Posts Tagged ‘deficit spending’
Keynesian solutions: after total failure, try, try again
by Jim Quinn
The Burning Platform
Posted August 23, 2011
“LENIN IS SAID TO HAVE DECLARED THAT THE BEST WAY TO DESTROY THE CAPITALIST SYSTEM was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth.” – John Maynard Keynes – The Economic Consequences of the Peace
While Barack Obama vacations on Martha’s Vineyard this week he’ll be thinking about his grand vision to save America – again. There is one thing you can say about Obama – he’s predictable. He promises to unveil his “new” plan for America in early September. The White House said Obama will give a speech after the September 5 Labor Day holiday to outline measures to boost hiring and find budget savings that surpass the $1.5 trillion goal of a new congressional deficit-cutting committee. It is heartening to see that Barack has turned into a cost cutter extraordinaire. He should be an inspiration to the Tea Party, except for one little problem. The plan he unveils in a few weeks will increase spending now and fret about spending cuts at some future unspecified date.
I can reveal his plan today because the White House has already leaked the major aspects of his plan. He will call for an extension of the Social Security payroll tax cut of 2% for all working Americans. This was supposed to give a dramatic boost to GDP in 2011. Maybe it will work next time. He will demand that extended unemployment benefits be renewed. Somehow providing 99 weeks of unemployment benefits is supposed to create jobs. It’s done wonders thus far. He will propose some semblance of an infrastructure bank or tax cuts to spur infrastructure spending. It will include a proposal for training and education to help unemployed people switch careers. He will attempt to steal the thunder from the SUPER COMMITTEE of twelve by coming up with $2 trillion of budget savings by insisting the Lear jet flying rich fork over an extra $500 billion.
You may have noticed that followers of Keynesian dogma like Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, Brad Delong, Richard Koo, John Galbraith, every Democrat in Congress, and every liberal pundit and columnist have been shrieking about the Tea Party terrorists and their ghastly budget cuts that are destroying our economy. They contend the stock market is tanking and the economy is heading into recession due to the brutal austerity measures being imposed by the extremists in the Republican Party. There is just one small issue with their argument. It is completely false. It is a bold faced lie. This is 2011. The economy has been in freefall since January 1. No spending cuts have occurred. Nada!!! As the CBO chart below reveals, the horrendous slashing of government will amount to $21 billion in 2012 and $42 billion in 2013. Of course, those aren’t even cuts in spending. They are reductions in the projected increases in spending. Politicians must be very secure in the knowledge that Americans are completely ignorant when it comes to anything other than the details of Kim Kardashian’s wedding and who Snooki is banging on Jersey Shore.
I’d like to remind the Harvard educated Keynesian economists that Federal government spending is currently chiming in at $3.8 trillion per year. Federal spending was $2.7 trillion in 2007 and $3.0 trillion in 2008. Keynesians believe government spending fills the gap when private companies are contracting. Obama has taken Keynesianism to a new level. Federal spending will total $10.8 trillion in Obama’s first three years, versus $8.4 trillion in the previous three years. Even a Harvard economist can figure out this is a 29% increase in Federal spending. What has it accomplished? We are back in recession, unemployment is rising, forty six million Americans are on food stamps, food and energy prices are soaring, and the middle class is being annihilated. The standard Keynesian response is we would have lost 3 million more jobs, we were saved from a 2nd Great Depression and the stimulus was too little. It would have worked if it had just been twice as large.
