Monthly Archives: January 2011

Obama Nation- Throw Social Security, Medicare under the Electric Bus

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“You’re the type that would complain if they hung you with a new rope.”

Hopefully this entire administration and Congress will go down in history as the last out of paradigm regime that nearly succeeded in turning the US into the next Japan, which now includes the drive to become a net exporter, before the lights came on and every lived happily ever after.

Meanwhile, it’s more of the same, with Paul Ryan ratcheting up the fear mongering after taking the hand off from President Obama, specifically stating we were going to be the next Greece if didn’t take immediate proactive measures.

And, of course, absolutely not a peep of criticism from any politician, the media, or headline economist- hawk or dove- on that operational absurdity.

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India hikes interest rates to contain inflation

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The higher rates won’t cure their inflation problem, and instead fuel nominal growth and add to the problem.

What does generally happen, however, is inflation helps the automatic fiscal stabilizers work to bring down the govt deficit, which is hailed as a good thing, as it unknowingly undermines aggregate demand and causes a slowdown.

India hikes interest rates to contain inflation

January 25 (AP) — India’s central bank raised key interest rates Tuesday for the seventh time in little over a year as it attempts to contain inflation. “Inflation is clearly the dominant concern,” the Reserve Bank of India said in its latest review of monetary policy. India’s inflation rate jumped to 8.4 percent in December as prices climbed for fruit, vegetables, manufactured goods and fuel. The Reserve Bank of India hiked the repo rate to 6.50 percent from 6.25 percent. It raised the reverse repo rate to 5.50 percent. It kept the cash reserve ratio at 6 percent. The Indian economy reverted to its pre-crisis trajectory, with growth in the first half of the fiscal year ending March 2011 estimated at 8.9 percent, it said.

Debt as a percentage of GDP ratio:

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State of the Union

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Some of the risks listed at year end seem to be coming on line, including slower growth out of China, euro austerity keeping a lid on demand in the euro zone, and US fiscal balance too tight for anything more than very modest top line growth, given current credit conditions and the negative income effects of near 0 interest rate policy and QE.

With crude oil continuing to soften, and Brent looking to close the gap with WTI by falling more than WTI, the dollar continues to gain fundamental support as it becomes ‘harder to get’ overseas.

And falling gold and silver prices, along with most other commodities, are showing a world that is sensitive to those indicators that QE2 doesn’t look to have been at all inflationary, leaving many people with positions they otherwise would not have taken (long gold, silver, commodity currencies, and other implied ‘short dollar’ positions).

The risk here is that the dollar gets very strong, and commodities very weak, which can lead to a US equity correction as well as a strong bond rally, all contributing to a deflationary malaise, as the theme remains:

Because we believe we can be the next Greece, we continue to work to turn ourselves into the next Japan

Which includes a misguided national effort to export our way to prosperity, which is likely to be featured by the President tonight.

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Obama and GE working together

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“For America to compete around the world, we need to export more goods around the world. That’s where the customers are. It’s that simple,” Obama said.

Yes, and only because he and our Congress are grossly overtaxing us for the size govt we have along with our current credit and trade conditions.

GE is a major exporter, and it should now be obvious that the exporters like GE are in control of policy, promoting their interests at the expense of the macro economy.

By fostering fear of being the next Greece, they continue to shepherd us into becoming the next Japan.

Obama all for creating jobs in India

By IANS

January 23 — Showcasing a new General Electric(GE) deal with India, U.S. President Barack Obama has called for a new effort to put the economy into job-creation “overdrive” by boosting American exports.

“For America to compete around the world, we need to export more goods around the world. That’s where the customers are. It’s that simple,” Obama said visiting the birthplace of GE founded by inventor Thomas Edison at Schenectady, New York. The Schenectady plant now makes power-generating turbines that the company markets globally, including a recent sale in India.

“We’re going back to Thomas Edison’s principles. We’re going to build stuff and invent stuff,” said Obama as he named General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt to head an advisory panel on job creation. The panel will be called the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, a successor to the Economic Recovery Advisory Board that was chaired by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

“The economy is in a different place” than two years ago, Obama told workers at Schenectady. But, though the economy is again growing after a deep recession, the President acknowledged that “it’s not growing fast enough yet.”

Obama held up exports as a core goal, arguing that for a decade the U.S. economy has relied too heavily on debt-financed consumption by its own citizens.

