Tag: finance

Presented with no comment…

 

 

h/t @NihilarianZH

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1h6Gfiu Tyler Durden

Read this short monologue by the Fed’s Dick Fisher from the Fed’s January 2008 meeting. Then read it again, especially if you are the Chairmanwoman of the Fed.

* * *

Well, Mr. Chairman, I’ve seen the discount rate tally. I’ve listened carefully to all my fellow Presidents and to Governor Kohn. I suspect I know what your fellow Governors are going to recommend. I’m in a distinct minority at this table. This weekend, by the way, I searched the newspapers for something to read that didn’t have anything to do with either a rogue French trader or market volatility or what the great second guessers were blabbing forth at the chat show in Davos; and in doing so I happened upon a delightful article. I hope you saw it in the Saturday New York Times on the search for a motto that captures the essence of Britain. My favorite was nemo ne inclune lacet, which very loosely translated, I think, means “never sit on a thistle.” [Laughter] Well, that’s where I am. I’m going to risk sitting on the thistle of opprobrium for my respective colleagues by making the recommendation that we not change the funds rate and that we stay right where we are.

Now, for the record, I would have supported last week’s 75 basis point cut for the reasons that it would put us ahead of the curve and bought adequate insurance against a recession. I told you that directly, Mr. Chairman, and I mentioned it to Governor Kohn as well. Judging by the policy rules on page 21 of the Bluebook, as well as by the adjusted rule that our economist Evan Koenig has developed in Dallas, we are, indeed, ahead of the curve from the Taylor rule standpoint as we meet today with the rate of 3.50. As was mentioned earlier, we have not been docile. We have cut rates 175 basis points in a matter of months, and we’ve taken some new initiatives that I think are constructive and useful. I’d like to see more along the lines of the TAF. To be sure, in the discussion that we had in that emergency meeting, I had the same concerns that President Hoenig expressed in the call, but with the wording change that was put forward by Governor Kroszner I ended up where President Hoenig did. I regret not voicing my discomfort with the penultimate sentence in the statement—the one dealing with appreciable downside risk after the move we took—as I felt that it undercut the potential effect of our decision. During that call, you may recall that I pointed out the pros and cons. I began my intervention on that call by saying that there’s a very fine line between getting ahead of the curve and creating a sense of panic. I also expressed concern of the need to be mindful of inflation, as many have at this table today. There are some critics who say we panicked in response to the market sell-off of that Monday. I do not believe that’s the case, and I don’t believe it’s the case because I find it impossible to believe. As I’ve said repeatedly in this room, other than in theory, markets are not efficient, and on the banks of the Hudson or the Thames or the Yangtze River, you cannot in practice satisfy the stock market or most other markets, including the fed funds futures market, in the middle of a mood swing. When the market is in the depressive phase of what President Lockhart referred to as a bipolar disorder, crafting policy to satisfy it is like feeding Jabba the Hutt—doing so is fruitless, if not dangerous, because it simply will insist upon more.

But attempting to address the pathology of the underlying economy is necessary and righteous, and that’s what we do for a living, and I think we are best sticking with it. We’re talking about the fed funds rate. I liken the fed funds rate to a good single malt whiskey—it takes time to have its ameliorative or stimulative effect. [Laughter]

But I’m also mindful of psychology, and that’s what I want to devote the remainder of my comment to, and then I’ll shut up. My CEO contacts tell me that we’re very close to the “creating panic” line. They wonder if we know something that they do not know, and the result is, in the words of the CEO of AT&T, Randall Stephenson, “You guys are talking us into a recession.” To hedge against that risk is something to them unforeseen, even after they avail themselves of the most sophisticated analysis that money can buy. CEOs are, indeed, doing what one might expect. They are tightening the ship. They’re cutting head counts to lower levels. They’re paring back cap-ex where they can beyond the levels they would otherwise consider appropriate after imputing dire assumptions of the effects of housing. I’m going to quote Tim Eller, whom I consider the most experienced and erudite of the big homebuilders, which is Centex, who told me, “We had just begun to feel that we were getting somewhat close to at least a sandy bottom. Then you cut 75 basis points and add ‘appreciable downside risks to economic growth remain’ in your statement, and it scares the ‘beep’ out of us.” He didn’t use the word “beep.” These are his words, not mine. Imagine scaring a homebuilder already living in hell. The CEOs and CFOs I speak to from Disney to Wal-Mart, to UPS, to Texas Instruments, Cisco, Burlington Northern, Southwest Airlines, Comerica, Frost Bank, even the CEO of the felicitously named Happy State Bank in Texas, repeated this refrain, “You must see something that we simply do not see through our own business eyes.” They do see a slowdown. They are worried about the pratfall, as I like to call it, of housing. They’re well aware of California’s and Florida’s economic implosion and broader hits to consumer welfare across the national map. I recited some data points from those calls yesterday. But they do not see us falling off the table. They worry aloud that by our words and deeds we are inciting the very economic outcome we seek to cut off at the pass by inducing them to further cut costs, defer cap-ex, and take other actions to hedge against risk. They can’t fathom it but assume that we can.