The 2nd Great Depression was not avoided, it was delayed. Our two decade long delusional credit boom could have been voluntarily abandoned in 2008. The banks at fault could have been liquidated in an orderly bankruptcy with stockholders and bondholders accepting the consequences of their foolishness. Unemployment would have soared to 12%, GDP would have collapsed, and the stock market would have fallen to 5,000. The bad debt would have been flushed from the system. Instead our Wall Street beholden leaders chose to save their banker friends, cover-up the bad debt, shift private debt to taxpayer debt, print trillions of new dollars in an effort to inflate away the debt, and implemented every wacky Keynesian stimulus idea Larry Summers could dream up. These strokes of genius have failed miserably. Bernanke, Paulson, Geithner and Obama have set in motion a series of events that will ultimately lead to a catastrophic currency collapse. We have entered the second phase of the Greater Depression and there are no monetary or fiscal bullets left in the gun. Further expansion of debt will lead to a hyperinflationary collapse as the remaining confidence in the U.S. dollar is exhausted. We are one failed Treasury auction away from a currency crisis.
John Maynard Keynes argued the solution to the Great Depression was to stimulate the economy through some combination of two approaches: a reduction in interest rates and government investment in infrastructure. Investment by government injects income, which results in more spending in the general economy, which in turn stimulates more production and investment involving still more income and spending and so forth. The initial stimulation starts a cascade of events, whose total increase in economic activity is a multiple of the original investment.
It sounds so good in theory, but it didn’t work in the Depression and it hasn’t worked today. It is a doctrine taught in every business school in America with no actual results to support it. Who needs facts and actual results when a good story believed and perpetuated by non-thinking pundits will do? Every Keynesian play in the playbook has been used since 2008. The American people were told by Obama and his Keynesian trained advisors that if we implemented his $862 billion shovel ready stimulus package, unemployment would peak at 7.9% and would decline to 6.5% by today. The cascade of recovery was going to be jump started by a stimulus package that equaled 27% of the previous year’s entire spending. Obama’s complete package was implemented. The outcome was an eye opener.
Austerity top priority as economy sputters, Americans suffer
from The Huffington Post
Posted: August 3, 2011
WASHINGTON – This week’s big debt deal has left progressives despairing over a disconnect between Washington and the rest of the country that they say has possibly never been wider. Their concern arises from the fact that while the country suffers from a sputtering economy and a grinding jobs crisis, elected officials are celebrating the passage of a massive deficit-reduction bill almost guaranteed to even further slow the economy and cost jobs.
For the weeks leading up to the agreement, Democratic and Republican leaders were essentially trying to out-austere each other. It’s that bipartisan enthusiasm for reducing the government’s budget – and the speed with which both parties abandoned a job-creating agenda – that left-leaning analysts say demonstrate how beholden elected officials from both parties have become to the rich, and how out of touch they are with the problems of the poor and the middle class.
“If these people were rational policymakers, they would not focus on deficit reduction right now,” said Neera Tanden, chief operating officer at the Center for American Progress. “They would focus on stimulus right now.”
“What’s crazy about Washington is that the only thing we talk about is deficit reduction; that nobody talks about jobs,” Tanden said. “It’s borderline insane.”
To liberal economists like University of Texas professor James Galbraith, the explanation lies in what he calls the Washington elite’s “deficit hysteria.” From this perspective, the spending cuts signed into law Tuesday were the culmination of the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars by moneyed interests into the development and inculcation of a specific Washington consensus that anyone who doesn’t believe the government is dangerously overextended — and who doesn’t consider the danger of deficits as very, very serious — is a wild-eyed radical.
“The rich have drawn a political box around what can be done here,” said Damon Silvers, policy director for the big umbrella union AFL-CIO. “They are gutting the modern state in order to avoid a real conversation about taxes.” While Washington lauds its cuts, the traditional arguments in favor of deficit reduction probably have never been weaker than they are right now.
THE ARGUMENT AGAINST AUSTERITY
None of the economic signs that augur for deficit reduction are remotely visible. Quite to the contrary: A high unemployment rate, enormous unused capacity, inadequate market demand, cheap capital and record-low interest payments, incipient deflation, crumbling infrastructure and underwater homeowners all point to this being an ideal time to increase government borrowing – to invest in infrastructure, provide debt relief to homeowners and generally increase demand and create jobs.
