Schwarzenegger Seeks Obama’s Help

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Still haven’t seen any discussion of a per capita revenue distribution to all the States?

$500 per capita would give California maybe $19 billion and be ‘fair’ to all the States.

It would also support aggregate demand (spending power) output and employment, which presumably is a national priority?

Feel free to send this suggestion to your representatives!

Schwarzenegger Seeks Obama’s Help as Budget Gap Defies Solution

By Michael B. Marois and William Selway

Dec. 24 (Bloomberg) — CaliforniaGovernor Arnold Schwarzenegger wants President Barack Obama to help ease large- scale cuts to the most populous U.S. state’s already diminished social programs amid a $21 billion anticipated deficit.

Schwarzenegger, a Republican, plans to ask for relief totaling as much as $8 billion, according to a California official who asked not to be identified because details haven’t been resolved. Instead of seeking one-time stimulus money or a bailout, the state wants the U.S. to reduce mandates and waive rules stipulating minimum expenditures on programs such as indigent health care, the official said.

California has been among the states most affected by the economic recession. It has the lowest credit rating and recorded the nation’s second-highest rate of home foreclosures, trailing only Nevada. Unemployment peaked at 12.5 percent in October amid the loss of 687,700 jobs from the year before, when the jobless figure was 8 percent. Wealth declined as the stock marketlost 40 percent of its value in 2008.


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fixing the economy

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I was asked by a reporter to state how I’d fix the economy in 500 words and replied:

Fixing the Economy

1. A full ‘payroll tax holiday’ where the US Treasury makes all FICA payments for us (15.3%). This will restore ‘spending power’ allowing households to make their mortgage payments, which ‘fixes the banks’ from the ‘bottom up.’ It also helps keep prices down as competitive pressures will cause many businesses to lower prices due to the tax savings even as sales increase.

2. A $500 per capita Federal distribution to all the States to sustain employment in essential services, service debt, and reduce the need for State tax hikes. This can be repeated at perhaps 6 month intervals until GDP surpasses previous high levels at which point state revenues that depend on GDP are restored.

3. A Federally funded $8/hr job for anyone willing and able to work that includes healthcare. The economy will improve rapidly with my first two proposals and the private sector far more readily hires people already working vs people idle and unemployed.
In 2001 Argentina, population 34 million, implemented this proposal, putting to work 2 million people who had never held a ‘real’ job. Within 2 years 750,000 were employed by the private sector.

4. Returning banking to public purpose. The following are disruptive and do not serve no public purpose:
a. No secondary market transactions
b. No proprietary trading
c. No lending vs financial assets
d. No business activities beyond approved lending and providing banking accounts and related services.
e. No contracting in LIBOR, only fed funds.
f. No subsidiaries of any kind.
g. No offshore lending.
h. No contracting in credit default insurance.
5. Federal Reserve- The liability side of banking is not the place for market discipline. The Fed should lend in the fed funds
market to all member banks to ensure permanent liquidity. Demanding collateral from banks is disruptive and redundant, as
the FDIC already regulates and supervises all bank assets.
6. The Treasury should issue nothing longer than 3 month bills. Longer term securities serve to keep long term rates higher than
otherwise.
7. FDIC
a. Remove the $250,000 cap on deposit insurance. Liquidity is no longer an issue when fed funds are available from the Fed.
b. Don’t tax the good banks for losses by bad banks. All that does is raise interest rates.
8. The Treasury should directly fund the housing agencies to eliminate hedging needs and directly target mortgage rates at
desired levels.
9. Homeowners being foreclosed should have the option to stay in their homes at fair market rents with ownership going to the
government at the lower of the mortgage balance or fair market value of the home.
10. Remove the ‘self imposed constraints’ that are disruptive to operations and serve no public purpose.
a. Treasury debt ceiling- Congress already voted for the spending and taxes
b. Allow Treasury ‘overdrafts’ at the Fed. This is left over from the gold standard days and is currently inapplicable.
11. Federal taxes function to regulate aggregate demand, not to raise revenue per se, and therefore should be increased only
to cool down an overheating economy, and not to ‘pay for’ anything.