Our Beige Book contacts and the respondents to the business outlook survey in Dallas say pretty much the same thing. One of those actions is to fatten margins by passing on input costs. Now, I mentioned the rail adjustment factor yesterday, and I’m troubled by the comment that I quoted yesterday from the CEO of Tyson Foods. “We have no choice but to raise prices substantially.” I mentioned that Frito-Lay has upped its price increase target for ’08 to 7 percent from 3 percent. Kimberly-Clark notes that it is finding no resistance at all to increasing prices in both its retail and institutional markets, and I mentioned that Wal-Mart’s leaders confirm that, after years of using their price leadership power to deflate or disinflate the price of basic necessities—think about this—from food to shoes to diapers, they plan in 2008 to apply that price leadership to accommodate price increases for 127 million weekly customers. This can’t help but influence inflation expectations among consumers.

I experienced a different kind of price shock two weekends ago, when I went to buy a television so I could watch President Rosengren’s football team demolish President Yellen’s. [Laughter] I was told that they had doubled their delivery and installation fees because of a “fuel surcharge.” Well, I reminded the store clerk that I had been there about the time of the Army-Navy game, around Thanksgiving, and that gas prices had not doubled since the Army-Navy game, and he said, “Mr. Fisher, we’re selling less, and we will take what we can get away with however we can get away with it.” With one-year-forward consumer expectations, according to the Michigan survey, already above 3 percent, everyone from Exxon to Valero to Hunt Oil and our own economists in the Greenbook telling me that oil is likely to stay above $80, and the national average price therefore above $3, this mindset really worries me. I’m going to add one more very troubling little personal anecdote. Driving home from work last week I heard a commercial for Steinway pianos. The essence of the advertisement was that manufacturing costs had increased and that you could buy a piano out of their current inventory at the “old price” that was in place in 2007; but come February 1, there would be sizable price increases, so you’d better purchase your piano quickly. It has been thirty years since I have seen advertisements to go out and buy now before the big expected price increases go into effect. Now, this is an isolated, little bitty incident, but I fear this may be just the beginning of the more pervasive use of this tactic.

Everyone in this room knows how agnostic I am about the predictive value of TIPS and the futures instruments comparing TIPS with nominals, like the five-year, five-year-forward. I’ve sent around an eye popping chart that shows the predictive deficiencies of the professional forecasters that were tracked by the Philadelphia Fed. I know that dealers are telling us that inflation is contained, but I have spent many years in the canyons of Wall Street, and I would caution against their disinterest in the predictions that they offer. When I see that every measure of inflation has turned up, learn from studying the entrails of the last PCE that 83 percent of the items therein experienced a price upswing, consider the shortcomings of the few tools we have for evaluating expectations of future inflation, and then hear from microeconomic operators of the economy that, by golly, we’re going to take what we can while the getting is good, I can’t help but feel that we cannot afford to let our guard down by becoming more accommodative than we have already become with our latest move.

Mr. Chairman, you know because we’ve talked about this that I’ve anguished over this. In fact, to be politically incorrect in a government institution, I have prayed over it. It is not easy to go against the will of the people you have enormous respect for, but I have an honest difference of opinion. I truly believe we have it right at 3½ percent right now. I think that, even with some important language changes, we risk too much by cutting 50 basis points at this juncture and driving the real rate further into what I perceive, even on an expectations-adjusted basis, is getting very close to negative territory. Mr. Chairman, I think we’ve gone as far as is prudent for now, and that 3½ percent, together with the other initiatives we’ve taken to restore liquidity, is sufficient. So I ask for your forbearance in letting me sit on the thistle of recommending no change.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1p2TJQs Tyler Durden

Authored by Yevhen Bystrytsky, originally posted at Project Syndicate,

Acrid black smoke hangs in the air and stings the eye in much of central Kyiv, where state repression is dampening hope of resolving Ukraine’s political crisis. With a truce between the government and the opposition shattered only hours after it came into effect, and with dozens of people reported killed in recent days, any hope for an end to the country’s deepening civil disorder appears to be fading fast.

Yes, a tentative settlement has been reached, following mediation by European Union foreign ministers, with a promise of early elections. But such settlements have been proposed before, and no agreement is likely to gain broad acceptance unless it includes the immediate departure of President Viktor Yanukovich.

