The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Class Warfare Page 22 of 36

Japanification and the end of the American Dream

Stirling Newberry and I have been writing about Japanafication for years—on blogs, at least since 2004.

Those of us who are old enough remember when Japan was THE miracle economy.  Technologically advanced, vibrant and rich.  It was eating America’s lunch, and most other countries.  For peak alarmism at this fact in a fictional form, read Michael Chrichton’s Rising Sun.

Tokyo real estate was worth more than the entire world’s real estate combined.

Then the bubble crashed.  Japanese policy was to protect the banks, and to bury the bad loans on the books.  They undertook literally decades of stimulative policy, mostly pouring useless concrete (exactly the wrong thing to do unless your country really lacks that sort of infrastructure, which Japan did not.)

To put in terms familiar to my readers, they extended and pretended.

Japan went into semi-permanent stagnation.

We have, now, the news of a quarter drop in GDP of 6.8% annualized for the last quarter.  (This is blamed on increased sales taxes, but it was coming anyway.)

The long stagnation is over (it’s been over for a bit).  Japan is actually in decline.

This is important because Japanification was always the plan for the US after the bubbles: extend and pretend, stagnate wages and employment.  Pretend.

But there were significant differences between the two countries.  Japan started with massive savings and a huge trade surplus.  It is now in trade deficit and savings compared to debt are way down.  Economic equality was relatively high, as well, spreading demand.

America came out of the financial crisis with a trade deficit, a pathetic savings rate and massive inequality.  This is why I predicted that Japanification would not work in the US.  It could not, because there was no saved fat to be used to create the long bright depression the Japanese had.

This brings us to stimulus and development (not just for developing countries).  The money must be used not for pork projects with no follow on, but to create new industries or to bring money off the sides into the economy.  Pouring concrete (and not even bothering to shore up nuclear reactors in areas which were not electorally viable) was pointless in Japan.  Buying bonds is pointless and even harmful.

Likewise you cannot have real open trade flows and expect to keep whatever you are building.  You build it, you make it work and once an industry is systemized, it can be moved to a low cost domiciale. It takes deliberate government policy to prevent that.

Monetary policy in Japan could never work, because the money went to the wrong things, and much of it immediately decamped overseas in the so-called carry trade—borrow low in Japan, buy securities somewhere else where they had a higher return.

All of this should be obvious and uncontroversial. It is not, it flies directly in the face of modern neo-liberal theory and it is that theory, in the face of decades of failure, that the Japanese followed.

The human capacity for ideologically driven stupidity and atrocity is endless. (Those who do not believed me are invited to study Church history and its effect on society from 1000 AD to 1900 AD or so.)  People will ignore the evidence in front of their eyes, years of failure and continue doing the “safe”, “orthodox” thing no matter what the results.  This is true even for well-meaning people.

Of course, in the US, Japanification has a US twist: it massively increases the wealth of the already wealthy, through unconventional monetary policy.  American leaders are far too greedy to make Japanification work: any surplus, or room to lend, or room to print money, must be given away to rich people as quickly as possible.

I point out, finally, that the first sin in Japanification was buying the bad loans.  This was a huge mistake in the US too, bailing out the banks and not forcing them and their share and bondholders to take their losses was the main mistake of the financial crisis.  Yes, things might have been worse if the US had done so (though steps mitigating the hit on the regular economy would have been easy enough to take with the 4 TRILLION dollars used bailing out rich people), but even so, the US would have recovered better afterwards.

Instead the US has an economy in which 90% of the population has seen an actual decrease in income and wealth, while 10% has seen an increase: with the 1% and the .1% and the .01% benefiting most of all.

Japanification was the plan for America. It isn’t working, it could never work, but the policies in place are nonetheless doing what is most important to their architects: they are making the rich richer, and everyone else poorer and doing it quickly.

The Bush years were the long suck.  This is the deep dive, and remember, the US isn’t in recession yet (though it is in depression).  The pain when it happens (and absent nuclear war, there is always another recession), will be unbelievable.


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Yellen tells American Industry not to produce jobs or good wages

There is no other way to read this:

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said U.S. labor markets are far from healthy and signaled the Fed will keep monetary policy loose until hiring and wage data show the effects of the financial crisis are “completely gone.”