With American banks and other businesses sitting on trillions of dollars they refuse to lend or invest, one can hardly accuse deficit-spawned borrowing of “crowding out” private loans. And with people lining up to lend money to the U.S. government for long periods of time at near record-low rates, one can hardly argue that the deficit is driving up interest rates.
Thomas Palley, an economist at the New America Foundation, says Republicans’ focus on the deficit regardless of economic conditions is logically consistent because their core interest is limiting government.
But Democrats have been brought in, too. The fully bipartisan nature of Washington’s deficit obsession was brought home in early 2010, when President Barack Obama created a commission to reduce the deficit and chose a pair of deficit hawks to be its leaders.
“What is going on now I think has everything to do with the fact that you have almost a second generation of deficit obsessives who occupy all the strategic positions in public policy discourse,” said Galbraith. And over time, Democratic leaders haven’t just embraced deficit reduction as a goal, they have explicitly bought into government austerity as the primary solution.
There is, of course, another way to reduce the deficit: Stimulate economic growth and grow out of it. “We have a huge deficit because we have a huge recession,” said Larry Mishel, head of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. Democrats could have, as an anti-deficit strategy, decided to put all their energy into pushing for a pro-growth agenda. But they chose not to. Last November, when Obama decided to make a statement about the deficit, he did so by freezing pay for federal workers.
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The Debt Deal con: Is it fooling anyone?
by Brandon Smith of Alt Market
Posted August 4, 2011
ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIC ANALYSIS BRINGS WITH IT A CERTAIN NUMBER of advantages and insights, but also many uncomfortable burdens. Honest financial research is a discipline. It requires us to not only understand the fundamentals, but to question the fundamentals. It requires us to look beyond what we would LIKE to see in the economy, and accept the reality of what is actually there. With this methodology comes the difficulty of knowing the dangers ahead while the mainstream stumbles about well behind the curve. It means constantly having to qualify one’s conclusions, no matter how factual, because the skeptics and opposition base their views on an entirely different set of rules; farcical rules that no longer (or never did) apply to the true state of our country’s fiscal health.
After a while, you begin to expect that a majority of the public will buy into any number of government or Federal Reserve con games and swindles as the process of full spectrum collapse rolls onward. However, this expectation is not always accurate…
A majority of Americans were against the bailouts, TARP, quantitative easing, the “too big to fail” concept, etc. Sometimes a government action is so fraudulent that even those who aren’t educated on the specifics can smell the grift in play. The recent debt ceiling debate and resulting debt deal are fuming with the hot stench of predigested disinformation, so much so that no one seems to be happy with it, even people who a month ago were begging for it. When you have to parade around a hobbled shooting victim in order to get any applause for your legislation, then you may be in trouble…
Though their reasons and motivations vary, everyone, whether on the so called “Left”, or the so called “Right”, is asking “Was anything really accomplished here?” The question is a valid one. To discern the exact nature of the debt deal, we must first cut through the web of misconceptions that surround it. While no American is satisfied with the final plan, many are disenchanted for the wrong reasons. Let’s clear the fog (or light a match), as it were…
Where are the spending cuts?
Were any cuts actually made in this debt plan that has been painted by the MSM as a “historic landmark” in spending reform? If you think yes, then you have been hornswaggled. Only yesterday I came across perhaps the most profoundly inept New York Times Op-Ed piece I have ever seen (and that’s saying something):
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/opinion/the-tea-partys-war-on-america.html?_r=1
In it, Joe Nocera, a typically impotent mainstream financial hack, proceeds to outline the debt deal snafu in grade school fashion, claiming not only that cuts in spending attributed to the bill will destroy our fragile economy, but that all the blame for this destruction rests squarely on the shoulders of Tea Party Republicans, who are apparently no better than “terrorists”. Yes, that’s right, fiscal conservatives are now terrorists hell bent on our nation’s demise. Gee…we didn’t see that one coming. While I am not particularly happy with the direction the Tea Party has taken since 2010, especially the constant attempts by Neo Conservatives (fake conservatives) to co-opt the movement, the Tea Party is hardly to blame for any destabilization of the economy, if for no other reason than they accomplished nothing in the deal. Nocera’s idiocy is made embarrassingly apparent in his outcries against spending cuts, because NO cuts were actually made.