In fact, Yanukovich’s government seems prepared to use any and all measures to remain in power. Taking a page from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s playbook, tax police are prosecuting civil-society organizations in the hope of cowing them into silence and irrelevance. Yet, despite such intimidation, Ukrainians from all walks of life have been protesting for three months in cities across the country.

At its heart, this is a struggle between Ukraine’s European-oriented West and its Russian-fixated East for the country’s geopolitical soul. Will Ukraine move closer to the European Union or instead join the Russian-dominated Eurasian Union?

Despite the mounting violence, Ukraine is not on the verge of civil war – at least not yet. But make no mistake: the risk of the country – and its military – splintering is very real, as Yanukovich’s decision to sack Volodymyr Zamana, the head of the armed forces, attests. The conflict needs to be stopped now.

To achieve that, Ukraine needs a transitional government of experts and a new constitution that returns the country to the system that prevailed until a decade ago, with power divided between Parliament and the president. Moreover, a presidential election should be held within three months, with a new parliament voted in soon after.

But Yanukovich has shown that he does not want a negotiated solution. Until the recent surge in violence, it seemed that dialogue might defuse tensions. An amnesty for detained protesters was offered, and protesters agreed to withdraw from government buildings. But when demonstrators fulfilled their promise and evacuated occupied buildings, Yanukovich resorted to force in an effort to end the protests altogether.

Indeed, the police began firing into crowds of demonstrators, and have reportedly killed at least 70 and injured hundreds more. Hospitals are overflowing, and many people are avoiding state clinics, because they are afraid of being detained – or worse. The activist Yuri Verbitsky, a mathematical physicist, was abducted by five men in late January from a Kyiv hospital, where he had gone to seek treatment after being injured by a stun grenade at a demonstration. Verbitsky’s battered body was found the next day in a forest outside the city.

Any prospect for resolving the crisis ultimately depends on regaining citizens’ trust in their police and security forces, which are now viewed by many as an occupying force. To reestablish the public’s confidence, there can be no impunity for those who fired bullets or gave the orders to fire. Officials’ excessive use of force, and the government’s reliance on semi-criminal thugs (known as titushki) to attack protesters, must be thoroughly investigated.

But, even as the ongoing violence makes such an investigation all the more urgent, Ukraine’s prosecutor and courts refuse to act. That is why it is crucial that a high-level international mission – comprising civil-society leaders, the Council of Europe, and the European Union – launch a comprehensive inquiry and pressure Ukraine’s government to cooperate.

The EU and the United States have introduced diplomatic sanctions since the latest round of murderous violence began. This should include a travel ban not only on all officials who ordered, oversaw, or implemented the crackdown, but also on Yanukovich’s political enablers: the oligarchs who are now sitting on the sidelines while spiriting large sums of money out of the country.

Sanctions should be lifted only when a credible investigation into the last three months of violence is permitted and a technocratic government is in place (at which point the EU and its member states should offer concrete economic assistance). Prime Minister Mykola Azarov resigned last month, ostensibly to make way for such a solution. But Yanukovich has refused to take the next step, or to commit to constitutional reforms, which largely explains the protesters’ growing frustration – and their determination to press ahead in the face of brutal repression.

There is a perception in the West that all of Ukraine’s political forces are weak, divided, and corrupt. And there are growing concerns, often fueled by sensationalist media coverage, that far-right forces are gaining the upper hand within the opposition camp. But, though such forces do exist, the vast majority of demonstrators on the Maidans across the country are ordinary people angry about abuse of power, state violence, official impunity, and corruption.

For the venal and vicious elites who have taken control of Ukraine, the real threat is these demonstrators’ perseverance, not the provocations of a radical fringe. Indeed, while I refuse to believe that Ukraine’s march to civil war is unstoppable, I also know that our citizens will never be silenced again.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1l6thoK Tyler Durden

Having thrown in his bearish towel in December, the self-proclaimed "last bear standing" has had a tough January. His plan, to "just be long pretty much anything" appears to have back-fired (for now) as Eclectica reports a 3.6% loss in January – the worst month since the Fund's inception.

 

 

His largest loss was on a long Japan theme (leveraged) and that was somewhat offset by gains in his short emerging markets and short China themes.

 

It appears nothing hs changed from Hendry's December perspective of the inexorable melt-up in developed markets thanks to central bank largesse (247% of NAV exposed to stocks) though he does note "renewed turmoil" which, we suppose, merely supports his thesis longer term.

 

Via Eclectica,

January witnessed renewed turmoil in emerging market equities and currencies. The Fund profited from positions within our Short Emerging Markets and Short China themes (+0.9%).