Look, why would those who hire people want easy money to go away?  They don’t.  So if giving people good wages and employment will mean the Fed tightening, they have every incentive not to do so.

The actual way to do it is to say “this policy is not working.  If it does not show progress, we will cancel it.”

If what you wanted was high wages and low actual unemployment.

Which isn’t what Yellen wants.

The Result of Austerity and Neo-Liberalism is the Rise of the Neo-Fascist Right

includes, as expected, the rise of the neo-fascist right.  The UK Independence Party and France’s National Front won national elections to the European Parliament.

This doesn’t mean they would win national elections proper, the EU vote is often a protest vote, but the results are still impressive.

This the natural reaction to austerity.  When times get tough, and when the “mainstream” parties have no answers which work, people will vote for alternatives.  In Greece, to the Greek’s credit, this was SYRIZA, an actual left wing party (though the fascist Golden Dawn party did do reasonably well).

When I was a child, living in the city of Vancouver, I told my father I didn’t see a lot of racism.  I’ve always remembered his response “wait till times get bad.  People will  hate those who are different.”

My father was a child of the Great Depression.

The neo-liberal left of Europe and North America offer no solutions.  They cannot offer solutions, it is not possible under neo-liberalism to fix the problems neo-liberalism has created: they are a result of neo-liberalism’s genuine beliefs about how the world economy should be run.

You can not, under the neo-liberal model of globalization, tax the rich effectively: they can go somewhere else.  You cannot hold wages up, because jurisdictions can always be played against each other.  You cannot fix the environment and stop the mass wiping out of species and the probable death of a billion humans, because jurisdictions can be played against each other.  That countries no longer produce the majority goods they need themselves, nor in many cases even the food, means jurisdictions cannot unilterally do the right thing, even if they wanted to (which they don’t.)

Because the oligarchs also control the means of ideological dissemination, you also can’t effectively communicate either the problems or good solutions.  Because the oligarchs control the means of political production (ie. the process of producing and nominating political candidates), you can’t get into power the people who would actually want to change the neo-liberal political order (and if by some miracle you could, expect them to be treated as Argentina or Venezuela have been treated or destroyed as Howard Dean was.)

Neo-liberalism is an effective ideology and set of policy prescriptions: not because it produces good outcomes for the majority of people (that’s not its purpose), but because it creates a constituency (oligarchs and their supporters/retainers) who are able to maintain it in power.

All ideologies eventually come to an end, however.  The oligarchs hate real left-wingism far more than they do fascism.  They have crushed the left.  Because no new coherent ideology can arise due to oligarchical control over the mechanisms of dissemination, all that remain are old ideologies.

Given no real and viable left-wing parties to vote for; given the failure of what they are told are left-wing policies (as with Obama being called a left-winger when his economic policy has been to give trillions to oligarchs); people will vote for the only other option: the hard right—the neo-fascists.

They are, at least, against the status quo.  The UK-IP wants to leave the EU.  They want less “free” trade.  And so on.  Given no other option for actual change, people opt for the parties actually offering it, even if those parties are noxious.

And so, the hard right rises because of the failure of the so-called center-left, which is not left wing at all, but is for more slightly less cruel neo-liberalism.

But neo-liberalism cannot be made kind. It is antithetical to one of the fundamental purpose sof neo-liberalism, which is to drive down wage rises and inflation by playing jurisdictions against each other.

And so the hard right rises.

Remember, the economies in Germany and Italy under Hitler and Mussolini, for ordinary people, improved immensely.  (Unless you were a Jew, gay, a socialist, a gypsy, etc…  But that’s a price those who won’t pay it, are willing to pay.)


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Why Nations Can’t Resist Austerity

Free trade, as practiced, is designed to destroy local autonomy by making nations dependent on foreign goods, and by removing decision making from democratically elected bodies and pushing them to transnational tribunals, secret courts and laws which cannot be changed without opting out from treaties, something most countries are reluctant to do, because they need the trade once they are enmeshed.

