Keynesian Economics:Fire in the Hole

These days it is getting harder and harder to be bummed by the the endless torrent of bad political and economic news finding its way to my desktop. The sun is returning to Wyoming and the sparkling days and slanting sun on our snow capped peaks is a better physic to the soul than any antidepressant. As a carpenter I find myself at our local lumberyards from time to time. There are few carpenters at the order desks these days and few orders. Jackson Hole has 5 lumber yards and if the foot traffic I see in them is any indication, there will be fewer of them pretty soon. The gossip is that one or two will be gone by the summer . Tax receipts are off , for rent signs are everywhere and rumors abound of local banks and even the local ski hill possibly going under . But thank goodness our Wyoming legislators in Cheyenne are manning the fort promising no change in the country's most lenient DUI laws("You can't take away a guys license. How is he going to get to work!?") and repeal of concealed weapons permits. Now anyone may be able to pack their piece in plain view anywhere they want: "No Obama is gonna take away my gun!"
Our elected, appointed and bought and sold representatives in the District of Corruption continue to shovel manure out the front door to a waiting unquestioning media. Timmy, our Secretary of money said yesterday in his best Keynesianeese Catch 22 logic that "without growth we cannot begin the process of fiscal responsibility." I guess that means we don't get fiscal responsibility any time soon. So he called for more spending, more QE, more stimulus,more debt. The only way to fix a debt laden economy and get back to that Amurican Dream is more shovel ready projects and more money shoveling. That's how these Keynesian imbiciles think. Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz keep telling us that if the current level of stimulus isn't working, that we're not shoveling enough. Their solution to a fiasco caused by debt is to take on more debt, prop up more banks so we can get them loaning again and get the old American consumer consuming again gorging on cheap Chinese junk at Walmart and overpriced american cars and vinyl McMansions in distant suburbs. Thirty years of bogus neoclassical economic assumptions have destroyed what used to be a pretty nice country. But Timmy says we need to continue to borrow to get our growth back. Unless you are JP MorganChase or Gold-in-Sacks. you have to pay interest on what you borrow. To pay back the principal and the interest, you need growth. And what happens if you don't have growth? You can't pay your loan off. Therein lies a fallacy of Lord Keynes and his deluded followers. You cannot just keep assuming debt ad infinitum hoping that growth will retire the debt.Once the debt becomes too large, default will become inevitable. We have had exponential economic and population and productivity growth as a consequence of the industrial age and this growth was achieved by work which was accomplished by ever more efficient machines and technological innovations running on virtually free energy. Growth was easily achieved if for example one man could run a machine which could do the work of 100 men in one day. These machines created prodigious increases in productivity and wealth creation and spawned a generation of economic thinkers who labored to understand and explain the workings of this new economic machine inside the box of the Industrial age but now that the Industrial Age is coming to a close, they continue to use the same models and assumptions and policies that seemed to explain the functions of money and capital and labor within an industrial economy. Most economists ignore the role of fossil energy within such an economy. Without this free seemingly inexhaustible source of energy, the Industrial revolution would not have occurred in the manner that it has. The world population would not be approaching7 Billion people. The US would not be carpeted with strip malls and nail salons and suburban shitboxes linked by millions of miles of asphalt and concrete highways. Simply put, energy facilitated this transformation of society and the disappearance of free fossil energy dooms this economic model and despite the Panglossian promises of Exxon that our fuel will soon come from algae allowing this wondrous profligate dream to continue unabated, simply put, it ain't gonna happen and our something for nothing society will soon be undergoing wrenching changes. Our politicos don't get it, our citizens don't get it. This massive wealth creation has led to an entitlement mentality in which we Americans representing 5% of the population get to consume 30% of the world's resources playing our version of a zero sum wealth and power game. As Americans we are entitled to live and work and travel where we want spend and consume what we want and receive pension and health benefits at the end of our fulfilling lives. We elect leaders who promise these benefits. Again, simply put,it ain't gonna happen. We have millions of unionized state and municipal workers who have been promised unimaginably generous benefits.
Cops and firemen in California with a high school education drawing 6 figure incomes retire on 6 figure incomes in their 40's and 50's with lifetime health benefits.Both the States and the Federal Government have immense unfunded promises totalling over $50 Trillion dollars, a sum as large as the entire GDP of the world. We do not have a government that is telling us that we need to learn to find better and cheaper ways to travel and grow food and clothe and house and educate ourselves. We instead have leaders who tell us to shop and spend and drive and eat. We will consume and borrow our way back to prosperity, and most of the baying sheep just keep grazing and shitting, oblivious to the wolf of economic reality that will soon tear them to pieces.