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Fed reverse repo tests

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Repo testing???

This is downright embarrassing:

Fed’s Reverse Repo Tests Going Well, Industry Group Head Says

By Liz Capo McCormick

Dec. 23 (Bloomberg) — Federal Reservetests of tri-party reverse repurchase agreements have “gone extremely well,” according to the head of the industry group working with the central bank on the transactions.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has drained $990 million in reserves from the banking system through five trials this month as part of its “tri-party reverse repo operational readiness program” announced Nov. 30. The central bank stressed at that time that the tests don’t represent a change in policy and were one tool at its disposal for the eventual withdrawal of the unprecedented monetary stimulus added to the economy.


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more from Geithner and Obama

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Geithner: Tight Lending Threatens US Recovery

Dec. 22 (Reuters) —U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner expressed confidence on Tuesday that the U.S. economy was on a solid recovery path, but said tight lending practices by banks still pose a risk.

He said the Treasury “will do what is necessary” to prevent another severe downturn. “We cannot afford to let the country live again with a risk that we’re going to have another series of events like we had last year,” Geithner said.

So how about a payroll tax holiday, revenue sharing for the states, and funding an $8/hr job for anyone willing and able to work? Maybe this is why:

On December 16, Mr. Obama told a television audience that if his “health care bill” doesn’t pass, “the federal government will go bankrupt” and that “health care costs are going to consume the entire federal budget.”

Someone needs to remind them how, operationally, the federal government actually does spend and lend:

(PELLEY) Is that tax money that the Fed is spending?

(BERNANKE) It’s not tax money. The banks have– accounts with the Fed, much the same way that you have an account in a commercial bank. So, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed.


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Hedge funds bet on rising yields

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Yet another legend (or two) slips into the ‘better lucky than good’ category.

They may be right, but it will be for a different reason:

Top hedge funds bet on big yields rise

By Henry Sender

Dec. 22 (FT) —The recent rise in long-term US interest rates comes as good news for several leading hedge fund managers, including John Paulson, who have positioned their trading books to benefit from higher yields on US Treasury securities.

Mr Paulson, who made big gains earlier this decade by betting against the subprime mortgage market and whose firm, Paulson & Co, manages $33bn, has said he believes government stimulus efforts will inevitably lead to higher inflation and a corresponding rise in rates.

“It will be difficult for the government to withdraw the economic stimulus,” Mr Paulson said in a speech. “An increase in the monetary base leads to an increase in the money supply, which leads to inflation.”

Bond prices fall as yields rise, and Mr Paulson told the Financial Times last week that he has been hoping to benefit in the Treasury market by buying options that would become profitable if rates headed higher. TPG-Axon’s Dinakar Singh has been making similar options trades, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Julian Robertson, the hedge fund manager, has pursued a related strategy, hoping to benefit from a bigger difference between short-term and long-term interest rates, known as a steeper yield curve, a person familiar with his trades said.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which hit a crisis low of 2.055 per cent last year, has moved from 3.2 per cent last month to 3.75 per cent on Tuesday.

Hedge fund managers, however, have been hesitant to engage in short sales of Treasury bonds to profit from the rising yields – and falling prices – because of the Federal Reserve’s heavy involvement in the market. This has led some to buy options – dubbed “high strike receivers” – that would enable them to profit from sharply higher Treasury yields, hedge fund managers say. These trades, which are relatively cheap to execute because they are so out of the money, are based on the thesis that yields could hit 7 or 8 per cent.

“If they are right, and the world ends, they will make a fortune,” said one fund manager who is sceptical of the idea. “If they are wrong, they haven’t lost much.”

Some traders are cautious because many peers lost large sums betting that rates would rise in Japan in the 1990s – as yields fell to less than half a percentage point. The trade was termed the “black widow” because it left so many victims.

