Mystery Economic Theater 2010

[garo]

I think Tabbi is bang on target. Zerohedge has its fair share of democrat hating loonies. The financial services industry and the retail traders are full of a certain type of Republican who likes to blame the government for everything and keeps ranting about the need for the government to get out of the way.

It is beyond stupid to say that Fannie and Freddie caused all this. They contributed for sure, but how can you absolve the greed of bankers and real-estate types, the repealing of Glass-Steagall, CDOs, rating agencies and what not.

[ewmayer]

Letter to Bernanke: "Denial is Not a River in Egypt"

Words (almost) fail me ... in a recent speech at an annual academic-economist confab in Atlanta, Banana-Republic Ben denied that the Fed`s post-DotCom-bubble EZ-Money madness and nonfeasance with respect to oversight of lending practices had anything whatsoever to do with the housing bubble (which BR Ben completely failed to recognize for what it was, despite his allegedly vast economic perspicacity). Instead he trotted out the same bogus, diversionary "foreign savings glut" hypothesis favored by his thoroughly discredited predecessor and co-conspirator-in-bubble-blowing, Alan "Mr. Bubble<sup>TM</sup>" Greenspan. Instead of dignifying this latest load of self-serving, delusional codswallop with riposte of my own, I`ll let some other worthy folks do it:

Karl Denninger tears Bernanke a new one in Fed Bubble Blowing: A Study Of Denial.

Mish Shedlock quickly responded with Ben Bernanke Looks In Mirror, Sees Barney Frank

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke is back at it again, pointing the crisis finger at everyone but himself. To be sure there are plenty of congressional clowns deserving of a Babe Ruth style "big point", but the biggest point belongs straight at himself.

The New York Times` David Leonhart (here by way of Mish) asks, Fed Missed This Bubble. Will It See a New One?

If only we’d had more power, we could have kept the financial crisis from getting so bad.

Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, has said it is difficult “to know in real time if an asset price is appropriate or not.”

That has been the position of Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, and other regulators. It explains why Mr. Bernanke and the Obama administration are pushing Congress to give the Fed more authority over financial firms.

So let’s consider what an empowered Fed might have done during the housing bubble, based on the words of the people who were running it.

In 2004, Alan Greenspan, then the chairman, said the rise in home values was “not enough in our judgment to raise major concerns.” In 2005, Mr. Bernanke — then a Bush administration official — said a housing bubble was “a pretty unlikely possibility.” As late as May 2007, he said that Fed officials “do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy.”

The fact that Mr. Bernanke and other regulators still have not explained why they failed to recognize the last bubble is the weakest link in the Fed’s push for more power. It raises the question: Why should Congress, or anyone else, have faith that future Fed officials will recognize the next bubble?

Bloomberg columnist Caroline Baum, in Bernanke’s Ivory Tower Doesn’t Have a Mortgage:

The real fed funds rate was negative from 2002 to 2005, the longest stretch since the 1970s, a decade notable for high inflation and unemployment. The teaser rates lenders offered on ARMs were pretty close to zero when adjusted for inflation.

When you can borrow for free and invest in an asset whose price can only go up (at least that was the perception about home prices), guess what happens? Credit is misallocated. Lending standards decline. Everyone wants in.

Yes, monetary policy is a blunt instrument, as Bernanke pointed out. Keep rates too low -- create too much money -- and sometimes that money chases goods and services prices, which we designate as inflation. Other times it piles into certain assets, which we call a bubble. By all rights the Fed should be indifferent as to which of the two outcomes its interest-rate policies engender. Neither is good for the economy.

Tax Receipts Put the Lie to Xmas Spending

The MSM dutifully reported the alleged consumer spending figures fed to them by the various retail trade groups and the government, without doing the obvious sanity check of seeing whether sales tax receipts confirmed the story. Well, they most assuredly do not:

From The Wall Street Examiner:

Month to date tax receipts are now in for the entire month of December. They’re down 7.7% from December 2008, which is exactly the same rate of decline as November’s. We know that the TBAC and Treasury officials were not anticipating that in their debt sales forecast for the first quarter. They had assumed that a recovery was taking root and would continue to do so.

But I thought that we were in the midst of a strong economic recovery? So say all the pundits, all the Tout TV folks, everyone...

So how come I can't find it in the sales tax receipts of the states, and I also can't find it in the Federal tax receipts?

Doesn't recovery mean more spending, some hiring, or at least people getting more hours even if they don't have new jobs?

If this is all happening, as we're being told incessantly on ToutTV, shouldn't tax receipts be going up?