The Jobs Joke

This depression is starting to get me down, should I say depressed? Washington continues to disgorge lies and bogus statistics. 4th quarter economic growth up 5.7%, unemployment hitting a 5 month low of 9.7%, more green shoots everywhere. Mark Twain talked about lies, damned lies, and statistics! Obama talked about creating jobs and he has a jobs bill which is another in a long line of bad bills and bad policy going back to ronnie and the trickledowners with the usual structure of tax breaks and government guarantees. This is no way to create jobs. Last year the federal government extended and extended unemployment benefits to the tune of $140 Billion. All you have to do to get an unemployment check is to ask for it and prove you don't have a job. You get unemployment for doing nothing. FDR gave money to the long term unemployed but he made them work for it with projects like the CCC. The banks and corporations allied with their Keynesian economists in government and academia have destroyed good jobs in this country . We have been told for decades that free trade and globalization was good for America, that America would be an information and service economy. This was a fraudulent, cruel hoax. In the 1950s, manufacturing contributed 28% to our GDP. Today it is a minuscule 12%. There are far more people employed by Federal, state and local governments whacking away at keyboards and pushing paper than employed in actually making something! Public sector jobs contribute nothing to the wealth of a nation. Banking ,finance, insurance and real estate represented about 14% of our 50's economy and that is now more than doubled. We once had an economy that would extract raw materials from our mines and forests , deliver them to a factory and build things for ourselves and for export. We made things that the world needed and sold them to a world that paid us in cash and gold. In the 1920's the US had amassed a giant trade surplus equal to 5-6% of World GDP. This manufacturing and trade economy provided real jobs for a growing nation. And now what do we have? Only 12% of our economic activity involves making stuff. These same corporations moved their factories to the lowest cost producers overseas encouraged by supportive government laws and tax policy which made fortunes for our corporations at the expense of their US workers. The banks and corporations thorough their shills in government deregulated laws protecting workers and a domestic manufacturing economy. The past decade of the Bush administration's bank and business friendly encouragement finally killed off the goose that laid the golden egg. The banks and corporations now control the government. And with no one looking, these banks looted the world with leveraged bets on bogus innovative instruments and in the process destroyed the world economy. And when their bets finally went sour, they looted the public treasury to cover their losses.
So what can we do to fix this mess? We can remove the influence of these banks and corporations. We can change the laws and tax policy that allowed this debacle to happen. In short, we can remove all the bad guys and replace them with good guys, remove all the bad laws and replace them with good laws. How hard is that? We can then pay off our debts and start anew. Again,how hard is that?
The serious answer is that it would be very hard. In fact in my view, it will be impossible. I am working my way through a wonderful new book entitled "this Time is Different" by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, a history of world economic crises of the past 800 years. One of the little tidbits I discovered in their analysis of financial crises was that once a country has a debt to GDP ratio exceeding about 90%, recovery became prolonged and difficult and in many cases impossible without collapse. Our current official debt as of yesterday was $12.27 Trillion, and our estimated 2009 GDP is $14.4 Trillion. That is a debt/GDP ratio of 85%. But that figure is wrong. You see in the US we have these things called GSE's whose sole purpose is to provide backing for mortgages, and they are in almost all respects government entities, every bit as much as the FAA and Homeland Security. You know them as Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac and the other debt laden entities like Ginny Mae and the FHA. These organizations have presided over the 100% federalization of home ownership in the US and the problem is, they are broke and have had to have their debt covered by the taxpayer.The total debt of these GSE's is now $6.3 Trillion. They have sold this debt to the world. It is owed to the Chinese and Japanese, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and others . It's called agency debt and trades like treasuries. It is real debt and yet is not counted as Federal debt, even though Barak Obama and his Budget Office had promised to include this as federal debt in any of their calculations. To date they have not. So if you include this $6.3 Trillion you have $18.5 Trillion of Federal debt. This is a debt/GDP of 128%, not 85 %, and is far above the 90% danger point of Rogoff and Reinhart. This is fixed debt, not budget deficit. Obama's proposed budget deficit for the next fiscal year is an additional $1.6 Trillion which of course will be added to the Federal debt if he can persuade someone to buy more of our debt. IF he is successful, that will be $20.1 Trillion in debt or 139% of GDP. And trillion dollar deficits loom in the future. No one in their right mind believes that this debt will ever be repaid but in order to not default on this debt the US has to continue to pay interest on this debt which of course represents loans from the Chinese and others. At some point they may stop extending us loans either because they fear US default or because they become mad at us if we say, sell arms to Taiwan, or if their economic bubble pops. If the largest government in the world can't borrow, that American dream could really unravel. These folks in the bond markets might demand much higher interest rates for their perceived risk incurred in lending to a profligate United States. In fact I am betting that this will happen and I have been investing in ETF's which short treasuries. Tim and Benny and Larry know this and someone has leaked plans of their proposal to compel Americans to own some percentage of government debt in their retirement accounts!!!
Nassim Taleb wrote a recent financial best seller called the Black Swan which dealt with the risk of unlikely but catastrophic events. When I look up now I don't see one black swan but a veritable flock of black swans. That we are entering a depression is in my view a virtual certainty, and the economic, political and employment structure of the US is such that the difficult decisions necessary to deal with this predicament are not being made. Time is running out.