“Nobody understood the extent of deflation and economic weakness in Japan,” said Dino Kos of Portales Partners, a research consultancy, who was then a Fed official. “More money was lost on that trade than on any other single trade. Everyone piled in when rates were at 3 per cent and then at 2.5 per cent and then at 2 per cent.”


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Auerback Critiques Bernanke

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Well stated!!

Bernanke doesn’t understand the basic economics of central banking

By Marshall Auerback

Dec 19 — I would like to incorporate a critique of quantitative easing based on Bernanke’s comments in Ed’s post “Quantitative easing and inflation expectations.”

You’ve got to focus on improving the conditions for potential borrowers, not on the banks’ balance sheets. Banks are never reserve constrained. Even the BIS, the central banks’ central bank, understands this. In a recent report, the BIS said the following:

In fact, the level of reserves hardly figures in banks’ lending decisions. The amount of credit outstanding is determined by banks’ willingness to supply loans, based on perceived risk-return trade-offs, and by the demand for those loans. The aggregate availability of bank reserves does not constrain the expansion directly.

It is obvious why this is the case. Loans create deposits which can then be drawn upon by the borrower. No reserves are needed at that stage. Then, as the BIS paper says:

in order to avoid extreme volatility in the interest rate, central banks supply reserves as demanded by the system.

The loan desk of commercial banks have no interaction with the reserve operations of the monetary system as part of their daily tasks. They just take applications from credit worthy customers who seek loans and assess them accordingly and then approve or reject the loans. In approving a loan they instantly create a deposit (a zero net financial asset transaction).

The only thing that constrains the bank loan desks from expanding credit is a lack of credit-worthy applicants, which can originate from the supply side if banks adopt pessimistic assessments or the demand side if credit-worthy customers are loathe to seek loans. Banks are never reserve constrained, so this comment below from Bernanke is either ignorant or deliberately misrepresents the actual operations of the banking system (as opposed to the nonsensical Economics 101 version).

Ultimately, if the economy normalized, and the Fed took no action, the banks would take those reserves, try to lend them out, and they would begin to circulate, and the money supply would start to grow. And then, ultimately, that would create an inflationary risk. So, therefore, as the economy begins to recover, and as we move away from this very weak economic environment, the Federal Reserve is going to have to pull those reserves out of the system.

The mainstream belief is that quantitative easing will stimulate the economy sufficiently to put a brake on the downward spiral of lost production and the increasing unemployment. Quantitative easing merely involves the central bank buying bonds (or other bank assets) in exchange for deposits made by the central bank in the commercial banking system – that is, crediting their reserve accounts. It is commonly claimed that it involves “printing money” to ease a “cash-starved” system, and based on the erroneous belief that the banks need reserves before they can lend and that quantitative easing provides those reserves. That is a major misrepresentation of the way the banking system actually operates.

Bank lending is not “reserve constrained.” Banks lend to any credit worthy customer they can find and then worry about their reserve positions afterward. Even the BIS recognizes this. In reality, if the banks are short of reserves then they borrow from each other in the interbank market or, ultimately, they will borrow from the central bank through the so-called discount window. They are reluctant to use the latter facility because it carries a penalty (higher interest cost). But the reason that the commercial banks are currently not lending much is because they are not convinced there are credit worthy customers on their doorstep.

The current incoherence of our economic policy making could diminish if we had a Fed chairman who understood how the banking system genuinely operated, as well as one who would understanding the linkages between banking lending and fiscal policy, which he persistently downplays (or even worse when he starts calling for long term reforms to balance the Federal government’s budget). It is a national tragedy that this man is being given the chance at another term in office.


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Stiglitz Warns US Economy May Contract Next Year

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Unfortunately, he and all the other deficit doves still can’t refute, and thereby tacitly support, the notions that include ‘we have to borrow money from China to pay for it.

So, while probably right on the prognosis, he remains part of the problem rather than part of the answer as The 7 Deadly Innocent Frauds continue to take their toll.

