March 10, 2014

A Healthy Economy Requires Fewer People Working on Wall Street, Making Much Less Money / Les Leopold

http://www.alternet.org/economy/american-economy-recover-we-need-fewer-people-working-wall-st-making-much-less-money?akid=11570.227380.HgLMPp&rd=1&src=newsletter966557&t=3





All of us suspect the obvious — that Wall Street not only is too big to fail, but also just too damn big. But where's our evidence? It's one thing to direct our anger at financial elites and the top one percent. It's quite another to make a factual case that Wall Street, indeed, is much too big, and therefore should be radically reduced in size. So here's some data.

1. Explosion in Financial Sector Incomes But No Rise in Economic Growth

Check out this chart: Between WWII and 1980, the wages of financial workers were the same as those who worked in non-financial industries. Then the two lines split apart with Wall Street extracting an enormous premium. Do the financiers deserve it? And how would we know if they do or don't? The answer should depend on how much value the financial sector, in fact, produces for our economy. Is there a correlation between the explosion in Wall Street incomes and economic growth?



https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/EV5CUPE86agSGgrPDRcAZYEQS45Ij4mTRn1hmN8vO-gnN0nLETCSFlCwVF94m8FMViR9_WmwMjNNejO7zT5jm706q9hs8Pxn5TwmBsStoiOe1pdFM_BB6dMwtcuzTk9erBAxEgU



Yes, there is, but it's negative. As Wall Street wages rise, economic growth slows down.

1950s (1950-1959): 4.17 percent

1960s (1960-1969): 4.44 percent

1970s (1970-1979): 3.26 percent

1980s (1980-1989): 3.05 percent

1990s (1990-1999): 3.2 percent

2000s (2000-2009): 1.82 percent

[Source for these unemployment numbers ]



2: The Decline of Workers' Share of the Economy

Wall Street apologists argue that financiers are responsible for boosting U.S. productivity and creating new, decent-paying jobs. Well, we're still waiting. In fact, in the decade following the early 1990s, labor's share of our national income actually declined by 7.2 percent. Why? The usual suspects include globalization, technology and too much government spending on the social safety net. You know the arguments: we are falling behind the global competition; we are losing our jobs to new technology; government "entitlements" are crippling the economy; and so on.

Not quite.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) produced an eye-popping study concluding that the biggest factor in the decline in workers' share of income is financialization — that it accounts for almost 50 percent of the decline in labor's share (from ILO, Figure 38).

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/6ze_yXmXPQYRdmmzhQhfEthNjCWJMjqrCra33_gGkRPw8o-YCSkfpoCDPqKd9JaXXyOSI8v5prItxa2ZiU0dbN2lnFD9wsotFohkMc2hlhP1am-dqi3L_DiG-ybs7aOp_oN9f7s

3. Wall Street Costs Too Much

A compelling measure of financial bloat can be found in an excellent paper by economists Gerald Epstein and James Crotty. They look at the "financing gap" which "measures the extent to which different sectors of the economy depend on external finance as opposed to financing with internal savings."

So for every dollar consumers and businesses borrow, how much does Wall Street charge? More and more, which is the exact opposite of what is supposed to happen in capitalism. The rise of advanced technologies, global markets and more creative work organization should lead to a drop in price, not an increase. But not on Wall Street. If we compare the booming 1960s with the last decade, we see that Wall Street is now charging four times more for its services...

March 7, 2014

Weekend Economists Waiting for Godot March 7-9, 2014

This is a snowdrop. I have a clump of them in the sunniest, warmest spot in what I can call my own garden in this condo association. I have been waiting 2 months already, and I'm probably going to have to wait another for the snowdrops to return to Capitstrano....I mean, Ann Arbor.

Snow drops will force their way through the last inch of snow to reach the light, but they cannot manage the 8-12 inches of ice that cover them right now. I looked. I wait.

There are lots of people waiting for Spring, around here. Or jobs, or the final collapse of Western civilization. Everything is in suspended animation, a state of being once described by Samuel Becket.