Remember, last December was pretty much the bottom, or so the pundits have told us. We keep hearing that sales are improving, durable goods are improving, employers aren't firing any more (and indeed many people are looking for a positive employment number for December and a positive revision to +ve for November) - and yet none of that makes any sense - especially employment turning to an actual positive number - if Treasury tax receipts are actually down on a y/o/y basis from last December.

My Comment: Denninger's article above also has a nice discussion of some of the "unintended consequences" related to states taking government stimulus money.

[ewmayer]

Geithner Told AIG to Withhold Material Information

Now see for ordinary folks (and even ordinary CEOs of mega-corporations) this sort of thing would be - what`s the word I`m looking for? ... ah yes - "illegal", but for top officials of the then-Bush administration (who have since been further promoted by Obama) it`s clear that silly old "rule of law" does not apply:

Geithner’s Fed Told AIG to Limit Swaps Disclosure:

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Perspectives on "A Lost Decade":

The Washington Post had a wonderful summing-up of the just-past decade (which I like to call the "naughties", and yes, I *know* it "really doesn't end for another year" ... but I switched from Fortran-style unit-offset to zero-offset array-indexing years ago, so for folks like me, it did indeed end last Thursday night):

Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy, workers:

It was, according to a wide range of data, a lost decade for American workers. The decade began in a moment of triumphalism -- there was a current of thought among economists in 1999 that recessions were a thing of the past. By the end, there were two, bookends to a debt-driven expansion that was neither robust nor sustainable.

There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.

Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999 -- and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.

And the net worth of American households -- the value of their houses, retirement funds and other assets minus debts -- has also declined when adjusted for inflation, compared with sharp gains in every previous decade since data were initially collected in the 1950s.

State of the State Addresses in CA, NY

Governor Paterson: "New York Runs Like a Payday Loan Operation":

In a strikingly blunt State of the State address, Gov. David A. Paterson chastised the lawmakers seated before him on Wednesday, saying they had spent the state into near-ruin and stood by as a plague of political corruption destroyed New Yorkers’ trust in their government.

In State of the State address, Arnold Schwarzenegger unveils an ambitious wish list: California legislators quickly dismiss some of his key proposals for practical or ideological reasons; the state budget crisis also will pose a huge hurdle.

My Comment: Schwarzenegger's speech (which I watched yesterday evening via C-SPAN rebroadcast) was much more optimistic that Paterson`s - he even proposed several state fiscal stimulus programs (without saying were the money might possibly come from) - but given the dire state of the budget and the CA legislature`s dysfunctionality (now made worse by Arnie being seen as a "lame duck" governor, of the "I don`t need to work with this guy, I just need to wait another year and he`s gone" variety), I fear "optimistic" is likely going to prove a euphemism for "delusional". Consider these startling numbers, many of which were highlighted in Schwarzenegger`s speech:

- After one round of massive cuts to education, social services, imposition of mandatory 10% workday reduction for many state workers via furloughs (which the state employee unions are fighting tooth and nail ... they recently got a judge to declare the furloughs unconstitutional, which will likely prove a Pyrrhic victory because it makes massive layoffs almost inevitable) and the papering-over of nearly $10 billion of last year`s deficit via accounting gimmicks and borrowing, the state is still bleeding red ink at a rate of roughly $2 billion per month.

- State tax revenues are in freefall mode, having plunged 25% in 2009

- In 1980, 10% of the general fund went to higher education and 3% went to prisons; Today 11% goes to prisons and only 7.5% goes to higher education. (California spends an average $50,000 per prisoner per year, 50% more than any comparable large state).

- The cost for state employee pensions is up 2,000 percent in the last ten years, while revenues have only increased by 24 percent.(You read that right ... public employee pension costs have exploded 20-fold in just 10 years ... and that cost is still rising, while revenues plunge).

- The elephant in the room is public-employee costs (salaries, benefits and pensions), but even given the above disastrous, fiscally ruinous numbers, Schwarzenegger said "for current employees these pensions cannot be changed -- either legally or morally. We cannot break the promises we already made. It is a done deal. But we are about to get run over by a locomotive. We can see the light coming at us." In other words, you see the locomotive coming, but because you made an irresponsible set of promises, you are committed to standing on the tracks, but hope "the legislature will work with you to raise money to build a second set of tracks onto which to divert the train before it runs it you over." Good luck with that.

[ewmayer]

I`ll leave it to one of the ZeroHedge regulars to sum up today`s major U.S. economic news (I added some Bloomberg and commentary-from-financial-windbag links to the text):

consumer credit plunges, historic.

cali declares state of fiscal emergency.

jobless report this a.m. horrible.

market goes up.