Turd in a Punchbowl

Well I have been on vacation from blogtown for a while and it is not because of a lack of material for blog topics. I am just still stunned by scalia and the rest of the misbegotten brethren on the court who finally clarified that corporations are people just like you and me. I'm glad they cleared that up. Does that mean that corporations can be imprisoned and executed like people, waterboarded like people,TAXED like people? Does it mean that if a corp buys another corp that it is engaging in slavery? The repubs are dancing in the aisles and the dems including our dear leader are predicting Armageddon.The fact is that the court has now codified a reality that has existed for decades. To wit the corporations own the government, lock stock and barrel.They write our laws, wage our wars and determine our destiny. The financial corporations with their lobbying arm, The Federal Reserve, control monetary and fiscal policy and to a large extent foreign economic policy by virtue of dominant representation in the IMF and the World Bank.The situation is utterly out of control. We have America's favorite bank led by Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs jamming his financial proboscis into the heart of the taxpayer sucking the life out of our children. This is the same Goldman that received $12.7 billion from Hank and Timmy and Benny in TARP last year while declaring a profit of $12 Billion and paying out exec bonuses of $16 billion paying an effective corporate income tax rate of 1%! The American people are outraged and even Barack is beginning to push back with populist rhetoric shades of Andrew Jackson. But even if you believe in the sincerity of our dear leader, I do not think that this will be change we can believe in. The recently proposed Volker Rule which would in effect reinstate aspects of the depression era Glass-Steagal Act is already meeting stiff opposition from members of the Senate Banking Committee like Richard Shelby(R) of Alabama who fully intend to take care of Goldman and the other phony casinos who pretend to be banks and who contribute heavily Senator Shelby and others. And now that there is no limit to how much money, Shelby can get from Goldman, you can be sure that Richard will do whatever it takes to keep Lloyd and the rest of his blood funnel brigade happy.
There are a few green shoots visible . NY AG Andrew Cuomo yesterday brought civil charges against former Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis for fraud. And today the Italian government also seized assets of BOA in Italy. You may recall that former Goldman CEO and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson referred to BOA and Ken Lewis as "The Turd in the Punchbowl". You will have to ask Hank to elaborate on that one. It's my view that this is a punchbowl full of turds including Hank and Tim and Summers, Rubin,Greenspan, Jamie Dimon et al. And TARP prosecutor Neil Barofsky, one of the few heroes in this mess is promising more indictments . We can only hope.














