Timing is Everything

Once again we have come to a crossroads in American history where the future will be shaped by politics rather than rational decision making and as usual the Achilles heal will be the past rationale that the US economy is so resilient that whatever decision is made will either be the right one or we’ll have the time to adjust it and everything will work itself out.

I am of course speaking of the US Budget Deficit, which is growing at an astronomical rate for several reasons. On May 15th the US deficit will reach an unrealistic 14.8 Trillion Dollars, this does not include SSI nor Medicare, whose trusts were breached during the Reagan administration in the 80′s. Nor will it include the reality of the Federal Reserves unbelievable holdings of $2 Trillion in still toxic subprime mortgage securities. It will mainly be centered around the bankers and corporations lobbying for their share of a quickly depleting dollar.

The idea that the US economy could never suffer a irreparable hit is the long standing idea that we are America and has no other basis in fact, but lets just weigh that against some truth. The US trade deficit is way to high, and this is a massive liquidity leak, so to speak. The Fed Chief is fudging number that don’t agree with the worlds foremost investors, which has a huge effect on investor confidence, and he seems to be measuring inflation against numbers on paper and not the commodities they purchase. Keynesian philosophy only really works when you have a supply side surplus and excluding food and energy from core inflation is part of that philosophy giving us a false sense of inflation, which can be rated as high as 10% when you take this and other factors into consideration.

In 1971 when the US went off the gold standard gold was $35 an ounce and if we were to rate the US dollars buying power we can see, looking at golds current $1500 an ounce price, that the dollars purchasing power has faded horribly.

We are still seeing adjustments in housing, which for a time, became a meter for the dollars purchasing power, and prices could very well fall back to pre-1980′s levels exposing the system that built the inflated sense of wealth of converting assets into debt. And now the fact of inertia gets to come front and center stage for the final act to answer the question, “can a debt based society beat the odds the past has proven time and time again?”.

The strongest facts, which will likely be overlooked in this scenario of political posturing, will likely be the need to restore the fading confidence in the dollar and a truly responsible fiscal plan to get us back to a long term solvent state. In the Book, “This Time is Different”, the authors point out several indications that have been consistent in the collapse of past fiat currency based economies, and the most prevalent to me seems to be the confidence factor that makes their treasuries a solid investment, and when investors are only interested in 4 and 6 month treasuries, you can practically count the days on their confidence.

The Second Law of Hyper-Inflation

It’s been a couple of years now since the original ripple of the Subprime Market Shift. I am choosing to call it a shift because ever since it occurred we have been steadily moving toward the point of no return. Simply put, the Fed response to the economy over the last 2 years has had a profound effect on the progress and seriousness of what’s happening in the World’s Economy.

The most recent event in the saga has been the slow response to raise interest rates amid a rush of market activity. On paper it looks great, “Highly residual market roars back with a flood of investor cash.” sounds good right? Well without getting into a math quiz prep, lets just look at the basics. In the last 2 years the stock market has gained back 60-65% of it’s pre-subprime shift, while unemployment has very quickly gotten worse, but slowing. Consumer spending is erratic, which means impulsive and not a trend, but rather a whim.

The main problem isn’t any one of these, and there are more I haven’t mentioned. The real problem is that prices over the last 4 years have skyrocketed in many areas of the economy, while some of these are seeing deflation. Much of this inflation has to do directly with the prices of energy. It has effected everything from shipping to food cost, which are the two biggest burdens on an economy. The US Economy was built on cheap food and cheap fuel. It has a hard time thinking outside of that box, and has been excluded as a model type for inflationary scaling. Normally it fluctuates with supplies, but supplies are limited now and the pressure of demand is not letting up, but excelling.

During the peak of the credit crunch part of the shift many people failed to notice that supplies of rice had dried up. During that time China stopped exporting rice and actually imported it for the first time in history. India, the second largest supplier of rice to the world’s markets as well stopped exporting rice. The Philippines could not get 75,000,000 tons from any one country, while a wheat rust began spreading across Africa and the Middle East. All this will put real pressure on the populational scope of possibilities. How many is too many? In any case both energy and food are real factors and can no longer be looked at as separate from core inflation. It must now be balanced.