An audit of the FED is no longer needed. These types of events have happened so many times over the past several months that it is obvious that no human being with a rational mind AND THEIR OWN MONEY AT RISK would be buying long.

I'm serious, I no longer need to support an audit of the Fed. I've seen all the proof that I need. Don't forget to watch the futures late sunday nite, early monday morning. they are up 80% of the time and that is where the gains are made.

they are purposely creating yet another (echo) bubble, it is not economically productive but simply a way to stealthily recap the banks.

Urge your friends and loved ones to get out of US equities, it is a Ponzi scheme.

And speaking of Ponzi schemes .... Serious questions have been floating around about how the USGovt plans to get someone to buy $2 trillion in new IOU issuance this year, given that foreigners are no longer net buyers, and even bubble-head Ben and his boys over at the Fed are feeling the strain on their magic money-printing press. Well, we just found out about one scam they are going to try, which is to force everyone`s 401(k) money into Treasuries by way of "encouraging the purchase of annuities".


There Are Now More Government Employees than Goods-Producing Workers in the US

For the first time there are decidedly more government employees than goods-producing (manufacturing) employees in the US according to the Department of Labor.

This chart is from The Mess That Greenspan Made here.

It is interesting to think about this in terms of health care, pension plans, job security, employee loyalty, and so forth.

The reason for this is not the growth of government jobs but rather the drastic shrinkage in US based manufacturing employment while government employment remains resilient. As a percent of the population, the number of government employees is now about 9% which is slightly lower than it was in the 1970's.

The Service sector dominates. There is a nice chart showing goods-producing, government, service, and non-employed percentages from EconomPicData here.

US corporations have been offshoring jobs for many years, in part due to the structural problems of benefits and environmental costs in a developed nation and Asian mercantilism. Some of this transfer of employee is due to natural market forces, but a great deal of it is a result of purposeful national policy and trade practices such as currency pegs, for example.

[cheesehead]

Another example of how economic recession impacts government in ways that recall political slogans:

"Grim Reality: Weak Economy Is Draining Funds For Indigent Burials"

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/...ease_rece.html

and

"More Unclaimed Bodies As Economy Impacts Funerals"

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=122312597

. . .

... In Oregon, demand on the indigent burial fund was so high last year, the Legislature had to nearly triple fees on death certificates to keep the fund solvent.

As Crocodile Dundee might remark to conservatives,

You call the estate tax a death tax? No, but triple fees on death certificates -- that's a "death tax".

[garo]

Transcript of an interesting interview with two Mother Jones journalists on Bill Moyers Journal.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01...anscript3.html

[ewmayer]

Barry Ritholtz features an article from the Yale Journal on Regulation:

The Wages of Failure: Executive Compensation at Bear and Lehman, Pre-Collapse:

The standard narrative of the meltdown of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers assumes that the wealth of the top executives of these firms was largely wiped out along with their firms. In the ongoing debate about regulatory responses to the financial crisis, commentators have used this assumed fact as a basis for dismissing both the role of compensation structures in inducing risk-taking and the potential value of reforming such structures. This paper provides a case study of compensation at Bear Stearns and Lehman during 2000-2008 and concludes that this assumed fact is incorrect.

We find that the top-five executive teams of these firms cashed out large amounts of
performance-based compensation during the 2000-2008 period. During this period, they were able to cash out large amounts of bonus compensation that was not clawed back when the firms collapsed, as well as to pocket large amounts from selling shares. Overall, we estimate that the top executive teams of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers derived cash flows of about $1.4 billion and $1 billion respectively from cash bonuses and equity sales during 2000-2008. These cash flows substantially exceeded the value of the executives’ initial holdings in the beginning of the period, and the executives’ net payoffs for the period were thus decidedly positive.

My Comment: BR also notes that this kind of pathologically misaligned exec comp structure pretty much became the norm for Big Finance in the past several decades.


Chavez Devalues Venezuelan Currency by 50%, Threatens To Seize Businesses Which Raise Prices

Venezuela devalued its currency by half yesterday, the first such action since March 2005, as President Hugo Chavez seeks to pull the economy from recession amid falling oil revenue.
...
The government, which restricted foreign currency trading in January 2003 following a two-month general strike intended to oust Chavez from power, last devalued the currency by about 11 percent in March 2005. The bolivar was also devalued in 2004.

