to panic, from fear to greed, that is expected in the rest of the human condition. This framework much better explains a financial system willing to lend to anything with over 40 chromosomes (“46 chromosomes? That’s so old fashioned!”) a few years ago, but unwilling to lend even to itself right now.

2:44 am

Conventional economics describes an artificial world of slight deviations from equilibrium; Brenner presents the real world, in all its danger and uncertainty. Man lives not only by the sweat of his brow, but by the fortitude of his intestines, for survival demands that we take mortal leaps of a kind that are unknown to the conventional model. Men who would prefer to be timid risk everything to leapfrog their peers before they themselves are left behind.

American asset markets did not offer returns high enough for the baby boomers to earn enough to retire. There are a number of reasons for this. One is that not only Americans, but Europeans, Japanese, and above all Middle Easterners are aging rapidly and seeking retirement assets, such that the price of all capital assets rose and their prospective rate of return fell. Capital markets, as I have argued in the past, come down to old people lending money to young people, and the declining numbers of young people in the industrial world during the past generation are reflected in shrinking investment opportunities.

With home prices rising 10% a year between 1998 and 2006, Americans found that they could use leverage to achieve triple-digit returns on their equity (if you buy a $200,000 house with $10,000 down and its price rises by 10%, or $20,000, your return on equity is 200%).

In Brenner’s model, survival means maintaining one’s social status, one’s place in the pecking order or the corporate food chain, because falling behind decreases the likelihood of survival. Rivalry is the driving force, not an abstract measure of utility. There is something profoundly Biblical in this view: “I considered all labor and all excelling in work, that it is a man’s rivalry with his neighbor. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.” – Ecclesiastes 4:4.

Rivalry between nations never was so clear cut as in the preparations for World War l. Each European nation feared being leapfrogged by the others. France feared Germany’s high population growth rate, Russia feared Germany’s intrusion into the restive western wing of its empire, Germany feared Russian industrialization, England feared the losses of its ability to control the continental balance of power, Italy felt left out, and so forth. All had excellent reasons to fight rather than be left behind, but the result was the collective ruin of all the European nations.
At the outbreak of the war in 1914, some of Europe’s best minds exulted in the “leap into uncertainty”. Thomas Mann, arguably the greatest writer of the past century, wrote a famous essay entitled “Thoughts in War” comparing the risk-taking attitude of the artist and that of the soldier. A great sense of liberation from the ordinary swept over Europe as its nations prepared to risk everything for their place at the head of the queue. The trouble is that they risked everything, and they all lost everything.

Knight, unlike Brenner, thought that entrepreneurship did not add enough wealth to justify the disruption that it occasioned. Joseph Schumpeter, who took from Mephisto the notion of creative destruction and applied it to economics, was pessimistic about the future of capitalism. He thought communism would triumph.

3:02

This is the first all-encompassing global dislocation of contemporary finance, impacting virtually all economies, markets and asset classes. The media are now all over the “Wall Street” and “banking” crisis. I am of the view, however, that the collapse of the hedge fund industry has moved to the forefront – that it is now at the epicenter of global market upheaval.

Having watched the ballooning of the hedge fund industry over the past few years in absolute awe, I can say today that an industry collapse would entail the sale (voluntary and forced by the margin clerk) and unwind of literally trillions of positions. It has been history’s most spectacular speculative bubble and, especially over the past few years, it became very much global in nature and infiltrated virtually all asset classes. This bubble is in a full-fledged collapse – entailing unprecedented liquidations – and it’s taking global markets down with it.

3:07 am

….being political and arbitrary, Paulson and Bernanke have rejected value theory and opposed the free-market price mechanism. They have striven to reinflate high speculative housing prices and staunchly opposed a return of these prices to some long-term equilibrium. They acted intentionally to depreciate the US dollar so as to increase competitiveness of US exports and reduce the real burden of US foreign debt. They forced negative real interest rates in an environment where interest rates have to be totally freed and help in making sound economic policy.
This environment was characterized by rapidly falling real savings, outrageous food and energy price inflation, and mounting loan defaults. Recently, the Fed has become over-leveraged by injected close to one trillion dollars of liquidity into the financial system, simply by printing money out of thin air.
Had the Fed allowed free interest rates, financial markets would have never become frozen. A market freezes only when the government decrees a price far below the equilibrium price, which forces suppliers to withdraw their commodity from the market. Moreover, equilibrium interest rates would have allowed banks to strengthen their incomes, and would have called for a small amount, if any, of liquidity injection by the Fed since demand for credit would be checked and deposits and foreign savings would increase. That Paulson and Bernanke’s action is dangerously destabilizing is clear. Just ask what will happen when the Fed cannot add another trillion or decides to withdraw liquidity; most likely, the whole system will freeze again.