First, the $2 trillion plus compromise we hear about so often is slated to take place not over the next ten months, but the next ten years! Only $917 billion in cuts are officially mandated by the bill. The final $1.5 trillion will be voted upon at a later date. Only $21 billion in cuts will be applied to discretionary spending in 2012, $42 billion in 2013, and the remaining cuts after 2014. This strategy, by itself, is wholly inadequate in making even the slightest dent in our national debt, being that our government’s spending has grown exponentially with each passing year.
In June of 2009, our national debt stood at $11.5 Trillion. Today, it climbs past $14.5 trillion. That’s an increase of $3 trillion in the span of two years. Now, I don’t know where men like Boehner, Reid, or Obama, learned simple math, but I can tell you their numbers don’t add up. Even if current spending levels stay static (which they won’t), by 2013, we will have to increase the national debt to at least $17.5 trillion, while only cutting $63 billion from the budget. Wow….sounds like progress to me.
Even worse (yes, it gets worse), the spending cuts that were finalized are based not on current spending, but on PROJECTED spending, or what is often called “the baseline”. That means, essentially, that no existing programs or subsidies are specifically facing cuts, only programs and subsidies that have yet to be created! So, Obama could ostensibly forgo an extra $2 million taxpayer subsidized vacation to Hawaii or Manila, and then claim this as a “spending cut”. Imagine it! We could save so much money as a country by not buying all the things we could have bought beyond what we already buy! Huh?
So, no official spending cuts until after elections. No specific programs identified for cutting. No cuts to current deficit spending. Debt ceiling elevated yet again. All that debate and noise, and nothing has changed…
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Ron Paul appeals to America: “Default now, or suffer a more expensive crisis later”
by Ron Paul, op-ed first posted in Bloomberg
Posted July 22, 2011
Default now, or suffer a more expensive crisis later
DEBATE OVER THE DEBT CEILING HAS REACHED A FEVER PITCH in recent weeks, with each side trying to outdo the other in a game of political chicken. If you believe some of the things that are being written, the world will come to an end if the U.S. defaults on even the tiniest portion of its debt.
In strict terms, the default being discussed will occur if the U.S. fails to meet its debt obligations, through failure to pay either interest or principal due a bondholder. Proponents of raising the debt ceiling claim that a default on Aug. 2 is unprecedented and will result in calamity (never mind that this is simply an arbitrary date, easily changed, marking a congressional recess). My expectations of such a scenario are more sanguine.
The U.S. government defaulted at least three times on its obligations during the 20th century:
• In 1934, the government banned ownership of gold and eliminated the right to exchange gold certificates for gold coins. It then immediately revalued gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35, thus devaluing the dollar holdings of all Americans by 40 percent.
• From 1934 to 1968, the federal government continued to issue and redeem silver certificates, notes that circulated as legal tender that could be redeemed for silver coins or silver bars. In 1968, Congress unilaterally reneged on this obligation, too.
• From 1934 to 1971, foreign governments were permitted by the U.S. government to exchange their dollars for gold through the gold window. In 1971, President Richard Nixon severed this final link between the dollar and gold by closing the gold window, thus in effect defaulting once again on a debt obligation of the U.S. government.
Unlimited spending
No longer constrained by any sort of commodity backing, the federal government was now free to engage in almost unlimited fiscal profligacy, the only check on its spending being the market’s appetite for Treasury debt. Despite the defaults in 1934, 1968 and 1971, world markets have been only too willing to purchase Treasury debt and thereby fund the government’s deficit spending. If these major defaults didn’t result in decreased investor appetite for U.S. obligations, I see no reason why defaulting on a small amount of debt this August would cause any major changes.