Waiting for Godot (/ˈɡɒdoʊ/ GOD-oh) is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which two characters, Vladimir and Estragon, wait endlessly and in vain for the arrival of someone named Godot. Godot's absence, as well as numerous other aspects of the play, have led to many different interpretations since the play's 1953 premiere. Some categorize this as an absurdist play.

Waiting for Godot is Beckett's translation of his own original French version, En attendant Godot, and is subtitled (in English only) "a tragicomedy in two acts". It was voted "the most significant English language play of the 20th century". The original French text was composed between 9 October 1948 and 29 January 1949. The première was on 5 January 1953 in the Théâtre de Babylone, Paris. The production was directed by Roger Blin, who also played the role of Pozzo.

March 5, 2014

Repo, Baby, Repo: How Unregulated Banking Triggered the Crash of '08 By Mike Whitney

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article36623.htm



October 23, 2013 "Information Clearing House - Subprime mortgages did not cause the financial crisis, nor did the housing bubble or Lehman Brothers. The financial crisis originated in a corner of the shadow banking system called the repo market. That’s where the bank run occurred that froze the secondary market, sent prices on mortgage-backed assets plunging, and pushed the financial system into a death spiral. In the Great Crash of 2008, repo was ground zero, the epicenter of the global catastrophe. As analyst David Weidner noted in the Wall Street Journal, “The repo market wasn’t just a part of the meltdown. It was the meltdown.”

Regrettably, the Federal Reserve’s nontraditional monetary policies (ZIRP and QE) have succeeded in restoring the repo market to it’s precrisis level of activity, but without implementing any of the changes that would have made the system safer. Repo is as vulnerable and crisis-prone today as it was when the French bank PNB Paribas stopped redemptions in its off-balance sheet operations in 2007 kicking off the tumultuous bank run that would eventually implode the entire system and push the economy into the deepest slump since the Great Depression. By failing to rein in repo, the Fed has ensured that financial crises will be a regular feature in the future occurring every 15 or 20 years as was the case before banks were more strictly regulated and government backstops were put in place. Repo returns us to Wild West “anything goes” banking.

Why would the Fed be so reckless and pave the way for another disaster? We’ll get to that in a minute, but first, let’s give a brief explanation of repo and how the system works.

Repo is short for repurchase agreement. The repo market is where primary dealers sell securities with an agreement for the seller to buy back the securities at a later date. This sounds more complicated than it is. What’s really going on is the seller (primary dealers) are getting short-term loans from money market funds, securities firms, banks etc in order to maintain a position in securities in which they’re suppose to make markets. So, repo is like a loan that’s secured with collateral. (ie–the securities) It is a “funding mechanism”.

What touched off the Crash of 2008, was the discovery that the collateral that was being used for repo funding was “toxic”, that is, the securities were not Triple A after all, but subprime mortgage-backed gunk that would only fetch pennies on the dollar. So, when PNB Paribas stopped redemptions in its off-balance sheet operations on August 9, 2007, the rout began. Cash-heavy investors (like money markets) turned off the lending spigot, which reduced trillions of dollars of MBS to junk-status, precipitated massive fire sales of distressed assets that were dumped on the market pushing prices further and further down wiping out trillions in equity and reducing the financial system to a smoldering pile of rubble. That’s why the Fed stepped in, backstopped the system with explicit guarantees for both regulated and unregulated financial institutions and set about to reflate financial asset prices to their precrisis highs.

Newly appointed Fed chairman Janet Yellen summarized what happened in the panic in a speech she gave earlier this year. She said:



In other words, the crisis began in repo. Unfortunately, Wall Street has fended off all attempts to fix the system, because repo is a particularly lucrative area of activity. And we are talking serious money here, too. Tri-party repo alone–which is a small subset of the larger repo market–represents “about $1.6 trillion in outstanding repos daily.” That means that the prospect of a big dealer dumping his portfolio of securities on the market at a moment’s notice igniting another panic, is never far away.