Had the Fed allowed free interest rates, financial markets would have never become frozen. A market freezes only when the government decrees a price far below the equilibrium price, which forces suppliers to withdraw their commodity from the market. Moreover, equilibrium interest rates would have allowed banks to strengthen their incomes, and would have called for a small amount, if any, of liquidity injection by the Fed since demand for credit would be checked and deposits and foreign savings would increase. That Paulson and Bernanke’s action is dangerously destabilizing is clear. Just ask what will happen when the Fed cannot add another trillion or decides to withdraw liquidity; most likely, the whole system will freeze again.
The destabilizing policy of Paulson and Bernanke has been rightly addressed by Professor Jonathan R Macey from Yale University in a Wall Street Journal article on October11, 2008, titled “The government is contributing to the panic: it’s time to let markets do their messy work”. He showed that Paulson and Bernanke have always acted in panic, distorted market mechanisms, rewarded speculation, punished conservative bankers, and heightened uncertainties to a point of freezing capital markets. He could have also added that the demeanor of Paulson and Bernanke was hardly the stuff to encourage trust and confidence among the public, the needed ingredient in a state of panic.

Governments have to defend the value of money, so essential for production and exchange, and should not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Governments can guarantee the money of depositors. But the purchase of bad mortgages and of intoxicated assets by governments will create immense fiscal and social problems, administrative burdens, and should not be acceptable

Proponents of bailouts contend that without these the economy will succumb. Their argument is not substantiated by monetary data; they only seek a golden opportunity to get rid of their losses. Economic policy should never be conducted through judgment and power struggle. It has to be based on the statistical apparatus, and evaluated carefully by policymakers.

Obama and the plumber

notes oct 14 2008

lafire and banks..

http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/10/up-in-smoke.html

11:43 negative equity, from Calculated Risk via NY Fed.

Having negative equity in one’s home reduces mobility rates … by nearly 50 percent from its baseline level according to our estimates. That the net impact of negative equity is to reduce, not raise, mobility certainly does not mean that defaults and foreclosures are insignificant consequences of this condition. However, it does signify that the preponderant effect is for owners to remain in their homes for longer periods of time, not to default and move to another residence.
Finally, reduced mobility has its own unique set of consequences which have not been clearly identified or discussed in the debate about the current housing crisis. Substantially lower household mobility is likely to have various social costs including poorer labor market matches, diminished support for local public goods, and lesser maintenance and reinvestment in the home.
emphasis added

11:45

“Those banks have been nationalized, overtly or not overtly, which is something that hasn’t happened before in the history of developed countries,” Volcker said. “How to wean them from government support? That is the challenge of the future.”

notes oct 13 monday 2008

.from calculated risk blog quoting Krugman in The Great Unravelling.

.. It seems clear to me that one should regard America’s right-wing movement — which now in effect controls the administration, both houses of Congress, much of the judiciary, and a good slice of the media — as a revolutionary power in Kissinger’s sense. That is, it is a movement whose leaders do not accept the legitimacy of our current political system. [pp. 5-

8:58 the problem is will bailing out banks also bail out society? Or has banking got us in a debt problem that means assets sum to near zero? My view is that the problem of interest requiring exponential growth has got us in a very bad situations. Is the a way to recover within the current rules?

 

9:02 from calculated risk

Apparently Paulson is considering making equity investments in strong banks to keep them lending. This would be voluntary. From Interim Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability Neel Kashkari this morning:

Equity purchase program: We are designing a standardized program to purchase equity in a broad array of financial institutions. As with the other programs, the equity purchase program will be voluntary and designed with attractive terms to encourage participation from healthy institutions. It will also encourage firms to raise new private capital to complement public capital.

I wonder what “attractive terms”means?

graphic of past markets

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/10/11/business/20081011_BEAR_MARKETS.html

notes oct 12

6:40 Money and interest and bad choice

So, money is created by banks to lend, and hence more must be paid back than was lent out. the result is an increasing increasing need for growth to make the payments. Not possible. How much did we allow ourselves to go down paths that we knew were wrong? for example, limits to growth. obviously we cannot go with infinite growth, yet we allowed ourselves to not notice. to go stupid.

 

8:35 On Cheney

But just as critics warned back in 1992 that American overreaching would ultimately create a coalition of enemies determined to check it, so Cheney’s relentless amassing of power and influence has finally rebounded on him in Bush’s second term. With the rise of Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, Cheney faces true rivals who command the president’s ear.