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Global Worries

The world has a lot of things to worry about at the moment. Unless you were born without mirror neurons, you cannot help being stricken by the horrific images emanating from Haiti, a country which has been in full collapse mode for eons. The US will likely play a big and expensive role bringing aid and equipment to deal with the devastation of a 7.0 magnitude quake. Let us hope that the nation of France ponies up the largest aid package as it was France that imposed onerous reparations on the country after the successful slave rebellion which began just after the French Revolution. These reparations, initially 150 million francs were imposed on former slaves to pay back the loss of lands and slaves of the wealthy French Planters and it took the former French slave colony almost a century to pay back these huge sums, a burden not unlike what was imposed upon post WWI Germany. The US has also occupied Haiti from time to time in attempts to restore order to a country which has been pretty disordered for a long time.
Meanwhile back at the ranch Phil Angelides investigating the financial collapse had his hands full with tongue lashings from the Likes of Lloyd Blankfein of GS because Phil dared to suggest that Goldman Sachs created the type of garbage securities that brought down the world's financial system while secretly running counter bets against their own garbage. Replied god's own worker Lloyd: They were grownups. They should have known better. Lloyd wasn't worried by a little insolent twerp like Phil Angelides, lately of the Callifornia Treasurer's Office. I mean, how much money did Phil make ? He obviously was not doing god's work like Lloyd was with his blood funnel as CEO of Goldman Sachs. Goldman is AAA rated and what is Callifornia's debt rating? Just a few notches above junk bond status. I am not a bond expert but I'll bet that the big municipal bond funds are prohibited from owning munis with a junk bond rating. Speaking again of rating agencies, Fitch, an international rating agency has put out the word three days ago that the debt of the United States may lose its AAA status if Barak and Ben and the rest of the Keynesian katzenjammer kids don't start acting like adults and cutting spending or raising taxes. State and Federal debt will be hitting 94% of US GDP this year. Just 3 years ago in the glory years of the bushwacker it was a mere 57%. This is a very big deal. Why did I have to read about it in a British paper, the Telegraph? Likewise little has been made in the mainstream US media about this debt which is has an average maturity of only 4 years as compared to 7 years in Eurosville and 10 years in the insolvent sovereign island of god save the queen. Something like 40% will have to be refinanced over the next 18 months which will be a problem if China and the Saudis and Japan don't buy these new treasuries. China in fact has already cut way back on its purchases. It's just released trading surplus with the US fell about 35% in 2009 from $296 billion to $196 billion . China has been spending it's surplus building infrastructure:highways, dams,buildings, railroads,cars, ports and canals. It has also been spending 14% more on oil and purchasing a stunning 80% more iron ore last year. It seems that for some reason the Chinese think that spending these dollars now as fast as they can is a better bet than buying more Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac and Ben Bernanke toilet paper, and who can blame them. The Saudis have also cut way back and are mimicking the Chinese throwing up infrastructure and Refineries and chemical plants. As for the Japanese, well they are not doing so good either. They are starting their third lost decade running unimaginable budget deficits which have been largely funded by their own citizens who now are old and wont be buying any more Japanese bonds. They'll be selling them to buy rice cakes and sushi. Japan could be the big story this year or next. The only sizable country now running bigger budget deficits than Japan is, you guessed it: the good ole US of A. Look at the stunning graph listed above of annual budget deficits in percentage terms. You will see Japan running immense deficits, never less than 35%, and their total debt is approaching 240% of GDP. Now that Japan's export driven economy has hit the wall, it is hard to imagine any way to get cheap financing for Japan's deficits. It remains to be seen if there will be buyers for low interest long duration US debt either. The big buyer of US debt lately has been the Fed. That's right: we are conjuring money out of thin air to buy our own debt. If you can wrap your mind around this, you're a better man than me. The Fed also of course loans money at zero interest to those fine banks that we all love, so that they can buy treasuries yielding 4%. That way these banks don't have to go out and loan money to the public and take the risk that the public will not pay them back. With the money that these banks get for free they can take some of the interest earned and pay out nice fat bonuses to themselves. I'm not making this up. It seems to me that the Fed could just as well loan this money at zero interest to Joe Q Sixpak and let him buy treasuries, or to the Guvnah of Callifornia and bingo! Callifornia is saved along with the treasury auction. What could be simpler? Instead, because the banks own the Fed and the government, they get the free money while the rest of us stand in line at the unemployment office, hide our cars from the repo man and hope that the knock at the door isn't the sheriff serving papers. And now that Barak Ofaker's popularity is going down the toilet because even Joe Pickemuptruck has figured out the basics of this Ponzi casino game, the Pres is pretending to hate the bankers who own him and the legislature lock stock and barrel. The big question is how long can this goofy charade last? So to summarize, we have two countries. One is building roads, power plants. railroads and factories with money they have on hand and the other is invading oil producing countries and bombing turbans with toy planes remotely controlled in Langley Virginia using toy money. Which of these two countries has the best chance to succeed?