The national debt now stands at just over $14 trillion, while net total liabilities are estimated at over $200 trillion. The government is insolvent, as there is no way that this massive sum of liabilities can ever be paid off. Successive Congresses and administrations have shown absolutely no restraint when it comes to the budget process, and the idea that either of the two parties is serious about getting our fiscal house in order is laughable.
Boom and bust
The Austrian School’s theory of the business cycle describes how loose central bank monetary policy causes booms and busts: It drives down interest rates below the market rate, lowering the cost of borrowing; encourages malinvestment; and causes economic miscalculation as resources are diverted from the highest value use as reflected in true consumer preferences. Loose monetary policy caused the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, and now is causing the government debt bubble.
For far too long, the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy and quantitative easing have kept interest rates artificially low, enabling the government to drastically increase its spending by funding its profligacy through new debt whose service costs were lower than they otherwise would have been.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats sought to end this gravy train, with one party prioritizing war spending and the other prioritizing welfare spending, and with both supporting both types of spending. But now, with the end of the second round of quantitative easing, the federal funds rate at the zero bound, and the debt limit maxed out, Congress finds itself in a real quandary.
Hard decisions
It isn’t too late to return to fiscal sanity. We could start by canceling out the debt held by the Federal Reserve, which would clear $1.6 trillion under the debt ceiling. Or we could cut trillions of dollars in spending by bringing our troops home from overseas, making gradual reforms to Social Security and Medicare, and bringing the federal government back within the limits envisioned by the Constitution. Yet no one is willing to step up to the plate and make the hard decisions that are necessary. Everyone wants to kick the can down the road and believe that deficit spending can continue unabated.
Unless major changes are made today, the U.S. will default on its debt sooner or later, and it is certainly preferable that it be sooner rather than later.
If the government defaults on its debt now, the consequences undoubtedly will be painful in the short term. The loss of its AAA rating will raise the cost of issuing new debt, but this is not altogether a bad thing. Higher borrowing costs will ensure that the government cannot continue the same old spending policies. Budgets will have to be brought into balance (as the cost of servicing debt will be so expensive as to preclude future debt financing of government operations), so hopefully, in the long term, the government will return to sound financial footing.
Raising the ceiling
The alternative to defaulting now is to keep increasing the debt ceiling, keep spending like a drunken sailor, and hope that the default comes after we die. A future default won’t take the form of a missed payment, but rather will come through hyperinflation. The already incestuous relationship between the Federal Reserve and the Treasury will grow even closer as the Fed begins to purchase debt directly from the Treasury and monetizes debt on a scale that makes QE2 look like a drop in the bucket. Imagine the societal breakdown of Weimar Germany, but in a country five times as large. That is what we face if we do not come to terms with our debt problem immediately.
Default will be painful, but it is all but inevitable for a country as heavily indebted as the U.S. Just as pumping money into the system to combat a recession only ensures an unsustainable economic boom and a future recession worse than the first, so too does continuously raising the debt ceiling only forestall the day of reckoning and ensure that, when it comes, it will be cataclysmic.
We have a choice: default now and take our medicine, or put it off as long as possible, when the effects will be much worse.
The Economic Death Spiral has been triggered
by Gordon T. Long
Posted originally May 27, 2011
This posting has been abbreviated slightly
For nearly 30 years we have had two Global Strategies working in a symbiotic fashion that has created a virtuous economic growth spiral. Unfortunately, the economic underpinnings were flawed and as a consequence, the virtuous cycle has ended. It is now in the process of reversing and becoming a vicious downward economic spiral.
One of the strategies is the Asian Mercantile Strategy. The other is the US Dollar Reserve Currency Strategy. These two strategies have worked in harmony because they fed off each other, each reinforcing the other. However, today the realities of debt saturation have brought the virtuous spiral to an end.
