There’s a remarkable amount of optimism in the US financial media given the underlying health of the economy. Of course, the sort of short term investors that have come to dominate securities trading had been in a “risk on/risk off” pattern for a protracted period before commodities weakness and the remarkable run of the Nikkei has led to some renewed focus on relative values of various macro plays. But the markets are still dominated by an underlying faith in the willingness of central bankers to protect the backs of investors and limit any downside (while, ironically, many of these same investors howl about ZIRP and QE, which were clearly intended to goose the value of financial assets and real estate, with the hope that would lead to more consumer spending).
Economic Slowdown Coming - Even for the Fatcats
And why shouldn’t the professional investors (as opposed to widows and orphans who can no longer rely on low risk bond investments to produce adequate income) be pleased as punch? This recovery may be nothing to write home about, but it sure has served those at the very top of the food chain extremely well. Remember, the income gains in this tepid rebound have gone entirely to the top 1% while the rest of us as a whole have lost ground. And aggregates like that mask increasing distress among at the bottom of the economic ladder. For instance, in New York, a city that has benefitted more from the tender ministrations of the Federal Reserve and Treasury than most cities in the US, the number of poor and near-poor increased in 2011. From the New York Times:
The rise in New York City’s poverty rate as a result of the recession has apparently eased, but not before pushing nearly half of the city’s population into the ranks of the poor or near-poor in 2011, according to an analysis by the Bloomberg administration.
That year, according to the city’s measure, about 46 percent of New Yorkers were making less than 150 percent of the poverty threshold, a benchmark used to describe people who are not officially poor but who still struggle to get by. That represents a rise of more than three percentage points since 2009, when the nation’s recession officially ended.
And with so many left out of the fruits of what growth there has been, there’s a real possibility that the economy will move into stall speed. And the econopundits are finally waking up to the fact that the slowdown in the rest of the world will drag on the US. 25% of S&P earnings come from Europe, for instance. From the Wall Street Journal:
Troubles overseas are threatening the U.S. recovery for the fourth year in a row. This time it’s weakening economies abroad, rather than tumbling financial markets, signaling turbulence ahead.
U.S. exports of goods to the European Union are declining outright. Growth in overall U.S. exports has been sputtering for months, after a three-year postrecession surge. And major U.S. companies are reporting increasingly dour overseas outlooks tied to the recession-plagued euro zone and slowing growth in other leading economies such as China.
The renewed fears of a global slowdown come after months of hope that a stronger recovery was finally taking shape.
“Every now and then you see a glimmer, things seem to improve, and then a little bit of bad news comes,” World Bank chief economist Kaushik Basu said….
And this is before you get to the fact that the gangrene of European austerity is reaching the core, yet the only debate among the powers that be is whether to ease up a bit, not whether to change course completely. And political fissures are widening. Italy is the one country that Germany can’t push around much because it could credibly leave the Eurozone. Luigi Bersani, the center-left leader that the Troika had hoped would win the Italian elections, was ousted by his own party in a series of votes over Parliamentary leadership, leading to the re-election of Giorgio Napolitano as President. This development is seen to favor Berlusconi, who has advocated leaving the eurozone. People came to the streets as the vote was announced and Beppe Grillo called for protests, although he said he could not travel in in time from the north to join.
Now the optimists are touting housing and shale gas as the drivers of recovery. Yet we are at risk of seeing a repeat of the pattern of 2010 through 2011, in which growth in the first three months fades, leading to the question as to how much of that growth was an artifact of seasonal adjustments that don’t fit well with an economy in a balance sheet recession. And the high profit levels that stock mavens have celebrated are part of the problem. We’ve never had a recovery where the labor share of GDP growth had been so low. Some stock-watchers have also pointed to Warren Buffett’s remark in 1999:
In my opinion, you have to be wildly optimistic to believe that corporate profits as a percent of GDP can, for any sustained period, hold much above 6%. One thing keeping the percentage down will be competition, which is alive and well.
What appears to have changed since then is major industries becoming more concentrated (banking is a prime example), leading to oligopolistic pricing, which is rent extraction, pure and simple.
In addition, Paul Krugman reminds us this evening that cutting government spending when the economy is less than robust is a sure path to a slowdown. And he stresses an angle that is often treated as secondary in policy discussions, namely, the way the long-term unemployed are effectively permanently unemployed. The usual excuse offered is that their skills have become stale, but Krugman contends that the real issue is pure and simple prejudice:
The key question is whether workers who have been unemployed for a long time eventually come to be seen as unemployable, tainted goods that nobody will buy. This could happen because their work skills atrophy, but a more likely reason is that potential employers assume that something must be wrong with people who can’t find a job, even if the real reason is simply the terrible economy. And there is, unfortunately, growing evidence that the tainting of the long-term unemployed is happening as we speak.