Vampyroteuthis Infernalis

"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. "
............Matt Taibbi-Rolling Stone
in an article July 13, 2009

I was stunned by the vivid visual imagery of Matt's characterization of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank from hell that everyone loves to hate.............except of course almost everyone in Barak's economic cabinet.
It turns out that there really is a species called the Vampire Squid just as there really is an investment bank headquartered in New York which has captured the White House and the engaging black family within that house. Goldman Sachs may be the most powerful and visible financial superpower controlling the economic destiny of the United States but it is simply one of many, and it perfectly epitomizes the class of arrogant rapacious insatiably greedy money changers now running amok through the swinging doors between Washington and Wall Street. But no matter how many insults and brickbats are hurled at them, old GS and the rest of the ragtag band of financial bandits just keep partying and jamming their blood funnel into the heart of America. And a curious fact I stumbled upon the other day was that this super profitable casino bank was in the 1% income tax bracket in 2008. That is not a misprint. This is the bank that was bailed out by the US taxpayer with the hysterical importuning of it's former CEO Hank Paulson, lately of the bush administration and the US Treasury, the bank whose current CEO Lloyd Blankfein claims he is doing ""god's work," having made many king's ransoms peddling worthless securities all over the globe and then rewarding its worker class with billions and billions in bonuses earned from the destruction of the world's financial system. And they paid 1% income tax. I mean how bad does this have to get before these millionaire financial terrorists are brought to justice? Of course if you accept the premise that GS sets the agenda of the government, I guess they are the government in effect....Check...Mate.