One of the two global strategies enabled the Asian Tigers to emerge and grow to the extent that they are now the manufacturing and potentially future economic engine of the world. The other allowed the US to live far beyond its means with massive fiscal deficits, chronic trade imbalances and more recently, current account imbalances. The US during this period has gone from being the richest country on the face of the globe to the biggest debtor nation in the world. First we need to explore each strategy, how they worked symbiotically, what has changed and then why the virtuous cycle is now accelerating into a vicious downward spiral.
ASIAN MERCANTILE STRATEGY
The Asian Mercantile Strategy started with the emergence of Japan in the early 1980s, expanded with the Asian Tigers in the 90s and then strategically dominated with China in the first decade of this century. Initially, Japan’s products were poor quality and limited to cheap consumer products. Japan as a nation had neither the raw materials, capital markets, nor domestic consumption market to compete with the giant size of the USA. To compensate for its disadvantages, Japan strategically targeted its manufacturing resources for the US market. By doing this, the resource poor island nation took the first step in becoming an export economy – an economy centered on growth through exports versus an economy like the US, where an excessive 70% of GDP is dependent on domestic consumption.
The strategy began to work as Japan took full advantage of its labor differential that was critical in the low end consumer product segment, which it initially targeted. Gradually, as capital availability expanded, Japan broadened its manufacturing scope, moving into higher levels of consumption products requiring higher levels of quality and achieving brand recognition. Success soon became a problem as the Yen began to strengthen. To combat this the Japanese implemented the second critical component of what became the Asian Mercantile Strategy template. It began to manipulate its currency by aggressively intervening in the forex market to keep the yen weak.
Further success forced Japan to move to a more aggressive forex strategy to maintain a currency advantage. It was strategically decided that Japan’s large and growing foreign reserves were to be re-invested back into the US. By buying US Agency and US Treasury debt instruments it kept the dollar strong relative to the Yen. The more successful Japan became, the more critical this strategy became. In the 80s Japan dominated global expansion as it brought US automotive and consumer electronics’ manufacturing to its knees.
By the early 90s the Japanese labor advantage was quickly being lost to the Asian Tigers because the Yen versus the Asian Tiger currencies was too strong. The Asian Tigers were following the Japanese model. The Asian Crisis in 1997 re-enforced to all Asian players the importance of holding large US dollar denominated reserves. This further accelerated and reinforced the strategy of purchasing US Treasury and Agency debt. With China’s acceptance into the World Trade Organization (WTO), China emerged on the scene in full force. Armed with the lessons of the last twenty years, China took the Asian Mercantile Strategy to another level in its ongoing evolution.
The results were one of the largest and fastest transfers of industrial power ever to occur in history. In ten years, China assumed the role of the world’s undisputed industrial powerhouse in the world.
The virtuous cycle further accelerated as Asia became more dominant because its reserves, reinvested back in the US, began to have a larger and larger impact. The more Asia bought US Treasury and Agency debt, the lower US interest rates were forced, allowing Americans to finance more and more consumption. The more Asia bought US securities, the stronger the US dollar was against Asian currencies, and therefore the cheaper Asian products were relative to US manufactured products. It was a self reinforcing Virtuous Cycle. The result was a staggering 46,000 factories transferred from the US to Asia over the same ten year period. The transfer set the stage for chronic unemployment and public funding problems, but it was temporarily hidden by equally massive increases in debt spending.
Travesty of a Mockery of a Sham, Phase II
by Charles Hugh Smith
Originally posted in Of Two Minds
February 10, 2011
THE FACSIMILE OF U.S. GROWTH NOW DEPENDS ENTIRELY ON CENTRAL STATE MANIPULATION AND STIMULUS OF RISK TRADES AND FINANCIAL SLEIGHT-OF-HAND.