Keynes believed that most production of basics should be local: you should manufacture most of what your country needs, in your country.  You should also, ideally, be able to feed your own population.

If you can’t make what you need or what your people (and more importantly, elites) really want, then you’re screwed.  In the modern world you need hydrocarbons, you need food, and you need the machinery which turns hydrocarbons into the industrialized lifestyle.

Your prosperous citizens probably want food your country doesn’t produce: summer vegetables in winter, possibly meat you can’t provide in large enough quantities, and so on.  They want electronic goods like smartphones that due to patents are quite expensive, and which you probably can’t make domestically.

Your elites want a vacation in Paris, a home in London, a German car, a French mistress, a New York Apartment, and a variety of luxuries that their own country doesn’t make.

If you want or need these things; if you do not have a taste for what your country can produce, in terms of basics and luxuries; if you do not ensure your country can feed itself, generate electricity and make cars or other forms of transit, you MUST do what those who control the trade regime want you to, or you will find yourself cut off from all these things.

Distributed production of necessities (which includes basic lifestyle goods and luxuries and machine goods) is anti-democratic and anti-national control in a world where the primary decision making units which are amenable to pressure from the commons, whether democratic or not, is exerted almost entirely on national and local units.

If you want to not do austerity when the Troika demands it, you must be in a position to tell the Troika to go stuff itself. If you have made yourself vulnerable, by losing your ability to feed yourself; by not developing local industry or exporting it; by your citizens acquiring a a perceived or real need for foreign goods; or by your local elites wanting to be “transnational elites” who want foreign luxuries and who feel as at home in Paris, New York and London as in their own country, then you cannot refuse to do what those who control the trade and international monetary regime tell you to do.

This is always the devil’s bargain offered in international regimes: “you can get all the stuff we have if only you open up”.  It’s true, and for many countries it works for a while.  The less you had, the shorter period it works for (countries who only have to be convinced to give up their ability to feed themselves by switching to cash crops and forcing subsistence farmers get a few years), but once you’ve given away your autonomy, the deal will, at some point, always turn bad.  Those with the whip hand, will always eventually drive you down unless you have as much power over them as they have over you.

And knowing that your elites are no longer yours, but theirs, they will always find someone to do it for them, because your elites will be eager to sell you out for the flat in New York, the vacations in the south of France, the German automobile, the French mistress, the Swiss boarding school for their children, and for the fine luxury goods their own country cannot make.

If you get yourself into this position, you must overthrow your elites, and you must figure out how to become independent again.  You must make deals with other blocs: the Russians and the Chinese, for the transition period, and figure out how to move your production of what matters back to local, and if you no longer can, how to feed yourself. You must inculcate in your elites and peoples a desire for what you make locally – local lovers, the food of your nation, the luxuries you can produce.


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The Rapid Destructon of Countries

My regular readers have no doubt noticed my near-obsession with the Ukrainian crisis.  Part of it is the risk of real war, but most of it is that the Ukraine is yet another country being destroyed.  Even if it had been kept together, even if the Russians had taken the Maidan coup sitting down, the coup signaled the Ukraine’s destruction, because it meant that IMF austerity, meaning slashing pensions 50%, increasing gas prices by 50%, selling off the industries worth selling and the agricultural land which is the most valuable thing the Ukraine has, would occur.  Massive debt would be piled onto Ukraine, at higher rates than Russia was offering, and the economy would be looted.

Since 9/11 we have been destroying countries at a ferocious rate: Iraq, Iran (sanctions there are brutal), Libya (far better off under Qaddafi), Syria, Southern Lebanon (their industry destroyed by Israel in 2006).  After the financial crisis Portugal, Spain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Cyprus to a lesser or greater degree. Even core economies like Britain and the US, while not technically in recession, are gripped by what is a long Depression, with real standards of living for median individuals dropping, health metrics dropping and employment and wages never recovering to pre-crisis levels.  Egypt has been turned into an even worse despotism than under Mubarak, Turkey is sliding down the road to an elected kleptocratic dictatorship, Thailand is in permanent turmoil.