FX positions within these themes generated a positive return of +0.3% as our “good versus bad EM” FX basket posted gains, largely driven by shorts against the Turkish lira and the Russian ruble. Equities provided an additional +1.4%, led by short exposure to Chinese and EM indices. These gains were partially offset by losses on curve steepeners in Australia and Korea, which were closed out during the month.

Developed market equities suffered sharp sell-offs over the course of the month as emerging market woes spilled over into global risk assets. The Fund’s core Long Developed Markets theme suffered as a result (-2.0%). Developed market equities cost the fund -1.7%, led by weakness in internet and robotic stocks. Additional call option exposure to US and European indices cost a further -1.3%. Equity losses were partially offset by gains in front-end rates in the Euribor and Short Sterling curves, generating a positive contribution of +0.8%.

The largest detractor to performance came from our Long Japan theme (-3.0%). Losses on Nikkei call options were the single biggest drag on performance during January (-2.2%), as the underlying index fell -8.5%. Cash equity positions in Japanese brokers and property shares cost a further -0.8%.

 

 

From Hendry's December letter…

Last bear standing? Not any more…

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking that the last bear is capitulating. It isn't a good sign. Maybe it is that simple. But I think it is a little more complicated. We, and I accept we aren't the first here, sense that US monetary officials may now be willing to subordinate the demands of their own economy to the perils confronting emerging market economies. If that is the case, the great peril is not that the Fed finally tightens monetary policy and US stock prices suddenly tumble from what are very obviously overpriced levels. Would that it were – our curmudgeonly portfolio structure (think dynamic volatility targeting and stop losses) works well with big stock market reversals. Instead the greater peril is that the current backdrop will turn out to mark a rapid acceleration in the ongoing move to the upside. A hint that this might be the case comes from looking back through the 113 years of price data for the Dow Jones Industrial Average. We have done this (so you don't have to), searching along the way for the comparable periods that fit most tightly to the last 500 trading days. What is clear is that periods of trading similar to the one we have seen over the last two years don't often seem to end quietly: they boom big time or they crash. Which is it to be this time? Looking at the markets of 1928, 1982 or even 1998, all of which have scarily similar looking historical charts to today's, we wonder if it won't be both. Starting with the boom bit.

Let's look at what happened in 1998. All sorts of market moving events were shifting the sands. There was the fall out from the Asian Tiger crisis. There was Russia's local currency default. And there were the event risks of the collapse of LTCM and the Y2K scare. Together these things ensured that US monetary policy was set far too loose for the US economy itself. And the result? A parabolic trend to the upside in equities that destroyed anyone who chose to stand in its way. This is what I fear most today: being bearish and so continuing to not make any money even as the monetary authorities shower us with the ill thought-out generosity of their stance and markets melt up. Our resistance of Fed generosity has been pretty costly for all of us so far. To keep resisting could end up being unforgivably costly.

 

As a reminder, here is Hendry's conclusion from his December letter:

Just be long. Pretty much anything.

 

So here's how I understand things now that I am no longer the last bear standing. You should buy equities if you believe many European banks and their sovereign paymasters are insolvent. You should buy shares if you put a higher probability than your peers on the odds of a European democracy rejecting the euro over the course of the next few years. You should be long risk assets if you believe China will have lowered its growth rate from 7% to nearer 5% over the course of the next two years. You should be long US equities if you are worried about the failure of Washington to address its fiscal deficits. And you should buy Japanese assets if you fear that Abenomics will fail to restore the fortunes of Japan (which it probably won't). Hey this is easy…

 

And then it crashed

 

I have not completely lost my senses of course.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/OjQwhO Tyler Durden

The "common knowledge" meme among the uber-paid economists and talking-heads os Wall Street remains that if data is bad, it's the weather's fault; but if data is good, that's the recovery. However, as Lance Roberts explains in this brief clip, the deterioration in US fundamental macro data is not a one-month blip and in fact "the trend of economic growth has clearly been on the decline rather than gaining strength as has been hoped by the majority of economists". Furthermore, he notes (and shows in simple chart form) that the trend of consumer weakness, which makes up 70% of economic growth, has declined to levels that are more normally associated with very slow growth economies. Simply put, it's not the weather stupid, it's the economy.

 

Via Lance Roberts of STA Wealth Management,

I recently sat down with Gerri Willis at Fox Business News, along with Rick Sharga to discuss the economy and whether it is really JUST the weather that is dragging on the economic reports as of late…or is it something else?

This is a subject I have touched on recently stating:

"The recent "polar vortexes" have crippled much of the North and the North East with record low temperatures and severe weather and snow conditions.  The economic impact of just the first polar vortex that hit in December is already calculated to be well above a $10 billion dollar hit to the economy.