“As I was walking through the plant, you guys had put up some handy signs so I knew what I was looking at. And I noticed on all of them they said, this is going to Kuwait; this is going to India; this is going to Saudi Arabia.”

“That’s where the customers are, and we want to sell them products made here in America,” Obama said.

“That’s why I travelled to India a few months ago – and Jeff was there with us – where our businesses were able to reach agreement to export $10 billion in goods and services to India. And that’s going to lead to another 50,000 jobs here in the U.S.

“Part of the reason I wanted to come to this plant is because this plant is what that trip was all about. As part of the deal we struck in India, GE is going sell advanced turbines – the ones you guys make – to generate power at a plant in Samalkot, India.

“Most of you hadn’t heard of Samalkot, but now you need to know about it, because you’re going to be selling to Samalkot, India,” Obama said mentioning the small Andhra Pradesh pilgrim town, 165 km west of Visakhapatnam, at least four times.

“And that new business halfway around the world is going to help support more than 1,200 manufacturing jobs and more than 400 engineering jobs right here in this community-because of that sale,” he said amid repeated applause.

Obama said U.S. firms are “on track” to achieve his goal of doubling exports in a five-year period.

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Greenspan on the gold standard

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Fed Chairman – Alan Greenspan! In an interview with Fox Business: “We have at this particular stage a fiat money which is essentially money printed by a government and it’s usually a central bank which is authorized to do so. Some mechanism has got to be in place that restricts the amount of money which is produced,

Yes, it’s called Congress.

And right now, for the size govt we have, they are grossly over taxing us.

either a gold standard or a currency board, because unless you do that all of history suggest that inflation will take hold with very deleterious effects on economic activity… There are numbers of us, myself included, who strongly believe that we did very well in the 1870 to 1914 period with an international gold standard.” And a further stunner: Greenspan himself wonders if we really need a central bank.

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Angry Irish Voters Ready to Exact Revenge

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Notice that they are angry at the government, not the currency arrangements, as previously discussed.

What’s saving the euro is that it’s not intuitively obvious that the currency arrangements could possibly be part of the problem.

Rates are low, there’s relatively little inflation, and and the foreign exchange value is reasonably strong and stable.

And it makes perfect sense that they are now paying for past govt abuses and policy blunders.

So the widespread dissatisfaction is directed at the national govts in question.

And there is little or no inclination to abandon the euro.

Angry Irish Voters Ready to Exact Revenge

January 21 (Reuters) — Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen’s government, called “The Muppet Show” by one newspaper on Friday, can’t die soon enough for most voters.

espair has turned to fury among Irish people over an economic meltdown that has forced them to swallow ever deeper cutbacks and tax increases, while ministers emerge from their luxury state cars to speak of the country having turned a corner.

Ireland has witnessed no Greek-style riots but voters are impatient for the March 11 election, called by Cowen on Thursday, to exact revenge on the political class.

“We need to hurt them,” said Bernadette, a mother of four and owner of a wine importing business that has cut its staff to three from 15, “Unless you hurt them they won’t pay any attention to you.”

Voters regard the political class as at best complacent and at worst complicit in the nation’s transformation from economic star to euro zone basket case.

Cowen’s Fianna Fail party is set for a record rout in March, according to opinion polls.

While voters are likely to elect the mainstream opposition, some will opt for independents or the hard-left nationalist Sinn Fein party.

“They should all be gone. There should be an immediate general election. Everyone is sick of it, said postal worker Gerard Williams, 43.

“I’ll be voting for independent candidates. The big parties have lost the run of themselves,” Williams said as he walked through St Stephen’s Green in central Dublin.

Outside Cowen’s home county of Offaly, it is difficult to find anyone with a good word to say about him.

In an editorial The Irish Times newspaper despaired: “God Almighty, no one thought it could have got worse! The Government is staggering like a drunken sailor towards collapse.”

The Irish Independent said previous comparisons between Cowen and the captain of the Titanic had been unfair: “Even the captain of the Titanic was able to rearrange the deck chairs.”

Cosy Culture

A botched attempt at a cabinet reshuffle forced Cowen to call the early election following scandals over his drinking habits and questionable choice of golf buddies.

Polls suggest the two main opposition parties – centre-right Fine Gael and centre-left Labour – will form the next coalition government.

But with Fianna Fail set for a hammering the field is also open for independent candidates and Sinn Fein.

Ireland’s crisis has its roots in reckless lending and lax oversight of bankers and property developers, groups actively courted by politicians for donations during the boom years.