My Comment: Really interesting about that "falling oil revenue", which seems to be occurring despite oil prices (in US$) having more than doubled in the past year and approaching their just-before-the-peak-insanity levels of Spring 2008. How badly must one mismanage one`s economy and oil industry to accomplish that feat? Mish, who like me has thoroughly soured on Obama`s "handling" of the U.S. economic crisis, can`t resist drawing some parallels between Chavez` nationalization of most of the Venezuelan economy and the ongoing nationalization of most of the U.S. economy. At least Chavez has the excuse of being a leftist loonie ... Obama`s excuse that he "inherited this mess" is getting less traction by the day as he actively makes it worse and allows the takeover of the U.S. government by the financial interests to approach its completion.

I wonder if, a full year into his first presidential term, Franklin Roosevelt - for all his government-interventionist-excess faults - was still whining about "the mess he inherited from Herbert Hoover" ... somehow I doubt it. And he most certainly wasn`t doing so while letting a bunch of Wall Street insiders run the Treasury, Fed and his economic-policy team.

[ewmayer]

Originally Posted by garo

Transcript of an interesting interview with two Mother Jones journalists on Bill Moyers Journal.

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01...anscript3.html

Nice interview ... care to share any snips which particularly grabbed you?

-------------

Fed profits: $52 billion in 2009By Colin Barr, senior writer: The Federal Reserve banks made a $52 billion profit in 2009, reaping extra income on the government securities they bought in an effort to stabilize the financial system.

My Comment: That alleged "profit" (inquiring minds are asking "and where did the Treasury get the billions in interest it paid to the Fed?") is dwarfed by the billions in subsidies channeled by the Fed to the banks by way of the alphabet soup of "special lending/liquidity programs" and the losses-to-come on the $Trillion-plus worth of mortgage-backed securities the Fed overpaid for in order to prop up the housing market. The selective, credulous MSM reporting here reminds me of the reporting about all those wonderful taxpayer-backstopped financial firms which "paid back their TARP funds" (after benefiting not only from the biggest government bailout/backstop in world history, followed hard upon by the biggest government-sponsored stock-market pump job in world history), which never mentioned all the ones that have *not* paid back TARP, quite a few of whom never will.

SEC Actively Supporting AIG Bailout Cover-up

SEC Order Helps Maintain AIG Bailout Mystery: It could take until November 2018 to get the full story behind the U.S. bailout of insurance giant American International Group because of an action taken last year by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

My Comment: I honestly wish I could say I am surprised at this.

Federal Reserve "Funded" 91% of U.S. Deficit in 2009

My Comment: ...But don`t you dare call it a Ponzi ... technically it`s a Temporary-Emergency-Bank-Liquidity-Provisioning-Temporary-Emergency-Discount-Lending-Facility-Temporary-Emergency-MBS-Purchasing-Temporary-Emergency-Treasury-Issuance-Absorption-Temporary-Emergency-Quantitative-Easing-Accommodative-Monetary-Policy-For-Growth-Stimulation-Temporary-Emergency-Agency-Purchase-To-Support-Residential-Housing-Market-Temporary-Emergency-CRE-Bond-Purchase-To-Support-Commercial-Real-Estate-Market-Temporary-Emergency-Stock-Index-Futures-Pumping-To-Support-A-Buoyant-Equity-Market-Rebound program, OK?

[garo]

Thanks to taxpayers like you who generously bailed banking from the financial shipwreck it created for itself and for us, by the end of 2009 the industry's compensation pool reached nearly $200 billion. And despite windfall profits, the banks will claim almost $80 billion in tax deductions. And nearly $20 billion of those deductions will go to just three institutions — Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs.

Ah, yes — Goldman Sachs, that paragon of profit and probity — which bet big on the housing bubble and when it popped — presto! — converted itself from an investment firm into a bank so it could get your bailout money. Now consider this: in 2008, Goldman Sachs paid an effective tax rate of just one percent. I'm not making that up — one percent! — while their CEO Lloyd Blankfein pulled down over $40 million. That's God's work, if you can get it. And, believe me, Wall Street bankers know how to get it.

and

Derivatives were at the center of the financial meltdown in 2008. And at first everybody was all ready to regulate derivatives. And the big idea was to put them on an exchange, like a stock exchange, where they're all traded publicly and transparently. What happened was there were corporations — you know, if you're an airline, and you're worried about the price of jet fuel, you might want to buy a hedge. Hedge the price of jet fuel. And so, the airlines and some other companies went to Congress and said, look, those are derivatives, but they shouldn't be traded on the exchange, because that's not the financial stuff that blew up the world. No problem. Everybody pretty much agreed they ought to be exempted from that. But then it's all in how you write the rules. So, the rules got written. And as they slowly got changed, it turns out you've got to define who is an end user. Who is a corporation, as opposed to a bank? And the rules got written and they got written a little more broadly and a little more broadly until eventually if you read the rules right, it looked as though pretty much anybody was an end user. Goldman Sachs would end up being an end user. And 80 percent of the derivatives would have been exempt.

and

Yeah, yeah. It goes a lot deeper. It's what Simon Johnson the chief- former chief economist for the I.M.F., it's what he calls Intellectual Capture. And-

BILL MOYERS: Intellectual Capture.