Stiglitz Warns US Economy May Contract Next Year

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz warned there’s a “significant” chance the U.S. economy will contract in the second half of next year, and urged the government to prepare a second stimulus package to spur job creation.


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Bernanke statements to TIME editor

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This is a recent statement by Chairman Bernanke regarding the ‘exit strategy:’

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke sat down on Dec. 8, 2009 with TIME managing editor Richard Stengel, Time Inc. editor-in-chief John Huey, TIME assistant managing editor Michael Duffy, and TIME senior correspondent Michael Grunwald for a conversation on everything from the state of the economy to the contents of his wallet. Here is an extended, edited transcript of the interview:

Ultimately, if the economy normalized, and the Fed took no action, the banks would take those reserves, try to lend them out, and they would begin to circulate, and the money supply would start to grow. And then, ultimately, that would create an inflationary risk. So, therefore, as the economy begins to recover, and as we move away from this very weak economic environment, the Federal Reserve is going to have to pull those reserves out of the system.

In fact, the causation is that loans create deposits in the banking system. Reserves are not involved. So even if the banks advanced $2T in loans tomorrow, excess reserves of $2T would still be there. Sadly, it seems to be a case of senior Fed officials who no doubt more than understand this obvious point not feeling comfortable enough to discuss it with the Chairman in casual conversation and bring him up to speed on banking and reserve accounting.

He also made the following statements, indicating he had no idea that, functionally, ‘putting capital into banks’ is nothing more than regulatory forbearance, and that the banking system- the some 8,000 regulated and supervised public/private partnerships already in place to do the bidding of the Fed- could have just as easily been used to make the loans and buy the securities in question. Instead, the Fed has burdened itself with the logistics of accounting for the multi thousands of individual mortgage backed securities it currently has in its Maiden Lane and other portfolios that are also currently removing over $50 billion in income from the ‘non govt.’ sectors:

This immediately became relevant, because in mid-October, the crisis heated up again to the point that we thought that we were again within days or hours of a collapse of many of the largest financial firms in the world. It was a dramatic weekend. It was Oct. 10 or 11, Columbus Day weekend, when the Finance Ministers and the central bankers of seven of the largest industrial economies had a meeting here in Washington, which, of course, I attended. Usually, those meetings are very scripted and very dry. In this case, there was palpable concern among the participants that the collapse of their financial system might be just days away, and there was a great deal of discussion about how we, collectively, as the policy makers leading those countries could stop the collapse.

In the days that followed, countries all over the world, particularly the advanced industrial countries, took strong measures to prevent the collapse of the financial systems. That included putting capital into banks; it included preventing the failure of large financial firms; it included guaranteeing the debts of financial firms so they could borrow and keep themselves afloat; it included making short-term loans to firms so that they would have the short-term credit they needed to pay off lenders who were withdrawing their funding. And, again, this was the U.S. doing this, but also many of the most important industrial countries around the world simultaneously, including the U.K., Germany, France, Switzerland and others.


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US Government will go “bankrupt” if health care bill doesn’t pass

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The stupidity of the rhetoric (from both sides) just keeps getting worse:

President Obama: Federal Government ‘Will Go Bankrupt’ if Health Care Costs Are Not Reined In

President Obama told ABC News’ Charles Gibson in an interview that if Congress does not pass health care legislation that will bring down costs, the federal government “will go bankrupt.”

The president laid out a dire scenario of what will happen if his health care reform effort fails.

Gibson Obama“If we don’t pass it, here’s the guarantee….your premiums will go up, your employers are going to load up more costs on you,” he said. “Potentially they’re going to drop your coverage, because they just can’t afford an increase of 25 percent, 30 percent in terms of the costs of providing health care to employees each and every year. “

The president said that the costs of Medicare and Medicaid are on an “unsustainable” trajectory and if there is no action taken to bring them down, “the federal government will go bankrupt.”


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