 

Surging electricity and heating costs are eating into real disposable incomes which is diverting consumption away from retailers.  Inclement weather has shut down manufacturing activity and will crimp demand for employment and new orders as witnessed by the sharply reduced employment report in December and this week's ISM survey.

 

The chart below is the STA Economic Composite Index (for details on its construction read this) from January 2011 to present.  As you can see, the trend of economic growth has clearly been on the decline rather than gaining strength as has been hoped by the majority of economists.  I have also labeled events that have contributed to the rolling recoveries and slowdowns along the way."

Moreover, as I discuss in the interview below, the trend of consumer weakness, which makes up 70% of economic growth, has declined to levels that are more normally associated with very slow growth economies.

I also agree with Rick's views on the mortgage and housing market.  See my latest housing updates below.

Is Housing Set To Lift Off?

Updating The Housing Recovery

 

 

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/OjL9zn Tyler Durden

The following exchange between then-Kansas Fed president (and current FDIC director) Thomas Hoenig and the Chairsatan, uttered during the historic Sept 16, 2008 FOMC meeting, is of particular importance for four reasons: 1) it appears to be the first instance in the Fed records, where the phrase “too big to fail” is memorialized; 2) it highlights something that has become all too clear by now: in giving to a culture of moral hazard, the Fed is now being openly “played” by the market (read the big banks); 3) it confirms that the Fed has learned zero lessons from the crisis and 4) the thinking behind the “Bernanke (global) Put” is laid out for all to see.

MR. HOENIG. Mr. Chairman, I have thought about this considerably because I think we have come to a time in our history when we have institutions that clearly ought to be and may in fact be too big to fail. I think we tend to react ad hoc during the crisis, and we have no choice at this point. But as you look at the situation, we ought, instead of having a decade of denying too big to fail, to acknowledge it and have a receivership and intervention program that extends some of the concepts of the FDIC but goes beyond that. That is, if you are insolvent, it is not a central bank issue—we are a liquidity provider—and therefore the government comes in. But unlike the GSEs, everyone has to take some hit—the equity holders, certainly the preferred stockholders, also the subordinated-debt holders, and perhaps the senior ones—by assuming a certain amount of loss. They would have immediate access to—pick a number—80 percent. The research would help us pick that number, and they can have access, but the rest becomes a subordinate-subordinate position after the liquidation so that you have still a sense of market discipline in play and you don’t get the system gaming it in that, if you know there’s a bailout coming, you buy the debt and sell the equity short to make a bundle. I think therein lie the distortions that are absolutely detrimental to the long-run health of the economy.

 

Regarding how we go forward, I think we are going to have many lessons from this. Part of the problem has been very lax lending and, obviously now, weaknesses in some of the oversight. Also a history of our reacting from a monetary policy point of view to ease quickly to try to take care of the problem and, therefore, to create a sense in the market of our support has raised some real moral hazard issues that we now need to begin to remedy as we look forward in dealing with future receiverships. We are in a world of too big to fail, and as things have become more concentrated in this episode, it will become even more so.

 

CHAIRMAN BERNANKE. I certainly agree—and the Treasury Secretary and I have said publicly—that we need a strong, well-defined, ex ante, clear regime. But we have the problem now that we don’t have such a regime, and we’re dealing on a daily basis with these very severe consequences. So it is a difficult problem.

 

MR. HOENIG. I think what we did with Lehman was the right thing because we did have a market beginning to play the Treasury and us, and that has some pretty negative consequences as well, which we are now coming to grips with.

Yes Tom, unfortunately 5 years later, not one lesson has been learned, as for the “market playing” you and the Treasury, we too can’t wait for the moment when not even the market can “game” the clueless mandarins at the Marriner Eccles building, and it all comes crashing down…

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1f4yaXh Tyler Durden

The following exchange between then-Kansas Fed president (and current FDIC director) Thomas Hoenig and the Chairsatan, uttered during the historic Sept 16, 2008 FOMC meeting, is of particular importance for four reasons: 1) it appears to be the first instance in the Fed records, where the phrase “too big to fail” is memorialized; 2) it highlights something that has become all too clear by now: in giving to a culture of moral hazard, the Fed is now being openly “played” by the market (read the big banks); 3) it confirms that the Fed has learned zero lessons from the crisis and 4) the thinking behind the “Bernanke (global) Put” is laid out for all to see.