What of Roberts? And his current chief of staff?

I think he future will call this the Cheney presidency.

9:30 on Pragmatism. 

People act pragmatically. Pragmatism repeated becomes ideology. Until collapse/change happens. Ideas are not so important. it is the sums of pragmatic choices that make the situation.

What does this do to a pragmatic attitude? It must be contrasted with a rational driven model of action: recent history suggests these are worse. (fascism, communism, ..).

10:01  What is happening at the economic summit in Washington?  The pressure is on for solid announcements before Monday market opening.

10:19 report from La Jolla in the NYT. Angry uppers.

Letting Lehman fail was almost incomprehensible. It took the federal government many decades, after the banking collapse leading to the Great Depression, to restore confidence in the financial system. Then, in one horribly misguided moment, Mr. Paulson, with the apparent agreement of Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Fed, demolished that confidence. Now, we have to spend $700 billion to try to get it back, and it’s by no means certain that even this enormous bailout plan will work…

Frankly, I don’t know the answer. I just know that for a long time, we have paid Wall Street “experts” unimaginable sums for preparing for our retirement. They still have our money, and we have ashes. And I wonder whose side government is on, which is a bad thought to have, and I wish I didn’t have it. As the song goes, there is revolution in the air.

Ben Stein is a lawyer, writer, actor and economist. E-mail: ebiz@nytimes.com.

 

The truth is, we really don’t know. There does seem to be more debt than value. Sorting this out -politics, violence, external events, authoritarian centrism? Or evolution and innovation?

GardenWorld looks more and more necessary.

10:29 ordered John LeCarre A most Wanted Man

10: 31 Review of the freedom agenda by James Traub

modestly helpful.

And Ribaud

On a blue summer evening I shall go

down the path

And, brushed by wheat, walk on the

fine grass.

Dreaming along, I’ll feel the coolness

under my feet

And bathe my bare head in the poetic

wind.

I won’t speak, I will not even think,

But infinite love will geyser up in my

soul,

And I’ll go far, far away, like a Gypsy

Into the wilds — as happy as if I were

with a woman.

. . . who is present at his own invention as an actor in life (in more ways than two: the above is Rimbaud’s second known post-schoolwork poem, written at the age of 15, and it foresees his life — if in an innocent,

12:10 Tom Barnett, an alternative sort of to GardenWorld. Actually together.. from Amazon

Product Description
The author of the groundbreaking New York Times bestseller The Pentagon’s New Map brings us a remarkable analysis of the post-Bush world, and America’s leadership role in it.
In civilian and military circles alike, The Pentagon’s New Map became one of the most talked about books of 2004. “A combination of Tom Friedman on globalization and Carl von Clausewitz on war, [it is] the red-hot book among the nation’s admirals and generals,” wrote David Ignatius in The Washington Post. Barnett’s second book, Blueprint for Action, demonstrated how to put the first book’s principles to work. Now, in Great Powers, Barnett delivers his most sweeping— and important—book of all.
For eight years, the current administration has done much to disconnect or alienate America from the world, but the world has certainly not been standing still. Now, with a chance to start over, what do we do? Where’s the world going now, and how do we not only rejoin it but become a leader again in what has become the most profound reordering of the globe since the end of World War II?
In Great Powers, Barnett offers a tour de force analysis of the grand realignments that are both already here and coming up fast in the spheres of economics, diplomacy, defense, technology, security, the environment, and much more. The “great powers” are no longer just the world’s major nation-states but the powerful forces, past, present, and future, moving with us and past us like a freight train. It is not a simple matter of a course correction but of a complete recalibration, and the opportunities it presents are far greater than the perils. Barnett gives us a fundamental understanding of both, showing us not only how the world is now but how it will be.
There are those writing now who say America is in decline . . . and we just have to deal with it. Barnett says no. Globalization as it exists today was built by America—and now it’s time for America to shape and redefine what comes next. Great Powers shows us how. Bibliography. Notes. Index.

12:23   No savings and lots of debt. How to manage? The pressure will be on to “save hte system” rather than face the underlying reality that money created with interest due (what banks do) requires exponential growth. Seems to me that story is nearly finished, but the next president will try very hard to keep it going “just one more round before we go home.” But is that possible?  

That would be my take on the meaning of “Capitalism is amoral and rapacious.  Government is supposed to protect us from those negative aspects of capitalism while allowing us to benefit form the positive.”

Meanwhile see lots of progressive projects being stopped. Pressure on pollution regulations to be backed off so production can be cheaper. We can all come up with many examples.  

This week will be challenging.