How Wal-Mart is Destroying America

You have to admit that is a provocative blog post. I could have entitled it "How Trade with China is ........."
The reason I chose to come down on the world's largest retailer is because their business model has been the indirect cause of massive job losses in the United States and in China. Their original business motto was "Always low prices." Wal-Mart scours the world for the lowest cost goods to sell in their low cost big box stores and for the past few decades that has largely meant goods from China as any visit to your local Wal-Mart will establish. The company began as a publicly traded company in 1970 but it didn't really accelerate its expansion until the late 70's and 80's which was also not coincidentally the beginning of the Reagan Republican deregulation and Globalization movements. Therein hangs our tale.
There is a long established concept in economics called The Law of Comparative Advantage first elucidated by Robert Torrens and David Ricardo in the second decade of the 19th century. This law refers to the ability of one country to produce something at a lower cost more efficiently than might be the case in another country. This may occur because of an abundance of a particular resource or the skilset of the population. Other countries may also be able to produce the same good but at a higher cost. Countries can take advantage of these differentials to market goods in which they hold a comparative advantage by trading with countries which also hold a comparative advantage in the production of something else. Country A might produce beautiful durable pottery and stoneware while country B might make equally good metal pots and pans. Both countries can then trade to get the best quality and price for the respective goods and thus both countries benefit from the trade. Capital can move within the countries borders among the different industries to facilitate trade and industry but historically capital did not flow freely between countries. Historically the IMF, the WTO, the World Bank and others pushed free trade under the comparative advantage principle but the ascent of the globalization paradigm in the past several decades has killed that model of comparative advantage and replaced it with absolute advantage where production is shifted to the lowest cost producer in the world.Cost is the sole driver of the business. It's the bottom line. How many times have you heard that! Not quality, service, reliability, growth in the company, but cost, low cost and just low cost.That's what Wal-mart says right in the front of it's blue buildings. So what do you get for the lowest cost? JUNK ! But low cost JUNK! We now have a global zero sum game where global corporations able to move capital and companies across borders unimpeded for the purpose of making the greatest possible profit for the corporation by procuring the lowest cost of production. As a result some countries benefit and some do not. These globalized corporations do not concern themselves with the chaos and destruction of native industries that result from this business model. These corporations and especially the financial TBTF have been able to perform what is in effect gang rape of the American middle class by waving free trade slogans and policies that ridicule manufacturing and promoting the new information and financial economy. The result has been that real wages adjusted for inflation for the shrinking middle class has actually contracted over the past thirty years. This has occurred because the US manufacturing base has also been contracting and now represents only 13 % of our economy. You may not care if you are a bankster or an orthopedic surgeon or one of the few winners in this new wunderwirtshaftssystem, but if you are not one of those lucky beneficiaries, you may have noticed that you are circling the drain. My view is that this horrific decline of our middle class economy has been caused by these neoclassical and libertarian economists who came into ascendancy at about the time of the Reagan Administration but which has continued under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Now I will ask again, should you care? Damn straight you should care because this economic damage to the American economy has real true national security implications. Wal-Mart and globalized mega corporations like Wal-Mart have subcontracted our manufacturing economy over to China. Now I don't care if your plastic salad shooters now come from Shanghai instead of Skokie but really vital components like machine tools, auto and truck and plane parts, computer and electronic and communication components and even certain parts in weapons are manufactured overseas. Those overseas workers have real jobs making real things designed by American educated engineers which the world absolutely needs while Americans have jobs in a declining and even frivolous service sector. Does America really need any more human resource or marketing consultants or fast food or retail clerks? More nail salons in strip malls and more geriatric wal-mart greeters luring us into their fluorescent lit junkboxes to buy their always low cost Chinese junk?
Industrial products today are assembled from many parts and the lack of a key component can mean that the product cannot be completed until the part arrives. And if the part comes from a factory in Chongqing, then what? What if the whole product comes from Chongqing? The really annoying feature of having products arriving from China is that they may still retain their American names. In many cases the American corporations moved everything, lock, stock and drill press to China, everything but the workers. American companies using American machinery run by Chinese laborers . The corporations were ably assisted by friendly tax laws devised by their lobbyists lawyers who ensured that the cost of the decommissioning and closure of the factories, the transport of the machinery, and even the travel and entertainment and living expenses of the executives were all deductible corporate expenses. Now instead of having to pay American workers $17/hr and provide pensions and health care, these executives can now pay 70 cents/hour to poor Chinese girls from distant rural villages who are virtually slave labor. And if business falls off, well then you just send those poor girls back to their villages and shutter the factory. Nothing personal, ma'am. Its just business. Oh by the way, you have to buy your own bus ticket.This is virtually what happened when the giant Broyhill furniture factory in the Carolinas moved their furniture manufacturing to China in this last lost decade. So if you're a corporate executive, what's there not to like. Ronnie said it would be like this if we could just get guvment off our backs. What's there not to like, you ask again? Well these corporations have allowed one of history's great wealth transfers from a rich nation to what had been the worlds most populated poor nation. So much has been transferred that the USA is now in debt to China who hold more than $2 trillion of our treasury and agency securities. With all this new found wealth funneled by our corporations into the Communist government of China, they have been able to embark on a massive industrial, military, infrastructure, and energy buildup such that they are now the world's second largest economy. They are scouring the world building refineries and buying exclusive energy contracts from African and South American oil producers who formerly supplied an open world oil market. China has surpassed the US to become the world's largest producer of greenhouse gasses. China is now the world's largest car producing nation, on track this year to produce 13 million vehicles from 117 car and truck plants. It should be kept in mind that our money is being transferred to a nation that has 1.3 billion hard working, rugged and clever people who had little difficulty fighting the giant US military behemoth to a decisive standstill in Korea in the 1950's . The US had a great deal of difficulty defeating the tiny nation of Japan while suffering horrendous losses in the waning years of WW 2. The US military fights wars by dropping bombs .That advantage would be marginalized if we tried it on the Chinese.And nuclear weapons would be virtually useless in a modern great power conflict as was realized by the cold war with Russia. It would be a MAD option. Trying to fight a land war in Asia would be a fools errand. The smart money would be on the Chinese. Our last land war in Asia didn't go too well despite clouds of aircraft and high tech weapons. We were defeated by a pajama clad peasant army on bicycles. I don't think the Chinese Communist government deliberately decided to co opt our manufacturing economy to achieve military, economic and technological superiority but the fact remains that they are well on the way to just that. Our globalization free trade champions on Wall St and K street have handed our economic destiny over to the totalitarian government of China with the acquiescence and cooperation of our own government which of course is no longer a representative democracy any longer but instead an organized cadre of Wall Street Bankers and Global corporations who control the agenda, the bills and the purse strings by virtue of their minions on K Street .The noise from Washington about stimulus measures and restoring jobs and reestablishing lending is posturing and peristaltic flatus wafting across the plain and there is little to indicate that the politicians and bankers or the corporations are changing their modus vivendi as they go about god's work amassing mammon. This corporate dominated Washington political establishment with it's shock troops in the WTO, the IMF, Goldman Sachs run Federal Reserve and the World Bank have brought the citizens of this country to their knees as they live in opulence and suck on the teats of the shrinking udder that once was the milk of the American economy.