Why do banks borrow in the unregulated, shadow system instead of conducting their business in the light of day where regulators can check the quality of the underlying collateral, oversee the various transactions on public trading platforms, and make sure that capital requirements are maintained? It’s because the banks want to deploy all their capital, leverage up to their eyeballs and play fast-and-loose with the rules. Here’s what the New York Fed has to say on the topic:



In other words, the banks are conducting their operations in the shadows because it’s cheaper. That’s what this is all about. Here’s more from the same report:





...The point is, had the system been adequately regulated with the appropriate safeguards in place, there would have been no fire sales, no panic, and no crisis. Regulators would have made sure that the underlying collateral was legit, that is, they would have made sure that the subprime borrowers were creditworthy and able to repay their loans. They would have made sure that repo borrowers (the banks) had sufficient capital to meet redemptions if problems arose. And regulators would have limited excessive leveraging of the securitized assets. Regulation works. It provides safety, stability, and security as opposed to panic, bankruptcy and severe recession which is the scenario that Wall Street’s profiteers seem to prefer....

MORE MISERY AHEAD--PREDICTIONS AT LINK

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

March 5, 2014

As Ye Sow, So Shall Ye Reap By Paul Craig Roberts FROM OCTOBER

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article36621.htm

The year 2014 could be shaping up as the year that the chickens come home to roost.

Americans, even well-informed ones, don’t know all of the mistakes made by neoconized and corrupted Washington in the past two decades. However, enough is known to see that the US has lost economic and political power, and that the loss is irreversible.

The economic cost of this lost will be born by what remains of the middle class and the increasingly poverty-stricken lower class. The one percent will have offshore gold holdings and large sums of money in foreign currencies and other foreign assets to see them through.

In the political arena, the collapse of the Soviet Union presented Washington with the grand opportunity to reallocate the Pentagon budget to other uses. Part of the reduction could have been returned to taxpayers for their own use. Another part could have been used to improve worn out infrastructure. And another part could have been used to repair and improve the social safety net, thus insuring domestic tranquility. A final, but perhaps most important part, could have been used to begin repaying the Treasury IOUs in the Social Security Trust Fund from which Washington has borrowed and spent $2 trillion, leaving non-marketable IOUs in the place of the Social Security payroll tax revenues that Washington raided in order to fund its wars and current operations.

Instead, influenced by neoconservative warmongers who advocated America using its “sole superpower” status to establish hegemony over the world, Washington let hubris and arrogance run away with it. The consequence was that Washington destroyed its soft power with lies and war crimes, only to find that its military power was insufficient to support its occupation of Iraq, its conquest of Afghanistan, and its financial imperialism.

Now seen universally as a lawless warmonger and a nuisance, Washington’s soft power has been squandered. With its influence on the wane, Washington has become more of a bully. In response, the rest of the world is isolating Washington....

THIS IS THE REAL STATE OF THE UNION....READ IT CAREFULLY, AND WEEP

March 3, 2014

Organizers Worth Their Salt Jane Slaughter

http://labornotes.org/2014/02/organizers-worth-their-salt

Bosses hate a salt—a pro-union worker who’s taken a job with the intent to organize.

A few unions are recruiting salts these days, usually young people who apply for low-wage jobs in retail, hospitality, or logistics. But unions are reluctant to talk about salting, not wanting to alert management to look out for suspicious characters. In this article every worker will use a pseudonym and their situations will be disguised.

Former salt Kendra Baker says salting offers something the labor movement badly needs: a “space for young people to develop skills as workplace organizers.” The 2011 uprising in Wisconsin and the Occupy movement created “a lot of curiosity and enthusiasm about the labor movement,” she said.

Now coordinating a salting program, she stresses that salting ensures a union drive will have “a workplace-organizing component, to maintain a level of militancy on the shop floor and make sure the campaign is putting the workers first. Workers should be taking a lead on the messaging and on the goals and planning the actions.”