One piece of evidence comes from the relationship between job openings and unemployment. Normally these two numbers move inversely: the more job openings, the fewer Americans out of work. And this traditional relationship remains true if we look at short-term unemployment. But as William Dickens and Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University recently showed, the relationship has broken down for the long-term unemployed: a rising number of job openings doesn’t seem to do much to reduce their numbers. It’s as if employers don’t even bother looking at anyone who has been out of work for a long time.
To test this hypothesis, Mr. Ghayad then did an experiment, sending out résumés describing the qualifications and employment history of 4,800 fictitious workers. Who got called back? The answer was that workers who reported having been unemployed for six months or more got very few callbacks, even when all their other qualifications were better than those of workers who did attract employer interest.
So we are indeed creating a permanent class of jobless Americans.
Another open question is the odd continued rise of stock prices even as corporate earnings weaken. Why are investors paying more for companies whose earnings are declining in aggregate? In normal bull markets, you see a new leadership group emerge, and late in cycle, investors increasingly favor conservative stocks. This time the leaders are defensive plays, high quality companies that pay healthy dividends. While bulls say that this is predictable given ZIPR, we’ve had ZIPR for years now. Why should these stocks be worth more now?
Now of course, the short answer is simple: it’s the momentum, stupid. Many fundamentally-oriented investors have been licking their wounds. And the nature of momentum-driven investing is that it can work longer than more sober-minded souls would think possible. When this disconnect ends is anyone’s guess. But markets like this suggest that even more caution than usual is warranted.
In Italy, A Bold New Populist Plan Led By a Comedian Fires Up a Country
Comedian Beppe Grillo was surprised himself when his Five Star Movement got 8.7 million votes in the Italian general election of February 24-25th. His movement is now the biggest single party in the chamber of deputies, says The Guardian, which makes him “a kingmaker in a hung parliament.”
Grillo’s is the party of “no.” In a candidacy based on satire, he organized an annual "V‑Day Celebration," the "V" standing for vaffanculo (“f—k off"). He rejects the status quo—all the existing parties and their monopoly control of politics, jobs, and financing—and seeks a referendum on all international treaties, including NATO membership, free trade agreements and the Euro.
"If we get into parliament,” says Grillo, “we would bring the old system down, not because we would enjoy doing so but because the system is rotten." Critics fear, and supporters hope, that if his party succeeds, it could break the Euro system.
But being against everything, says Mike Whitney in Counterpunch, is not a platform:
"To govern, one needs ideas and a strategy for implementing those ideas. Grillo’s team has neither. They are defined more in terms of the things they are against than things they are for. It’s fine to want to “throw the bums out”, but that won’t put people back to work or boost growth or end the slump. Without a coherent plan to govern, M5S could end up in the political trash heap, along with their right-wing predecessors, the Tea Party."
Steve Colatrella, who lives in Italy and also has an article in Counterpunch on the Grillo phenomenon, has a different take on the surprise win. He says Grillo does have a platform of positive proposals. Besides rejecting all the existing parties and treaties, Grillo’s program includes the following:
It is a platform that could actually work. Austerity has been tested for a decade in the Eurozone and has failed, while the proposals in Grillo’s plan have been tested in other countries and have succeeded.
Default: Lessons from Iceland and South America
Default on the public debt has been pulled off quite successfully in Iceland, Argentina, Ecuador, and Russia, among other countries. Whitney cites a clip from Grillo’s blog suggesting that this is also the way out for Italy:
The public debt has not been growing in recent years because of too much expenditure . . . Between 1980 and 2011, spending was lower than the tax revenue by 484 billion (thus we have been really virtuous) but the interest payments (on the debt of 2,141 billion) that we had to pay in that period have made us poor. In the last 20 years, GDP has been growing slowly, while the debt has exploded.
. . . [S]peculators . . . are contributing to price falls so as to bring about higher interest rates. It’s the usurer’s technique. Thus the debt becomes an opportunity to maximize earnings in the market at the expense of the nation. . . . If financial powerbrokers use speculation to increase their earnings and force governments to pay the highest possible interest rates, the result is recession for the State that’s in debt as well as their loss of sovereignty.
. . . There are alternatives. These are being put into effect by some countries in South America and by Iceland. . . . The risk is that we are going to reach default in any case with the devaluation of the debt, and the Nation impoverished and on its knees. [Beppe Grillo blog]
Bank Nationalization: China Shows What Can Be Done
Grillo’s second proposal, nationalizing the banks, has also been tested and proven elsewhere, most notably in China. In an April 2012 article in The American Conservative titled “China’s Rise, America’s Fall,” Ron Unz observes:
During the three decades to 2010, China achieved perhaps the most rapid sustained rate of economic development in the history of the human species, with its real economy growing almost 40-fold between 1978 and 2010. In 1978, America’s economy was 15 times larger, but according to most international estimates, China is now set to surpass America’s total economic output within just another few years.