To be sure, some have been destroyed militarily, some by internal political strife and others by austerity but the collapse or decline is clear in all cases.  The so-called Arab Spring was to a large extent caused by the financial crisis and the soaring food prices which came in its wake.  Syria was deliberately destabilized by the West, and as bad as Assad is (he appears to just love torture), the situation is worse under him than before. Qaddafi, likewise no Saint, ran Libya better than the current near anarchy.

Though not as bad, the austerity driven destruction of countries has been even more common.  Austerity is crazy, it says “take on vastly more debt and cut spending”, but what happens is that the economy contracts due to the reduced spending, so that the debt becomes even more injurious, and the country then has to borrow even more money.  Greece is more in debt, with a smaller economy, than when the Troika started “helping” them.

This destruction is done for the benefit of various elites: the south of Europe has been shoved into poverty so that financial elites didn’t lose their money, and so that they can make even more money off loans effectively guaranteed by the IMF, ECB and northern European governments.

The correct thing to do, of course, was to force financial elites to take their losses, toss those who had engaged in fraud in jail (which is to say almost all of the executive class), and bail out ordinary workers.  The ONLY country to do this was Iceland.

Our current world system destroys countries.  And it is destroying more and more.  It drives their populations into penury, it takes whatever they have and distributes it to oligarchs, and if a country irritates our Lords and Masters too much, it will be destroyed by economic sanctions or direct or indirect military force.

This is all of a piece: the reason food prices are so high is because of financialization: because all the money has flooded to the top, and there is no money to properly oversee expansion of agriculture and to subsidize food (which is far cheaper to do than the bailouts were, so it’s not a case of being “unaffordable.”

Understand this: if you are not a member of the oligarchy, the financial elite, or a senior member of the security state, your well-being is of little interest to our Lords and Masters.  Oh, they might prefer that you don’t die, or go hungry (they might not), but if your well-being conflicts with the desires of the oligarchy, as it did during the bailouts, they will not hesitate to cut you dead.

If you’re unfortunate enough to live in a non-core country, well, even your ability to eat, or not have a nasty militia beat you, rape your daughter, and put drill holes in your son, let alone have a good job or be able to live with dignity, is of little interest to them.  This is not hyperbole, it is an exact description of how those who live in non-core countries have been treated, repeatedly.

And remember, the core is shrinking. Greeks and Italians and Cypriots and Spaniards and Irish—they thought they were members of core countries; that they were Europeans, that Germany and France and the ECB and the IMF wouldn’t destroy their countries.

The core is shrinking: the moment elites neither need nor fear you, you are disposable.  Are you willing to do anything, absolutely anything, to stay on the inside? If you are, and you can claw your way over the bodies of the others competing for the shrinking spots, well, you may live a good life as a retainer.  Otherwise one day you too will be surplus to needs.

One day sooner than you think.


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The Age of the Obvious: Thomas Piketty’s Capital

The economist Thomas Piketty, who along with Emmanuel Saez has done great work on the concentration of income, has written his magnum opus, Capital(pdf).  The title is an obvious reference to Marx’s Kapital, and the book is a huge survey of 200 years of economic history, specifically relating to what Piketty calls Capital.  It is here, as Galbraith points out in his excellent review, where Piketty starts moving away from Marx: for Piketty, capital is just anything that is valued in money: capital is wealth, whereas for Marx it is whatever allows Capitalists to control the means of production, and thus workers.

Piketty’s argument is that:

1) If national income grows slower than capital (wealth, really), then capital tends to concentrate.  If income grow faster than wealth, then capital tends to disperse.

2) Capital grows faster the more of it you have: so if you have a hundred thousand, you get more returns than someone with ten thousand.  A million gets less than a billion, and so on.  This contradicts orthodox economics, with its claim of diminishing returns, but it is a common sense observation of how the world actually works today, and Marx noted the concentration of money and capital in his time.

3) The long term growth rate for wages over the last 200 years has been about 2 to 2.5% (tech increase of a bit over 1%+ population increase).  The long term growth rate for capital (money/wealth), has been 4 to 5%.  There have been periods and places where this is not true, but it is generally true.

4) Wealth is wiped out by war, financial collapse and depression, or it is controlled by confiscatory taxation and inflation.  The good period after the war is thus created by the wars and depression, and the policies that followed from them.