The U.S. economy has become increasingly dependent on asset bubbles, financial legerdemain, credit expansion, Federal borrowing and the manipulation of risk trades to maintain the illusion of “growth.” Compared to an economy based on organic demand and productive growth, the current U.S. economy is a travesty of a mockery of a sham, and has been since 2001.
There are a number of factors at work, but let’s start with two: the ratchet effect, and the Keynesian Project.
In the ratchet effect, increases are easy and resistance-free: it’s incredibly easy to hire more employees in bureaucracies, for example. But once the ratchet has advanced, it is nearly impossible to return to the previous tooth in the gear.
So for a city government to expand payroll from 10,000 to 20,000 employees was effortless, to reduce a 20,000 person payroll back to 10,000 is exceedingly painful.
The ratchet effect is a key feature of addiction. When one beer no longer creates a “buzz,” then the consumer drinks two, and so on, until a six-pack is the new baseline. Below that level of consumption, the addict gets panicky, for the entire necessity of creating a buzz is at risk of catastrophic failure.
The U.S. economy is now addicted via the ratchet effect to unprecedented levels of Federal borrowing and Federal Reserve credit creation and manipulation. Let’s set aside the fact that America’s Central State has by some calculations guaranteed some $13 trillion in private financial assets via TARP, AIG’s backstop, the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, etc. – roughly the size of the entire GDP of the nation.
Let’s focus instead on the fact that the Federal government must borrow and spend 11% of GDP ($1.5+ trillion) every year, and the Fed must buy $1 trillion in impaired private assets or new Treasury debt annually (another 7% of GDP) just to create an illusory GDP growth of 2.5% a year. So we’re spending/injecting 18% of the GDP to conjure a “growth” of 2.5%.
That means we’re spending/injecting $7 to create $1 of “growth” in GDP. And thanks to the ratchet effect, there’s no going back now without systemic disruption. Does anyone seriously believe spending $7 to birth $1 of “growth” is sustainable? If so, then let’s eliminate that $1.5 trillion deficit spending and the Fed’s $1 trillion-a-year purchases of impaired debt and Treasury bonds, and see if GDP “grows” via organic demand and production.
Everybody knows what would happen: the wheels would fall off the illusory “recovery.” The “recovery” is precisely analogous to an alcoholic who claims to be sobering up but who is actually drinking seven beers a day to get a buzz when a few years ago he only quaffed two or three a day.
Here is the Keynesian Project in a nutshell. Unfettered Capitalism works in straightforward cycles: the organic business cycle of expansion, overcapacity and overleverege inevitably leads to a credit bust in which those whose borrowing exceeds their ability to service their debt go broke, and the dominoes of overcapacity and credit expansion topple as losses mount and consumption based on increasing debt falls.
Bad debt gets wiped out, along with “pyramid-scheme” type assets (mortgaged assets are leveraged to buy more mortgaged assets) and excess capacity. As production declines, workers are laid off and consumption declines, further pressuring impaired financial assets.
As Marx had foreseen, these cycles increase in depth and severity. Though Marx invoked dialectical theory and history rather than the ratchet effect, the basic idea is the same: Capitalism becomes increasingly dependent on financial capital, and the resultant crises eventually become severe enough to take down Capitalism as a sustainable productive system.
Keynes’ proposed to counter these worsening business cycle implosions with massive injections of Central State borrowing and spending. The atmosphere of fear as assets, credit and consumption all contracted would be replaced by a revival of “animal spirits” (the magical elixir of Capitalism), consumption would be stimulated by direct government spending on capital projects and welfare (fiscal stimulus), and banking credit would be restored via stimulative Central Bank credit expansion (monetary stimulus).
But Keynes failed to grasp what Marx had intuited: the ratchet effect. Once the Central State ramped up deficit spending and expansive credit, then the organic economy became dependent on that new level of Central State spending and credit expansion.