MR. HOENIG. Mr. Chairman, I have thought about this considerably because I think we have come to a time in our history when we have institutions that clearly ought to be and may in fact be too big to fail. I think we tend to react ad hoc during the crisis, and we have no choice at this point. But as you look at the situation, we ought, instead of having a decade of denying too big to fail, to acknowledge it and have a receivership and intervention program that extends some of the concepts of the FDIC but goes beyond that. That is, if you are insolvent, it is not a central bank issue—we are a liquidity provider—and therefore the government comes in. But unlike the GSEs, everyone has to take some hit—the equity holders, certainly the preferred stockholders, also the subordinated-debt holders, and perhaps the senior ones—by assuming a certain amount of loss. They would have immediate access to—pick a number—80 percent. The research would help us pick that number, and they can have access, but the rest becomes a subordinate-subordinate position after the liquidation so that you have still a sense of market discipline in play and you don’t get the system gaming it in that, if you know there’s a bailout coming, you buy the debt and sell the equity short to make a bundle. I think therein lie the distortions that are absolutely detrimental to the long-run health of the economy.

 

Regarding how we go forward, I think we are going to have many lessons from this. Part of the problem has been very lax lending and, obviously now, weaknesses in some of the oversight. Also a history of our reacting from a monetary policy point of view to ease quickly to try to take care of the problem and, therefore, to create a sense in the market of our support has raised some real moral hazard issues that we now need to begin to remedy as we look forward in dealing with future receiverships. We are in a world of too big to fail, and as things have become more concentrated in this episode, it will become even more so.

 

CHAIRMAN BERNANKE. I certainly agree—and the Treasury Secretary and I have said publicly—that we need a strong, well-defined, ex ante, clear regime. But we have the problem now that we don’t have such a regime, and we’re dealing on a daily basis with these very severe consequences. So it is a difficult problem.

 

MR. HOENIG. I think what we did with Lehman was the right thing because we did have a market beginning to play the Treasury and us, and that has some pretty negative consequences as well, which we are now coming to grips with.

Yes Tom, unfortunately 5 years later, not one lesson has been learned, as for the “market playing” you and the Treasury, we too can’t wait for the moment when not even the market can “game” the clueless mandarins at the Marriner Eccles building, and it all comes crashing down…

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1f4yaXh Tyler Durden

Preface: Liberals might assume that it is Republicans who are cheerleaders for global corporations at the expense of government.  But, as shown below, liberal politicians have been just as bad … or worse.

Matt Stoller – who writes for Salon and has contributed to Politico, Alternet, Salon, The Nation and Reuters – knows his way around Washington.

Stoller – a prominent liberal – has scoured the Congressional Record to unearth hidden historical facts.  For example, Stoller has previously shown that the U.S. government push for a “New World Order” is no wacky conspiracy theory, but extensively documented in the Congressional Record.

Now, Stoller uses the Congressional Record to show that “free trade” pacts were always about weakening nation-states to promote rule by multinationals:

Political officials (liberal ones, actually) engaged in an actual campaign to get rid of countries with their pesky parochial interests, and have the whole world managed by global corporations. Yup, this actually was explicit in the 1960s, as opposed to today’s passive aggressive arguments which amount to the same thing.

 

***

 

Liberal internationalists, including people like Chase CEO David Rockefeller and former Undersecretary of State and an architect of 1960s American trade policies George Ball, began pressing for reductions in non-tariff barriers, which they perceived as the next set of trade impediments to pull down. But the idea behind getting rid of these barriers wasn’t about free trade, it was about reorganizing the world so that corporations could manage resources for “the benefit of mankind”. It was a weird utopian vision that you can hear today in the current United States Trade Representative Michael Froman’s speeches. I’ve spoken with Froman about this history, and Froman himself does not seem to know much about it. But he is captive of these ideas, nonetheless, as is much of the elite class. They do not know the original ideology behind what is now just bureaucratic true believer-ism, they just know that free trade is good and right and true.

 

But back to the 1967 hearing. In the opening statement, before a legion of impressive Senators and Congressmen, Ball attacks the very notion of sovereignty. He goes after the idea that “business decisions” could be “frustrated by a multiplicity of different restrictions by relatively small nation states that are based on parochial considerations,” and lauds the multinational corporation as the most perfect structure devised for the benefit of mankind. He also foreshadows our modern world by suggesting that commercial, monetary, and antitrust policies should just be and will inevitably be handled by supranational organizations. [Background.]

Here’s just some of that statement. It really is worth reading, I’ve bolded the surprising parts.

“For the widespread development of the multinational corporation is one of our major accomplishments in the years since the war, though its meaning and importance have not been generally understood. For the first time in history man has at his command an instrument that enables him to employ resource flexibility to meet the needs of peopels all over the world. Today a corporate management in Detroit or New York or London or Dusseldorf may decide that it can best serve the market of country Z by combining the resources of country X with labor and plan facilities in country Y – and it may alter that decision 6 months from now if changes occur in costs or price or transport. It is the ability to look out over the world and freely survey all possible sources of production… that is enabling man to employ the world’s finite stock of resources with a new degree of efficiency for the benefit of all mandkind.