KEVIN DRUM: Right. It goes beyond regulatory capture, where, say the banks control the S.E.C. That's one thing. Intellectual Capture means that essentially the financial industry has convinced us, you know, in the '50s what was good for General Motors was good for America. Now it's what's good for Wall Street is good for America. And they've somehow convinced us that we shouldn't ask about what's right or what works or what's good for America. We should ask what's productive, what's efficient, what helps grow the economy.

DAVID CORN: This is the Stockholm Syndrome. Where you're hostage starts identifying with the people holding them captive. Americans have been, you know, have been talk- said- told over and over again that if the Dow's going up, if Wall Street's making money, it's good for you.

BILL MOYERS: Often when workers are being laid off. That's-

DAVID CORN: Yeah, but other measurements of the economy aren't taken to- aren't held in such high esteem. And so, when I was talking to members of Congress and pollsters about why there was not more popular, you know, revulsion against Wall Street that was leading to action in Washington, Congressman Brad Sherman — he's a Democrat from California. He led during the whole TARP argument- what he called the skeptics caucus. They were kind of opposed, but they were just raising questions. And he says the problem is that people are told that if you don't serve Wall Street, Americans will be out on the streets fighting for rat meat. That basically the whole-

BILL MOYERS: Rat meat?

DAVID CORN: Rat meat. Those- that's his- those are his words, not mine. I never- think I never would come up with that. With that image. But that- basically, we'd all be out fighting for grub on our own. And that so- what happens is people are — while they're angry at Wall Street, particularly on the, you know, on the corporate compensation front, which is very easy to get angry about. They also are fearful of taking Wall Street on, because they've been taught that if, you know, if the DOW falls, if you take on the big banks, it's going to be bad for all of us. So, it really is this Stockholm Syndrome, where we're forced to identify with people who are holding us hostage without our interest in mind.

[garo]

Hilarious pic:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/01/how-bankers-think/


More revelations about the AIG non-disclosures

The SEC, working hand in glove with AIG, agreed to keep bailout terms sealed, including information on the pass thru to counter parties such as Goldman Sachs at 100 cents on the dollar. This SEC granted “confidential treatment” was agreed to last May, and a “secrecy order” (WTF is that?) will stay in place until November 2018.

An excellent idea from BR

So far, we have learned that Wall Street has become impervious to regulation. Our Parliament of Whores is bought and paid for, well greased by the Street’s lobbyists. Wrap your lips around this big purple legislation and suck. Even the most benign regulation — i.e., a basic disclosure of mortgage costs relative to a plain vanilla, 30 year fixed — has been thwarted.

When lobbying prevents even the most simple of consumer disclosure legislation, you have a broken political system. Such failures can only occur when a democracy has been lost — when corporations own Congress, when the will of the electorate is ignored, when money has utterly corrupted the political process. Have no doubt about this: Our experiment in Democracy is nearly over; we have morphed into a Corporatocracy – a government by and for large corporate interests. Let’s pray it is only temporary.

Pushing regulation through the front door may have become impossible due to this corruption; However, a TBTF tax can be passed because it raises money to close the deficit. It will be difficult to vote against, given all the undirected anger against banks and wall street during big bonus time.

And, here’s the interesting part: It could potentially do more than reduce the deficit — if it goes far enough, it could actually solve the TBTF problem. Exempt small regional banks with under $25 billion in deposits. Make the tax progressive so it become increasingly larger as deposits become greater. $25-$50 billion in deposits is one fee (Let’s say 0.1%, that’s $25 million on $25 billion in assets). Have it scale to the point where its punitive — 1% on a trillion dollars in deposits.

The goal here isn’t to raise money — its to force the TBTF banks to become smaller — to break up the Citigroups and the Bank of Americas. This tax will restore competition to the banking industry.

[ewmayer]

Dubai Debt Crisis Halts Building Of World's Largest Indoor Mountain Range:Representatives from the emirate of Dubai announced with disappointment this week that its recent debt crisis has forced developers to halt construction on the city's long-planned 22-mile-long indoor mountain range.

Gotta love Der Zwiebel...