As I described in the Survival+ analysis, in effect the central State rescued Monopoly Capital by partnering with it. This results in a financial/State Plutocracy which “saves” the organic economy by taking control of its income streams, credit creation and financial assets.
That is the U.S. economy in a nutshell: a travesty of a mockery of a sham. The consumer became dependent on easy, cheap credit and home equity extraction to maintain his/her consumption. The student became dependent on easy, cheap credit to fund his/her increasingly costly college education. Monopoly capital became dependent on financial slight-of-hand, the debauchery of credit, fraudulent mispricing/masking of risk, stupendously leveraged bets on risk assets, etc. for its swollen profits. Politicans became dependent on unlimited borrowing and spending to keep the illusions of competence, sustainability and “growth” alive.
Bring Out Your Dead
from Casey Research
Posted originally July 16, 2010
AS I WRITE, THE PRICE OF GOLD HAS AGAIN BROKEN BELOW ITS NEW BASE at $1,200, and the U.S. stock market is again under strong pressure, due to a confluence of fears, most of which point to a deflationary double-dip. The fears are fanned by disappointment in the early quarterly results now being released, by the latest CPI reports that show inflation continuing to moderate, and by yet another poll revealing faltering consumer confidence.
The market is also spooked, no doubt, by just-released notes from the latest Fed Beige Book that make it clear that the Fed is (finally) beginning to understand the entrenched and endemic nature of this crisis. While the notes are written in shamanic double-speak, the point is unambiguous – members of the Fed don’t expect the economy to get back on track until 2015 or 2016.
• “Participants generally anticipated that, in light of the severity of the economic downturn, it would take some time for the economy to converge fully to its longer-run path as characterized by sustainable rates of output growth, unemployment, and inflation consistent with participants’ interpretation of the Federal Reserve’s dual objectives; most expected the convergence process to take no more than five to six years.”
The simple reality the Fed is waking up to is that the structural underpinnings of the economy are damaged beyond any quick or easy fix. That’s because until the debt is wrung out of the system, either through default or raging inflation – there’s no chance of it actually being paid in anything remotely resembling current dollars – the equivalent of an economic Black Death is going to plague the land. Each new government initiative, the latest being financial reform, that doesn’t decisively address the debt, but rather tightens the dead hands of politicians around GDP, only serves to spread the wasting disease like so many flea-infested rats running through the economy.
And so, each new day will find the carts freshly laden with failed homeowners, businesses, and banks that have succumbed.
Pundits are fond of saying that things are never really “different this time around”… yet there is something truly unusual now going on.
See if you can spot the disconnect in the following descriptions of the current economy.
• Record total debt.
• Record government deficits.
• Record trade deficits.
• Massive additional government debt financing required to keep the doors open and avoid reneging on social contracts directly affecting the quality of lives of millions of people around the globe – the U.S., Japan, and Europe especially.
• Near record-low interest rates.
Anything strike you as out of place?
It is, of course, obvious to you, dear reader. However, in the event you pass this edition on to a less savvy acquaintance, I will try to clarify by first reducing things to micro-scale and putting a human face on the situation.
In that case, the current setup with massive debts and low, low interest rates would be as if you made an uncollateralized loan to an acquaintance at a very friendly, low interest rate. Then he comes back again for more, and more, and more. Because you live in a small town, you know he’s putting the touch on a bunch of other people too. And because you know his loose-lipped accountant, you also know what his income is, and even what his total debts are – and it is blatantly obvious that he won’t be able to repay his debts in a dozen lifetimes.
So would you keep lending him money? And, if you did, would you do it at the same friendly interest rates?
Not hardly. And therein lies the almost Twilight Zone caliber disconnect in the world as we know it.
In a conversation yesterday, my dear partner and friend of several decades, Doug Casey, made just that point – that the situation today should only exist if the fundamental laws of economics had been suspended. Interest rates should be going up, but they aren’t – rather, they are bumping along at the very bottom of the possible range.
Quantum Pranx 