by ilene - September 6th, 2010 4:10 pm
Mish disagrees with Robert Reich’s lessons of Labor Day… – Ilene
Courtesy of Mish
It’s Labor Day. The markets are closed. Those working for government, banks, schools etc have the day off. All totaled, 17.3 million citizens do not have a job today nor a job they can return to on Tuesday. Another 8.9 million will not work as many hours as they would like, this week, next week, or the week after that.
How NOT to End the Great Recession
In a New York Times Op-Ed, Robert B. Reich, a secretary of labor in the Clinton administration, and professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley comes to all the wrong conclusions about where we are, how we got here, and what to do about it. (Robert Reich’s "The Real Lesson of Labor Day" here.)
Please consider How to End the Great Recession
Reich: THIS promises to be the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans. Organized labor is down to about 7 percent of the private work force. Members of non-organized labor — most of the rest of us — are unemployed, underemployed or underwater.
Mish Comment: When organized labor is at 0%, both public and private, we will be on our way to prosperity. Organized labor in conjunction with piss poor management bankrupted GM and countless other manufacturing companies. Now, public unions, in cooperation with corrupt politicians have bankrupted countless cities and states.
Reich: The Labor Department reported on Friday that just 67,000 new private-sector jobs were created in August, while at least 125,000 are needed to keep up with the growth of the potential work force.
The national economy isn’t escaping the gravitational pull of the Great Recession. None of the standard booster rockets are working: near-zero short-term interest rates from the Fed, almost record-low borrowing costs in the bond market, a giant stimulus package and tax credits for small businesses that hire the long-term unemployed have all failed to do enough.
That’s because the real problem has to do with the structure of the economy, not the business cycle. No booster rocket can work unless consumers are able, at some point, to keep the economy moving on their own. But consumers no longer have the purchasing power to buy the goods
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Tags: academia, bubble, Economy, FDR, Financial Crisis, Great Depression, Labor Day, military spending, Mish, new deal, organized labor, pension benefits, public workers, real world, Recovery, Robert Reich, unemployment, unions, wage discrepancies
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by ilene - August 27th, 2010 4:11 pm
By Barbara Kiviat, courtesy of TIME
Homeownership has let us down. For generations, Americans believed that owning a home was an axiomatic good. Our political leaders hammered home the point. Franklin Roosevelt held that a country of homeowners was "unconquerable." Homeownership could even, in the words of George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Jack Kemp, "save babies, save children, save families and save America." A house with a front lawn and a picket fence wasn’t just a nice place to live or a risk-free investment; it was a way to transform a nation. No wonder leaders of all political stripes wanted to spend more than $100 billion a year on subsidies and tax breaks to encourage people to buy.
But the dark side of homeownership is now all too apparent: foreclosures and walkaways, neighborhoods plagued by abandoned properties and plummeting home values, a nation in which families have $6 trillion less in housing wealth than they did just three years ago. Indeed, easy lending stimulated by the cult of homeownership may have triggered the financial crisis and led directly to its biggest bailout, that of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Housing remains a drag on the economy. Existing-home sales in July dropped 27% from the prior month, exacerbating fears of a double-dip. And all that is just the obvious tale of a housing bubble and what happened when it popped. The real story is deeper and darker still.
For the better part of a century, politics, industry and culture aligned to create a fetish of the idea of buying a house. Homeownership has done plenty of good over the decades; it has provided stability to tens of millions of families and anchored a labor-intensive sector of the economy. Yet by idealizing the act of buying a home, we have ignored the downsides. In the bubble years, lending standards slipped dramatically, allowing many Americans to put far too much of their income into paying for their housing. And we ignored longer-term phenomena too. Homeownership contributed to the hollowing out of cities and kept renters out of the best neighborhoods. It fed America’s overuse of energy and oil. It made it more difficult for those who had lost a job to find another. Perhaps worst of all, it helped us become casually self-deceiving: by telling ourselves that homeownership was…
Tags: America, Fannie Mae, FDR, Foreclosures, Freddie Mac, George Bush, home values, homeownership, Jack Kemp, walkaways
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by ilene - June 19th, 2009 1:05 pm
Discussion on systemic risk, too big too fail institutions, and regulator capture. Courtesy of Benign Brodwicz (intro) and Simon Johnson at The Baseline Scenario - Ilene
The Obama plan is exactly backwards in its approach to systemic risk. It will increase systemic risk.
As pointed out by one of the leaders of econophysics, Eugene Stanley (here), one of the prime results in the exploding field of network theory is that densely connected networks are chaotic and unstable compared to sparsely connected networks.
This only makes sense. If every part of a network affects every other part of a network it becomes very easy for large perturbations to propagate through the network, and rebound, and so on.
The Obama-Summers-Geithner solution to our problem of systemic risk is evidence of an intellectual obtuseness that is breathtaking.
The Fed created or permitted by neglect of its duties the systemic risk that caused this crash, and the Great Depression before it. Mish got this right.
The obvious solution given that systemic risk is a characteristic of the structure of the financial system is to change the structure of the system to reduce systemic risk. Break up investment banks and commercial banks. Eliminate financial institutions that are big enough to create systemic risk all by themselves (no more “too big to fail”). Make it impossible for the system to become densely connected by limiting leverage. The plan does increase capital requirements but not enough. And it leaves the trading of CDSs, the densely-linked network of derivatives that largely caused the supposed near melt-down of the system last fall, lightly regulated and less than transparent.
You can’t leave the TBTF institutions in place, or they will capture the regulators again. Or perhaps it’s better to say they’re not letting them go at this time.
Glass-Steagall and the other laws that the neocons undid over the past thirty years worked. They kept the system stable for sixty years.
Let’s bring them back.
Here is Simon Johnson’s take:
What is the essence of the problem with our financial system – what brought us into deep crisis, what scared us most in September/October of last year, and what was the
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Tags: bankers, FDR, Financial System, Glass-Steagall, Obama plan, Simon Johnson, systemic risk, Teddy Roosevelt, the Federal Reserve
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the site