These factors are mixing to provide an unstable rate of inflation. The argument against this might be that the economy had suffered infrastructural damage and without TARP and keeping interest low The economy could stall and loose any momentum it has gained by our interventions. Frankly I think loosing all of the exisiting banks that jumped on the derivatives bandwagon would not have been such a huge loss. Loosing GM, who is still pushing big trucks and probably helping with the anti-Toyota campaign can go into the dung heap if you ask me. It would be nice to live in a place where oil company and auto maker bedfellow’s didn’t orchestrate our environment economically.

But what to do about Ben. Obama, after having hindsight to call on, stuck with Ben. Congress approved Ben, and if you ask me; I see Ben as part of the problem at it’s crux. You can’t blame Congress for wanting more American’s to own their own homes, regardless of what Fox News might say, and you can’t blame Alen Greenspan for ignoring what shouldn’t have been such a big problem had the SEC asked for clear disclosure from the banks and investment houses on their inventory of subprime investments. In your mind you think of these derivatives as somewhat safe considering the houses were real, that the securities were representing real value. The problem was they were popular raising the value way above the physical value of the homes. So when it fell it fell hard, and that could have been resolved right away when Ben became aware of the collision about to take place… Oh wait!

That’s right! Ben didn’t do anything! He said the subprime fallout would stay in the subprime market. That was way off by the way. Then we fail to recognize the main stress which would prevent this from being an easy recovery… the price of oil and natural gas, which had been going up steadily since the invasion of Iraq. It was causing UPS and Airlines companies to add service or fuel charges to their services. It was effecting food costs, creating shortages, raising values accross the board. Heating cost one winter effect consumer spending directly, but the demand for these things are primary, while supply on the other hand wasn’t to be cured by invading Iraq. It won’t be solved by drilling in Alaska. The only thing that will solve it is greater efficiency. New technology and conservation.

Yes Ben, we have suffered a major systemic threat, but it isn’t the conditions that fail. It is the system which has so many flaws. All we managed to do was put the dying patient on life support for a little while. The conditions themselves were not met with clearly and desisively. They were resolved temporarily in order for the direction of our economic base to keep perpetuating. The problem is that it won’t last and Ben’s gonna provide us with the keys. Failing to raise interest rate in order to keep moving forward is exactly the wrong thing to do. Your might be thinking that he raised them a quarter point, but that was after the momentum in the market was accelerated to the degree is pressing with now. If he would have raised it for the second time it might have slowed down the pace, but he didn’t.

So here is my prediction from this flotsam of ramblings. Ben’s response have been steadily late. He didn’t take inventory when it started and could have done more earlier without pumping 4 trillion dollars into the banks, who should have failed due to poor risk assessment and management. He could have primed Congress to reign in the banks before the splash and had them increase their cash positions earlier. They could have forced the SEC to ask them for full disclosure and written off the debts, assembling them back into real estates, and not paper. None of these things happened. It is likely we will stay the course and what was the direction wasn’t really working all that well. It is likely to repeat itself.

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Fed to markets: Let the bubble blow David Callaway – MarketWatch

Fed to markets: Let the bubble blow David Callaway – MarketWatch

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Is that Tamiflu in your pocket…?

OMG!! We’re all gonna DIE! Again… It really amazes me how ridicules the Nation’s Media is. Look, I like Drama just as much as the next guy, but Pandemic? The Spanish Influenza kill 50 million people in 30 days. Loosing 200 in a week is not on the same scale. First of all only about 50-75 people in the US have contracted this thing, and according to “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (they) estimate that approximately 1.1 million persons are living with HIV in the United States.”(1)

The funny part about living with the US’ Media is that they are all on the same script. I wonder if viewers could start a group law suit for starting a panic over total misinformation. When Howard Dean was tore apart by the Media after misinterpreting what I would consider to be a pep rally to raise the morale of the thousands of volunteers that were there to support his Campaign. For weeks we had to see this one stupid picture that fraudulently depicted his actions, while the “commentator news core” ripped on him and told us all about his poor behavior, unbecoming of a president.

Now, everyone may not agree with me, but I think he was the only president running at the time who had any real plan, including a balanced budget, health care for America, and alternative energy. We could have really used him in 2004, but that’s not what happened. Instead we got a Republican agenda which was running rampant against all the things most American’s believe in, like Torture and Financial System Bailouts, and 4 dollar a gallon gasoline.