 

But to fulfill its full potential the multinational corporation must be able to operate with little regard for national boundaries – or, in other words, for restrictions imposed by individual national governments.

 

To achieve such a free trading environment we must do far more than merely reduce or eliminate tariffs. We must move in the direction of common fiscal concepts, a common monetary policy, and common ideas of commercial responsibility. Already the economically advanced nations have made some progress in all of these areas through such agencies as the OECD and the committees it has sponsored, the Group of Ten, and the IMF, but we still have a long way to go. In my view, we could steer a faster and more direct course… by agreeing that what we seek at the end of the voyage is the full realization of the benefits of a world economy.

 

Implied in this, of course, is a considerable erosion of the rigid concepts of national sovereignty, but that erosion is taking place every day as national economies grow increasingly interdependent, and I think it desirable that this process be consciously continued. What I am recommending is nothing so unreal and idealistic as a world government, since I have spent too many years in the guerrilla warfare of practical diplomacy to be bemused by utopian visions. But it seems beyond question that modern business – sustained and reinforced by modern technology – has outgrown the constrictive limits of the antiquated political structures in which most of the world is organized, and that itself is a political fact which cannot be ignored. For the explosion of business beyond national borders will tend to create needs and pressures that can help alter political structures to fit the requirements of modern man far more adequately than the present crazy quilt of small national states. And meanwhile, commercial, monetary, and antitrust policies – and even the domiciliary supervision of earth-straddling corporations – will have to be increasingly entrusted to supranational institutions….

 

We will never be able to put the world’s resources to use with full efficiency so long as business decisions are frustrated by a multiplicity of different restrictions by relatively small nation states that are based on parochial considerations, reflect no common philosophy, and are keyed to no common goal.” ***

These ["free trade"] agreements are not and never have been about trade. You simply cannot disentangle colonialism, the American effort to create the European Union, and American trade efforts. After their opening statements, Ball and Rockefeller go on on to talk about how European states need to be wedged into a common monetary union with our trade efforts and that Latin America needs to be managed into prosperity by the US and Africa by Europe. Through such efforts, they thought that the US could put together a global economy over the next thirty years. Thirty years later was 1997, which was exactly when NAFTA was being implemented and China was nearing its entry into the WTO. Impeccable predictions, gents.

 

***

 

I guess it turns out that the conspiracy theorists who believe in UN-controlled black helicopters aren’t as wrong as you might think about trade policy, and not just because United Technologies, which actually makes black helicopters, has endorsed the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

 

***

 

These agreements are about getting rid of national sovereignty, and the people who first pressed for NAFTA were explicit about it. They really did want a global government for corporations.

 

***

 

Ball in particular expressed his idea of a government by the corporations, for the corporations, in order to benefit all mankind. Keep that in mind when you think you’re being paranoid.

 

The full hearing can be downloaded here, though it is a big file.

The bottom line is not that liberals – or conservatives – are evil.

It’s that neither the Democratic or Republican parties reflect the true values of the American people (and see this).

Indeed, a scripted psuedo-war between the parties is often used by the powers-that-be as a way to divide and conquer the American people, so that we are too distracted to stand up to reclaim our power from the idiots in both parties who are only governing for their own profit … and a small handful of their buddies. See this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this and this.

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1f4ycym George Washington

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

It's not just that banks are no longer needed–they pose a needless and potentially catastrophic risk to the nation. To understand why, we need to understand the key characteristics of risk.

The entire banking sector is based on two illusions:

1. Thanks to modern portfolio management, bank debt is now riskless.

2. Technology only enhances banks' tools to skim profits; it does not undermine the fundamental role of banks.

The global financial meltdown of 2008-09 definitively proved riskless bank debt is an illusion. If you want to understand why risk cannot eliminated, please read Benoit Mandelbrot's book The (Mis)Behavior of Markets.

Technology does not just enable high-frequency trading; it enables capital and borrowers to bypass banks entirely. I addressed this yesterday in Banks Are Obsolete: The Entire Parasitic Sector Can Be Eliminated.

Unfortunately for banks, higher education, buggy whip manufacturers, etc., monopoly and propaganda are no match for technology. Just because a system worked in the past in a specific set of technological constraints does not mean it continues to be a practical solution when those technological constraints dissolve.

The current banking system is essentially based on two 19th century legacies. In that bygone era, banks were a repository of accounting expertise (keeping track of multitudes of accounts, interest, etc.) and risk assessment/management expertise (choosing the lowest-risk borrowers).