According to Eamonn Fingleton in In The Jaws of the Dragon (2009), the fountain that feeds this tide is a strong public banking sector:
Capitalism's triumph in China has been proclaimed in countless books in recent years. . . . But . . . the higher reaches of its economy remain comprehensively controlled in a way that is the antithesis of everything we associate with Western capitalism. The key to this control is the Chinese banking system . . . [which is] not only state-owned but, as in other East Asian miracle economies, functions overtly as a major tool of the central government’s industrial policy.
Guaranteed Basic Income—Not Just Welfare
Grillo’s third proposal, a guaranteed basic income, is not just an off-the-wall, utopian idea either. A national dividend has been urged by the “Social Credit” school of monetary reform for nearly a century, and the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network has held a dozen annual conferences. They feel that a guaranteed basic income is the key to keeping modern, highly productive economies humming.
In Europe, the proposal is being pursued not just by Grillo’s southern European party but by the sober Swiss of the north. An initiative to establish a new federal law for an unconditional basic income was formally introduced in Switzerland in April 2012. The idea consists of giving to all citizens a monthly income that is neither means-tested nor work-related. Under the Swiss referendum system of direct democracy, if the initiative gathers more than 100,000 signatures before October 2013, the Federal Assembly is required to look into it.
Colatrella does not say where Grillo plans to get the money for Italy’s guaranteed basic income, but in Social Credit theory, it would simply be issued outright by the government; and Grillo, who has an accounting background, evidently agrees with that approach to funding. He said in a presentation available on YouTube:
The Bank of Italy a private join-stock company, ownership comprises 10 insurance companies, 10 foundations, and 10 banks, that are all joint-stock companies . . . They issue the money out of thin air and lend it to us. It’s the State who is supposed to issue it. We need money to work. The State should say: “There’s scarcity of money? I’ll issue some and put it into circulation. Money is plentiful? I’ll withdraw and burn some of it.” . . . Money is needed to keep prices stable and to let us work.
The Key to a Thriving Economy
Major C.H. Douglas, the thought leader of the Social Credit movement, argued that the economy routinely produces more goods and services than consumers have the money to purchase, because workers collectively do not get paid enough to cover the cost of the things they make. This is true because of external costs such as interest paid to banks, and because some portion of the national income is stashed in savings accounts, investment accounts, and under mattresses rather than spent on the GDP.
To fill what Social Crediters call “the gap,” so that “demand” rises to meet “supply,” additional money needs to be gotten into the circulating money supply. Douglas recommended doing it with a national dividend for everyone, an entitlement by “grace” rather than “works,” something that was necessary just to raise purchasing power enough to cover the products on the market.
In the 1930s and 1940s, critics of Social Credit called it “funny money” and said it would merely inflate the money supply. The critics prevailed, and the Social Credit solution has not had much chance to be tested. But the possibilities were demonstrated in New Zealand during the Great Depression, when a state housing project was funded with credit issued by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the nationalized central bank. According to New Zealand commentator Kerry Bolton, this one measure was sufficient to resolve 75% of unemployment in the midst of the Great Depression.
Bolton notes that this was achieved without causing inflation. When new money is used to create new goods and services, supply rises along with demand and prices remain stable; but the “demand” has to come first. No business owner will invest in more capacity or production without first seeing a demand. No demand, no new jobs and no economic expansion.
The Need to Restore Economic Sovereignty
The money for a guaranteed basic income could be created by a nationalized central bank in the same way that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand did it, and that central bank “quantitative easing” (QE) is created out of nothing on a computer screen today. The problem with today’s QE is that it has not gotten money into the pockets of consumers. The money has gotten—and can get—no further than the reserve accounts of banks, as explained here and here. A dividend paid directly to consumers would be “quantitative easing” for the people.
A basic income guarantee paid for with central bank credit would not be “welfare” but would eliminate the need for welfare. It would be social security for all, replacing social security payments, unemployment insurance, and welfare taxes. It could also replace much of the consumer debt that is choking the private economy, growing exponentially at usurious compound interest rates.
As Grillo points out, it is not the cost of government but the cost of money itself that has bankrupted Italy. If the country wishes to free itself from the shackles of debt and restore the prosperity it once had, it will need to take back its monetary sovereignty and issue its own money, either directly or through its own nationalized central bank. If Grillo's party comes to power and follows through with his platform, those shackles on the Italian economy might actually be released.