5) The Industrial Revolution created a period where income grew faster than wealth.  That period was extended by the cataclysms of the early 20th century.  But the gains from the Industrial Revolution are mostly gone: once every part of the World has gone through it (China, India, Africa), that’s it—you return to an era where wealth grows faster than income and inequality is thus permanently high.

This is an important book: it marshals a lot of data, and puts it together in a coherent model.

But the model is not as new as it might seem. Piketty spends a lot of time distancing himself from Marx, and well he should, because this argument, even with a different model of what Capital is than Marx used, isn’t that much different from Marx’s view on the concentration of Capital, nor is his view of post – WWII history particularly different from a fairly orthodox reading of it: the financial collapse, depression, and two World Wars destroyed the wealth and thus power of the rich, and made it possible to put in place policies which were hostile to their interests and which made it so that more of national income was distributed to ordinary people.

Low inflation is bad for ordinary people (who tend to borrow) and good for the wealthy (who tend to lend).  Policies since 1979 have favored crushing inflation.  This has increased the power of the rich.

High marginal taxation is good for ordinary people (they don’t pay the taxes, they get the benefit of the money, and the rich are kept weak).

There is no fundamental analysis of the mode of production or the mode of violence, either, and without those you cannot determine how much power various groups have to take a share of the national income.  How many people are needed for production?  How many people are needed for violence?

Piketty’s book is important primarily because it proves the obvious, and this is the age of the obvious.  You must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, what any educated individual already should know because there is a lot of money in obfuscating the obvious. It pays very well to be a conservative ideologue spouting off about economic freedom, because very rich people want the government to make them rich, bail them out, and not tax them.

Political decisions are important: in 1929 Hoover, the Fed, and later FDR did not bail out the rich.  They were allowed to lose their money, and thus much of their power.  That was a decision: another decision could have been made, and in 2008 it was made: the rich were bailed out.  It was made differently in 2008 because the rich have spent the last 80 odd years obsessing over what went wrong in 1929 that allowed FDR, the New Deal and everything which flowed from it. Ben Bernanke’s entire career was “how do we make sure the rich don’t lose their money so that FDR doesn’t happen.”  He was chosen to be the Fed Chairman precisely to ensure that the next Great Crash, which everyone who wasn’t an idiot knew was coming, wouldn’t wipe out the rich.

The cost of his actions is the actual drop in ordinary Americans wealth and income, the impoverishment of the south of Europe, the austerity in England, the failed Arab Spring, the Ukrainian Maidan revolution, and so on.  Yes, a Great Depression was forstalled, but a long Depression was created instead, and there were other options: other ways to forestall a depression.

History is not inevitable: decisions are made by people that change its outcome.

As for Piketty’s prescription: a wealth tax is fine as far as it goes, but the question isn’t whether the rich should be taxed, the question is how to create a world where they can be taxed.

That question, and questions like how we could increase the technological rate of improvement, increase the power of the commons, allow national policy by dismantling so-called “free trade”, and so on, are not dealt with.

But Piketty’s book is still important, because it proves the obvious beyond a reasonable doubt.  In this it is similiar to the mountain of evidence of climate change.  We can now say that climate change is happening and anyone who denies it is a fool.  Likewise we can now say that allowing returns on unearned wealth to be higher than labor income, in a capitalist economy, leads to high inequality and doesn’t improve the economy.  We should have known that already; we did know it already; now it has been proved to the point where we can say anyone who denies it is a fool.


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You will never, again, have a good economy for ordinary people so long as this continues

Reuters on Ben Bernanke’s post-Fed career:

Bernanke was paid at least $250,000 for his first public speaking engagement, in Abu Dhabi, since stepping down in January, according to sources familiar with the matter. That compares to his 2013 paycheck of $199,700, and the appearance was only the first of three around the world this week.’ (two weeks ago)

Ben Bernanke bailed out investors to the tune of trillions of dollars.  Now they are making sure he, personally, will be rich, so that no Federal Reserve Chairman ever thinks of not putting them first, second and last.