The Lost Decade

There is no shortage of news items crossing my desk here in the waning days of the worst decade in our history. The shadow government nominated and elected an inarticulate third rate Texas governor and a paranoid chicken hawk vice president who then chose a coterie of like minded neo conservative ideologues who launched the last imperial war with an ill thought out invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, The stated goal in Bush's words was to establish a stable and permanent democracy, The transparently obvious goal was to control access to the vast oil and gas fields of the region. Almost ten years on, the US remains mired in what conservatively could be described as a debacle which has no end.
This was the decade that the shadow government deregulated the banks who then ran amok through the world spreading their newly devised financial instruments which largely involved the securitization of mortgage assets and the creation of an unregulated and unseen derivatives market. The failure of this business model collapsed the banking system. The same shadow government of private bankers within the Federal Reserve and Treasury then deftly transferred these vast losses to the taxpayer. During this same decade the Chair of the Fed Alan Greenspan inflated a vast asset bubble in real estate and other assets . Credit was extended to anyone with a pulse and consumer, corporate, state,local, municipal, and Federal(including GSEs) debt levels soared such that that debt is now 557% of GDP according to Forbes Magazine.( Current GDP is around $14 Trillion.). If you add in the various entitlement programs, the number soars to 840%. There has been no attempt to address this mountain of debt either by the Bush or Obama administrations.
The US stock market turned in the worst decade in the history of the United States which has had a stock market of sorts since about the 1820's. The worst decade, even worse than all the other financial panics including the decade of the Great Depression. The S&P average yielded -.0.5% annual return for the decade. The Dow hit 10,000 in 1999, about where it is now.
I include this graph of inflation and the Dow during the decade of the Great Depression. You can see the steep cliff dive descent in 1929 followed by a surprising spike of about 60% in 1930, a so called bear market rally. My contention is that we are in a similar bear market rally and I think the next moves are down mirroring the graph shown. All the chess pieces of fiscal and political incompetence are in place and I see no way to avoid the next crash. I have begun to sell off what stocks I own in my dwindling personal retirement position and I have urged everyone I know to do the same. 2010 looks to be an interesting year.