Personally I feel that any format that presents itself as a news program must leave commentary to the commentary segments and should be held accountable for the facts they present as news to America. I wish Howard Dean would have sued AP News and any parrot news agency who repeated the lie. It’s bullshit and we all know the Media is a PR scandel in American life. If you don’t believe me check out your sources and the fact surrounding them and see what’s what. Don’t take my word for it, do a little research on your information.

1). Taken from the CDC website.

We Own You, Citi!

Now that we own a 36%, most likely majority, stake in Citibank I would like to propose a solution to help ease the suffering of its stock holders, the American People. Lets trim down the company and sell off all the divisions of the bank until it is NOT “Too Big to Fail”. All those little subsidiaries and other companies that Citi purchased during its rise to being too big can now go back to being their own little businesses. At least that’s my vote, since I now own it!

Assessing the companies risk, based on the conditions of the present financial climate, I feel that this decision, which may effect the lives of many of the companies stock holders in a positive way should begin commencing now.

One of the things that totally amazes me is that Congress hasn’t begun the Anti-trust hearings for these bailout banks, and the auto makers. Who wants to have a few companies that are too big to fail ever again? Oh, but wait! That’s just how it is…

Yesterday I watched a Documentary on the Labor Movement of the early 20th Century, when the IWW was trying to get an 8 hour work day for ALL workers in America. The government of the US finally got so disgusted with this sense of an empowered workers organization that they arrested all the Union leaders and sentenced them to prison for causing disruption to the American way of life, and it dawned on me! This has always been a war, and as long as socialism was the enemy, the Company of the United States of Wealthy Corporations would use every tool in its arsenal of abuse to discourage anyone from ever joining sides with the enemy…

It amazes me (an yet doesn’t surprise me) that there isn’t the biggest outcry in American History, for the heads of the Corporations and Financial Institutions, that have put our children’s and their children’s future at risk. Remember, when Bush took office in 2001 there was a 6 Trillion Dollar Surplus in the US budget, and that administration along with the previous Republican Congress’ habit of deregulation turned our country completely over to the point that the rating firms are watching to see if the US Credit rating might not be threatened, by the massive debt we’ve accumulated.

There has always been a tenuous thread of difference between the Social and Capitalist leans in America, and it usually takes a time like this to point out the massive division of wealth that the rich enjoy when we forget the lessons of the past. Greed has never made our country prosperous for very long. When Reagan pushed for the trickle down economic measures that brought us out of the 70′s recession, it barely lasted through his term in office, and the same thing happened during the second Bush. It doesn’t work and deregulating the financial institutions, trusting them to monitor and assess their own risk leads to greed, and not longevity of prosperity for everyone, because the flawed part of the Trickle Down part always gets stuck in linings the rich pockets.

I think it’s hilarious that Fox News and some Conservative Politicians are calling Obama a Socialist like its a bad thing, while using the excuse “I Worked Hard for What I Have”. Excuse me, but who worked hard? To me it looks like all those people who are losing their jobs right now were some of the hardest working people out there. Most CEOs don’t even do their own dishes, let alone work. And if you think that’s not the truth, ask them, or better yet let them try to make billions of dollar without our help. See how long that lasts. What a joke…

The US Financial Crisis: Confidence or the Lack of

There’s an old saying that goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. The irony of this statement, in today’s broken financial system,

Bernanke and Paulson testify before Congress

is the concept that what is broken here is the system, when in fact what is broken is confidence in that system.

According to Secretary of Treasury Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke the banking system needs more liquidity in order to restart the banks ability to loan to each other. The belief is that they are not lending due to earlier commitments called Drawdowns, prearranged loan agreements to businesses.

The fact is that banks are not loaning to each other for two entirely different reasons. One, the possible write downs from their Subprime Mortgage Security positions, and two, the possibility that anyone of these banks could collapse at anytime. Hense the lack of confidence.

What really needs to be solved in this situation are the things that are truly broken. The biggest break I can see is the continuing collapse of homeowners. Something like 2 million Americans are at risk of loosing their homes this year, either through variable rate mortgages they were sold, or unemployment. This is the foundation of the bigger problem that has led the US to this position and crisis, and it is no longer exclusive to the US. Fannie Mae today announced 29 Billion Dollars in 3Q losses due to foreclosures or delinquencies.