You cannot, and will not, have a good egalitarian economy while this sort of thing goes on.  It is not possible.  Those who have been in such positions should be given a very nice pension (say 5x median income) and not allowed to keep any additional earnings for the rest of their lives.

I can hear fools squealing already “gold plated pensions” and “paying them not to work” and “not fair”.

It would be far cheaper than the status quo.  Far, far cheaper.  Right now people like Ben Bernanke and Bill Clinton (worth 100 million after repealing Glass-Stegall and pushing through NAFTA) don’t work for you, they work for the people who will make them rich after they leave office.  That costs you far far more than a generous pension for the rest of their lives.


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The Golden Rule: Why Bankers Are In Charge

In our society, we determine much behaviour, and most economic behaviour, through the medium of money. This is not universal: many societies have not used money as their main means of determining who received goods, but we do.

If someone receives money for doing something, it is also a message which says “do more of this.” The more money, the stronger the message.

The most potent message, and the strongest effect on behaviour, is when someone has the right to create money. Money, in our society, is created by borrowing. Banks and other financial institutions which have the right to lend thus have the right to create money. They have to have some form of collateral, even if that collateral is just an expectation of future earnings “great business idea, we’ll lend you money, and use your expected profits as our collateral.”

This money can be loaned out at multiples of the underlying asset. During the 2000s some brokerages were allowed multipliers (leverage) of over 40X. Even better, often whatever you buy with a leveraged loan can then be used as an asset for another round of leverage, leading to extremely high levels of effective leverage.

Some organizations also have access to very low interest rates: they can borrow at close to “prime” the rate the central bank offers to the very best credit risks. Major banks are amongst those who can borrow at this rate. They can then lend out to other people, again, at a higher interest rate, and with leverage.

If you, personally, could borrow money at 1% annual interest rate, and lend out ten times that, do you think you could make a profit? What is your mortgage rate? What is your credit card’s interest rate?

This is as close as it comes to free money, and it takes a special genius to lose money when given these advantages.

The first rule of money is the rule of profits: if a group of people are making more profits than everyone else, they will come to control more and more of the society. Not only can they buy up other companies, but they can afford to donate to politicians, give politicians and regulators cushy jobs between government gigs, and they can afford to set up think tanks and endow university chairs and buy newspapers and television stations and so on in order to control the dissemination of ideas.

In theory profits are supposed to be self-limiting. If an industry makes more money than other industries, outsiders should see an opportunity, start up businesses, compete and drive down prices.

In the real world, that doesn’t happen as often as it does in theory, because you can’t just start up a bank with access to the Central Bank’s window. You can’t easily start up new pharmaceutical businesses, because it’s vastly expensive and there are huge regulatory hurdles. And when it does happen, why would you compete? Why not take the outsize profits? Why would you drive down profits? How does that benefit you?

The other check is supposed to be diminishing returns. The more money you have, the harder it is to find something to invest in: you run out of mortgages, or you run out of businesses to invest in which can make those returns. This does work, somewhat. It is at the heart of why the financial collapse happened: there weren’t enough assets for all the money chasing them, so widespread fraud occurred (liars loans, for example) and many people were given loans who couldn’t pay them back, while artificial assets were created which were not worth what they were sold for. Eventually this collapsed, but because the financial industry had already bought the political world, they were bailed out at a cost of trillions.

Behaviour you reward, is repeated. Bankers made millions of dollars, personally, in bonuses. This told them that what they did was valued, and they should do more of it. They did.

The fact that Wall Street and Fleet Street salaries and bonuses were so large also made financial executives not care about the future. When you make millions in a few years: enough to live on for the rest of your life, in high style, it isn’t important if you’re driving the firm to bankruptcy. You don’t need the bank or the firm to be there, you’ve already made your mint.

Now, as a politician, if you do what the financial industry (or any other wealth industry) wants, they donate to your reelection campaign. They make sure your friends and family have jobs. They invite you to the best parties. And if you’re defeated, and have voted the right way, well, they’ll take care of you afterwards as well, with a cushy job. Bill Clinton, who deregulated Wall Street, is worth 100 million dollars.

Because bankers control a lot of money, they control what other people do.


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