Both of these functions are now automated. The funny thing about technology is that those threatened by fundamental improvements in technology attempt to harness it to save their industry from extinction. For example, overpriced colleges now charge thousands of dollars for nearly costless massively open online courses (MOOCs) because they retain a monopoly on accreditation (diplomas). Once students are accredited directly–an advancement enabled by technology–colleges' monopoly disappears and so does their raison d'etre.

The same is true of banks. Now that accounting and risk assessment are automated, and borrowers and owners of capital can exchange funds in transparent digital marketplaces, there is no need for banks. But according to banks, only they have the expertise to create riskless debt.

It's not just that banks are no longer needed–they pose a needless and potentially catastrophic risk to the nation. To understand why, we need to understand the key characteristics of risk.

Moral hazard is what happens when people who make bad decisions suffer no consequences. Once decision-makers offload consequence onto others, they are free to make increasingly risky bets, knowing that they will personally suffer no losses if the bets go bad.

The current banking system is defined by moral hazard. "Too big to fail" also means "too big to jail:" no matter how criminal or risky the bank managements' decisions, the decision-makers not only suffered no consequences, they walked away from the smouldering ruins with tens of millions of dollars in personal wealth.
Absent any consequence, the system created perverse incentives to pyramid risky bets and derivatives to increase profits–a substantial share of which flowed directly into the personal accounts of the managers.

The perfection of moral hazard in the current banking system can be illustrated by what happened to the last CEO of Lehman Brother, Richard Fuld: he walked away from the wreckage with $222 million. This is not an outlier; it is the direct result of a system based on moral hazard, too-big-to-jail and perverse incentives to increase systemic risk for personal gain.

And who picked up all the losses? The American taxpayer. Privatize profits, socialize losses: that's the heart of moral hazard.

Concentrating the ability to leverage stupendous systemic bets in a few hands leads to a concentration of risk. Just before America's financial sector imploded, banks had pyramided $2.5 trillion in dodgy mortgages into derivatives and exotic financial instruments with a face value of $35 trillion–14 times the underlying collateral and more than double the size of the U.S. economy.

In a web-enabled transparent exchange of borrowers bidding for capital, the risk is intrinsically dispersed over millions of participants. Not only is risk dispersed, but the consequences of bad decisions and bad bets fall solely to those who made the decision and the bet. This is the foundation of a sound, stable, fair financial system.

In a transparent marketplace of millions of participants, a handful of participants will be unable to acquire enough profit to capture the political process. The present banking system is not just a financial threat to the nation, it is a political threat because its outsized profits enable bankers to capture the regulatory and governance machinery.

chart courtesy of Market Daily Briefing

The problem with concentrating leverage and moral hazard is that risk is also concentrated. And when risk is concentrated rather than dispersed, it inevitably breaks out of the "riskless" corral. This is the foundation of my aphorism: Central planning perfects the power of threats to bypass the system's defenses.

We can understand this dynamic with an analogy to bacteria and antibiotics. By attempting to eliminate the risk of infection by flooding the system with antibiotics, central planning actually perfects the search for bacteria that are immune to the antibiotics. These few bacteria will bypass the system's defenses and destroy the system from within.

The banking/financial sector claims to be eliminating risk, but what it's actually doing is perfecting the threats that will destroy the system from within. Another way to understand this is to look at what happened to home mortgages in the runup to the meltdown of 2008: the "safest" part of the financial sector ended up triggering the collapse of the entire pyramid of risk.

Once we concentrate risk and impose perverse incentives and moral hazard as the foundations of our financial/banking system, then we guarantee the risk will explode out of whatever sector is considered "safe."

Once you eliminate the "risk" of weak bacteria, you perfect the threat that will kill the host.

The banking sector cannot be reformed, for its very nature is to concentrate systemic risk and moral hazard into breeding grounds of systemic collapse. The only way to eliminate the threat posed by banks is to eliminate the banks and replace them with transparent exchanges where borrowers and owners of capital openly bid for yield (interest rates) and capital.

Bankers (and their fellow financial parasites) will claim they are essential and the nation will collapse without them. But this is precisely opposite of reality: the very existence of banks threatens the nation and democracy.

One last happy thought: technology cannot be put back in the bottle. The financial/banking sector wants to use technology to increase its middleman skim, but the technology that is already out of the bottle will dismantle the sector as a function of what technology enables: faster, better, cheaper, with greater transparency, fairness and the proper distribution of risk.

There may well be a place for credit unions and community banks in the spectrum of exchanges, but these localized, decentralized enterprises would be unable to amass dangerous concentrations of risk and political influence in a truly transparent and decentralized system of exchanges.

Of related interest:

Certainty, Complex Systems, and Unintended Consequences (February 14, 2014)

Our Middleman-Skimming Economy (February 11, 2014)

via Zero Hedge http://ift.tt/1f4yaGD Tyler Durden