Revelations that Cowen played golf with the former chairman of Anglo Irish Bank months before it was taken into state care cemented for many people their view that business and politics enjoyed a cosy culture.

The spectacle of ministers and parliamentarians resigning before the election with large pensions and reports of developers and bankers living well overseas have infuriated those who didn’t buy into the Prada bag culture during the boom years when Ireland was called the “Celtic Tiger” economy.

“It’s the ordinary man in the street, the middle classes, those in the private sector that are paying,” said Marion, 57, who worked in a multinational firm for 30 years.

“I didn’t benefit from the Celtic Tiger. I lived within my means. Will I even get a pension now?”

The downturn has forced Irish people, particularly young graduates, to seek work abroad, a bitter development for people who thought they had seen the back of mass emigration.

“There are no jobs; all of my son’s friends have left,” said Bernadette. “They are leaving because this is not a country to live in anymore. The government looked after the banks. For them, it’s like we don’t exist.”

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Joe Firestone post on sidestepping the debt ceiling issue with Coin Seigniorage

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Joe Firestone has a new post on Coin Seigniorage, where he gives credit to our own Beowolf’s comment on this website.

As far as I’ve been able to determine, it does work operationally. It seems the US Treasury is already legally empowered to simply mint it’s own platinum coin in any denomination it wants and effectively deposit it in its Fed account, rather than sell bonds to the public to fund its Fed account.

This process doesn’t change actual govt spending, so doing it this way doesn’t add to inflation, nor does it change the fact that govt deficit spending adds income and net financial assets to the other, non govt sectors. It’s just that the new financial assets will simply be new reserve balances at the Fed, rather than new Treasury securities (which are also simply accounts at the Fed).

What issuing these coins does do is remove the legal need for the debt ceiling to be raised, and also reduce the amount of outstanding Treasury securities, which is what is called govt debt. So while both reserves and Treasury securities are, functionally, govt liabilities and differ in name (and sometimes duration) only, the headline rhetoric does make that distinction. So technically, this process eliminates the ‘national debt’ and removes any (misguided) notion of solvency risk:

Links to the post on various websites:

Correntewire

Firedoglake

Our Future

Daily Kos

The most discussion is at Kos.


The best comments are at Correntewire.

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macro currency update

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So it looks to me like all the major currencies have somewhat strong fundamentals.

That is, policy is working to make them ‘harder to get.’

EU and UK austerity policies are proactively cutting net govt spending from where it was.

And the EU has figured out that the ECB can fund at will entirely without ‘finance’ concerns, gradually removing the perceived chances of catastrophic defaults and the break up of the currency union with each succeeding intervention.

While higher crude prices are making the $US a bit easier to get offshore, interest rate policy, including QE2, is removing dollars from the non govt sectors that would have otherwise been paid out by the US govt, and domestic credit expansion remains anemic, particularly with regards to housing, the traditional source of ‘borrowing to spend.’ And the international stampede out of the dollar due to unwarranted fears of QE2 is still in the process of getting reversed. This flight took a variety of forms, from selling the dollar vs other currencies to buying gold, silver, and other commodities in general.

China is tightening up on state sponsored lending which makes yuan harder to get as they ramp up their politically motivated struggle to fight inflation.

And there are at least some noises that even India and Brazil seem to be at least leaning towards less inflationary policy, though sometimes misguided.

And while Japan has done a bit of fiscal expansion, and a bit of dollar buying, markets are telling us it hasn’t done enough, at least not yet, as the yen remains firm even after more than a decade of a near 0 rate policy.

All the currencies getting strong at the same time with only minor shifts in relative value is also evidenced by a general deflationary bias in the market place.

And, as previously discussed, this is coming after rising commodity prices have had a chance to bring on higher levels of supply.

Low interest rates have also added their positive supply side effects, as inventory is cheap to hold and capacity cheap to bring on line and keep in reserve.

Historically, private sector credit expansion has kicked in as economies recover, replacing the aggregate demand from government deficit spending, as the automatic fiscal stabilizers work to increase tax payments and reduce fiscal transfers for the likes of unemployment compensation.

This time, however, it seems to be different, with govts. taking proactive measures to contain and reduce deficits rather than continuing the govt. deficit spending until the hand off to private sector credit expansion takes over and the automatic fiscal stabilizers kick in.

In other words, for the size govt we have, we remain grossly over taxed as evidenced by the still massive output gap.

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