Giving the banks more money to shore up the loses from their overwhelming risk taking won’t solve the problem, as Japan found out after 14 years of recession. What needs to happen is transparency. Banks need to write-OFF all these Subprime Securities and the SEC needs to force them to do it. There is no way they will volunteer to do it on their own for fear of stock holder sentiment being lost, but which is the bigger threat.

Th US Government also needs to do it’s part in a real way, instead of buying shares and Nationalizing companies, or buying up all the bad paper. This kind of give away of American Tax Payers money is reckless and ignorant. This direction is Paulson’s, who actually led the way to giant risk taking out of greed and now he wants to fill the empty coffers of the guilty. read more

The double edged sword of Bailouts sends the message that there is something gravely wrong. It may solve the immediate need for the banks, which by the way are hording this money, but creates it’s own monster. That being loss of confidence. In fact it may be motivating banks to do nothing to solve their own mistakes in order to get their cut. Greenspan may have been guilty of bad decisions, but he was never guilty of bad PR when it came to sending out news.

According to Adam Smith, the father of theoretical economics based on Free Enterprise, nothing in this economic system is really broken. Economics is similar to Natural Selection. If economic systems become outdated, something will rise out of the collapse to take it’s place. He called it supply and demand, that if were left alone it would naturally define itself. What is not in demand, in this instance, is the heavy risk taking that led to this crisis. You can see this in the Libor to Over Night Spread.

So, should we seek to stabilize it and prolong it’s lack of usefulness, by stimulating it like a heart patient who has flatlined, or let it collapse and allow Natural Selection to have it’s day. Personally I believe that America and the World for that matter have the resilient strength to arise from the challenges to be stronger, wiser and better than the past it was created out of.

Another Waste of Breath

It only took Congress 5 years to finally complete phase 2 of an investigation to the pre-war intelligence over the invasion of Iraq, and the build up by the White House to go to war on stretched information and sometimes blatant lies. I mean we all saw Colon Powell deliver that hopeless bull to the UN about the aluminum tubes. It was on every channel and no one questioned it at the dinner table, or thought about how many lives would be destroyed by sitting there listening and not voicing there objections.

We all saw the President stand up in front of Congress and tell us about the Nigeria paper that had already been disproved by Valerie Plame’s husband, as a fraudulent forgery, that Saddam was trying to get yellow cake (enriched uranium), and this was part of his “WMD” program, but the Republicans in Congress were trying to protect their buddies and had no intentions of protecting the sovereign citizens they supposedly represent.

It amazes me that we have come to this point as a “democracy”. What do people expect when there is nothing remotely close to a reaction over something that has killed literally hundreds of thousands of people while the mentality of complacency rings in with banners and bumper stickers to support our troops. What a joke. And if the pre-war intelligence for Iraq was theater for our entertainment then so must be everything else this administration has claimed and Congress has rolled over for.

Maybe if we hadn’t allowed Congress to lock the number of House Representatives at 450 something in the early teens, we might still have a voice in our political process. The story isn’t even important anymore. No one really cares about it. All we care about is our life-style obsessions.

America is as broken as it can get and Congress is so blinded by soft money and lobbyists that it can’t even end farm subsidies in the wake of a world food shortage. Of course they’re not going to impeach the President for one of the lies that took us to war. That would be doing something.

I find it amazing that there may not be enough solid evidence to convict Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and yet we as a nation have gone to war twice because we were so sure we were right about 9/11, that we were willing to kill for it. So where’s the WMD’s?

The bottom line is that the President swore an oath to protect the Constitution. It clearly states that the President must annually inform the Congress of the “State of the Union”. When He stepped behind that podium and told Congress and the American people that the Nigeria paper was solid evidence that Saddam had Nuclear ambitions he knowingly committed perjury under oath. The CIA had informed him after reading his speech, previous to the State of the Union address, that the intelligence might not be accurate.

The investigation into the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity to the media, and the conviction of I. Lewis Libby’s perjury, reveals foreknowledge of the Presidents actions before Congress, that the White House Administration was attempting to hide the indiscretion, by discrediting an OpED article by Joseph C. Wilson (Plame’s husband), which revealed the Nigeria Paper to be a forgery. It reveals the motive behind misleading Congress, the UN and the American People, that the White House was intent on attacking Iraq, even if they had to lie to achieve this end.

Senate Panel Finds Iraq Intelligence Exaggerations