MORE

March 3, 2014

Big-Money Donors Demand Larger Say in Campaign Strategy (GOP)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/us/politics/big-money-donors-demand-larger-say-in-party-strategy.html?hpw&rref=us&_r=0

The Republican donors who have financed the party’s vast outside-spending machine are turning against the consultants and political strategists they once lavished with hundreds of millions of dollars.

In recent months, they have begun holding back checks from Republican “super PACs” like American Crossroads, unsatisfied with the groups’ explanations for their failure to unseat President Obama or win back the Senate. Others, less willing than in the past to defer to the party elders and former congressional staff members who control the biggest groups, are demanding a bigger voice in creating strategy in exchange for their continued support.

Donors like Paul Singer, the billionaire Republican investor, have expanded their in-house political shops, building teams of loyal advisers and researchers to guide and coordinate their giving. And some of the biggest contributors to Republican outside groups in 2012 are now gravitating toward the more donor-centric political and philanthropic network overseen by Charles and David Koch, who have wooed them in part by promising more accountability over how money is spent.

“People are really drawn to the Koch model,” said Anthony Scaramucci, a New York hedge fund investor and Republican fund-raiser, who attended the Kochs’ annual donor conference near Palm Springs, Calif., in January. “It’s adaptive, data-driven, and they are the most propitious capital allocators in political activism.”

NOT GOOD NEWS...MORE AT LINK

March 3, 2014

The Year in Elections, 2013

https://sites.google.com/site/electoralintegrityproject4/data-1/expert-survey-2/the-year-in-elections-2013

In many countries, polling day ends with disputes about ballot-box fraud, corruption, and flawed registers. Recent cases such as Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia illustrate these controversies, undermining legitimacy and stability. There are disputes even in long-established democracies such as the US and Britain. But which claims are accurate? And which are false complaints from sore losers?

To address this issue, new evidence gathered by the Electoral Integrity Project compares the risks of flawed and failed elections, and how far countries around the world meet international standards. The EIP is an independent research project based at the University of Sydney and Harvard University, under the direction of Professor Pippa Norris.

This annual report evaluates all national parliamentary and presidential contests occurring in 66 countries worldwide holding 73 election from 1 July 2012 to 31 December 2013 (excluding smaller states with a population below 100,000), from Albania to Zimbabwe. Data is derived from a global survey of 855 election experts. The report includes 73 national parliamentary and presidential contests held worldwide in 66 countries. All continents and regions are represented. Immediately after each contest, the survey asks domestic and international experts to monitor the quality based on 49 indicators. These responses are then clustered into eleven stages occurring during the electoral cycle and summed to construct an overall 100-point expert Perception of Electoral Integrity (PEI) index and ranking...



... historical experience of democracy did not determine current levels of integrity; as shown in figure 3, the quality of elections was strong in several third wave democracies and emerging economies, including the Republic of Korea, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Lithuania, Argentina, and Mongolia. These countries are highly rated by experts although they only established multiparty systems and competitive democratic elections during the late-1980s and early-1990s.

By contrast, the United States ranked 26th out of 73 elections under comparison worldwide, the lowest score among Western nations, falling into the Moderate Integrity category.

March 1, 2014

After several years sniffing around the edges, and the Snowden revelations

I can feel sure that your post is much more fact than most are willing to admit. It will take time for the skeptics to come around, but rest assured, the 1% always overplays their hand, and those who don't see it now will have their noses and much more rubbed into it.

What too many on DU fail to realize is that there's been massive suppression and manipulation of the "permissible" news ever since the printing press began, and even earlier, when copyists were told what to copy and what to burn. The Internet, by giving everyone freedom of the press, has enabled a great uncovering of many deeply buried truths, as well as the propagation of many scabrous falsehoods.

By labelling sites "suspicious, bogus, alarmist, etc" some seek to continue the suppression of both acquisition of truth and critical thinking. The bogus will sort itself out, if it's given an airing. There's no need to suppress it.